Meadow

Winter has faded to spring, then summer, and Minthe is bored again.

Her prospects have dried up like a creek bed during a drought. She has seen hide nor hair of the rough-hewn grullo, not since their first, brief, tantalizing meeting; the same can be said of the coal-black stallion with the strange profile. Even the cockroach has disappeared, though that’s of her own design. After her last run-in with that scarred, frail little cricket, she’d made a break for the distant forest, weaving herself around the trees like lichen and slithering into the dark spaces in between the trunks. Minthe knew how to make herself visible, how to flash in the light like fire, beautiful and wild and just as dangerous… but she also knew how to hide herself away, to run and run and run until the beast nipping at her heels found an easier, less slippery target.

Now that all familiar scents have disappeared, though, Minthe’s hunger builds. There’s plenty of sustenance here in the rolling fields of the Meadow; this is different, a need that sits deep in her chest, not her stomach, and can’t be satisfied by sweet green grass or soft-petaled blooms. Too long has the chestnut mare gone without the feeling of skin pressing against skin, the thud of bone against the underside of her hooves, the taste of blood on her tongue. If she doesn’t get her fix soon, she’ll have to resort to drastic measures - and Minthe is not a mare who begs for scraps.

Time, then, she decides on one balmy summer day, to remind them all of what they’re missing, and what a life with her at their side could be, if they were worthy of the privilege.

Minthe waits until evening to come out in the open. She strides languidly through long, verdant grasses, the straight lines of her body backlit by the golden rays of the setting sun. Her tail swishes, both in a display of serenity and to waft her scent into the warm breeze. Fireflies dance around her, flashing at each other; though they irritate her, buzzing in her fluted ears, she laughs with fabricated mirth at their displays, settling a mask of innocence over herself like a well-worn cloak.

She is a heat-seeking missile looking for its next target, the most beautiful flower with the perfume of a corpse, a vine choking the breath from its host. Minthe is ready, after so many months out of the spotlight, to receive the attention she needs more than air, and has laid the traps that have yielded her results countless times before. All she has to do now is wait.