by Matt Gillick
 
For years, I’d heard the cries at the bottom but didn’t want to see. I rest on the Lugnaquilla. I notice how the land could shimmer in daylight green if daylight ever visited past the gray. With my frayed tail, leaking Tullamore, and my clipped wings dragging at my sides, I lose balance. A slip in muddy rain. One slip was all it took. 
 
Knowing it’s the end, I try to flap and throw myself into the wind, into the mistiness, after gleeking a mouthful of hissing spew for one last reign of fire—a mere smoke ring of burnt wood, aged casks—and down the hill I go in a fiery helix, sliding down tributaries of dirty river runoff veining into the heart of Dublin City: a place I’d only seen in faded postcard horizons. 
 
I plummet along the grassy, tumbling hill, scratching the peat that breaks apart in the rain. Rocks spiking through the wet-brown knock off pieces of me as I approach this thudding reality of descent, crash. Below, I see a herd of lambs begging to graze, screaming rotten and dry, but there’s grass everywhere. Why don’t they eat? 
 
Their heads rise from their painted world as my wings whittle away. They cry out now, not in fear, but anticipation—they’re not lambs but bent-over children, pale and frail; their bellies nothing but ribs. I rake through the land, shedding my final skin.
 
They bleat and bleat, and soon their hunger becomes my hunger. They suck at the hillside stained by what’s left of me. Some dig with their cloven hooves and stick their faces into the dirt. Neck deep, wasting away. My scales fall, my eyes clear, no longer seeing what I saw from atop that ancient mound of a mountain. So, this is the truth: nothing but burn…and raining ash. I am that rain. The children close in, to feed, and I do nothing to stop them.

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Matt Gillick is from Northern Virginia. Check out his other published work on his website: mattgillick.com.