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pacificpikachuEh, I feel obligated to write in this, but right now I'm feeling particularly bland.
Well, lessee...what is there to write about?
I just finished Ryuichi's LJ in the Gravitation RPG... Now I've finished a total of five of them. That's actually pretty good--they're longer than you'd think. So far not one of them has been the slightest bit disappointing. These writers are great.
I saw a little of FMA on Thursday night! *Dances* I saw almost all of episode...four, was it? With the blue roses and whatnot? Anyway, it was very cute. *^^* I'm going to have to see more of it before I can properly judge it, though. Ed seems younger than I thought he would seem, based off of pictures I've seen of him and stuff. @.@ He's cute. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing more so I can see exactly how much I like it.
I also saw an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It was on after my bed time, but the fact that Yoko Kanno does the music made me not really care if I was sleep-deprived the next day. When I saw the animation for the opening theme, my eyes went "O_O". When it got to the actual show, however, the animation wasn't all that exciting. The storyline was okay (a little on the meh side...), and I'll watch it again if I get the chance (I did like the opening and ending theme, but didn't really hear much of the background music), but it wasn't the most exciting thing I've ever seen.
Oh, but it was funny watching it because I've met the lady who does the main character's voice. It's Mary Elizabeth Mcglynn-- she also does the voices of Julia (Cowboy Bebop), Jaguara (Wolf's Rain), and she directs the English versions of Bebop and WR. She's really nice--she even came with us at Anime Expo to the Wolf's Rain cosplay gathering. She (and the other Wolf's Rain VAs we met) were completely amazed at how much Nicole and I knew about the show. They said we know more than they do. ^^;; We have all their autographs.
I kept trying to watch bits and pieces of RahXephon and FLCL today, but Ryan and his friend James keep stealing the TV from me so they can play PS2. -_- It's been a boring day.
Here, I'll post a little of my writing for you guys to read if you wish/find the time/are bored enough. Feel free to skip it, though.
Embers
When the fire eats away at itself…when its energy and vivacious spears of light patter slowly into lethargy…there will be only embers left. Minuscule, firefly flickers…sharp red eyes in the all-encompassing darkness. Breathing with the breath of one who has known their youth…and watched it slither away…watched themselves wither, turn cold. Life will not matter, but the embers will. The fragments of a lost dream. A crimson moon, rimmed with a outlines of a silver dream… And a life, only half-lived…and half-imagined.
Hidama was half-wolf and half-dream. The family bought her from a man on the side of the road in Montana. He pleaded for them to take her in--said that his house burned down a few weeks ago for no reason he could find, and all her siblings and her full-wolf mother were caught in the fire. He found her in the rubble three days after the pattering flames ceased their crackling. Her breath was scarce, her eyes were scorched closed, and most of her cloudy white fur had been singed off of her body. He almost left her there to die because the memories of the fire were so painful in his chest, but when she began whining as he strode away, he couldn’t help but take her with him. Now he was stuck with her, and she needed someone who could pay for her food.
The family looked at her for a while, pondering, while she stared back at them with a depth so solid it appeared to transcend both the pup’s age and size. Her eyes were yellow and deep like old amber, and flames still leapt and hissed in her eyes every time light fractured upon them.
They said, “No thanks,” and didn’t mention their fear of the power in her eyes. They continued on their way as if they had never seen her. But she whimpered, pulled forward on her ratty-twine leash, and they spun on their heels and gave the man fifty dollars for her. As he took the two twenties and a ten in exchange for the tattered leash and big-pawed puppy, he intoned about her fur, and how it was terribly odd that her fur grew back a strange smoke-gray instead of white after that fire. They didn’t really care. It wasn’t that strange, surely.
Her name was Hidama because they saw it on a license plate on the road trip back to their home in Iowa and thought it sounded cool. They didn’t know it meant ‘fireball.’
They lived on a fifty-acre ranch with horses and a border collie named Kuro. Hidama settled in to their ranch life silently, and they ignored her a good portion of the time, because she ignored them in return. She never barked as long as they had her, and whined only when she woke from sleep. They couldn’t help but wonder if she was deaf or mute or both.
