Swiftcurrent Creek Rocks

Sprout picked his way slowly along the riverbed. He scanned his head slowly from side to side, doing his best to examine every rock, every leaf. After a quick bite of pheasant in the morning, he was brimming with energy to complete his project. If only mother nature would finally cut him a break and let him find what he was looking for.

Of course he would be looking for everyone but her. "It's you!" she said for no useful reason at all. The little red wolf was on the other side of the riverbed. Please, please tell me that he's been looking for me all this time, she thought to herself as she entered the waters, which seemed particularly calm in this part. Dashing through with great force and movement, she slowed and then sidled up to the other wolf. Her ears quickly dropped, and her eyes narrowed in annoyance as she realized he had been doing no such thing. "You can stop looking under every rock and leaf. Your favorite sister is here!" She knocked him on the head. "Here!"

While engrossed in his searching, Sprout sensed a disturbance in the Force. He unhappily directed his senses from the important task at hand to the disturbance now rapidly closing in. That disturbance turned out to be another wolf screaming and splashing water at him.

Rather nonplussed, Sprout turned back to the ground attempting to shut the disturbance out. This was not to be. He felt a great whump as a heavy object landed on his head and began to smother him. He gave a muffled yelp as he collapsed helplessly to the ground pinioned by his attacker's weight. As he lay flailing about, he found himself wishing he had paid the once-upon-a-time distraction more attention because apparently it was trying to kill him.

"Just because you don't acknowledge me," she said in a tone that sounded as if she were revealing a great, mysterious truth, "doesn't mean I'm not there." Suffocating him for what must have been a minute, Leaf quickly grew bored and removed her bottom from his face. She dusted herself off and then began to sniff around, wanting to see if there was anything worth eating or destroying. Finding neither of these things, she decided to return to the object of all her greatest frustrations and pernicious desires. Before all that, she approached to nudge him once--just to make sure that he was listening and not necessarily to see if he was breathing properly. "Tell me what you are trying to complete so I can destroy it," she murmured. There was no point in being deceitful, so she had decided to be as honest as possible.

After his initial futile struggle to remove the weight that was smothering him and deciding that playing dead was the best option, Sprout gave up and went limp. The weight--in no clear hurry--lifted itself clear of its target. The voice spoke again and finally triggered a spark of recognition through Sprout's oxygen-deprived brain. And again, he decided the safest option was to remain dead. He tried to control his breathing so it wasn't completely obvious he was alive. Better to be uninteresting to these sort of creatures driven purely by their curiosity. After considering his options for a moment, he felt a lackadaisical nudge--and decided to continue playing dead. Then it issued a demonic decree. But there was no way it could have known he was trying to create something. His mind raced, trying to find a way out. But he finally realized, there was no easy escape. So he decided to simply succumb to his fate. Without ever moving, he let his sudden weariness overtake him, and he drifted slowly to sleep.

I hate you. And yes, I am just writing as myself--just as you are.

Leaf felt her face twitch with annoyance. It was one thing for her brother to play dead but another thing altogether for him to fall asleep--and that the saddest part of all this was that he was being entirely sincere. Feeling a headache slowly forming in the front of her head, she decided she needed to change her tactics. She had recently read a therapy book that suggested that much of what maintained problem cycles were the very "solutions" people attempted to use. That is, their solutions consisted of much of the same thing (e.g. a mother playing the same unreasonable game that her daughter was). Instead, they needed to introduce something different, something that could change the problem cycle entirely. Moving away from Sleeping Beauty, the little red wolf began to examine the rocks and leaves around her. Oh! she would say when she find a particularly interesting specimen. She then began to amass a small mound of rocks, which soon became a veritable mole hill. With these same rocks, she began to build a small barricade around her sibling. "And so, they created a tomb for his body, in order to honor him," she said. With that, she left him. Without remorse. She would no doubt see him again at some point, but even if she did not, she knew where he would be (and lived).