Misfire

The frost had not yet melted
when I stood beneath the birch.
Everything around me held its breath
in a hush of refusal.
Even the birds were absent,
as though they had fled some
prearranged terror.

Then:
a shape among other shapes,
a sliver of motion
coated in fur, in hunger,
in the low arithmetic of survival.
I raised the gun.
I had done this before  –
this ritual,
this pantomime of power.

Grip. Breath. Pull.

But what followed was not thunder.
It was a sound like forgetting,
like a language breaking in the mouth.
The shot broke sideways  –
a failure,
not of aim,
but of essence.

The shape dissolved.
The trees did not.
The hush grew heavy, hostile.
The forest,
which had once seemed passive,
now leaned back
as if in revulsion.

And I  –
I stood,
neither ashamed nor afraid,
but strangely diminished,
as though some part of me
had been tested
and found lacking.

Something had spoken through me  –
but not in my voice.
Not in any voice.
A reply was demanded,
and I had given
an answer
in an extinct dialect.

I left the woods
with hands that stank of burnt metal and error.
And behind me,
in that soil-rich silence,
a question hung  –
a riddle not meant for humans,
no longer waiting
for anyone
to understand.