Iron-jawed beasts

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In the hush of the grass, they coil and keep watch. Before, I would slip through the greenery on my daily walks to spare myself the stumbling dance over cracked asphalt—but no longer. Now these iron-jawed beasts crouch beneath the green, eager to flay my skin and gnaw down to the bone.

They did not always dwell among us. Now they are everywhere at once, seeping into every crevice of the known world. They convulse and spew slick torrents of dark oil into the seas, blinding and choking the reefs. With every breath of fire, they scorch fields of wheat to ash, and where they burrow beneath the forest canopy, mushrooms weep from a surfeit of solitude, rotting away in their sleep.

From the East they came, these engines of ruin who clawed their way through our land and laid claim to it as though it had always belonged to them. For three fleeting years, we dared to believe that they had forgotten we existed. We fancied ourselves fortunate—until they reminded us that we, hidden away thousands of kilometers from their dominion, had never once slipped from their memory.

There is but one word for this: war. You may dress it in heavier cloth—call it all-out war, full-scale war, a war of total ruin and annihilation—but strip away the frayed banners and it stands naked in its oldest name: war.

At nightfall one heavy summer night they finally descended upon us from the sky—jaws agape, dripping with viscous hunger, ravenous for flesh. Their hunger swelled with every guttural roar, a growing tempest of hunger and rage. We fled beneath the earth’s cold skin, retreating into shadowed hollows, waiting in breathless silence for their fury to ebb and fade.

In return, our own clockwork beasts rose and struck, driving them back—not eastward, whence they came, but downward, to the Hell that first spat them forth. The thunder of our violence echoed the enemy’s dirge, yet somehow it did not summon the same dread. We too could conjure death’s rattle, could bargain with the abyss—but we did so only to steal a little more time from its jaws, to taste the sweetness of another dawn.

When the sky finally flushed pink with the promise of morning, our protectors gave the signal that the peril had subsided, and we crawled back to our beds like field mice vanishing into hollowed walls. Though sleep would not come easily afterward, for the tongue still carried the bitter knowing that war had not descended upon us but merely unmasked itself. It had dwelt here all along—at the frayed hem of our slumber—waiting for the hour when we could feign blindness no longer.

I know I ought not to mythologize this war—it only makes their cruelty more distant, less tangible. So here it is plainly: behind every iron-jawed beast that targets us stands a man, and that man hails from a place called Russia. These men, drunk on the riddle of their souls and the ghost-weight of a storied culture, unchain their engines of ruin upon this land that dares to speak its own name—Ukraine.

After conjuring every Ukrainian mother’s howling lament, every Ukrainian child’s last frightened breath, those men from the land known as Russia return home—pressing lips to their waiting wives, tucking their own children beneath quiet stars, as though nothing has shifted, as though the land is not left starving for goodness because of them.

The land has been stripped bare, left senseless, reeling beneath the weight of this violence. It knows nothing of broken security guarantees or the hollow lies of spheres of influence. It knows only the ache of its own failure—its helplessness to feed us, to cradle us, for those from a place called Russia have stolen from it its sovereign right to nurture. I do not know how to express this sorrow to the land, and so I apologetically drift instead into the numbing half-light of near fairy tales, where at least some gentleness might soothe what truth cannot mend.

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