#white tufted marmoset | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tobelongtheseries · 7 years

Text

Talon

“To Belong” Writing Contest Entry Written by: Beth A.

Evening had settled over the city, bathing slated rooftops in a warm, honeyed glow. A cool breeze with the scent of rain on its breath trickled through the gutters like a sigh. The purple swell of rainclouds had all but dissipated, leaving spatters of dark, bruise-like hues in the sky. Squirming in the residue, Mennah perched on the sill of a three storey balcony, squinting into the light through the amber tint of her goggles, absorbing each brush stroke of colour in the sky shimmering in the petrol puddles below.

The small tuft of her tail flicked back and forth in a ‘come-hither’ motion as she balanced on the ledge by the tips of her toes, fingers curling into the strap of an oversized satchel slung over her shoulder like a rucksack. The wind, to prove it still had some breath left in its body, sought a hold on the marmoset’s tiny form, threading wispy fingers through her mane in a vain attempt to buffet her from her perch.

Even with the warmth of seeping, amber rays tracing through her fur, the cool, lingering touch of the rain made her shiver. Mennah’s pelt fluffed as the zephyr whisked by. Stricken with the urge to just do, she stretched her hand out, spreading it to catch the wind only to feel it slip through her fingers. The cool touch was substantially better than that stifling café. Her fingers twitched and curled. A purse on her lips, she adjusted the strap of her satchel and peered down, eying the drop. The row of terraces cast grey shadows to the sodden street below. Across the road, she could see the lights of ‘The Tablespoon’ flicker off. Fired. Again. She chittered despondently, steering herself over to the railings and perching on the edge. Coiling low, she sprung forward taking off like a bolt from a crossbow, vaulting across impromptu walkways and skittering along slated tiles. The world blurs by her, messy and incomprehensible.

Streetlights, wet pavements, flashes of passing cars. She blears through it all. Up here, she couldn’t be touched by the scolding tongues of scathing remarks and pompous consumers her ex-establishment had to offer. Up here, she was flying. The warmth in her arms and legs spread to the tips of her fingers, making them tingle every time she rebounded off something. Her abdomen twisted pleasantly, warming at the sweet way it stretched and coiled under the strain. However, the slow burn had grown into a persistent ache niggling on the edge of her senses. With a leap that carried her from a telephone pole to a parapet, the ache screamed. Water sloshed up her legs as she skidded to a halt. The avenues had transformed into wrapper strewn, gurgling alleys and the tiled roofs into flat, concrete balustrades. Gritting her teeth, Mennah reclined on her haunches, her tiny heart like thunder in her ears.

With a chittering groan, she pulled the satchel’s strap from around her neck and dropped it on the ground beside her. A low trill of pain filtered between the fissures of her teeth as her arm throbbed. Nimble fingers brushed through the dusty gold of her course fur, soothing the wrought muscle beneath. She needed a break. Pealing her goggles from her face with her good arm and setting them beside her, she felt her body warm. A faint trickle began to buzz through her flesh like the conjuring of a lightning bolt. Just as her skin started to sear, white engulfed her vision. With a pulse of light her limbs elongated, gold fur receded into bronzed flesh, and Mennah stepped out of her sprightly marmoset skin and into her willowy human one. She stood, stretching the soreness out of her biceps, arching her back to pull at the taut knots between her shoulders. Her hair brushed against her bare shoulders, swathes of bottle-green bleeding into black from the bottom up. Her toes curled as they squished together in the grime and dirt.

The swell of pollution and grime engorged itself on the previous trickle of rain, bloating, distending and bursting from the rooftops to trickle and pool in sludge-like puddles in the streets below. Mennah felt her nose wrinkle. With no bus pass or the money for a taxi and the only options being winding through alleys and risking her ass leaping through the voids between buildings, she was much happier taking the longer route home than trudging through the muck, thank you very much. The aftertaste of ozone in the air curled her tongue to her palate. She hated being outside after a wet spell. Scintillating, neon-blue lights pulsed above shiny, wet cobbled streets, mingling with the yellow vapour bulbs of the streetlamps. Fiddling with the bottle green ends of her hair, twisting and threading it around her fingers, Mennah watched as the evening sun swelled and casted a copper-pink glow, bathing the land in a swash of light and colour. She was silent, gaze locked on the brushstrokes of embers sweeping over the parapets and concrete rooftops.

