[First Fear] Loss

Moonlight slid across the birch trunks, and the ground thundered beneath his mother’s paws. Lawrence clung to the ruff of her neck as the trees rushed past. Breath tore in and out of her chest. Behind them, voices shouted through the dark. Human voices, eager and wrong in the forest.

“Left! I saw them cut left!”

“Watch out for the dark one!”

A shot cracked somewhere behind them. Birds burst from their trees. Lawrence buried his face in his mother’s fur. He could smell her, a hint of mint and dust from the road, the warm smell that was only her. He breathed in that scent and tried to make his shaking stop.

“Almost there,” she said with effort, her breath heaving. But for him she made her words sound gentle. “Hold on, my star. Hold on.”

She ran as if she could take the fear away and leave none of it for him. Her coat, pale lavender, caught the thin light of the moon. He had always liked that, how she seemed to glow a little. Other babs called her blessed under their breath when they met them on the road. Lawrence didn’t know what blessed meant. He knew she was safe. Her smell and her fur meant safety and comfort.

His father was ahead. A dark shape slipping between the trees, more shadow than bab. When the first shout broke through the trees he had turned once, eyes finding Lawrence’s for a heartbeat, then vanished. His coat, almost black, was swallowed by the night and he wore the darkness like a second skin. They were always travelling. Some towns smiled at them. Some didn’t want them there at all. His father always understood when to leave before the smiles turned to snarls that tried to tear them apart.

The birches grew close together where they were going, tightly packed together. Lawrence knew the place. They had slept here weeks ago. He remembered his mother curled around to keep him warm while his father told a story about a river with eladrians that sang silly songs and then sang several himself. Lawrence had laughed so hard he’d begun to hiccup. The hiccups had set both his parents to laughing too, and they pressed their cheeks to his to show their love and tell more stories that made their little star brighten their days.

Now there was no laughing.

His mother slid down a short slope and tucked him inside a tree hollow. Leaves crackled beneath his paws. The space smelled like old bark and moist soil and the smell of the last rain. He curled against the back of the hollow by instinct, tail fluff curled over his nose. The opening was narrow and slanted and through it he could see her face a little, her eyes wide and wet and something else he couldn’t name.

“We’re going to play a game,” she told him. “You have to be very, very quiet Lawrence. The quietest you’ve ever been. Not one sound. Not a peep. Can you do that, my good boy? If you are silent the whole time, you win.”

Lawrence nodded. “Quiet,” he whispered, as soft as he could. He wanted to ask, ‘What about papa?’ He wanted to tell her it wasn’t a fun game if she left him all alone. He wanted to ask why she smelled like fear and sad.

“Good boy.” She smoothed his tail around his nose, lips trembling. She lifted a loose piece of bark and placed it against the gap so only a thin slit of cool air came through. The birches were a wall again. “Remember, no sound until I come for you. If you make a noise, you lose.” She pressed her cheek patch to the bark where his face was, their warmth meeting through the thin wood, then she turned and went toward the place where the darkness had swallowed his father.

The hollow made the world small. Lawrence pressed his paws against his chest to keep the thumping of his heart that rushed through his ears quiet as if it would give him away. He practiced breathing smaller and smaller till it seemed nothing moved in him at all.

Time was cruel and it stretched onwards. He tried to count and he knew some numbers. One, two, three… the space between each count grew. He mouthed the number four without speaking it but wasn’t sure what came after that.

A big beetle crawled near his nose. It wasn’t the biggest thing he had ever seen, that was the river, which he believed was a living creature, a water snake so large it had laid down and couldn’t get up anymore. But his parents had told him if he wasn’t careful and didn’t respect it, then the river snake would gobble him up. It was enough to make him listen. But the beetle was the biggest thing in the hollow other than him. He wanted to squeak because its shell shone and he wanted to collect it and proudly show it to his mama and papa. He followed it with his eyes and kept absolutely still.

