Death of a Mulloway

It lay on the sand, its bronze scales wearing a soft shroud of moonlight, a gaping mouth no longer flushed by water but by the thin poison of pure air. I reached down and ran my fingers along the translucent mucus covering its body and felt the deep tremble of a life still fighting to free itself, the muscles and taut sinews now stripped of strength could only harden beneath the touch of my hand. It no longer moved but gave an occasional soundless gasp. I wondered what horrors were flashing or fading in the recesses of its brain, what it was feeling in those moments before dying. Its upward eye was locked in a frozen stare, a black pupil opening to a hole that plummeted beyond earthly depth. It seemed to hold me locked within an orbit that had opened around the gravity an inpouring dark. Fifty years on I feel the draw of its stare, the pull of the unknowable centered deep within its eye, still slowly winding me in, only now I am so much closer to its rim.