Happily Ever After

Written by Amethyst Mare

The grey-muzzled wolfess spun against the earth's rotation, pink ribbons trailing like feathers from her fine fingers like a spider's gossamer strands. Her faded earthen clothes hung in tatters, hardly resembling any known article of clothing at all. Did they need to? They were merely scraps of linen and wool that preserved canine modesty, though revealed much of her thinning fur, which had torn away from the skin in many places and was mottled with fierce sores. What was modesty to her, after all? What was pain when there was no soul to bear witness? She had no one left to impress from that forsaken society: she cared not. Other beings from a past life danced beyond her fingertips but beautiful facets of solitude curled in close to her heart.

She tumbled with a birdlike cry into her nest of frail sticks and leaves, burrowing into the filth like a mole seeking refuge from sunlight. Only, she sought refuge from a different kind of predator - out there. Out there was far, far too close. Out there was dangerous. Out there would not leave her in solitude, so the only feral defence she could raise was to hide. No one knew where she was and no one ever would.

No...that was a lie. Once, just once, he had come. Once, he had pleaded with her to leave her beloved sanctuary, go back to him. Pleaded with her, he had, thought he could catch her as easily as he would catch a mouse in a trap. 'Snap!' and she would be crushed, crushed like before. For it was not the closure of his steely jaws about her mind that she truly feared: it was being released afterwards.

Nuzzling her face into her bare arms and smearing dirt across an already grubby cheek, she sighed deeply, blinking as if not seeing the disarray before her dark nose. Her milky gaze roamed over the home she had carved for herself amongst the bracken and berries, but she had never sought the knowledge required to fend for herself beyond her garden, her beautiful, wild garden. All alone, so very alone, she walled herself in with no person still of the living to provide any elusive comfort. Did she crave it? She did not know or care to know. Others had wanted her to know. Yet her sweet mother was long acquainted with soft, earthen loam, a once steady heart beat stilled forevermore. So who would want her now? She sighed deeply, drawing her bony knees up to her chest, and ate a handful of blackberries, fancying the dark specks were some much coveted treat and not a bitter cluster.

"What good is life anyway?" She asked of a nearby blackbird, who cocked his beak inquisitively but had no answer for her. He only preened his wings and hopped closer with eyes only for what may provide him with some sustenance in the rapidly worsening cold.

Huffing at his silence, for she suspected that he was withholding some crucial sliver of information, she tossed him a blackberry, deeming that he had more reason to eat it than she did. He would be around for longer. Her limbs ached with fatigue and a deep-set cold that could not be subdued through any amount of rubbing and chafing, though she resolutely determined not to move a single inch form the nest or seek a more sheltered overhang. It was her nest. If she left, they would take it.

And she would have nothing.

With a painful slowness, she lay down, her sharp nose pressed into a mound of stinking, putrid bracken that served as some rest for her throbbing skull. One became accustomed to the stench after some time. Her paper-thin eyelids fluttered closed as delicately as a moth's wings settling together after a long, wearying flight. Thoughts, colours and sensations whirled and spun, one blending into the other, whirling and spinning - and falling abruptly still.

There were ribbons in her hair. A white dress adorned her shapely frame and the pearl beading picked out her attractive, hourglass figure. This time, when she padded gracefully to the pristine altar, shining with polish, and the smiling, handsome wolf, he did not cast a dismissive flick of his fingers in her direction and dash offstage. He took her paw, held her close, kissed her muzzle. The congregation murmured what a delightful, young couple they were and how beautiful their cubs would be as they walked, arm in arm, from the building, smiles so wide that one could not help but notice and be happier for it. The perfect couple.

Happily ever after.