In his head, distracted by the beetle, he pictured the three of them slipping away after this. He pictured the way his father would make a low sound when they reached a safe place, the sound that meant it was safe to rest. He pictured his mother curling around him, her body a half circle fitted to his. He pictured their cheek patches touching his, the warmth and the sweet, comforting peace of that.

Voices suddenly came closer. They were wrong in these woods. They didn’t belong. Lawrence pressed himself flatter. He thought about being quiet so hard he thought he could disappear.

“He went this way.”

“Can’t be far now.”

“Watch out!”

There was another shot from the human’s metal sticks. Then there were no more sound for a while. The quiet that came afterward did not feel safe.

The piece of bark darkened. Something blocked the moon. Lawrence watched the light change shape and stop. The bark moved and an eye peered in. A human’s eye, pale and round and too close. He smelled leather and oil and a thin metallic tang.

“Look at you,” the voice said. It sounded pleased with itself. “I found you, you little runt.”

Lawrence pressed his belly down and tried to become smaller. Before he could decide whether to bite or scream, a hand slid in and latched onto the soft at the back of his neck.

He had only ever been held there by his mother and father, and that had been with softness and purring and the safety of being carried. This was not. Pain ran down his back and everything in him wanted to jump out of his own skin to escape it. The sound that came from his throat was high and wild. He made a sound. He lost. He wailed. He twisted with everything he had because he didn’t want to be held by the human. He howled. He yeowled. His little legs clawed at the air and found nothing. Tears blurring the surroundings into hazy streaks.

“You’ll look great stuffed on my mantle,” the man said, his voice laced with the pleased cruelty of someone who’d found a prize. “Hold still now.”

Lawrence kicked at air. He cried raw and loud, words torn apart by fear. “No… no… Mama… Mama… please…”

And then the forest moved. It wasn’t a sound at first, it was a violence of light, pale-furred and terrible, coming from the left. Lawrence’s mother collided with the wrist that held her child, jaws finding tendons, her teeth buried deep. There was no warning growl.  She went from silent to a tearing snarl in the span of a breath. She bit and tore, ignoring the human’s screams until their grip opened and Lawrence dropped.

He struck the ground wrong. Pain burst white-hot up his foreleg and ran all the way into his chest. He tried to stand and couldn’t. The cry he made wasn’t a word, it had the pitch that babies only use that said to the world ‘It hurts. I don’t know what to do. I need help.’ He tasted dirt and copper and the crying seemed to make the hurt worsen. The leaf-bed that had been a cradle before became a hostile thing, a surface that brought pain and hurt.

His mother and the human crashed together in a tangle into the leaves. Another man stumbled up, breath ragged, hands doing clumsy things with a short, metal tube, his gun. 

“Get it off!” the human entangled with his mother howled. “Shoot it! Shoot it!”

“Hold still!”

Lawrence saw the gun. He didn’t know the word, only the shape, a short metal tube in a trembling hand, pointed with both fear and certainty. He saw his mother, coat silvered by the moon, every line of her body screaming not with noise now but with purpose. She pushed the man to the ground and braced to spring again.

The gun fired and the bang broke the night.

The sound broke the air. Lawrence’s ears rang and then there was nothing for a breath. Nothing except the feeling that everything had turned wrong somehow and his insides turned cold with dread.

When he could hear again, the sounds were scattered and wrong. The man who had held him made wet, gargling sounds. Lawrence stared because he had never heard a throat try to breathe after it could not. The other men shouted. One of them swore in a furious rhythm. The one with the gun still had his arms extended, hands shaking, eyes shocked at what they had done as if the bang had not come from him. Another was swearing and stepping backwards. 

His mother was not making any sound at all. Lawrence dragged himself on three legs to his mother, paying attention to nothing else.

She lay a few paces off on her side. Her flank moved once, twice, too shallow, too slow like it might stop at any point. Her coat, which had always seemed so clean and pale, had gone dark with a spreading wetness. The smell made his stomach drop.