She was a shadow upon the land. Her fur was soft like fog and never lost its gray hue as she grew closer and closer to looking like a real wolf every day, with spindly legs and the ivory teeth of a predator. She would disappear for days on end, never missed, never mentioned, but taken for granted when she was there. They didn’t bother getting her a collar. She didn’t need it, and she wasn’t theirs the same way a wild horse is never really anyone’s but the open plains’. She belonged to something long gone that probably never existed anyway. She belonged to flint-black skies and firefly stars and ithe land that smelled like campfires and shaman dreams and a moon that dangled in the sky like a decoration from before the world existed. Fire was in her eyes, even when they were closed and she slept with her head resting on her paws. While Kuro slept inside by his masters’ bed, Hidama always resisted the warm hearth, even when snow drifted down in steady flakes upon her fur. Right outside the doorway was where she had set her boundaries, for reasons that she herself did not know.
Hidama felt the same way about herself that everyone else felt about her. She was a mystery. She dreamed vivid dreams about reds and oranges when she could only see in black and white when she was awake. She wondered about the moon and how long it had been in the sky. She didn’t feel any more real than the fog feels it is real just before the sun rises. Her only friend, and her only reference point for understanding herself, was Kuro the border collie, who she befriended shortly after she arrived at the ranch.
Kuro was a jokester with sharp, laughing eyes of flint. He owned a thick, proud coat of black that curled upwards slightly if he got dirty enough herding the horses and sheep, and his chest, the tip of his nose, and all four of his legs were that particular shade of creamy white that is always dirty no matter how clean it is. He moved in a rough lope that juxtaposed her comparative drift. She spoke very little in her friendship with him, but when she did, it was bound to get the border collie thinking on levels he had never imagined existed.
“Kuro…what is the world if we cannot sense it?” she asked him once when she awoke with a whine from a colorful dream. “If there was no one here, would the world still be here?”
Kuro had been trotting into the open doorway of the house with every intention of curling up for sleep, but he turned and paused, eyes and nose flaring, when he heard her voice. His folded ears perked in her direction. “That’s a good question,” he puzzled. “I think I’ve heard the humans saying something-or-other about that. ‘Cept it was about trees. I can’t claim to know the real answer, though--everyone has a different answer to that question. Maybe there isn’t a real answer, and it only matters what you think is the answer. Everyone’s right, then, in a sense.” He stared at the wood grains on the side of the house in a thoughtful way.
Hidama trained her eyes on Kuro intently, and he was unnerved by the flames he saw in them. He never, ever looked in her eyes when she stared like that, because it hurt to look directly at them. Her eyes seemed to have all the sorrow of the moon, but with the coolness of that celestial body replaced with the passion and flame of the sun.
“Anyway…” he murmured, fidgeting. “Anyway, I’m going inside. It’s cold out here, and I’m tired from all that herding today. Sheep are stupid animals, y’know. They run off fear and they never know where you want them to go.”
She stared as he stalked off into the house, but interrupted his attempt at escape. “Kuro, do you dream about fire? When you dream, do you see…do you see in different ways than you do when you’re awake? I see fire. I see fire, and I see the moon…but it’s not like it normally is. It’s…it’s… You know how humans talk about that thing called ‘color’? How they say the two crayons are different when they’re not?”
Kuro was caught in half-step and was halfway through the doorway already, but her train of thought was intriguing to him. “Yeah…what about it?”
“I think I know what color is. I see it in my dreams. I see…it’s like the whole world is filled with lights that aren’t like the lights we can see. I can understand, then, how the crayons would be different. If they’re different colors--like the way the fire in my dreams is a different color than my world when I’m not asleep--then that’s how they’re different. I don’t know why I see these things all the time. I don’t know why there’s always fire in my dreams, every night.”
Kuro, interested as he was, really needed to get to bed. But first, he felt she needed some sort of closure for the conversation. “I can see the fire in your eyes, Hidama. It’s always there. I don’t know why either, but it seems to be your curse--or your blessing. You decide which. I’ll talk to you in the morning, okay? I need to sleep.” His words felt dark and searing to her, like the razors of a raven’s wing in the morning.
She tried to take it as just that. She milled around in circles, tramping out a bed for herself, and lay down, closing her eyes, but sleep did not come to her. Laughing fire--black and white and gray--danced across her eyelids. She could smell the soot, and hear the fire growling and snapping at her snout. Fear flittered in her chest like a butterfly gone mad.
She whimpered with remorse and quick fear, and got up, shaking away the dirt that clung to her fur. She stared at the moon, and it stared back. It had gone bloody crimson and looked angry to her. She shrunk away at the torch-flame light washing over her in nervous channels--lighting her fur to a pumpkin glow. She thought she was dead and the fireflies were washing over her to take her soul away. Her tail was hiding between her hind legs, and her whole body shook. The moon’s eyes never left her for a second, and she was going to burn in them.
