The Blessed One

She lay fevered floating in a dream, her form changing from human to lion and back and forth between them. Which one, if either, was her true self did not matter for she was one with both and both with one.

In her vision she ran across the savanna, her tawny paws lightly touching the grass, as her speed seemed to defy the concept of gravity while she felt the near joy of forgetfulness overtake her.

And then she halted, attracted by the smell of death and the voices that pleaded for help. Before her on the altar of the grass lay the dead oryx, the black and white markings of its face blending with the shadows of the late afternoon.

By the dead animal's stomach knelt five light brown forms, their appeals for their mother to awaken merged with their futile attempts to coax milk and life from where it no longer existed.

Normally, she would have killed the babies and feasted for days upon them and their mother, but something stayed her attack, something tugged at her heart in the eyes that found hers, eyes so young that they did not know the fear that they should have felt in her presence.

They tottered toward her on legs feeble from youth and the lack of food, and nuzzled around her four legs, then two, then four. Still she did not strike.

So she took them to raise as her own, and the villagers who saw them were amazed and named her “The Blessed One.”

Perhaps since she had no child or cub of her own they had moved a nurturing instinct deep within her, perhaps she was merely lonely and needed more than the feel of the wind at her face as she sped through life and across the savanna, perhaps for once she required more from existence than the fulfillment of the kill.

Or perhaps some higher power had ordained this to be her fate…

Whatever the cause, they grew knowing both the ways of lion and woman but not of their own kind.  When they encountered other oryx they either fled in denial or attempted to make them their dinner.

At neither did they succeed.

One day, one of them died. She attempted to nuzzle it back to its feet, but in her woman form realized the body was lifeless.

She transformed back to lion and ate it while the others merely watched knowing that some day that too would be their fate, although they could never leave her because the idea of death offered less fear than the concept that she would not be there to protect them.

Then she awoke from her dream in a room alone and cold. The late afternoon sun shone through the blinds painting black and white stripes on the empty space in the bed next to her while she gazed absentmindedly at the light brown color of the skin on the back of her hand.

Upon her lips she could still taste the blood.

Such is always the way of nature …