The Fallen Lamb

The mountains were teeth,
jagged and white beneath a sky that never forgave,
and I was only wool and breath,
a shivering hymn left in the cold.

They told me, trust nothing except the sheep.
Trust only the white, the meek, the quiet breathing in the dark.
But then he came—
not in shadow, but in sunlight so blinding
that my eyes burned for days.

The sun poured from his hands,
and I mistook the scorch for warmth.
Each word from his lips
was the taste of ripe fruit in a garden I was forbidden to enter.
I was the lamb,
but my heart beat like the hooves of something running toward the wolf.

His touch was not touch, but a claiming.
He unspooled me—thread by thread—
my fleece falling into his fists
until I stood naked in my trust.
The sheep around me bowed their heads,
and one by one, he led them away,
their innocence trailing like milk in the snow.

I thought love was this:
to bleed beneath someone’s light,
to drown in a pond full of lilies
because their fingers were already on your spine,
and your lungs belonged to their air.
I thought salvation was in his eyes—
eyes that swallowed mine whole.

But he was hunger wearing the skin of devotion.
His smile was a psalm with teeth.
He told me he loved me
as he drank the marrow from my bones.
And I—
God forgive me—
I thanked him for it.

When the fields lay empty,
and every sheep’s breath was gone from the night,
I looked at my hands and found them empty too.
No wool. No flock. No voice.
Only the echo of him,
still burning like the sun behind my eyelids.

He left the way he came—
with the quiet of something that never belonged to the earth.
And the mountains swallowed his shadow.
But the pull was still there,
a rope knotted around my ribs,
dragging me toward the place where his fire had gone.

I climbed the cliff.
Below, the darkness curled like an open mouth.
If I could not have the sheep,
if I could not have my own breath,
then I would follow him into the only pasture left—
the one where the grass burns forever.

The wind was the last shepherd.
It leaned into my ear and said:
"You were a lamb.
Now you are meat."

And I stepped forward.
Wool, blood, and soul,
all falling toward the wolf.

by Onnaya