the transformation from old to hawkish

    There’s the type of old that withers right down like an unwatered plant — and there’s the type of old that turns hawkish.  The hawkish bend at the waist, their shoulders take a gargoyle-like posture, with their beak growing long and narrow.  You’ll see this type of old at the grocery store, pecking at the card reader.  They’ll stand over buffet trays with their nose right up against the sneeze guard.  They hardly breath.  The nostrils are pinched tight.   The eyes narrow and shrugged in toward the snout.  It’s as if the whole face has been stuffed into a drinking glass.

     The hawkish-old are grumpy, as a generality.  It’s what leads them to become spear-faced in the first place.  A discontentment with the world and general living.  Nothing is right for them.  Their environment is highly crowded, musty, uncomfortable.  This discomfort runs through them in a network of varicose veins.  Their crude oil blood chugs and stalls continuously.

    Somewhere during the transformation, the voice box becomes corrupt.  Dust and angst coil into a rattlesnake at the back of their throat, ready to strike.  The most innocuous inquiry comes out venomous with a burning tail like a comet.  I’ve seen hawkish old people offend by merely asking directions to the commode.

    It’s not only the resonance of the voice that makes them brutish, it’s the beak which punts words out.  I’ve explained the sharpness of this feature, but you’ll also notice a hard, weathered scale.  Unlike a reptile, these spear-faced seniors never shed their outer layer of skin.  They wear it like a robe, flaunting it with every word, refusing to bother with chapstick, or vaseline.  Not concerned enough to offer a bit of moisture from the tip of the tongue.

    It wouldn’t help.  Their tongues go impotent with the rest of their body.  Tongues manage to slither into the shape of certain scathing words, but for other words, it will not operate.  The cold piece of meat will take back coarsely chewed food in choking swallows.  Other than that, they merely occupy a void the way a ornate rug would sitting in an abandoned building.

    Some studies will point the finger at genetics for this transformation, but I see it to be more voluntary.  Only after years of apathy and grumbling does a person, of any age, begin to kink at the hips.  At any moment, the physical changes can be slowed or reversed with regular smiling, dancing, or even gentle exposure to music.  These people must actively avoid these things.  Their jaws lock into frowns and it all begins slowly.  Soon enough, their features have convened in the middle of the face.  The noses extend and harden, adding weight and pulling the whole thing forward, off the natural axis.

    A blind man could sense someone in this hawkish state of being.  Their cars run on cigarette ash instead of fuel.  Music in elevators goes mute when they step in.  Glasses jump off waiters’ trays and slam themselves into the tiles.  The hawkish come with a certain odor.  Not repulsive, but not good.  It’s aromatically subtle, but it plays violently on the general population.  It feels instinctually dangerous, poisonous even, to the point that it would almost be impossible to be around them in areas lacking sufficient ventilation.

    Maybe these creatures croak one day.  Beak first, into the sidewalk, stiffness setting in before impact.  Or maybe they just go on, plodding on unsure footing, their talons leaving marks on the pavement. For all we know, they roam eternally.  The rattles in their throats shivering.  The predatory beak growing into a more gnarly and violent shape each year.

    I wonder if scientist have ever sawed into one of these beaks.  I’d imagine they’d carry rings of some sort, dating them back to prehistoric times when all living things were built for carnage.