Sunbeam Lair the wheezing cough of a smoker’s laugh

In the darkness, she was torn apart.

Brought to her very foundations, and found them cracked into unrecognizable form. 

Sometimes, she thought she heard voices, but she lived in the crevasses of shadow and pockets of deep darkness, and she did not breath a sound. There was nothing anyone could do to find her there, eyes glinting, poised like a rattlesnake in the dark places where rabbits hid. 

She heard someone describe her as a rat, once. Vermin, to be snuffed out with teeth in her throat. Too much coyote to ever be a wolf. The creature that once was would have balked at that, tried to correct it with words.

The creature that is, well, she didn’t care. So long as they stayed away, she would continue living in those small spaces, with her small gods and her small life in the scheme of a thousand others.

Broken glass in the shape of something moved with a curve through the dark, lit only by the knowing moon above, and by the mist and fog that pushed about her paws. It was there that she mixed medicine, pressing it onto her paws and her face, slathering it on her tail, what remained of it. The bone no longer shone in its crisp, bloody white, covered by an aching scab that broke and oozed blood if she moved too fast. Her body ached and was sore to the touch, but she did not feel it.

The knife’s edge in the dark, the rattlesnake slipped out from the cavern and into the misting night, staying in her shadow, to watch the moon hang in the sky, and wonder, for just a moment, where the faces she knew had gone. It occurred to her that she had not spoken in days, had not seen another creature besides the small ones in her small spaces with their even smaller lives, but this occurrence was unimportant. Unneeded.

Unnecessary.