She stayed that way as the evening quickly began to bleed a dusky blue. Sequestered under the titillating glint of the stars above, Mennah huffed, shuffling through her satchel and shucking out her hoodie to retain some remnants of warmth. There was something ravenous about the shift of summer to autumn. Despite the warm colours and the drizzled, honeyed evenings, emptiness ran through the howling winds. She used to love the autumn, but nowadays it left a bitter edge on raw nerves. The image of that bloated, pus-pile of a boss floated in her mind. Her nails began to leave crescent welts in the flesh of her palms. Fired, rejected, swatted away like a bluebottle fly. Maybe she did bite a little too hard into that old toad, but nobody had the right to insinuate her life or her intelligence because of her damn hair. Besides, her nose did look like an overripe bell pepper. And like that, she was thrown out; uniform left crumpled in the gutter ‘round the back. Her stomach gnawed on itself, tiny pinpricks beginning to sting at the corners of her eyes, and quite suddenly, she began to grow angry.

What the hell was she doing? She was stuck in a financial rut with nothing but a couple hundred pounds and a shitty foldup couch to her name, and she was sitting here slouching on someone else’s parapet wallowing. She fought the tears back, swiping them away with the back of her hand. With grim resolution she stood, squaring her shoulders from the weighted slouch they pulled themselves into. She was tired of crying, tired of feeling inadequate and alone, of being afraid. By all accounts, she should be fearless; she had persevered against the odds and faced the aspect of destitution many times with icy calm poise. Swallowing around the lump that’d crawled up her throat, Mennah found herself threading her fingers through her hair. Roots to ends. Black to green. The familiar motions soothed her frazzled nerves. There will be other jobs, she told herself, quelling the snake-like whispers in her head. You have enough for next week’s rent and more than enough time to find another job. Just breathe. Sucking up a sharp breath, Mennah tilted her head back, wincing as the bones grated and popped at the base of her skull.

She had no idea how long she sat there musing, but by the time she surfaced from the broiling torrent that was her mind, night had fully transcended and the moon hung like a lonely bone in the sky, stars scintillating like diamond shards trapped in bubbling tar. Holding it until her lungs began to cinder and her skin itched, she released the breath with a loud ‘pbbbbbbblt’, stepping back into the familiar itch that was her golden marmoset. Her hoodie slumped around her shoulders, swallowing her whole. Hopping through the neck, she balled it up, shunting the thing back into her satchel and hooked the strap around her shoulder once more. The soft cotton felt nice on her calloused fingers, and as she thumbed the tender blisters, she grimaced at the thought of swinging the rest of the way home. Come on you big baby, a familiar tenor echoed snidely in her head, it’s not that far. Pulling at the strap with a huff, she prepared herself to spring from the parapet when a great gust of wind rifled through the small tuft of green fur at the nape of her head.

She squeaked, head swivelling up to catch a glimpse of whatever oversized pigeon decided to fly in her space. All she managed to catch was a spray of white. She blinked a slow languid motion. An osprey. Not an unusual sight, but not a sight she was used to. Head tilted, Mennah caught herself gawking; the white flight feathers and the black speckles on the underside of their wings reminded her of the eyes of silver birches. Sharp black talons tucked by their tail feathers, curled and relaxed almost harmlessly. The air rumbled with the power of a blustering sea-tempest from a mere beat of their wings. Wings tilted down, and with it went the bird, twisting mid-air until its feet touched the adjoining parapet. The light undersides were tucked away, revealing cold brown flight feathers the colour of petrified wood. From the angle of their head, the osprey had to have known that she was there, but was simply content to fluff up and began preening those gossamer wings.

She was entranced, watching that powerful, slate grey beak glide through the primers and carefully work its way across to the secondary remiges. Picking at the last tufts, they suddenly paused, making a show of noticing her. Tilting their head and regarding the little marmoset with a raptor-like gaze. Drizzled yellow eyes met her pebble black ones and all at once, Mennah was held captive. There was something foreboding about those eyes. Enticing and dangerous; like honey traps rippling with the twitching limbs of hornets submerged. The backs of her ears began to tingle. Something deep in her reptilian brain told her to run, yet her limbs felt warm and heavy. For as tense as the air was, the silence was calming. Tranquil. Blinking out of her stupor, Mennah realised that the osprey was still watching her. They seemed to be waiting. Brow pursing, Mennah settled onto her haunches, regarding the raptor to see if they would reciprocate the gesture.

