March, 2024. Based on an original character.

Rocky on the Shore

There was a time when his long brass-tinted toes sept into the thick, wet sand, pebbles poking the strong wood but never indenting;

He would walk along the creek, stalking really, head low and hunches raised like a cat of prey, his hinds whirring ever so quietly,

A hum nearly indistinguishable from the numbles of nature, the swaying of grass and cheep-cheeps of birds and buzz of cicadas and of course, the water working itself;

What did he see? something smaller (but not by too large a margin), maybe a hare, unaware,

A red berry squashed in its teeth like the thing had been slaughtered;

The pickaxe he yielded was about half the size of his agile body, and one would see him and stare and think, why, he bears it with such ease,

Except that nobody saw him, not ever, nobody that did not make him this way, that did not craft him with his very hands;

But he would withdraw the pick from his backside and take it and lunge and strike the hare,

Just like that,

Like a skilled bird picking off a flying fish

Or an aged woman chopping an onion with a knife, exact;

There was a time when he would lift this pick, its blade embedded into the hare’s nape, the creature limp, the red berry still in its sorry mouth, and with his prize,

With a splash of its blood across what you would call his jaw like the thing had been slaughtered;

He would walk back along the creek, pick on his backside, and hare slung in what you would call his arms like a newborn,

He would work himself through the wood, with the sure steps of a thing who had lived there a millennia, who owned the wood like a king or god,

Who knew this hare, who could recall its life like it were his own, who could do with this every hare and fox and doe and frog;

There was a time when he would do this and he would return home.