Lost Creek Hollow don't you weep and don't you worry

He was not completely oblivious to the turmoil that Harlyn rolled through. He felt it too, though at some certain point he had been able to compartmentalize it all away, storing it and shoving it somewhere that it seemed it would serve it best to be forgotten. Yet it was all but forgotten, ever lurking in whatever shade or recess it could find in the riddled pathways of his thoughts, an ever constant reminder that things were far from all right in their neck of the woods. Like a picketing protest group, they displayed signs and hurled slurs as the funeral procession—that was better known as his outward expression—passed by.

He found her just as he had predicted, not at all too far away from the latest of their suburban forestry homes. There Mordecai found himself holding back for only a moment, all too familiar with the urging to compose oneself; though beneath that he wondered what horrors lied out from them to discover this evening, as it would have seemed in the latest of days there had been nothing but one after another, after another. Perhaps not quite at that rate of course, but nonetheless all ran together and pooled in whatever notch along their waters and quaint wood. It must have boasted at length, as he had not heard the cries of the unfamiliar; perhaps the cat had picked them all off.

That thought was enough to spur him forward, no longer willing to let Harlyn have her uninterrupted moment. His presence did not come without sound, but he hoped it was something of a comfort as he slipped alongside of her, drawing his scarred muzzle to drape along her shoulders and teeth to tousle the downy hairs of an ear.