All Fours

On the War Between Flesh and Story Chapter 1: Margot The morning is wet in the grass. The air smells of iron and something soft—milk, maybe. Her sides twitch. A fly lands and stays. She does not swat it. There is mud beneath her left hoof, but not deep enough to bother. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, slow. Her joints remember the night. She slept standing again. She does not remember why. Nearby, the small one stirs. The small one always wakes before the boy. He does not cry, only breathes sharply and kicks a little. She turns her head—not sharply, just enough—and sees him. He is warm and not yet hungry. This pleases her. She returns to stillness. A bird calls. Not one she fears. The sky is the wrong color for summer, but the trees are still. That means it will not rain soon. She doesn’t know how she knows that, only that she does. Her body knows the order of things. Her body does not lie. A sound—gate metal—sings in the distance. Her ears twitch before her head does. The boy is coming. His steps are not fast. He does not shout like the other one. He is kind. He brings salt or apple, and once, he wept into her shoulder for reasons she did not need to understand. She likes him best when he is quiet. He reaches the fence and leans his chin on the post. Watches her. She watches back. He is still. She is still. Then he laughs—not loud, not cruel—and tosses something over. It misses. She does not mind. The small one trots to it, nose to ground. Finds it. Licks. Looks up at her. She turns away, slowly, and chews. The heat is coming now. She feels it through the spine first. There will be flies. There will be biting. But not yet. There is peace in this hour. She does not miss the others. The ones who were taken. Her body remembered them for a while. Especially the tall one with the sick eye. But memory fades where it is not needed. This is wisdom. The small one lies down again, a soft thud in the dirt. He is not yet named, but she knows him. He is hers. She chews. The boy watches. The sun lifts behind the trees. And for a long time, nothing moves. Chapter 2: The Lie I once watched my father’s cow chew in perfect stillness for what felt like an hour. Her name was Margot. She had a calf named Googie, who followed her like breath. She did not know what she was. That’s what made her free. I did not understand that at the time. I thought we were different. Humans have always told stories. That much is true. But what no one wants to say—what I will say—is that we are not just storytellers. We are liars. By instinct. By survival. By design. And the first lie—the deepest, most enduring lie—is that we are not animals. This lie is not accidental. It is strategic. The mind cannot tolerate its own origins. It needs distance. It needs metaphor. It needs a sky god and a clean shirt and a word for everything except blood. So we invented purity. We invented dominion. We dressed ourselves in language and called it dignity. We built temples. Then we built walls. But the body remembered. That was the problem. The body remembered things the mind refused. Hunger. Rage. Milk. F*****g. Grief. These were not ideas. They were not metaphors. They were not sins. They were truths. And truth has always been a problem for us. We named it sin and wrapped it in shame. We called it “lower” nature. We carved out a ladder of being, put angels on top and worms on the bottom, and declared ourselves almost divine. Almost. Close enough to matter. Far enough to excuse the slaughter. But the lie never settled. It flickered. It cracked at the edges. You can hear it even now—in the prayers that are whispered just before orgasm, in the drunken confessions of men who can’t stop hitting what they want to love. The mind lied. The body didn’t. And so a war began—not between nations, but within each of us. A war between flesh and story. Between sensation and symbol. Between what we are, and what we needed to believe. The cow did not know she was a cow. That was her freedom. I knew I was not a god. That was my wound. Chapter 3: Beneath the Stone The creature did not flinch when the light touched it. That was the first thing I noticed. Its body glistened in the damp—segmented, pink, dumb to the interruption. It moved forward, slowly, by compression. No legs. No eyes. No clear direction. Only motion, as if movement itself were a memory. I crouched to watch it. There were four more, all close, nearly touching. I wondered if they knew each other. The idea was absurd. But it lingered. The soil was dark, soft from the morning’s rain. I lifted another stone, slower this time. The same bodies beneath—soft, unhurried, purposeful in a way that did not concern me. I did not disturb them. I had begun this habit with no real intention. It was merely the shape my mornings took. My wife said nothing of it anymore. She had learned that silence was more companionable than curiosity. The creatures fascinated me. Not for their uniqueness—there was nothing unique about them—but for their refusal to mean anything beyond what they were. They did not hesitate. They did not posture. They did not ask the air for justification. They joined when they met. No prelude. No flirtation. Just a thickening at the midsection, a shudder, and then a separation. Two of them mated once, inches from my boot. I had never seen anything so honest. I took notes when it felt appropriate. But mostly I watched. There were days I envied them. Their blindness. Their certainty. Their freedom from narrative. And yet, it was not just envy. It was a kind of awe. The awe of something older than scripture. More precise than speech. The smallest ones seemed to move in groups. I suspected familial connection. But I did not write that down. I had learned, over time, to distrust the reach of metaphor. I spoke aloud, sometimes, to test how it sounded. “They live beneath the threshold of invention.” I said it once. I regretted it. These were not metaphors. They were facts. They were reminders. The garden was quiet. The sky was still gray. I did not mind the damp. Later, at the table, I would be asked again about the trip. The islands. The bones. The birds. I would nod and speak politely. I would say that the finches were useful. I would not say that the worms haunted me more. They were, in truth, the reason I began to suspect we had not ascended. We had merely learned to cover the ground with story. Chapter 4: On All Fours He said “mask for mask” in the chat. I didn’t answer right away. His photo was half a face, blurred. The kind of body that doesn’t need to show more than a shoulder. He wrote: Hosting. Laid back. Clean. I was already hard. I don’t know if it was him, or the wanting. The wanting is older than the man. I didn’t ask his name. He didn’t ask mine. That’s part of the dance. You pretend it doesn’t matter so the body can matter more. We stripped language down until there was just enough left to get the address. I cleaned out. Brushed teeth. Deodorant, not cologne. I don’t know why that matters to me, but it does. One last look at my face. Then down. Shirt off. Back on. Off again. I left it off. I walked. The hallway smelled like someone else's dinner. The elevator was slow. I thought about turning back, but that’s just habit now. The voice that says don’t go comes from the same place as the one that begs please, someone, take me. He opened the door in shorts. No shirt. Nice body. Bigger than me. Not too big. He didn’t smile. Just nodded and turned around. No lights. Just a lamp. A couch. A closed window. Music I didn’t know. Bass-heavy, forgettable. I stood for a moment. He didn’t look back. Then, from the kitchen:“Drink?” I shook my head. He opened a drawer. Came back with the bottle. Little brown glass. I nodded. He passed it. I breathed it in. Poppers. Alkyl nitrite. Cheap from the sex shop near 8th. First sniff hits like a cough from behind the eyes. Second one makes everything shimmer, like the body's a floor and someone turned the light on underneath it. I sat. He knelt. We didn’t talk. He un… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com