Hunger
Today’s short story wrote itself. I was on a beach walk when I spotted this life-and-death event and stopped to watch it unfold in less than three minutes. I tweaked the setting to suit me, added a touch of pathos, and here it is!
Image by Palle from Pixabay
At dawn, when the marsh wore its silver skin of fog, a heron stood like a pale question mark at the water’s edge. One leg folded into the warmth of its feathers, the other planted in mud.
The bird had learned patience from this shallow water and waited, poised and alert, for ripples to betray what was hidden in its darkness. Surrounded by the familiar music of insects and the distant complaint of frogs, it waited as the whole wet world woke one small sound at a time.
The mouse did not belong to the water. It belonged to the dry shelter of grasses, to the crumbling banks where the marsh gave up to the field. Hunger, however, is a tide that pulls even the wariest of creatures into dangerous spaces. The mouse’s belly had been empty since the moon slid behind clouds the night before, and the marsh promised fallen grains and beetles.
Skittering down the bank in its small hurry, its heart a fast, bright drum, the mouse ignored one instinct and pursued another.
The heron’s polished bead of an eye flicked to the rustle of the seed head. Not a fish. Not a frog. Something else, quick and warm, disturbing the reeds unlike any breeze. The bird adjusted its weight, the smallest stir that didn’t send a message of danger.
The mouse paused. It sniffed at the night’s dew, its whiskers trembling in anticipation of a meal. A shadow darkened the marsh water, and in that short brush of time, the heron struck—violence wrapped in soft surprise as the beak closed around fur.
The heron lifted its head, and the world for the mouse became dark. It wriggled, feet bicycling, its small body bucking against the beak’s insistence. In one desperate twist, it found purchase with its teeth, a nip against keratin, and for a moment, the heron felt the needle of pain.
The bird tilted its head, a small, impatient motion, and the mouse slipped further in, fur rasping the slick corridor of throat.
The mouse thought of nothing in words. It thought in heat and cold, in the feel of how soil gives way in burrowed tunnels, in the smell of seeds. It thought of the quick shadows of owls. It thought of the nest, woven of grass, of the other mouse whose body had warmed its own in the dark.
The heron worked the mouse down with a practiced gulp. Only a single visible wave, a white river carrying a brown stone, was testimony to what had just happened.
Then, as it had done throughout the centuries this marsh had existed, the fog thinned, the dew winked in the morning light, and the heron glided soundlessly into the sky.
I’d seen a heron gulp down a fish before, but never a mouse, and judging by the reaction of the small crowd that gathered, this was a first-time experience for others as well. What about you?
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This is gorgeous. And yes, it reads like it wrote itself!
Some lovely poetic writing. It's not often one reads something from the omniscient point of view, but this was the only way to make this as effective as it is...