MicroHorror

I smell the rain, and the soil that is wet. It is in my fur and between my toes. The moon is full and my heart is full of the moon. I can feel my blood flow around her. She is a stone in my chest.

Cold air bites at my lungs. I breathe in sharp gulps of October fog and I see it leave my nose in twin streams; in this way I split the night in two so that I may stalk my prey hidden in the cleft I have made.

It is through this cleft that I see her, bundled against the cold and shivering. She stands on two pale legs that cannot bear her quickly across the wood. She has no fur and I smell her blood through her milk-skin. It is hot and alive, and it calls at me like running prey. In my mind’s eye I can see it burst forth as from a spring, feel it spray upon my muzzle, steaming in the nightchill that gnaws at my feet and pricks the points of my ears.

I am near and she sees me.

Those eyes!

She has trapped day-sky in them and sees the world from within it, sees me, from above. I see her eyes and I know she is the one. I feel my fur rise and I know she will run with me in these woods when next the moon is full. But she too will be wolf, and her blood will flow around the moon. I will look into those day-sky eyes and cry to the moon for the way it tugs at my heart.

She comes to the ground, but she does not stumble. She speaks to me but there is no terror in her voice. She does not fear my bared teeth and my blooded eyes, though she sees them through the cleft I have made in the night. She is not frightened of me. She has come seeking me.

Oh, how I drown in woe when I remember her beauty. She would have been my mate. She would have carried the moon in her chest, a stone that pierces when the chase is long. But she had longed for the bite I prepared for her.

And so I could not give it to her.

I feel the moon tug at my heart when I think of the night I dreamt the dream of the she-wolf with day-sky eyes.