The door had been left open from when Kuro went inside. The house scared her--but the moon scared her more. It couldn’t see her if she went inside.
She trotted anxiously inside the doorframe, crossing boundaries she had set for herself. Her tongue lolled from her mouth. The interior of the house was uniform and cool--shaded with twilight shadows that neither flitted nor deepened. She felt better for a little while, but soon she saw the windows. They leaked bloody light from the moon across the carpet, and the red deepened and deepened until it was light--flickering, leaping light that spread in slow, pattering tongues of flame. She whimpered, pacing the perimeter of the room, watching the very real flames as they slithered across the floor, bounded into the curtains, and began gnawing at the walls and furniture.
Fear ate her heart. She whined and whined as she always did in her dreams. She could usually whine and wake herself up from her dreams of fire, but the fire continued towards her, so close that its dusky heat was licking at her legs. She did not know where the fire had come from, or how it could have started in the middle of the carpet like that, but she did know that she needed to escape. This was no dream--though the colors were shining brighter than she supposed even the humans could see. It was a gloriously gruesome sight.
On legs that felt skinny and bent like those of a daddy long legs, she flickered out of the doorway and stood helplessly on the edge of the property as fire consumed her entire universe. She was so paralyzed by fear and fire, she didn’t even give a thought to those inside the house. She did not hear their screams over the bellowing of the flames. She did not hear a border collie howling her name. She did not hear them go quiet, for the fire obscured them from her, as it always had separated her from the rest of the world.
When the firefighters came the next morning, the house was little more than ashes and rubble. They found the bodies of four people, and one dog. One firefighter claimed that when he had arrived, there had been a wolf there, too, head lowered as if in remorse over the body of the dog. He said the wolf was pure black like obsidian, and had gray eyes as though there were nothing left in them but soot. He couldn’t remember whether she ran off, or whether she disappeared in front of his very eyes like a ghost.
A month later, a family walking in Montana came across a man with a gray half-wolf puppy. He said his house had burned down a few weeks ago, and she was the only one of her litter who had survived. The family saw the fire in her eyes, but they took her anyway. They didn’t know what she was.
But then again, neither did she.
Shadow
The sun melted across the horizon in buttery hues of saffron and dandelion, touching the shoulders of the tanned hills with a Midas’ Touch to send everything scintillating in tones of gold. A few scrape-bellied clouds, still bumbling westward in no particular hurry and at the will of the dawdling breeze, soaked up the light much in the way a sponge soaks up water, and proceeded to glow like opaque light bulbs amongst a backdrop of fire. Several mule deer, loitering over flanks of the hills on their cloven hooves, spread long, cape-like shadows dancing across the grass in a thin mimicry of their own grace.
The stranger appeared like a glitch in the system. Black, sinewy, and with sallow pumpkin-colored eyes that made the sunset look pale and sweet against their flames, his tail swept out in back of him like an old man’s cane turned fluid and rippling. He did not stride like a human might, nor did he waltz like a deer; he slipped across the hills almost like the shadows of the deer did, but with more cunning and care, and absent of the gentle exuberance. The shadow of a raven, that’s what he was-- but grimmer and blacker than the raven itself, and much less meandering.
His paws were big and seemed to sink on to the ground every time he took a step, his toes forming in cushioned pools to form around the texture of the ground. A square head and rectangular ears betrayed the flowing silk that made up the rest of his body, and also whispered of his feline nature. He was indeed not a shadow, though he could have passed for one; rather, he was a black panther. A black panther with very little credibility wandering the hills of England.
A rumble scraped his throat when his eyes met the deer, which had paled in their dancing and twinkled off at the absurd sight of him, but he made no attempt at charging them or even at stepping up his pace out of interest. They were already flickering away, and he was not accustomed to the hunt like one of his species should be. His instincts had rumored to him of warm blood, but he had never once tasted such a thing, and knew little about the psychology of the chase. Though he was a silken, graceful creature, his muscles were atrophied from the years he had spent enclosed, and the deer were wary and observant; used to predators, though not any of his variety. He didn’t stand a chance against their light, fragile speed.
