Meadow

all the trees are turning gold,
In the early hours she moved. Like a thin skiff of fog Echidna carried herself across the meadow. No more than a ribbon of gold and cream and stark black. She was not beautiful. Her build was compact, muscular, though the ravages of time had started to draw her down一

Life had not been kind to her,
It had been cruel, if nothing else.

Cruel and unusual with moments of brilliancy一she had been brilliant once. Before the islands and her time abroad. Brilliant and daring and dangerous as jaguar jaws to her foes. She can’t even remember their names now, or the names of those she loved. Those she lost.

Echidna keeps them in a pit inside her mind. She keeps them in the dark where they cannot run rabid in her memories and haunt her like ghosts. The little mare won’t allow it, she refuses to be pulled back into the past she escaped. But everything has a way of bubbling back up to the surface. There are some wounds, some regrets, which float like foam on the glass. They will not sink no matter how long they are held under the surface.

But she uses it as strength, the pain. Keeps it locked inside her bones. She stands, head high and blocky on her short neck. Her eyes, those two dark beetles settled a little too widely in her face, stare placidly over the dawn spewed meadow. He would come, she thinks, why wouldn’t he? She had something to tell him, she had something to confess like a sin.