The Second Gift Given by Ken Scholes, recorded by Mike Allen for Clark's World Magazine,

Issue 29, February 2009. The second gift given.

Go on all fours, sometimes upright, tracked with the three-horn spore alone.

He moved along the ridge in the red of the day when the greater light swallowed

the sky and heat danced over stone. Below the big waters licked at the land.

In the days when he was young, go on all fours remembered eating swimmers.

The people used to pierce in the shallows, while the children played on the shaped rocks that the oldest people had left behind.

But the swimmers were rarer now than even the three horns, and the big waters drank those rocks

long ago.

Rememberer of forgotten days said someday the big waters would drink all of the land

and the people as well.

But rememberer of forgotten days also said that the people had walked across the big waters before they were so big in the days before the sky burned red.

And Remember of Forgotten Days had difficulty remembering where, and sometimes when, to make water.

Go on all fours picked up a pebble and put it in his mouth. Hunger chewed at him. There'd been no meat for twenty days.

He clutched his piercer, its sharpened tip burned hard in fire, and went on threes with his nose to the ground.

His hackles rose. He crested the ridge and stopped. The scent of blood made his tight stomach rumble. Now he went upright, stretching

his neck, working his nose, darting his eyes over the place where the broken rock became gray scrub and spider trees.

Blood. The three horn lay in the shadows, sides heaving, a small piercer protruding from its neck.

Go on all fours sometimes upright growled a warning in the speech of the people, raising an octave into inquiry. No response.

He shuffled forward cautiously, pierceer ready. Laying beside the dying three-horn was a bowed stick, the ends tied together with a strand

of dried gut and a pile of small piercers.

He sniffed them, inhaling a strange sweet smell like nothing he'd known before.

...