The Gift
Candyce Byrne
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Candyce Byrne
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Table of Contents
The Gift
Late in the afternoon, just as the little fox was about to rouse herself for her evening hunt, something pricked her.
A flea, she thought, sitting up to scratch.
The shadowy den was filled with the warm, rusty odor of half-rotted leaves and her own muskiness. Outside was bitter winter.
As she scratched, the itch became worse, in just that spot she couldn’t reach at the center of her long, limber spine, no matter how she bent and twisted. The itch became intolerable, and she whined as she scratched.
She realized the itch meant she had been Chosen, and that she was being Sent somewhere with an urgency that bewildered her. Young as she was—in her first round of seasons—she was accustomed to being bewildered. She obeyed.
***
Alma wanted to turn over. Just to turn over. If she could stretch her arm out she could reach the button and call the nurse and get her to help her turn over. Which nurse was on duty this time of day? The quick one with jangly earrings and bad teeth who was too rough to trust with fragile old bone? No, that was the one who brought breakfast. She’d had lunch already, hadn’t she? Maybe even dinner. Hard to tell which was which with the slop they kept bringing. No taste, no smell. What was the point? She wanted to turn over, to stretch out her spine, to get rid of the pain in her spine… Maybe she’d go back to sleep.
***
The fox burst from her den and hurtled down the mountainside, aware that she was conspicuous in the late-day glare, a red streak with black-tipped feet and a white-tipped tail flashing across a snow-white world. She tried to keep to cover. The tender smell of mice and rabbits and other prey rose up from dens and burrows and hollows around and below her; she could sense their trembling anticipation, their need to guess what she would do to be ready to escape her. Before she could sort out the enticing aromas, her stomach knotted painfully. Strange—she should be hungry, but That which had her in its grip wouldn’t let her think about food. Her keen ears caught the faint gasps of little animals breathing again as the angel of death passed over.
At sunset she reached the treacherous black stone path on which humans rode their metal beasts. She crouched in the dead weeds choking the ditch and watched and watched and watched until no metal beast had roared past for many beats of her racing heart, then forced herself to dart out onto the path.
A metal beast immediately rumbled around the bend, its eyelights falling upon her, all but burning her—she thought it would surely pursue her. She leaped and threw herself toward the ditch on the opposite side, landing heavily and painfully so that the breath was driven from her.
Filthy wind buffeted her and stung her nostrils as the beast roared past, but it stayed on the stone path and ignored her.
Farther down the mountain she had to cross the stone path again, for it switched back and forth on its way to the plain. Nine times altogether she braved the path; she came to feel contempt for the metal beasts, knowing them for lazy, heedless hunters. Letting herself run on the open ground beside the path as it leveled out, she made excellent time.
When she reached the last wild tree she threw herself onto the ground and lay panting, trying to revive herself after her headlong flight. A dead metal beast, its sides ripped open, its heart stilled, lay beside a ruined human dwelling. She could smell rats and knew they were curled asleep somewhere among the metal bones. The side of the house had caved in and let snow drift into the building’s cold interior. The fox could smell no living humans, but in the rafters she sensed a restless, miserable presence she knew for a ghost—a human soul trapped by its attachment to the tangible, unable let go, unwilling to let itself leap to the Other Side. Human dwellings were often infested with such things.
Her breathing had almost returned to normal when she felt the stabbing, intolerable itch. Stifling her cry, she jumped to her feet and ran down the center of the stone path, knowing by instinct where to go but trembling nonetheless. She approached a second human dwelling, huddled lightless in the snow. A dog barked and howled in outrage as she passed. Around the dwelling the snow was so foul and trampled that the trails of both human and nonhuman animals were unreadable. She wondered how any species could survive in such disarray.
All around she saw things warped to human uses. The dwellings of humans were numerous on either side of the path, the smell of the creatures sickening her even though she knew they were safely asleep.
The guiding instinct stopped her where a clump of scraggly cedar bushes had been permitted to grow in the yard of a great, long, dark building. The bushes couldn’t offset the bleakness of the building or its yard, bare except for a blanket of filthy, foot-chopped snow, but they might shield her from hostile eyes. She crouched in the meager cover. She was terrified, cold, exhausted. Her feet hurt. She longed to circle out a bed in the bare earth under the bushes and bury her nose warmly in her tail and sleep, but she feared the punishing itch. She knew she wouldn’t be allowed to rest until her task, whatever it was, was done.
The building was grimmer than any human habitation she had yet seen. When she sniffed the frigid midnight, the air carried the stench of incurable disease as well as a sound that made her want to cover her ears with her paws—the moaning of souls that should have been dead but were still living. Even worse were the ghastly scuttlings and rattlings under the building’s glowering roof, the sound of a legion of ghosts.
No place on earth could be more appalling to her. This, she knew, was the place to which she had been Sent.
***
Alma wanted…
Roast chicken. She could remember the taste, the texture, the smell, the feel of it sliding down her throat. You hardly had to chew chicken if you’d cooked it long enough, filling the house with rich warm appetite-teasing smells. She remembered crackly, papery skin, where most of the spices were. Salt-and-peppery grease on her lips and fingers. The last shreds of meat clinging to the succulent, suckable bones.
They wouldn’t let her have roast chicken. She couldn’t chew it, they said. Of course not. Not when they wouldn’t let her have her teeth. Her dentures didn’t fit right, they said, because her gums had shrunk. Her teeth, they warned, would rub her mouth raw and give her sores. Besides, they said, she might choke on them when she fell asleep. She was always falling asleep.
***
Preparing to leave the scant protection of the scrub cedars, the fox shook herself from sharp black nose to bushy white-tipped tail. Abruptly she began to feel another strange thing on this night of strange things—rearrangement was taking place, a burning, turning, yearning that began in the soles of her feet and pierced her guts and made her ears ring and her eyes water.
She sneezed.
She lifted her forepaw to lick the burning pad and wffffed in horror. Instead of her own dainty black paw she saw a tiny palm and fingers, the hand of a human child. She felt compelled to stretch upward, her head and back rasping painfully against rough bark and sharp-needled branches.