Page 12 of Embers of Midnight
I’m done.The thought lands flat and honest.Tap me out. Tag in literally anyone else. God. A raccoon with a plan. A motivational poster. A better stomach.
Silence pads around the edges of the clearing and sits down where it can watch me. I close my eyes, not to sleep, just to make my universe smaller. The back of my eyelids glows red for a while and then darker. The horn’s pressure drops from scream to hum to a throbbing line I can live next to. My breathing finds a rhythm that isn’t a fight.
Time goes weird. Long. Short. My stomach suggests unspeakable things. My mouth tastes like fur and smoke and old fear. I doze with my eyes open and wake with them closed. The cold edits my edges whenever I let it and I edit them back because identity is petty like that.
A new sound enters the conversation. A rapid, offended chirr, then a shuffle, then the scrabble of small claws on bark. I crack one eye and look down my own ridiculous face at the tree I’m leaning on.
A squirrel stands on the trunk not two feet from my shoulder, tail up like a banner and eyes so bright they might as well beopinions. It stares at me the way a landlord stares at a supposed leak. Then it releases a string of tiny insults in a language I do not speak but understand perfectly: you live here now? really? in my hallway?
It steps closer, sniffs, makes a disgusted noise so pure it deserves an award, and rattles off more squirrel profanity. I blink at it because of all the things I expected to be judged by tonight, a woodland gremlin with a hot temper was not top five.
It disappears behind the trunk. I think it got bored.
It did not.
It reappears with a pinecone nearly as big as its head clenched in tiny hands and a purpose that puts mine to shame. It braces back on its hind legs, gauges the distance like a pro athlete, and pelts me square in the forehead.
The thunk is soft, humiliating, perfect. The cone bounces off my horn ridge, hits my nose, and drops into the snow between my front hooves where it sizzles a little because I am a walking health hazard.
For a second I forget how to do anything but exist. Then something in my chest makes the choice for me.
I laugh.
It’s not a human sound. It’s a heave of breath that goes out hot and fogs the air into a shimmering veil. It’s a low roll in my ribsthat cracks up my throat and comes out as a whuff that startles a bit of steam into the pinecone like it’s part of the joke. It hurts and it helps and I do it again because relief is a feral thing and I’ll take it however it shows up.
Nature just pelted me with a pinecone. Fine. I deserve that.
The squirrel fluffs itself twice, fired up about being right, cusses me out in chirps that absolutely mention property damage and HOA fees, then skitters away into a tangle of brush that didn’t melt. Its tail flicks indignation at me until the last possible second.
I stare at the pinecone between my hooves like it might have answers. It does not. It is a pinecone. It looks smug anyway.
The laugh empties out and leaves the kind of quiet that can heal things if you let it. I breathe. The world breathes back. The ruined clearing radiates heat like a bruise. The ring of trees throws a faint crackle now and then as bark cools and resettles. Snow gives up and slumps where it got too close to my shins.
Get up.The voice in my head doesn’t have a mouth, but it has my best interest and terrible timing.Up, girl. If you fall apart here, you’ll harden into a monument to bad decisions.
I plant my hooves. They argue. I negotiate. The horn throbs once like it wants to remind me it exists and then settles when I roll my head slow to one side and breathe into the neck stretch. Everything in me feels used. Not in a tragic way—in the honestway a muscle feels after you gave it more than you thought you had.
I stand. The tree gives me back a little of my heat with interest and I hate that it makes me sentimental. The pinecone sticks to the edge of my hoof when I lift it, like one last petty jab. I scrape it off on the bark and step past, careful.
The clearing looks worse from the far side. The puddled black center shimmers. The air shivers above it. I don’t look long because that version of me, the one that exploded instead of exhaled, is too close for comfort. I angle toward the trees that didn’t take the brunt of it and thread between trunks that smell like warm resin and apology.
Thirst is still a knife. Hunger is still a mean little drum. They can both wait. I walk because walking is the only plan that hasn’t betrayed me tonight. My hooves find the line of the creek again by sound and the cold edge of its breath. I keep an honest distance like we’re co-workers on rough terms.
Try again later,I tell myself, reasonable for once.Try again when you can bank the fire without it trying to eat your face. Try again when you aren’t shaking like a chair with one short leg.
The forest is wider here. Fewer low branches. A long slope that lets the night fall away in layers, pale and then dark and then pale again where the creek decides to be brave in the open. Far off, a blade of wind slides through the pines and plays every needle in a soft metallic chorus. It sounds like rain wanted to be a bell and settled for being a rumor.
My mind throws the alley at me because it’s rude and because brains love to lick wounds. I push the images back into a box for morning because I do not have the water for those tears yet and I refuse to cry steam.
I check the press of heat in my bones like a pilot checking gauges. The lines all read high but trending down. I can feel the edges of myself again, not just the blaze. The horn hum is a background thing now, an old fridge in a small apartment you stop hearing unless it stops.
You’re not okay,I tell myself, honest as a cut.But you’re moving. That counts.
Snow whispers under my hooves, a steady sibilant that scrubs the worst off everything. The cold tries to climb me. It melts and tries again. I keep going because I don’t know what else to do and because forward has been the only direction that made sense since the door of the diner clicked and the open sign gave up.
Somewhere ahead, water speaks in a different voice, flatter, wider. Maybe the creek fattens. Maybe it meets a river that can take being near me without throwing a fit. Maybe I’ll find a bend shallow enough to sink my face in and not turn it into a sauna.
Maybe I’ll reach a version of this story where I can be small for five minutes and not ruin anything by breathing.