The final rays of the retreating sun played across his midnight fur, and his pupils dilated as the land began its descent into blue night. He, too, descended downwards on the hill, towards a valley where there existed a stark contrast to the brown hills. Verdant green grass that glimmered with water droplets. He found it curious that there could be such a shade of green among such goldens and such bronzes, and he could also smell the sweet, putrid scent of cattle. He poked his thick whiskers in front of him to sift the breeze, and his prominent shoulder blades rolled beneath his loose skin as he crept closer and closer to his target destination.
It had taken nothing but a bit of carelessness on the part of his caretaker in order for him to make an escape. Having forgotten the nutrients that were added to his twice daily chunk of raw meat, his caretaker had whirled on his heels to fetch the liquid supplement out of the shed. He had shut the door behind him, but not latched it, and when the panther nudged the light chain-link fence with his big smudge of a nose, the door had slinked outwards. Just enough for the big cat to slip past and head leisurely for a patch of forest.
He was not treated badly at his home. His caretaker genuinely cared for the panther, and was indeed an animal expert who was well-versed in caring for exotic animals. The panther had an enclosure that offered him plenty of room to lounge and chase big rubber balls, and stalk back and forth along the fence line. One could even go so far to say that the panther was terribly pleased with captivity. He had never lived any other way, having been born to a captive mother in a zoo, and though he often felt callings from the distant hills that he could gaze at through the chain-links of his cage, he was generally content and loved bathing in the sun and purring like a big housecat.
His home pretty much left his mind, however, as he tromped closer and closer to what he now recognized as the home of a human. The grass beneath his pooling feet was soft and fresh from frequent sprinkling, and even slightly mushy. A four-foot tall barbed-wire fence separated him from a herd of peacefully grazing cattle, which were loafing about in orange and russet blobs in the dim evening. They were entirely unaware of his sinister approach, for he was downwind and quieter than the night sneaking up on them. His broad pink tongue traveled across his black lips and white fangs.
While he waited for the stars to notice him, he paced the length of the decrepit fence, much as he would have if he was still in his enclosure at home. At one point, his anxious striding was interrupted by the bay of a ragged steer near his patch of fence, and this pushed him out of his repetitive actions. He flattened his ears against his head and switched his tail in restlessness as he paused.
No longer content to merely stalk the fence line, he gathered his sinewy body into a bunch of skin and muscle, and was able to scale the fence in one fluid bound. However, this caught the attention of the dozing cows, and they flicked their ears at him and spun on their hooves as one, rolling their eyes uneasily and lumbering to the other side of the pasture in a cluster.
A rumble fluttered in his throat and chest, ferally rising until it was a hissing, yelling roar. He charged the cattle then, moving swiftly and with rolling speed, watching with wild, needle-sharp eyes as the cluster of cows diffused clumsily past him. However, their eyesight was much dimmer than his, and they were dumb from lack of instinct.
The panther made careful note of the black steer who had bayed earlier, for his legs seemed rickity and the cow himself feeble. Jutting into the bunch of cows, he singled out the steer and caused the animal to bolt out into the open field, where the panther was free to stretch out his legs in pursuit. He chased him into another corner, where the cow began whirling and hesitating with uncertainty in the confined space. The frightened animal splayed out his front legs and stared the panther in the eye with his own dumb, wide stare. Just then, the panther sprang and latched himself to the steer’s hefty neck. Securing his position with unsheathed hooks of claws that were able to sink into the heifer’s skin, the panther clamped on to his shoulder with bright sabers of teeth. In the mouth of such a wild beast, the warm blood tasted velvety and thick. The steer let out a wail of surprise and pain and began pitching his body in every which-way in order to rid himself of the panthers’ teeth and claws.
The panthers’ last moments were filled with the near thrill of victory, and confusion caused by the sudden crack that split the air just then. The panther unlatched his jaws from the heifer’s flesh, but he remained perched on his prey’s shoulder. With dizzy eyes, the panther stared in the direction of the noise.
Standing there was the farmer, gun aimed and ready. Before the panther could do so much as blink or evade, there was another crack and a searing pain ripped into his flank with the power of a baseball bat. He lost his grip then and fell into a black clump on the ground, writhing and snarling. There was one more snap, this impacting his skull, and his world went black and numb in a dazzling shiver of silver.
The farmer, just as shocked and confused as the panther he had just killed, trotted to the center of the pasture, where the black shadow was lying--twisted and sinewy and gruesomely beautiful--and with a seeming grin on his feline face.
Perhaps this was because it was better for him to die as himself, rather than to live as someone else.
Any comments would be appreciated. Don't be afraid to criticize--both of these were written in less than an hour and a half for my Creative Writing class.
