Wrong Turn

Process Diary

The Hadrolisk is mine, and it is built badly on purpose. It barely uses its eyes — they either give it a smear it cannot read or a single thing blown up so large that it stops being a thing at all, and neither of those is a way to find anything. So it does not look. It listens, and it feels for the heat in the air, and it waits for something warm to move past it. The tail is the weapon: a heavy ball on the end with a curved scythe blade laid over it, swung hard enough that nothing needs to be aimed. The fangs land second. Big sabered canines, pale, kept showing, and when they finally get used it is already over — the tail does the catching, the teeth do the finishing. I put two of them here, one seated up on the grey stone with its tail resting behind it, one lying down with its tail laid out separately in the dirt where you can see the ball and the blade both. Two of the same animal in the same dusk, and I wanted them to look like they had arrived at the same place from opposite directions. The trees are purple, the sky is the last of an orange sun going under, and the hills behind are already silhouetted. The title is the joke and it is not funny — something took the wrong turn to be here, and the Hadrolisk is the one standing beside the road it took, listening for it to happen again. Signed in the corner, like all of them.