I doubted if I should ever come back.
February snowfall announced a new morning. Everything was still: white slashed with browns and greys, as if the forest were holding its breath—no, as if the forest were keeping a secret. Only a coyote breathed in this neck of the woods, limping away from the stench of marijuana and musk and salt and smoke, dragging a mangled paw. Wounds wept droplets of blood into the snow, marking a groggy trail that wound more and more as the minutes went on. But the coyote had suffered worse, much worse, and what hurt more than anything was the burden of betrayal on her shoulders. It had its own stench: guilt and fear and disappointment mingled with the faintest of hopes that she had made the right decision. Hope was all that kept her moving onward, heading north, even as the snowflakes started falling again and tipping her dirty pelt with pure white.
The yowls of coyotes chased her through a waking nightmare, but as she turned and strained her tattered ears toward the imagined cries, she realized that she was not being pursued by the ones she had left. Once again, she tried to convince herself that what she did was not morally wrong, only a disappointment: no blood on her paws, no hearts broken, no promises broken in a breath. She did not leave to join an enemy or to hurt, only to return to the diverging path she had abandoned with a smirk and a kiss.
She sought neutral land, land unmarked by generations of pack paws, only the wandering tread of loners. She sought someplace untouched by responsibility or war. She was simply tired, and one morning she’d woken with dazzling mismatched eyes in her memory, and she realized she couldn’t live with the regret. Her comrades, her friends, had responded with cold shock and stoic indignity and hurt anger that had ripped new wounds into her small body and nearly broken her paw. She didn’t blame them, really.
The female heaved a sigh and paused, deciding to rest and to see if the fates truly meant for her to walk this path—though it was too late to go back. She’d abandoned her clan for the sake of a pretty girl, after all, the mistake of a fool. Shaking her head, she settled down in the snow and closed her eyes for just a moment, before her ears came up from her slender skull suddenly. She tilted her muzzle up, pointing it at a hazy sun gripped by dark bare branches, and howled Blind’s name.
Vesper had returned to the fork in the road, and took it.
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