The Beetle Leg

CAP LEECH

now I’ll talk.

You’ve answered to me for having found him crouched with bare, folded feet, for having watched the thinly wrinkled, perforated breath of skin that was his throat — dry now, untouched, except for the soothing pressure of some tons of earth — for having spied on the wrappings, the colorless cloth, the complete expulsion of bodily fluids, the immobility of ten dangling fingers shoved like minnows into the shriveled ground.

One town further then: last seen by a river peering upward into his lumpy jaws.

Take me there.