Leopard men and elephants and giant otters. Rhinos that had the heads of monkeys. Battled packs or herds of carnivorous undead blackened animals like charred driftwood that never had a name. Battled things that had fallen upon him out of the sky and lunged up from beneath the ground and came galloping like champions across the plain.

Covered over in mud, become truth in the plunge. Into deep pond, into a place where the white shone so bright it illuminated the little fish that fed on Behemoth’s flanks. The little fish that sang out at dawn like birds and lived nowhere: not the present, not the past, not the future. Blissful in their eternity of nothingness.

Singing and singing so close that Behemoth sometimes believed it was his body singing, of his fate. Strained to listen for instruction from the flesh. But could not understand the song, was troubled by this. By a burning shed. By a burning mind. Sometimes laden with mud to cool. Snapped at the night, lunged to eat stars, settled back down, still awake.

The Company never sang to Behemoth, asked nothing of him except that he devour. In this way, Behemoth read the ripples he left behind, the rings. Knew thereby he was the lord of the water. Free. To eat. To sleep. To shit. To pull himself back and forth between the holding ponds. As if Behemoth had been made to describe such a path until the end of days.

If sometimes Behemoth did not understand his dreams, Behemoth was at first untroubled, for he knew, somehow, that a dream was not real. Of a face resolving into a kind of living compass against the night sky. Of strange, green sky. Of stars not the stars in the same way the fireflies had not really seemed like fireflies. Too near, too far. The face both human and not.

An eye that grew in the dreams, red and swollen and dark. An eye that appeared from a swirl of globes filled with tiny creatures, staring up at him. Asking something, but what? A question that bothered at Behemoth. Came even a hesitation, an extra moment between the sighting and the rending, no matter the manner of creature.

But in the end, no rationing of meat could withstand the rationing of attention. Down the gullet they went, to join the ghosts. Even if Behemoth felt emptier, as if he feasted upon a thick mist, must gorge through the day and into the night. A weight pressing down that must be some new property of the sky. Or so Behemoth thought.

4. CAN’T REMEMBER