Blue Blood

I added some more to that short freewrite from before. Here you have it.

One white feather wafted to the ground and landed in a puddle of blue ink. Slowly, the fibers of the feather began to suck in the ink as tree roots would bits of the water table. Blue commenced its invasion of white downiness. Each soft branch sagged under the weight of the navy tar. The shape deformed so much, the object no longer could be identified as a feather. Blue concluded its incursion and overtook white until the object lay completely flat and submerged in thick, boiling liquid. A demon’s blood runs blue.

Lingering on the fringe between that little gray area that, if you look too closely, proves not to be gray at all, but a pattern of black spots on a white background, and the white area, she tipped forward and fell straight out with her arms hanging off the sides of her like broken wings, no longer responding to the signals pulsed out by brain nerves. Light dwindled. Her broken frame bounced off the black spots of the gray area and she landed face first into the black. Splurp said the black area as her body impacted its gummy surface.

Submersed from the waist down in something much like tar, she sat up and examined her ruined figure. Blood gushed from her armpits where her arms had broken. She gave a shake of her head, sending her hair twisting about like an explosion of tangled ropes, and rolled her shoulders back, discarding her broken arms. The bloody limbs fell into the muck, and she stood.

Light from the white area still fingered its way down through the black spots above as though the gray area provided a canopy for the rain forest of the black area. And forest it was indeed. Oh, what animals dwelled here. What creatures! Sucking and wheezing all around her, they trudged through the steamy stew landscape, their forms falling just out of light. Shapeless, featureless abstracts condemned forever to wander this dark land.

The armless angel – her name was L – began her journey through these lands. But first, she knew, she’d have to find herself some new arms by which to pick up things, or perhaps by which to defend herself.

A beast, nameless for one could not distinguish one species from the next, skulked by ignorant of the recent arrival. The angel was on his back before he could have known. What a squeal that creature did cry! She wrapped her legs around the animal’s hind quarters and sunk her fangs into the scruff of his neck to anchor her dominant position. With one clean thrust of her pelvis, she tore off its back limbs with her legs. Shrieking, shrieking, oh the blood, what black blood mixing with the landscape, the same mixture.

And the angel donned her new arms, black and oozing down her sides. The bumpy flesh boiled little bristles of hair, appearing almost blond when a cylinder of light hit it just right. The knees of the animal were bent contrary to the elbows of a humanoid, so the woman took control of these possessions as though they were her own and snapped the bone backward, crushing any cartilage to protect it from just that. She reached with fingers, but found only hooves. The rough bone wiggled on each side of the split. She bared her teeth, now stained dark gray. Exercising the muscles behind these hoof bones, she stretched them back and forth until they split wide open, allowing thin pallid fingers to emerge. Once free, they tore apart the hooves until they could be cast aside. She gave another shake of her hair and clawed her way through her arm skin with her new found fingernails. She attacked the tufts of blond hair, prying them from their soil like uprooting weeds. Flesh separated from muscles and dropped away. The angel bled red.

L pulled at the skin on her hands. She stretched it until it reached her shoulder and there she let it go, taught against her vulnerable insides. She yanked it around the sides to completely cover the surface of her new arms. Her fingertips smoothed out the areas where the edges came together, and the wrapping melted together. Her form was complete. And she bled no longer.