Well, lessee...what is there to write about?
I just finished Ryuichi's LJ in the Gravitation RPG... Now I've finished a total of five of them. That's actually pretty good--they're longer than you'd think. So far not one of them has been the slightest bit disappointing. These writers are great.
I saw a little of FMA on Thursday night! *Dances* I saw almost all of episode...four, was it? With the blue roses and whatnot? Anyway, it was very cute. *^^* I'm going to have to see more of it before I can properly judge it, though. Ed seems younger than I thought he would seem, based off of pictures I've seen of him and stuff. @.@ He's cute. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing more so I can see exactly how much I like it.
I also saw an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It was on after my bed time, but the fact that Yoko Kanno does the music made me not really care if I was sleep-deprived the next day. When I saw the animation for the opening theme, my eyes went "O_O". When it got to the actual show, however, the animation wasn't all that exciting. The storyline was okay (a little on the meh side...), and I'll watch it again if I get the chance (I did like the opening and ending theme, but didn't really hear much of the background music), but it wasn't the most exciting thing I've ever seen.
Oh, but it was funny watching it because I've met the lady who does the main character's voice. It's Mary Elizabeth Mcglynn-- she also does the voices of Julia (Cowboy Bebop), Jaguara (Wolf's Rain), and she directs the English versions of Bebop and WR. She's really nice--she even came with us at Anime Expo to the Wolf's Rain cosplay gathering. She (and the other Wolf's Rain VAs we met) were completely amazed at how much Nicole and I knew about the show. They said we know more than they do. ^^;; We have all their autographs.
I kept trying to watch bits and pieces of RahXephon and FLCL today, but Ryan and his friend James keep stealing the TV from me so they can play PS2. -_- It's been a boring day.
Here, I'll post a little of my writing for you guys to read if you wish/find the time/are bored enough. Feel free to skip it, though.
Embers
When the fire eats away at itself…when its energy and vivacious spears of light patter slowly into lethargy…there will be only embers left. Minuscule, firefly flickers…sharp red eyes in the all-encompassing darkness. Breathing with the breath of one who has known their youth…and watched it slither away…watched themselves wither, turn cold. Life will not matter, but the embers will. The fragments of a lost dream. A crimson moon, rimmed with a outlines of a silver dream… And a life, only half-lived…and half-imagined.
Hidama was half-wolf and half-dream. The family bought her from a man on the side of the road in Montana. He pleaded for them to take her in--said that his house burned down a few weeks ago for no reason he could find, and all her siblings and her full-wolf mother were caught in the fire. He found her in the rubble three days after the pattering flames ceased their crackling. Her breath was scarce, her eyes were scorched closed, and most of her cloudy white fur had been singed off of her body. He almost left her there to die because the memories of the fire were so painful in his chest, but when she began whining as he strode away, he couldn’t help but take her with him. Now he was stuck with her, and she needed someone who could pay for her food.
The family looked at her for a while, pondering, while she stared back at them with a depth so solid it appeared to transcend both the pup’s age and size. Her eyes were yellow and deep like old amber, and flames still leapt and hissed in her eyes every time light fractured upon them.
They said, “No thanks,” and didn’t mention their fear of the power in her eyes. They continued on their way as if they had never seen her. But she whimpered, pulled forward on her ratty-twine leash, and they spun on their heels and gave the man fifty dollars for her. As he took the two twenties and a ten in exchange for the tattered leash and big-pawed puppy, he intoned about her fur, and how it was terribly odd that her fur grew back a strange smoke-gray instead of white after that fire. They didn’t really care. It wasn’t that strange, surely.
Her name was Hidama because they saw it on a license plate on the road trip back to their home in Iowa and thought it sounded cool. They didn’t know it meant ‘fireball.’
They lived on a fifty-acre ranch with horses and a border collie named Kuro. Hidama settled in to their ranch life silently, and they ignored her a good portion of the time, because she ignored them in return. She never barked as long as they had her, and whined only when she woke from sleep. They couldn’t help but wonder if she was deaf or mute or both.
