Falling Backwards

by #6

Sometime before I believed in time...

From the mares back it felt like I could see the whole world. I could see them all. My herd spread around me in the pasture. The mare beneath me. My unsheathed power deep within her. Thrusting into the future. I was above them all. I could feel the wind in my mane. The tugging scent of grass and pollen. The sun on my back. I was the herd. My foals will be the herd. I was past present future and orgasm. I saw the men pointing the gun at me and paid no notice. I was the future. Then, I was the darkness.

Sometime near the begining of days...

The room smelt flat and I was stretched out and dying. I am flat on my back and my limbs feel splayed. My legs pulled long at the ankles and strangely articulate. My hoofs broken up into free moving hooflets. I open my eyes and am assulted by a shifting depth of image. Every detail of the room non-mobile yet screaming into my head. I can't smell the herd. I can't smell the wind. In despair and terror I fade into a death like sleep.

I dram I am galloping through a field of flowers. The flowers suddenly the wind stops blowing and the flowers stop mving. All the smells die away until there is nothing but a slight buzzing in my nose. A fly lans on me but I can't feel my tail. I wake shuddering.

A man stands in front of me and starts to make the strange mouth sounds they do. This time though something amazing happens. It's sortof like smelling fear or musk but whole ideas without any emotion. The sounds all mean individual THINGS. Drink THIS glass of WATER. I have no idea what the man feels about me, the glas, the water. But somehow the sounds make me understand that there is water in the glass and that I am to drink it. I lean my badly malformed head torwards the glass and the man tips the water into my mouth and I eagerly swallow. Another man joins him and they pull me up onto my hind legs and bring me before a portale. Through the portal I see the two men again holding a weak third man between them. In a horrible shock I realize that I am the man. I whiny in fear but al that comes out is a strange sucking sobbing sounds. Somehow the shock has broken something loose in me and I understand a bit of the sound meanig trick. I ask, "why?"

Reflections on a world gone mad

Over the next several weeks I would learn a great many things. From the trivial to the world shattering. I learned to stand then to walk. I learned the sounds meaning game called speach. I learned to stream my urine from the strange hanging uncased thing between my legs. I learned what I was.

"It's all very simple really. For two centuries man has been rebuildng species through the Circe treatment. We made a mistake. Luckily we can now bring you all back to try again." THe scientist smiled as he spoke. Human smiles make me rather nervous. I may never learn to do it myself.

All the scientists were eager to explain what they were doing. I think they wanted my approval. At some point man had learned a way to make men into animals. They had been doing it for a long long time. Then one day something went wrong in man. They stopped being able to breed. There were very few humans left. They had hardened themselves against change. Change from disease, change from each other. Just change I suppose. One day they found they couldn't make any more changes. No more changes and no more babies. No more man.

"The world NEEDS people." Her eyes sparkled as she said it. They glazed over like they were looking into a deep pool of water starring at the horse in the reflection wondering if she could touch it. But she wasn't a horse and whatever vision she saw was more fleeting then reflections on water. "We need you to be the people."

All of us descended animals. The rebuilt herds. The progeny of generations of condemned human transformies. We could be transformed ourselfs. We could take thier place. We would be the humans they need.

Socialization and the joy of schooling

After a few months of interacting with only the scientists they brought me into the herd. It wasn't a herd strictly speaking as none of us were horses anymore. We all looked like sixteen year old human males. But it was a herd in action. Very rapidly I learned my place in the order of things. Though the scientists tried to give us human names we tended to think of each other in much longer descriptions. Smells of spring and sand seems far more likely to BE someone than thomas. I have no idea what a thomas is. I knew that long dreams in his speach was the dominant one and that when the time came the mares would be his. I learned who my friends were and who to watch out for. I knew we were all playing a game for the men. We would appear to be a chattering group of teenage boys when they were in the room. As soon as they left we would break up and silently move about the room. Searching out our place. Once more a herd.

Dreams of speech

It's late in the night time. The moon is out and shined through my window casting alternating bars of shadow and silver streaming light. The moats of dust, each a tiny man, suspended in the air drifting. They seem to be dancing, calling, laughing. Laughing at me. I hear it in my dreams. The laughter of man. The bars on the window cage me in the room. The nightmares in my head cage my in the waking world. They do not allow us to sleep together as a herd. The humans are afraid we will maintain too much of our equine ways and instincts. They want to break us. Break us to the saddle of human culture and ways. I feel the bit in my mouth and the man turning me. Turning me torwards the window and its laughing dust. I may look like a man but I am still an animal to them. A tool.

The dust continues to dance in the still air of my room. gradually my breathing slows. My eyes close. The crushed too deep world of man expands out into the beautiful panarama of the world I knew before. The world of my dreams.

In the dream I am running with a mare. I can never remember which mare or if she is an idealized dream of all the mares I've known. We cross a stream. My hoofs crash through the frigid water onto the pebbles below. A fish startled by my might darts away. We finally come to rest beneath a branching tree on a small hill. The sky spreading out around me I notice an apple on the tree. Just as the mare turns her head to look at me I reach out with one hand and pick the fruit from the tree. As I bite into it the mares eye widens in terror. Looking down at the apple in my hand I real in horror at what I have done. The mares eye turns a deep cobalt blue and she turns and gallops away in fright. I am left alone. A man standing under an apple tree. Then the laughing begins. First one voice. Then another is added. Then another untill there is a cacaphony of sound. Human sound surrounding me in all directions. It's when I see the face smiling at me that I bolt awake.

The lives of my fellows

I believe the scientists are disapointed in our behavior. I overheard them talking after class. Somehow they know what we are doing even one none of them are in the room. They worry that we do not talk when they are not around. They worry that when they are around we do not talk right. We do not communicate. I am sitting in the classroom and the chattering goes on around me. Each of us speaks the same three or four phrases over and over. In a way it has a calming effect on me. It's like the wind rustling the leaves conveying no meaning other than I am here and alive. I don't think the humans know the value of simply being here and being alive. I add my voice to the chorus, "I am dream light dancer. I smell the day gathering place. I am here." "I am sitting here in my chair. The herd is here. We are alive.", answers a slender youth across from me. In this way the chatter moves around the room saying nothing and saying everything that needs to be said. Perhaps when man ran out of things that needed to be said and only said things to convey meaning perhaps that's when they began to die.

Falling Backwards copyright 1996 by #6.