All he knew was that he wanted to touch her and be near her. He stumbled on three paws, wiping tears out of his eyes with the back of his paws, a child’s clumsy gesture. He nosed at her shoulder. Her warmth was still there and he pressed himself against her.

“Mama.” He said it again and again, sounding like the sound a kitten would make. “Mama.”

Her eyelids fluttered and her eyes opened, finding him. The line of her mouth tried to turn into a smile and didn’t quite make it, but her eyes filled with warmth that seemed a little broken. “My precious little Lawrence,” she whispered.

“Mama.” He pressed his face against her cheek, breathing in the smell he knew better than anything: mint, dust, warmth and something new. The smell of iron. But her cheek was still warm and he pressed himself against her and all the parts of him that were breaking seemed to hold together under that warmth. “I… I lost,” he sobbed. “I wasn’t quiet. I lost.”

She lifted a paw and it shook so badly she had to try twice to lay it against his face. Warm pads, trembling claws. They made weeks of comfort happen in a heartbeat. He leaned into it hard as if that would stop the shaking “Are you safe?” she asked.

He didn’t understand how to answer that. The world around them was wrong and something was broken and he didn’t understand why. The world felt like a pretty thing with sharp edges. “Yes,” he said because that was the right thing to say.

“Listen.” Every part of her voice made the world narrow until he stood at the edge of a cliff. “You need to run away.”

Run? He stared at her. The game had turned into something else and no one had told him the rules. He could barely hold two thoughts in his head but they collided. He should help her. He should call for papa. He should stay so close that nothing could hurt them and they could all get away and be a family again like always. They could go back to how things were.

He shook his head, a small desperate motion. Run was a word for games, for chasing butterflies, for laughing. It felt wrong here. “No. We can get Papa,” he said, speaking too fast, as if speed would make the dream possible again. “We can… we can go to the road and… Mama…”

Her eyes closed for a heartbeat, opened again, heavy with pain and certainty. “No. Your papa is gone.” The words were plain. They dropped like a stone in a river. “Only you are left.” A cough broke out of her. She turned her head so he would not be splattered, and the care of that action broke him some more. “Run far away. Don’t look back. Find our kin. Let them keep you until you can keep yourself.”

He shook his head and pressed his face against her neck where her heartbeat had always been steady and strong. It beat weakly, and each beat felt like the last one could be next. The night blurred and he pushed as if he could put it back where it had been if he just pressed hard enough. “I can take care of you,” he said earnestly. “I can be good and quiet and…”

“You can live,” she said. The fierceness that had ripped a man open was still inside the words. “Now, Lawrence.”

He couldn’t move. He felt glued to the ground. Everything good he had ever known was under his cheek. His sprained paw screamed when he tried to shift. He wanted to say no. He wanted to say he would take the scolding for it later. He wanted there to be a later for them.

Her paw slid to his small back and pressed firmly, the way she did when thunder made him jump. It told his body what his mind refused. “Now,” she said again,  and her voice wavered, fear in it. Not for herself, but for her pup. “Go.”

“Please,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure whether he was asking her to let him stay or asking the world to turn back time. “Please, Mama.”

From the trees came the slap of boots on wet leaves. More men. Voices called to each other. A gun clicked in someone’s hands. Lawrence’s mother drew a breath and shouted, not to them, but to him, one last time. “Run!”

He bolted.

Pain shot up his foreleg. He stumbled and didn’t stop even when the pain blurred his vision. He ran crooked between tree trunks, through ferns that slapped him in the face, over roots that tried to trip him. Another shot cut the night. He did not look. If he looked, he would fall apart and forget how to run, and running was the only thing left that he could do.

He slid down a shallow bank into a gully where a thin flow of water ran, letting the water take his scent away, the cold biting at his belly and sending a shock through him that almost knocked him off his feet. He bit down on his cry because there was no one who could come protect him anymore. 