The osprey however, made no such move, their head swivelling to glare over the parapet. Their chest feathers puffed out like the hackles of a cat, and Mennah watched in awe as their wings splayed the span of her arms from fingertip to fingertip. She briefly wondered what those dark feathers would feel like. The next moment, with a powerful swoop of those wings, they were gone, diving over the edge and disappearing from sight. Trapped in a daze, she scooted over to the other parapet, curiosity pulling at her like marionette strings. Reaching the edge, she peered over. The prickle behind her ears spread to the back of her head. In the corner of a brown alley, an eclectic group of humans and animals had gathered in a semi-circle around a scruffy looking cat with a mangled ear and bristled fur. They had it surrounded. She felt her gut lurch. Trappers. Monsters that shucked the pelts off other animals and sold them on the black-market. Oh no … nononono she shouldn’t be here. She needed to leave. A rustle of movement caught her eye.

The osprey glared on from a podium, perched above the scene like a dour gargoyle. The little menagerie seemed to be talking to each other, their hushed words lost to her from the vantage point, but from the sounds of their oily timbres, it was anything but good. She wanted to look away, leave and pretend she didn’t see the way they pushed in around the poor person snared in their net, but she couldn’t. The situation was beginning to leave a nasty taste in her mouth. Her whole head was buzzing now, from the tip of her nose to the jut of her chin, her heart like thunder in her throat. Without warning, one of the men took a purposeful step forward, a walking skyscraper bound in coils of muscle, boxing the creature in. The cat tried to dart between his legs, but was a fraction too slow. His tail made a sickening crunch beneath the heel of the man’s boot. The yowl was curdling, a hollow cry of pain. Mennah’s gut lurched. A wild, livid glare flitted through her pebble black eyes. Her throat clenched, swallowing the black shriek crawling up her windpipe like a prowling panther.

This went beyond words. All that passed through her mind was rage. Her teeth bared, focus funnelled onto the dark pillar of a man like he was the focal point of a hurricane. Never in her entire life had she felt such anger coursing through her veins. Somewhere deep inside, she realised later, it fuelled her … and that terrified her. She didn’t think, only reacted. She threw herself off the ledge, honing in on the shaggy mane of chestnut hair. She landed like a brick on water but she quickly scrabbled for purchase. She grabbed at anything she could hold onto, hair, clothes, skin, and pulled as hard as she could, nails biting. She could hear screaming, shouts of surprise at the sudden appearance of a flying ochre furball, but she was deaf to them, working as much damage as she could before bolting the hell out of there. In her peripheral she caught a glance of a matted grey slinking around the corner. Her grip slipped. Strong hands ensnared her, fingers sinking into her ribs before being wrenched from the man’s scalp and flung away like a like a ragdoll. For a brief, weightless moment, Mennah panicked, the image of her small body breaking under the impact of such a throw flitting through her mind like a zoetrope.

Her skin blistered and the next moment her feet hit the ground, her momentum tangling them around each other. Her bare back smacked against the wall and her lungs stuttered, body crumpling to the ground. The slick of grime coated her arms and knees and smeared all down her front. The edges of her vision blurred and darkened, and slowly enclosed around her sight. Her mind felt slow, crammed with cotton. Figures fluttered by as her world swam in and out of focus. A flare of white with black speckles. Osprey wings. Her mind returned to the sensation of claws at her shoulders. And teeth at her nape. Terror filled her lungs like a heady gas and she lashed out, knuckles scraping against a hard jawline. The weight fell off her back with a yelp, but hands quickly replaced them, fisting in her hair, knotting the dark tendrils and gripping her face tightly. As calloused fingers dug into the soft swell of her cheeks, Mennah felt her lips peel back, unsheathing slick teeth, and she bit down hard. The giant screamed, hand slipping from her hair to wrench the other from her mouth, but she followed, a crazed light glinting in her eyes.

