July 22, 2023, 12:01 PM
sobeille slept in a pool of sunlight. pylons of sun spilled generously through the denmouth, each slumbering body etched in shimmering gold.
it was a quiet afternoon. the heat of midday had forced sapphique's intrepid hunters inside, where they reserved their energy and waited for oncoming night to soothe the scorching heat of late july.
clutched tight between little claws was the broken form of a fox sparrow, its copper feathers strewn about.
* * *
the hunter consumed his fill, leaving the floor beneath him strewn with the curled and dying bodies of hundreds of carpenter ants. alighting upon a narrow branch of sumac, he plucked one last straggler from his tail feathers and gobbled it with a greedy tilt of his head.
his crop squirmed with life, but those hapless prisoners would find no escape in that dark chamber. while their bodies segmented and digested, they would give the hunter the energy his high body metabolism demanded.
he would need to eat again in four hour's time, but for now he preened his coppery feathers with a safflower colored beak. every plume was addressed until they glistened vigorously in the dappled sunbeams.
later, he would fly through the tall spires of sequoia trees. in a dusty clearing near a fallen tree, he would spy the inching form of a green caterpillar glinting with fat and moisture. it moved laboriously across the forest floor. his thin talons would pierce its soft body and pin it to the ground. his sharp beak would rip the stemmata from pulpy thorax while green hemolymph seeped from where the caterpillar's head had once been.
he would not see his own demise spelled there in that mote-strewn clearing, in the face of a lumbering child who watched hungrily from under the eaves of a gnarled tree root.