I doubt any of us are going to be hailed as the next Jane Austen, that's asking a bit too much. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd want to be the next JA, even if I could reach that level of creative expression.

Alright, so this one is a tad more personal, as I've just started taking a creative non-fiction class and it has me in an interesting frame of mind (to say the least). Also, yay already managing to break my stick to 100 words and 100 words only rule. >.<;




I learn of her death one day after school. "A greyhound thought she was a rabbit," a simple statement from my mother that tells all I need to know, conjuring images of pumping legs, and flashing teeth, and trailing viscera.

I don't cry then. I cry at night, years later, as a creature plagued with nobility limps into the woods each time she's unobserved. As, day after day, she is sought out until she's finally discovered and carried back into the house, as she escapes whenever the door is left slightly ajar, returning to the woods, seeking to bury herself amidst dead grass and decomposing leaves.

We find her. A mass of gray hidden in a darkened wood - just one more shadow. Voices shrill with worry tease black tipped ears. They twitch, lay flat, block out reason, and curse the feel of the warm arms that cradle with the utmost care, that carry, that bring her home - the last place she wishes to be.

Her spirit dies on the kitchen floor, where she lays pinned by the weakness of her own quivering limbs, unable to make it from my mother's bed to the open door. That last jump took everything she had.

Little by little, her form fades from actuality into memory, present into past, gray blurring into shadow. The movement I catch out of the corner of my eye is a barren twig, its skeletal fingers swaying in the breeze. I think of all that it is not. It is not a flash of dark fur on an increasingly darkening backdrop. It is not the sound of small feet padding carefully through dead leaves. It is not the teeth of impatience sinking into a hand as if to say 'enough petting, leave me alone already,' nor is it the soft mewl of disappointment.

We bury her in the back yard. My brother and I hold hands.