Her teeth were locked and set. She wasn’t letting go without taking a chunk of him with her. A spill of copper tang spattered over her tongue. In response, something cracked across her cheek, sparking a flash of white across her vision. She drew back, but the hands followed, grabbing her shoulders like bike handles, thumbs digging into the meat around her clavicles, and threw her body onto the ground. She hit the dirt heavily, a gust of air rushing from her lungs. Her head cracked against the cement, teeth rattling as black spots popped behind her eyes for a brief second. Equilibrium whirling, she attempted to sit up, too stunned to notice the figure looming over her until his thick hand slithered around her neck and forced her back down. Head bouncing on the floor, her airways tightened, constricted, she fought to remove the grip on her throat. But it wouldn’t budge.

She howled and writhed, putting up as much of a fight as she could, but she was tired. The familiar flair in her arm was beginning to rile up and spread to her shoulder. Chest heaving, she fell limp. The man snickered, smirk pulling at his mouth and stretching a silvery scar etched under his bottom lip. “That all you got?” Mennah’s head ached and throbbed, making it hard to pull up much of a coherent thought, but she sucked on her tongue, pulling up as much moisture as she could and spat directly at the bastard’s face. “Go to hell,” she hissed as he reared back with a guttural growl. Hands tightened, crushing her windpipe. “You little -”

“Enough.” The air stilled. Through the watery film of her eyes, Mennah craned her head to see a woman, skin like cattails and rippling yellow eyes, observing the scene with a blasé demeanour. Her voice didn’t raise, words never wavered, but the clipped edge of her tone spoke of a woman who commanded attention. A pause. Fingers around her throat twitching. The man released his white knuckled grip. Back turned, Mennah took her chance and sat up, arms shaking as she braced and locked both elbows. She felt herself pale. The dull thrumming in her ears became a roar. She swallowed. Her throat was in agony. Her breath rattled in her chest in painful spasms, squeezing her insides to near-breaking points. The group around her spilled back, widening the circumference they set around her. A spasm of pain pinched her face. Her whole body strummed like taut elastic. Pouring over the throb of her body, she didn’t notice until the shadow spilled over her that the woman had edged closer. All she could do was swallow thickly as she leaned in, hot breath trickling over her face. Her lips tilted up invitingly; sharp, yellow eyes flitting softly over Mennah’s soft features like the light brush of a feather.

“Well, aren’t you the little hero?” she intoned, a soft, lilting croon like a mother coddling her sulking child. At once she’d bristled, livid. Who the hell did she think she was? This woman sat back and watched as someone’s tail was crushed, watched this monstrous and debilitating thing happen without as much as a bat of an eyelid. Hell, she probably instigated it with the way the group surrounding her torqued at her command. She was about to hash as much when before she could comprehend what was happening, hot lips were pressed against her own. Mennah’s eyes widened as she felt the woman’s mouth part, tongue probing at her bottom lip. As quickly as it started, the woman pulled away. Mennah sat there, ridged. She could still feel the heat of her breath linger in her. The woman’s lips pealed back into a grin and she leaned in, ever closer.

“I’ll be seeing you again.” Hot breath curled around the shell of her ear. She didn’t move, not even when she beckoned the group on with a click of her fingers. Not even when the bear-like man shot her a pernicious glare, one with a violent promise tied to its tail. She could only watch as the woman sprung to the air with a flash of light. As she left, she left her with a taste of smoke and iron on her tongue. She stayed there, aching on the ground, for several minutes until the sound of sirens crawled up the hill. She managed to clamber onto her feet, transform and scale the building and reclaim her satchel, dazed. She had a text on her phone; hey BB, wanna come over? can’t eat this jalapeno pizza by myself She didn’t reply.

As the morning rolled by, she woke to a choker of mottled bruises around her throat like giant, swollen amethysts and remembered that she left her goggles on the parapet. She spent the rest of the day curled on her beaten up loveseat, stomach folding itself over and over again. She felt as though she’d been tranquilised. Everything seemed to process a lot slower, and she felt numb to everything. All she could focus on was keeping the floor from buckling beneath her. She has Trappers on her tail. They were going to come for her. They were going to come for her and gods knew what they’d do? Mennah doubled over herself, wrapping her arms around her legs and pressing her forehead into her knees. Black rings were beginning to encompass her vision. She could still feel the talons shifting beneath her skin.

#contest #contest 6 #fanfic #fanfiction #to belong

6 notes · View notes