And once I had become the leopard, the World seemed to shift around me, and my talons receded into paws. I grew hind legs, and attached were two more paws.

My skin turned soft with a coat of hairs, and my body elongated itself. I had a tail, and my head grew ears into which a cacophony from the vast horizon entered.

At once, I believed I was where the Universe needed me, and I looked over the scorched Earth, the trees and the beasts that roamed over it, thinking they had been made for me.

I turned back before pursuing a larger prey as my new self, and saw the remains of the former me strewn about the ground.

What I would become when the winged ants scuttled over the former me was perhaps what I had become now: food for something greater than myself.

And as I took down the wildebeest, slowly as though Time had prolonged itself for the eyes of Nature, I thought of that former self inside the ants who would become feed for the ant eater. And how the remaining ants would take parts of me into the soil when they perished, thereby making of me what we shall become: nothing, yet all things.

So I crossed into Night aware of the fates of others there. And how Nature had laid her plan, and how some creatures became others, while the ones she offered me were taken into my journey over the waiting, arid terrain.

—

Falconhead currently inhabits the anatomy of a writer of fiction, but may, at times, inhabit a poet or playwright.