The Mouse

The day had silenced, quieted into the hurried hush of the mourning hours, throwing shadows spliced and spectacular, the ruins cutting, tearing lines into the fine sky, seeking to divide the constellations hanging on wary strings above. The wall had degraded long ago, the bricks crumbling and breaking away, free to the outside, left to topple over the edge of the structure and fall, diving to embrace the former street, now likewise claimed by the reach of desolation, the desert stretching its fingers in, no longer held at bay by the huddled masses.

Out of this hole, the scavenger looked up to the private view of the skies, darkened by lack of light but softened by its cloudlessness, a murky and lightly milkened blue. Though this particular path of heavens was clear of danger, the shades below churned with movement, with bitter intent that drew the pearls of her eyes, a patrol picking through one of the buildings hollow, the light of a flashlight every so often breaking the barrier of walls thin to ghost the open space, searching for the unseen, light ringed with reddened intentions.

The desert walker was not intimately familiar with this particular group of gangmen, though their signs lit in her eyes like beacons, tellings left of their inhabitance here. There was little change for diplomacy should she be caught in her hole. Though the individuals were but figures stark and black, their type smelled of metallic tang, of gasoline and musty sweat, canned food consumed far past its time, grease and the cooking of meat, flesh burnt to a satisfied crisp. But at her nest, one little hiding mouse would be burned with meticulous fingers and widening smiles, ivories gleaming with want. They would not find her, though. For even the mos...

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...oss her face, spreading jagged. The stars cast an eerie gleam in her eyes. They would not find her here, and by the next night, she would have slipped through their fingers yet again. Selling their secrets and scavenging the wares they had been hopeless to find.

On, the strider watched, vigilant, fingers reaching every so often to toy with the work laid before her, always returning to the to the outside. The skeletons before her danced, and she waited, that smile still broken on her mouth and moths beating their wings against the cavity of her chest. Alone - all she had was the knife comfortable against her hips, and a mind of little glass tricks.

The night taunted and the sky called, the wolves prowling with starved bodies stretched long.

The mouse waited in the nest, thieving mind closed and heart soft in her chest.

With all the company in the world.

Below.