Incantations of beasts

Jennifer Kite-Powell
4 min readJan 9, 2022
Burst. 2017. Jennifer Kite-Powell

These beasts were not beastly.

No more so than humans are beasts or behave beastly towards others.

These beasts didn’t come for us.

No one knew where they came from. One day they just appeared. Swimming in a channel that was made from war by men who acted like beasts.

The beast's lithesome white arms gently speared the water; their hand-like fins moved the water in ways we never imagined.

Their ghostly silhouettes were pearlescent, revealing their flamboyantly colored organs. As the beasts made their way through the water, their beating hearts and pulsating lungs pumped colorful blood through its veins, changing hues with every stroke.

If you were sitting on the little green mounds of earth overlooking the channel you could see an elongated white shadow more than ten feet long with bursts of color gliding through the water towards the mouth of the channel before it split into two directions.

No one knew where each direction of the incandescent blue water went, but that day, each direction was filled with the beautiful white shadows of the beasts.

As they swam, they left behind a trail of light in every color of the Crayola crayon box. You didn’t know if they were stirring up the bottom of the channel, where no one had ever…

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Jennifer Kite-Powell
Jennifer Kite-Powell

Written by Jennifer Kite-Powell

Speculative poet, flash fiction writer, author, podcaster & Forbes senior contributor. Read my work here, on substack or at www.jenniferkite-powell.com