The creature was shot. It ran toward us as though we were living doorways that led toward survival. It wasn’t shot for any purpose other than because there was a gun. The way it moved was hurried and half clumsy. Dying, it seems, is a little like being drunk. No great surprise there. But as it approached the three of us, the pattern it made on the ground took on a strange significance, as if it was itself some kind of perfect message in a language none of us could notice, let alone decipher. As for us, we were trapped in a scene from a film that can’t be made; held like puppets by the strings of an adventure we’d any of us undo, if there was any way to try it. But no. Our role was accomplished without our intentional participation. Witnesses.

As it hazarded its path toward us, the creature gave in to the bullet lodged somewhere in its holy body. As all bodies are holy. And when it slumped forward, its skull began to part catastrophically. What happened then I cannot reasonably convey. It seemed to me that space flowed through the crack, and opened it. Filled with suns. Stars that shone so bright they embarrassed the daylight. But then the flow transformed, and became animals and insects and fish, swarming into and out of existence, a fluid symphony of forms, preceding and transcending one another. A fountain of lives.

There was a terrible sound then, as if something deep within the animal gave way from long distress, and it gave up entirely, its skull completely parted, and the flow that emerged seemed simple blood for a moment. But then it seethed, and sang, and there the creature lay, spilling flowers and petals of the most astonishing variety from its interior, into a kind of pillow, into which it collapsed. And I saw what was its soul emerge and flee into the structure of the petals, as if they were a living mirror, that was a being, that was a doorway… that led beyond every possible trap and hunter.

And for a moment, I will tell you… I thought we three would follow. For a moment I thought… it made the window of escape… for -=us=-.