Prime Start

The child sniffled and cried over her parent. Her innocent tears rolling down her sweet cloud white snout to the darling pink of her sorrow-wet nose. Little fingers ending with filed nails that would have been claws. Cressida nudged, throat too tight to beg anymore.

The smell of their leaking end too distinctive and powerful to her senses, it clung to her throat and mind. Like thrones she used to put under her tongue.

Their bodies had lost their warmth. Softness stiff under their clothes torn by cruel loud guns. Their love turned scarlet. Their screams ringing louder than the barrel barks, even after their last cries were long gone. They were gone. She have seen the food-dogs and many rats that they had to eat be gone, but this wasn't the same...or was it?

Is this how dog-moms and rat-dads felt too? Or their kids?

Even when hers looks different from her. They didn't have boopers. They didn't have fur on their work-dirt skin. They didn't have hooves. But they were nice and loving. They were her momma and daddy...why did they kill them?

They hid her away. Told her not to come out till they were gone, no matter what.

She was so sad, she didn't hear the Fox Man.

His hands, warm and big with the softest paw-beans, gently cupped her shoulders as he came down to her. He didn't say anything. That nice, gentle voice that he used to sing for her in the dark. Her big pink eyes looked up at his sad face with those pretty purple markings and eyes.

They were so nice.

And, she couldn't hold back and wailed. She tried to cry like a good girl, but it was ugly sound of a child and braying cow. She used to be picked on all the time by the other kids. Cowgirl, they called her. Ugly moo moo.

But, unlike even her parents, he didn't even flinch. The Fox Man didn't tell her to hush, his arms wrapped around her tender. Protectively, letting her sniffle and cry against his shrouds. His fingers combing through her dirty mane. All she could cry was why? Why on her birthday? Why when everyone came to celebrate? Even the adults who were mean to her?

She was gonna be a big six-year-old girl today!

She didn't know why, but there was something deep, something unknown to her at that time, that she did. How the kids looked at her. How the adults sneered, glared, and looked at her. How some scared her off. How some even threw stuff at her, if she wasn't near her folk.

The Fox Man did too. The only word that sounded so ugly, so mean, so...unnatural to her as it grew inside her little chest and crying heart;

Hate.