He scrambled up the other side, belly and chest scraping mud, pebbles biting into his chest and ribs and a thorn snagged his ear, the tiny pain sharper than it should have been. He kept going until he found and wriggled under a mat of reeds. Mud coated him with the same indifference it had for frogs and old leaves. He pressed himself flat and held his breath.

Boots thudded past him. Men’s voices tangled, close and sharp and then farther. He heard, more distantly, a different voice giving orders to search and then to pull back. He did not try to make sense of the words.  A heel pressed the reeds. The mat bowed and water touched the fur along his spine. He closed his eyes and breathed so shallowly his body had to remind him to keep doing it. He tried not to cry out. The need to cry was like a physical thing, a pressure in his throat like a stone he could not swallow.

His sprained paw screamed when he tried to curl tighter. He held it to his chest and clenched his jaw until it hurt too. He wished his mother’s paw were still on his cheek, anchoring him to the part of the world that wasn’t full of fear. 

The heel lifted and the reeds sprang back. The men moved on. The sound of their search broke apart into random pieces until they were the ordinary noise of a forest again. The gully water made its thin sound again. Lawrence did not move. He waited with his face in the mud and his body shaking so hard the reeds trembled. He waited until waiting was the only thing that he could do. He waited until even the buzzing in his ears quieted. He could win this new, cruel version of the game because winning meant he was still alive.

Hours passed or maybe it was minutes that felt like hours. When the insects took back the air and began to sing again, he loosened his jaw. He eased himself out from the reeds and was cold to the bone. His sprain throbbed and throbbed and throbbed. He lay in the leaves beside the gully for a time he could not measure and cried. He tried to hold it in and could not. He cried until his breath came ragged and hot and his chest hurt from the shaking. He cried the way a body does when it has no idea what to do with what just happened, the sound torn out, going nowhere, a plea to a place that did not answer.

“Mama,” he whimpered into his tail.

No one answered. The bush offered its thorns and its smell and its illusion of safety. He rocked, a tiny movement, not because it comforted him but because if he didn’t his body thought it would break. He waited and listened for Papa’s steps to approach, laughing and joking that they would turn this nightmare into a game. Silence pushed at his ears instead. He told himself all the things a babling tells himself. That grown-ups come back, that mothers who say “Soon” mean today, that fathers who make promises will keep them. He held those ideas as long as he could. But they ran through his paws like water.

He tried to stand and almost fell. He crawled into a clump of arched grass and curled there and cried until the crying wore itself to small, hiccuping sobs. His throat tightened with them. There was no space inside him that wasn’t grief. When he finally slept, it was not because he was calm. It was because his body had nothing left to give.

He woke up shaking. The moon had shifted and he could see a thin band of sky between the blades of grass. It made him think of the long narrow strip of light that had fallen through the bark when his mother pressed her cheek to the wood where his face was. He reached up and rubbed his cheek as if he could warm it with that touch. It was cold.

When he tried to stand, his sprained paw buckled and he cried out, once, high and hurt. He looked around, terrified at his own noise. Nothing came. He tried again, learning the motion of moving with three legs, the quick little hops that got him forward without ripping the pain wider. He practiced and got faster. 

He dragged himself out of the grass and limped along the gully. The pain was a steady beat now. He had to move and obeyed himself because disobeying would mean he had to think about the place behind him and what it looked like now.

The ground lifted. A low ridge, narrow and slick. He climbed it, slow and careful, and found the birches again, their white bark pale as the moon. He did not go back to the hollow. He could not make himself turn that way. He stood looking at the trunks from a distance and shook his head like he could push back the idea that his mother might still be there. He whispered her name. No one answered.

He turned away.