She was a shadow upon the land. Her fur was soft like fog and never lost its gray hue as she grew closer and closer to looking like a real wolf every day, with spindly legs and the ivory teeth of a predator. She would disappear for days on end, never missed, never mentioned, but taken for granted when she was there. They didn’t bother getting her a collar. She didn’t need it, and she wasn’t theirs the same way a wild horse is never really anyone’s but the open plains’. She belonged to something long gone that probably never existed anyway. She belonged to flint-black skies and firefly stars and ithe land that smelled like campfires and shaman dreams and a moon that dangled in the sky like a decoration from before the world existed. Fire was in her eyes, even when they were closed and she slept with her head resting on her paws. While Kuro slept inside by his masters’ bed, Hidama always resisted the warm hearth, even when snow drifted down in steady flakes upon her fur. Right outside the doorway was where she had set her boundaries, for reasons that she herself did not know.
Hidama felt the same way about herself that everyone else felt about her. She was a mystery. She dreamed vivid dreams about reds and oranges when she could only see in black and white when she was awake. She wondered about the moon and how long it had been in the sky. She didn’t feel any more real than the fog feels it is real just before the sun rises. Her only friend, and her only reference point for understanding herself, was Kuro the border collie, who she befriended shortly after she arrived at the ranch.
Kuro was a jokester with sharp, laughing eyes of flint. He owned a thick, proud coat of black that curled upwards slightly if he got dirty enough herding the horses and sheep, and his chest, the tip of his nose, and all four of his legs were that particular shade of creamy white that is always dirty no matter how clean it is. He moved in a rough lope that juxtaposed her comparative drift. She spoke very little in her friendship with him, but when she did, it was bound to get the border collie thinking on levels he had never imagined existed.
“Kuro…what is the world if we cannot sense it?” she asked him once when she awoke with a whine from a colorful dream. “If there was no one here, would the world still be here?”
Kuro had been trotting into the open doorway of the house with every intention of curling up for sleep, but he turned and paused, eyes and nose flaring, when he heard her voice. His folded ears perked in her direction. “That’s a good question,” he puzzled. “I think I’ve heard the humans saying something-or-other about that. ‘Cept it was about trees. I can’t claim to know the real answer, though--everyone has a different answer to that question. Maybe there isn’t a real answer, and it only matters what you think is the answer. Everyone’s right, then, in a sense.” He stared at the wood grains on the side of the house in a thoughtful way.
Hidama trained her eyes on Kuro intently, and he was unnerved by the flames he saw in them. He never, ever looked in her eyes when she stared like that, because it hurt to look directly at them. Her eyes seemed to have all the sorrow of the moon, but with the coolness of that celestial body replaced with the passion and flame of the sun.
“Anyway…” he murmured, fidgeting. “Anyway, I’m going inside. It’s cold out here, and I’m tired from all that herding today. Sheep are stupid animals, y’know. They run off fear and they never know where you want them to go.”
She stared as he stalked off into the house, but interrupted his attempt at escape. “Kuro, do you dream about fire? When you dream, do you see…do you see in different ways than you do when you’re awake? I see fire. I see fire, and I see the moon…but it’s not like it normally is. It’s…it’s… You know how humans talk about that thing called ‘color’? How they say the two crayons are different when they’re not?”
Kuro was caught in half-step and was halfway through the doorway already, but her train of thought was intriguing to him. “Yeah…what about it?”
“I think I know what color is. I see it in my dreams. I see…it’s like the whole world is filled with lights that aren’t like the lights we can see. I can understand, then, how the crayons would be different. If they’re different colors--like the way the fire in my dreams is a different color than my world when I’m not asleep--then that’s how they’re different. I don’t know why I see these things all the time. I don’t know why there’s always fire in my dreams, every night.”
Kuro, interested as he was, really needed to get to bed. But first, he felt she needed some sort of closure for the conversation. “I can see the fire in your eyes, Hidama. It’s always there. I don’t know why either, but it seems to be your curse--or your blessing. You decide which. I’ll talk to you in the morning, okay? I need to sleep.” His words felt dark and searing to her, like the razors of a raven’s wing in the morning.
She tried to take it as just that. She milled around in circles, tramping out a bed for herself, and lay down, closing her eyes, but sleep did not come to her. Laughing fire--black and white and gray--danced across her eyelids. She could smell the soot, and hear the fire growling and snapping at her snout. Fear flittered in her chest like a butterfly gone mad.
She whimpered with remorse and quick fear, and got up, shaking away the dirt that clung to her fur. She stared at the moon, and it stared back. It had gone bloody crimson and looked angry to her. She shrunk away at the torch-flame light washing over her in nervous channels--lighting her fur to a pumpkin glow. She thought she was dead and the fireflies were washing over her to take her soul away. Her tail was hiding between her hind legs, and her whole body shook. The moon’s eyes never left her for a second, and she was going to burn in them.
