The Birthday Present - Part 3

[Deleted Member]

It was the morning before her birthday and the sun rose leerily in the sky. It was going to burn all day. She had moved down the river following the sounds of an inviting buzz which had seemed to echo in response to her melancholic hymn. She found herself away from the canopy of trees and beside a mighty grey mountain which reached like a dagger, piercing the bright blue sky. Only no *** had been spilled. Not that day.

Her body was dirty from the track, which had diverted her from the river to a stream and then a brook. The brook was almost running dry from the heat. She tried to wash her face in it but ended up covered with a mask of mud instead. She decided she liked the feeling of the warm mud and rubbed it all over her skin. Her arms, legs, belly, round bottom and breasts. It dried quickly to a shade of grey.   

It was as she admired her skin that she noticed the sun reflecting on a shiny almost almond shaped object upon the ground. Her gaze was drawn towards the object, as though a gift had been laid quite purposefully before her eyes. She could not work out what it was. It was old. Rusty. Iron. Jagged and sharp on one side but smooth and beautiful on the other. She inhaled its scent. It smelt like a mixture of mud and oxidised metal.  It was a day early for a birthday gift, so she decided she would use it to write in the mud. Words came as if from nowhere as she wrote the end of her story...

'The four***th day was the 40th anniversary of her birth. She waited up for the precise moment of two minutes before the second hour of the day to receive her gift. It was still dark. And even though the sun awakened the world early in July, her part of the world would still be cast in shadow by the time it was done.   She paused as she admired the ancient tool and contemplated the only gift to find her. She knew she had not made it easy. And wondered briefly if the gift could have ever been anything else.

The first thing that fell was her left breast, as she sliced it from her chest and it landed without a shred of elegance upon the muddy floor. It was quickly followed by her right breast, slightly larger. The slipperiness of the *** from the left breast made it messy work. Numb from endorphins or shock, she felt no *** as she tossed her sexuality into the muddy brook. Nevermore would they rise in passion or pleasure.  

The next thing to leave her body was her tongue. She felt her mouth fill with mud and rust and metal and *** as she cut her voice from herself. Nevermore a complex utterance would she whisper. Only wail.  

Finally she cut off her hands. It was a difficult task. To remove her right hand with the left already gone. Her *** was pouring from her veins filling the words she had written in the mud. The last tale her creative hands would ever tell. Nevermore would her story be written. As she faded out of consciousness her *** reached and filled the final word...

Nevermore.'  
 

After spending far too long contemplating his gift, which was now withered and broken from the heat of the sun. A wailing sound set the gift-bearer’s feet running before his brain understood why. His hands held his gift tightly. As he ran. Faster. Harder. Closer. Than he had ever run. His feet took him to a place with a pool of *** where a story had been written.

The wailing in his mind was endless. He searched but never found any other trace that she had existed at all.   So he took his gift and he laid it over her muddy ***y tale and he wept. And his tears filled the word.

Nevermore.