By Audrey T. Carroll
The night was never silent.
Whimper would go hunting in the in-between hours, in the not-quite-day and the not-quite night. When it was dark, it was safer to be curious, easier to hear predators in the grasses all around, easier to see when others could not. Whimper would look up, sometimes, when something flew overhead. The summer had been spent preventing the larger birds from taking the kits as their meal, and Whimper was still vigilant, even alone in these colder months with nothing left to protect.
It was this vigilance that first called Whimper’s attention to the skies, which were sometimes bright even when it was not day. Whimper had traveled two nights north, hoping to see what the lights were. But it was no clearer here than it had been from the grasses. Still, it felt closer, somehow, and it was a way to keep from staying in one place too long.
When Whimper decided to curl up to sleep with the start of day, bizarre images came in the night. Dreams were no stranger to Whimper. But these were different than imagining running alongside a river, or remembering a close encounter with something winged and treacherous.
There was a fire. Whimper’s instincts were to run, and so Whimper ran. Somehow, Whimper had been turned around; instead of running away from the fire, Whimper had run toward it. In a clearing rose a large flame, tall as the trees. Whimper got low in the grasses, watching, waiting. Then the bodies began moving around the flame. There were at least a pack’s worth of them. They looked like coyotes, but too large, jumping up on their back legs and down again. But as the shadows shifted, so did their limbs, sometimes hairless and human. They howled together. The colors changed. The flame was something like yellow, but not quite. Whimper realized the flame was the color of kinfur, the color that Whimper’s mate and kits had been that summer, the color that Whimper was. How many sparks made that one big fire, so bright in the trees, so dangerous, so active? The pack of creatures became hazy; the trees became hazy. It was only fire, only—
Once awoken, Whimper, alone again, could not recall the colors which had been dreamed.
About the Author
Audrey T. Carroll is the author of the What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and as a Fiction Editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.
Nebulous 