From Nadura (Channel Magazine, Spring 2025)
Crouching over a skin, you stroked its fur and eyed it with wonder. Laid it fur-down on your thighs and used your blade to scrape away the blood and fat. Licked the newly smooth inside. Took water from a puddle and rubbed the inside clean. You draped the skin tenderly on the branch of an oak and watched the sky for rain. You slept all night beneath the oak, and the next, until the skin was dry. Then you wore it.
When the lynx found you on your oak throne with your new skin, she howled high panic.
She pushed you down and batted you with her paws and swiped you with her claws and bit the skin and took it away with a grunt of uhrrruh and held it down and tore, ennn and annn and uuurrrrip and adrrra. She unmade the skin and stood above you and spat the pieces from her hot mouth mixed with her hot saliva onto your hot face under the half-moon of hot sun which gleamed through diminishing autumn treescape.
Fear retracted the skin of your face like facing a gale of wind.
Her jaws were in your face and your face was like prey and her black lynx lips were on your ear.
Nadar, nadra, nadura. You shook. Nadura. You repeated: nadura.
Then you were alone again, or thought you were, and shaking shook and full of danger, dug in me a pit to bury your skin. I felt your hurt and hurt for you as you dug. You dug in me with broken rhythm. You dug in me and undressed my layers, moved pieces of me aside and back again, tore up the roots that were my veins and ate them. You sang to me, using your voice to sculpt the air into images of pain and want. You shook and shook and I shook all the way down: past my fungal mats twined like constant lovers, past my old wet tunnels used and disused, past my gravels and softnesses and hosts of larvae and deposits of winking gold and past my mineral tides, all the way down to the crust of immovable stone that marked my body’s end.
This was a new feeling. I had experienced entries into my body before: the slow suck of rain plumping my molecules, the nudge of worms, the burn of root-growth, sun drying holes in me, animals displacing me, leaves unshaping me as they died to feed me and make my fine earth new.
But the music of your digging made me feel hollow and terribly exposed and terribly sad and thrilled and even enraged and above all, hungry. I had never been hungry before. I had never wanted before, at all.
The Thread (substack: Shark’s Parlor, December 2025)
Marianne Daigh 