The night began to wane and the first color of morning showed at the edge of the sky. Lawrence’s legs wobbled. He thought of stopping and the thought scared him. If he stopped, he would lie down and the humans might show up again. He kept moving. He found a stump and leaned against it, sides heaving, eyes clogged with tears that had dried and started again so often the fur there was stiff.

He tried to remember the last loaves they had shared. His mother had cut one in half with a careful claw, laughing that his father always took the larger half without noticing. His father had pretended to be shocked and had handed half his piece to Lawrence. His mother, smiling, had stolen a corner so they all had three pieces. He saw the shape of their paws, the easy way they touched the bread and each other. He heard his father’s voice telling a story about a city where the lamps were always lit and where choirs sang every day. He heard his mother hum to it and his father hum back and him trying to hum too, too high, too proud of his noise to stop, their cheeks pressed together softly to say you are ours and you are enough.

He thought of the way his mother curled around him when they slept, her body a warm wall that let the cold air touch only his back while his belly stayed pressed to her. His father would curl around them both, his dark coat a second wall, and Lawrence would keep warm at the center of their little world. He would fall asleep with his nose buried in fur and wake with gentle paw pads tapping his cheeks to coax him into the day. He remembered being annoyed by the tapping once and pretending to sleep longer just to hear his parents whisper to each other over him.

There would be no tapping. No humming. No soft press of cheek on cheek to say good morning, little one. The thought made him crumple to the ground. He put his head under his paws and let his body shake and didn’t try to stop it.

He cried again, and this time there was no end to it. It came in waves that did not get smaller. When the sobs slowed he would breathe and feel the place inside him where his family had been and the sobs would start again. He whispered, “Mama,” into his own fur, and the shape of the word did not comfort him. He whispered, “Papa,” and his throat closed up and the sound scraped out small and broken. He tried, “I’m alone,” and hearing it made the loneliness bigger.

Hunger arrived, a small, insistent feeling in his belly. He licked dew off the grass because he could not think of what else to do. He found a beetle and picked it up and held it a long time, apologizing without words to something that didn’t understand him. He put it back because the idea of biting it felt wrong. His stomach cramped at him anyway, unhappy with the choice, but he couldn’t fix either problem.

Birds began to make morning noises. The sound of their bright little throats made it sound like they were mocking his grief. He hated them for a heartbeat and then was ashamed of the hate. He pressed his ears flat to block them and found that nothing helped. He hated himself for hating.

He moved again because it was easier than lying down and crying. He went under ferns that brushed his face, under brambles that caught and pulled hair and left hot pinpricks of hurt, because those hurts were small and clear and that was better than the big hurt in his chest. When he had to stop to breathe he hid in the shadows.

He drank from a puddle that had formed in a hoofprint, and the water tasted like wet leaves and old iron. He spat a leaf vein out of his mouth and it clung to his lip anyway. He rubbed at it with his paw and crying began again because the gesture reminded him of his mother cleaning his face with the side of her paw after a meal and the way she would laugh when he tried to help and made it worse.

By noon he began to realize that he had gone in circles. Trees were all the same until they weren’t. He passed a fallen log that was black where it rotted and smelled like mushrooms and sat under it for a while because inside it felt like a roof. He dozed and jerked awake with his heart banging and thought he heard his father’s footsteps. He crawled out, eyes searching, and there was nothing there but sticks and shade. He made a sound too big for his throat and crushed it down until it hurt.

Sleep came like that. Wrong, sudden and then gone. He dreamed once that he was back in the hollow and the game had never ended and his mother lifted the bark with her gentle paw and said, “You win,” and he woke chewing on his own tail because the dream had felt so real he had needed to hold something in his mouth or he would scream.

Toward evening, a thin drizzle started. He walked through it without noticing at first. Then the wet sank into his fur and the sprain burned hotter. He cried again, less sound now, more shaking, his teeth chattering. He thought of the way his mother’s coat had warmed him. He thought of his father tucking his cloak around them when the rain started and Lawrence pretending it was a tent. He tried to pretend now and found that he was not good at it.

