Animal Activities #90

The wind changed and the fresh smell of ozone and crushed eucalyptus floated through the air toward her, her paw pads still warm in the red mud of the clearing.

Kiki was a pangolin-a ball of tight, glistening, intersecting keratin scales that rolled along softly. From the high gray-blue land of the hawks soaring in the sapphire sky, she was a living pinecone. And from the ground below, a rolling wave of the mightiest tide.

She rolled her long paper-lamp tongue up and plumped it into the hum of a colossal Baobab. The nest in the limb was wonder- ly and ornery, and she was on her way to it when a black, wormlike animal dodged from the grillwork of the trunk. Out of the bushes comes a covetous peg-eared jackal with amber eyes that glisten at her. He snuffled to make the grass bristle, then snapped.

That speed was not about to be relinquished. Her defence was part of the material of her jewellery. She became double in a fraction of a moment, sucked her delicate tum in small, scurried snout under her long tail and rolled herself into a big, shiny sphere.

Their teeth gnashed and clicked together in a metallic kiss as her scales adjusted, interlocking around his neck, shearing against his flesh, slicing him "ka-chunk" bit by bit for each guttural growl she unleashed. He scrambled and clawed against her seeking some loose point where his teeth might find purchase, but Kiki held him weighted low against her, keeping her scales adjusted so that every whip-flick of her tail showered him with a flight of razor-finned, blade-like scales that slashed open his snout, forcing him to squeal like a pig before he scampered away, looking to take his frustrations out on something with tender skin.

Kiki sat silent in the oppressive silence of her creators. She listened to the throb of the forest. She waited, listening to fifty heart beats until the sound of the jackal's paws deserted her into the dark.

She eased herself out of the sphere of living armor, uncurling her faceless black bead eyes to the shining light of the sunset burning orange on the glass. Safe, Kiki sat down beside her favorite apple tree and let her tail drape into the red dirt, a shadow settling on the field, as the starglow descended.

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