His hair was dark and dank like thick strands of algae. I was taken over by an irresistable urge to kiss him. He bit me, very hard, a little under my right ear. It felt like leeches, or as if I had decayed very quickly under layers of mulch and brackish slime. It was painful and exquisite.
I have often wondered about localised...well, spirits doesn't seem quite the right word...more elemental aspects of places. My friend had become the swamp, the stream, the leaves and roots and bark of this place.
I backed away, to watch and to learn. He was trying to climb the river bank. He stopped to grip and furiously rub a root that was extruding from the bank. I know masturbation when I see it.
I left for a while. I wandered, in deep reflection. I was struck by the crystalline perfection of the trees in the surrounding area. I was drawn back by the same ambiguous screaming.
He had dirt in every orifice. As I knelt a short distance from his head I could hear that he was ranting, almost chanting, near-incoherently under his breath. As I leant nearer, his vocalisations resolved into intelligible words - "the toothless, nameless desire under the feet of everyone". It seemed like the litany of the non-human world; the aspirations and thwarted desires of the swamp itself; its transmuted feelings of repression and neglect.