He took shelter in a notch between two roots and rested his cheek against the slick wood and thought of pressing his cheek against his mother’s. He pressed harder until the wood hurt, because pain felt like proof that he was still alive. He stayed there until the rain subsided but the cold stayed.

At night the forest changed again. Things that had hidden came out. His eyes could see better, but seeing better did not help. He heard steps that might have been deer and curled tight and decided not to find out. He drank more from the gully. It tasted like mud and old leaves. He swallowed anyway.

He wanted to call for his father. He wanted to lift his head and call out for him and see a dark shape, feel a large paw on his shoulder. He did not call. If his father could come, he would have come. If his father could not, the call would make the truth come faster, and he was not yet ready for the truth.

So he walked. He walked until walking was a thing his body did without thinking. He walked because stopping meant the memories would find him. He walked because every step felt like another tear in the life he had had, and if he made enough tears maybe one would be big enough to crawl through to a place where none of this had happened.

He thought of the games his parents had invented to make travel easier. Count the fireflies. Guess which rock his father would kick down the hill. Make stories for each star that blinked alive. Guess the shape in the clouds when the day turned hot and muggy and they needed to stop to rest. Hide-and-quiet. That one curled around him now like a cruel friend. Hide-and-quiet had saved him. Hide-and-quiet had also cost him everything.

He tripped and fell and lay there. He did not get up right away. He put his face on his paws and sobbed again because what else could he do?

The moon lifted. He could not feel it. Light came. He could not feel that either. He could feel his own breath because it was the only warmth he knew now. In. Out. In. Out. His chest stuttered anyway. He tried to make a promise. The only promise he could make was to keep moving until he fell. He wondered if that counted as a promise at all.

Near dawn he found a patch of thistle with a dry, dusty smell. He curled beside it and shivered so hard his teeth chattered. He closed his eyes and opened them because closing them brought back the slit of bark with his mother’s cheek on the other side and he could not hold that picture and breathe at the same time. He felt tired in a way that did not feel like sleep would fix it.

He rose. He chose a direction again. His paw throbbed. He lifted it and held it tucked and ran with the other three. The sky lightened. Birds started their morning song. He hated them again. He ran anyway.

A ridge sloped ahead, low and long, covered with scrub and stone. He climbed it, slipping, heart pounding. On the other side, the trees continued and continued. There was no town. There was no cart track. There was no smoke. There was no sound that meant family.

He stood there swaying, staring at the sameness. His chest hurt from the running and the crying and the cold. He pressed his paw hard to that spot as if he could make the hurt stop that way but it didn’t stop.

He set his good paw down. He set the next. He drew his breath. He imagined the place between his parents in sleep and felt the air there like a missing blanket he could never pull up again. He felt the press of their cheek patches that would never come. He felt the end of the stories his father had not finished. He felt the last touch of his mother’s paw on his face, the warmth already beginning to slip away even as he leaned into it.

He lowered his head. He ran.

He ran with tears freezing at the edge of his eyes. He ran with sound tearing itself out of his throat in ragged little gasps. He ran with the knowledge that behind him was a place he could not go back to and ahead of him was nothing he understood. He ran until the day blurred and the world became only breath and pain and the memory of two bodies curling around his, holding him so he could sleep. He ran because running was the only thing left he could do that felt like obeying them.

He did not look back.

The forest did not change to comfort him. The birches stayed white. The wind went on. The ground took his steps and erased them. He carried the night’s last loud sound in his ears like a mark that would not wash. He carried the warmth of his mother’s fur like a heat that would never be on his skin again. He carried his father’s voice like a story with no ending.

He ran, and with every step the life he had known was ripped a little further from him, until the only thing left of it was the hurt and the memory of being loved, and both of those burned the same. He ran, small and shaking, into a world that did not know him, and he did not stop, because stopping meant looking back, and looking back meant seeing nothing there.