The door had been left open from when Kuro went inside. The house scared her--but the moon scared her more. It couldn’t see her if she went inside.
She trotted anxiously inside the doorframe, crossing boundaries she had set for herself. Her tongue lolled from her mouth. The interior of the house was uniform and cool--shaded with twilight shadows that neither flitted nor deepened. She felt better for a little while, but soon she saw the windows. They leaked bloody light from the moon across the carpet, and the red deepened and deepened until it was light--flickering, leaping light that spread in slow, pattering tongues of flame. She whimpered, pacing the perimeter of the room, watching the very real flames as they slithered across the floor, bounded into the curtains, and began gnawing at the walls and furniture.
Fear ate her heart. She whined and whined as she always did in her dreams. She could usually whine and wake herself up from her dreams of fire, but the fire continued towards her, so close that its dusky heat was licking at her legs. She did not know where the fire had come from, or how it could have started in the middle of the carpet like that, but she did know that she needed to escape. This was no dream--though the colors were shining brighter than she supposed even the humans could see. It was a gloriously gruesome sight.
On legs that felt skinny and bent like those of a daddy long legs, she flickered out of the doorway and stood helplessly on the edge of the property as fire consumed her entire universe. She was so paralyzed by fear and fire, she didn’t even give a thought to those inside the house. She did not hear their screams over the bellowing of the flames. She did not hear a border collie howling her name. She did not hear them go quiet, for the fire obscured them from her, as it always had separated her from the rest of the world.
When the firefighters came the next morning, the house was little more than ashes and rubble. They found the bodies of four people, and one dog. One firefighter claimed that when he had arrived, there had been a wolf there, too, head lowered as if in remorse over the body of the dog. He said the wolf was pure black like obsidian, and had gray eyes as though there were nothing left in them but soot. He couldn’t remember whether she ran off, or whether she disappeared in front of his very eyes like a ghost.
A month later, a family walking in Montana came across a man with a gray half-wolf puppy. He said his house had burned down a few weeks ago, and she was the only one of her litter who had survived. The family saw the fire in her eyes, but they took her anyway. They didn’t know what she was.
But then again, neither did she.
Shadow
The sun melted across the horizon in buttery hues of saffron and dandelion, touching the shoulders of the tanned hills with a Midas’ Touch to send everything scintillating in tones of gold. A few scrape-bellied clouds, still bumbling westward in no particular hurry and at the will of the dawdling breeze, soaked up the light much in the way a sponge soaks up water, and proceeded to glow like opaque light bulbs amongst a backdrop of fire. Several mule deer, loitering over flanks of the hills on their cloven hooves, spread long, cape-like shadows dancing across the grass in a thin mimicry of their own grace.
The stranger appeared like a glitch in the system. Black, sinewy, and with sallow pumpkin-colored eyes that made the sunset look pale and sweet against their flames, his tail swept out in back of him like an old man’s cane turned fluid and rippling. He did not stride like a human might, nor did he waltz like a deer; he slipped across the hills almost like the shadows of the deer did, but with more cunning and care, and absent of the gentle exuberance. The shadow of a raven, that’s what he was-- but grimmer and blacker than the raven itself, and much less meandering.
His paws were big and seemed to sink on to the ground every time he took a step, his toes forming in cushioned pools to form around the texture of the ground. A square head and rectangular ears betrayed the flowing silk that made up the rest of his body, and also whispered of his feline nature. He was indeed not a shadow, though he could have passed for one; rather, he was a black panther. A black panther with very little credibility wandering the hills of England.
A rumble scraped his throat when his eyes met the deer, which had paled in their dancing and twinkled off at the absurd sight of him, but he made no attempt at charging them or even at stepping up his pace out of interest. They were already flickering away, and he was not accustomed to the hunt like one of his species should be. His instincts had rumored to him of warm blood, but he had never once tasted such a thing, and knew little about the psychology of the chase. Though he was a silken, graceful creature, his muscles were atrophied from the years he had spent enclosed, and the deer were wary and observant; used to predators, though not any of his variety. He didn’t stand a chance against their light, fragile speed.
