Paultjuh

The rain pattered against his armored coat. It didn’t know any better, as he was cloaked in a layer of moss and zigzagging branches, dotted with the occasional hint of a bloom.

He had slumbered here a long time.

Generations of chipmunks and creatures and beasts had been born and died and born again while he slept. In their legends he was a mossy hill, a strange rock, or nothing at all.

But the rain had found him.

It wasn’t a sleep, not truly, and so he did not quite wake. His gears merely began to whir once again after a long stretch of stillness. Slowly and haltingly, he moved.

His lower digits creaked back to life.

A wiggle of a toe.

A stretch of a leg.

Then he stood, breaking the vines that bound him, the roots of a bloom still clinging to his head.

With effort, he bent the twisted metal that joined his thigh and shin. He teetered. A toddler learning to walk. The light flickered on behind his eyes. The images in his brain-box unpixelated. Except for a few wires that had been chewed out by some unwitting rodent, he was whole.

As he stretched, the rain turned to mist. He examined one of his superior limbs, long and flexible, spinning his two digits. His once-silver coat had rusted copper-brown.

He scanned the area. A kingdom with no more kings. Their dwellings abandoned, eroded, like so many ocean-kissed shells. Some of his fallen brothers swallowed, as he had been, by the landscape. Part of the vegetation. At peace.

Through the mist, the sun began to shine. He noticed a winged creature tangled in a bramble. He made his way over to free it, side-stepping a pair of young mammals playfully chasing one another.

Now he walked among them, letting the creatures climb him, adorn him, and ride. He could not remember the time before his slumber and he did not miss it. 

By Leah Sarbib