The night is cold and stark, all the light soaked out of it and wrung through the peepholes of the stars. The clouds have dissipated and a fine mist hangs long and low over the shadowed valleys.

A girl runs, her uncovered feet moving as though they were raindrops, weaving through a small copse of trees, at first following a young brown path but then darting off into the unknown.  Her eyes are bright with fear and her breath coalesces in smoky puffs; as she bursts out of the copse, her speed increases near to the point of flying. Several figures emerge from the trees in hot pursuit.  

She stops at the edge of the bridge, fever screaming, cheeks glowing, cold. All that stretches out before her is bruise-colored grass, like soreness. They are behind her; she can feel the light of their lanterns as they come up over the hill.  All at once she plunges forward into nothing.  She slips inside the shuddering stems, curls into a ball, sips desperate silence from the air.  Something cold finds her wrist and she bites her tongue -- it is only her hair falling as she tears it from her scalp in white-hot clumps.

They are coming, they are almost upon her, they will burn her and drown her and shake the marrow from her bones!  Do they have hunting dogs? The distance is too great for her to be able to determine -- oh, she does not want to be brought down like a wild beast!  She wants dignity, funeral music, flowers, a deep blue resting place in the heart of things -- how she wants to rest!  She takes in a rush of oxygen and presses the palm of her left hand down on the earth.  Yes. They have dogs.  She can hear them barking as they run past the copse of trees before the bridge.  

How cool, how still the ground is!  She sinks deeper into the tall grass, listening to each thunder of her heart.  Oh!  If she shuts her mouth and holds her nose like this... what a quiet dizziness gains flight in her chest!  The spaces between the poundings grow longer.  Her ear now pressed to the ground, she hears their feet rattling across the bridge -- the dogs are in the lead.  Her heart is as solemn as dirt. She has run for so long the soles of her feet are worn down to the bone.

There is no water in the creek to mask her scent, just dirt, which wisps indiscriminately across the frozen plains.  As she sits, shaking, a strange upwelling of calm rises in her breast.  Heartbeats flutter in and out of hope -- dogs! They don’t have wings! She twists around to gaze at her shoulders. Neither does she.

The first ray of mourning light breaks across the sky.