The final rays of the retreating sun played across his midnight fur, and his pupils dilated as the land began its descent into blue night. He, too, descended downwards on the hill, towards a valley where there existed a stark contrast to the brown hills. Verdant green grass that glimmered with water droplets. He found it curious that there could be such a shade of green among such goldens and such bronzes, and he could also smell the sweet, putrid scent of cattle. He poked his thick whiskers in front of him to sift the breeze, and his prominent shoulder blades rolled beneath his loose skin as he crept closer and closer to his target destination.
It had taken nothing but a bit of carelessness on the part of his caretaker in order for him to make an escape. Having forgotten the nutrients that were added to his twice daily chunk of raw meat, his caretaker had whirled on his heels to fetch the liquid supplement out of the shed. He had shut the door behind him, but not latched it, and when the panther nudged the light chain-link fence with his big smudge of a nose, the door had slinked outwards. Just enough for the big cat to slip past and head leisurely for a patch of forest.
He was not treated badly at his home. His caretaker genuinely cared for the panther, and was indeed an animal expert who was well-versed in caring for exotic animals. The panther had an enclosure that offered him plenty of room to lounge and chase big rubber balls, and stalk back and forth along the fence line. One could even go so far to say that the panther was terribly pleased with captivity. He had never lived any other way, having been born to a captive mother in a zoo, and though he often felt callings from the distant hills that he could gaze at through the chain-links of his cage, he was generally content and loved bathing in the sun and purring like a big housecat.
His home pretty much left his mind, however, as he tromped closer and closer to what he now recognized as the home of a human. The grass beneath his pooling feet was soft and fresh from frequent sprinkling, and even slightly mushy. A four-foot tall barbed-wire fence separated him from a herd of peacefully grazing cattle, which were loafing about in orange and russet blobs in the dim evening. They were entirely unaware of his sinister approach, for he was downwind and quieter than the night sneaking up on them. His broad pink tongue traveled across his black lips and white fangs.
While he waited for the stars to notice him, he paced the length of the decrepit fence, much as he would have if he was still in his enclosure at home. At one point, his anxious striding was interrupted by the bay of a ragged steer near his patch of fence, and this pushed him out of his repetitive actions. He flattened his ears against his head and switched his tail in restlessness as he paused.
No longer content to merely stalk the fence line, he gathered his sinewy body into a bunch of skin and muscle, and was able to scale the fence in one fluid bound. However, this caught the attention of the dozing cows, and they flicked their ears at him and spun on their hooves as one, rolling their eyes uneasily and lumbering to the other side of the pasture in a cluster.
A rumble fluttered in his throat and chest, ferally rising until it was a hissing, yelling roar. He charged the cattle then, moving swiftly and with rolling speed, watching with wild, needle-sharp eyes as the cluster of cows diffused clumsily past him. However, their eyesight was much dimmer than his, and they were dumb from lack of instinct.
The panther made careful note of the black steer who had bayed earlier, for his legs seemed rickity and the cow himself feeble. Jutting into the bunch of cows, he singled out the steer and caused the animal to bolt out into the open field, where the panther was free to stretch out his legs in pursuit. He chased him into another corner, where the cow began whirling and hesitating with uncertainty in the confined space. The frightened animal splayed out his front legs and stared the panther in the eye with his own dumb, wide stare. Just then, the panther sprang and latched himself to the steer’s hefty neck. Securing his position with unsheathed hooks of claws that were able to sink into the heifer’s skin, the panther clamped on to his shoulder with bright sabers of teeth. In the mouth of such a wild beast, the warm blood tasted velvety and thick. The steer let out a wail of surprise and pain and began pitching his body in every which-way in order to rid himself of the panthers’ teeth and claws.
The panthers’ last moments were filled with the near thrill of victory, and confusion caused by the sudden crack that split the air just then. The panther unlatched his jaws from the heifer’s flesh, but he remained perched on his prey’s shoulder. With dizzy eyes, the panther stared in the direction of the noise.
Standing there was the farmer, gun aimed and ready. Before the panther could do so much as blink or evade, there was another crack and a searing pain ripped into his flank with the power of a baseball bat. He lost his grip then and fell into a black clump on the ground, writhing and snarling. There was one more snap, this impacting his skull, and his world went black and numb in a dazzling shiver of silver.
The farmer, just as shocked and confused as the panther he had just killed, trotted to the center of the pasture, where the black shadow was lying--twisted and sinewy and gruesomely beautiful--and with a seeming grin on his feline face.
Perhaps this was because it was better for him to die as himself, rather than to live as someone else.
Any comments would be appreciated. Don't be afraid to criticize--both of these were written in less than an hour and a half for my Creative Writing class.
