Kota gave birth to a tiny, crumpled, dead child. A little magpie freshly hatched, wet fur, open mouth and glazed lifeless eyes. She came to the eastern coast as soon as she felt the first pangs of a premature birth. Her heart folded neatly and tucked itself away, cracking and sinking. Her belly does not look right, hanging low too early, the movement inside stopped three days prior. She stays standing, pushing, groaning, bleeding and pacing. The dark foal drops into the cold sand, the tide’s fingers washing closer and closer by the minute.
“I’m sorry, baby.” she whispers against the stillborn’s cold wet flesh. The ghostmare, a mourning mother now, clenched her jaw and shut her blue eyes tight, tears rolling slowly down to mix with splashing sea-water and after birth on the baby’s black fur. She bid her dead child goodbye and stood in the fading light to watch the waves grab her daughter and pull her out to sea.
She stood there for four days on the beach ̶ a spot just between the Playground and the Den.
Her stomach writhes, her mouth dry as bone, she is forced to move on. Slowly she picks her way down the coastline and turns inland. There is a road between the Den and the Playground and it will bring her to water and grazing the quickest. She’s a few miles in when she hears the first bleats, she thinks it a dream, an illusion, a cruel trick. She freezes and the breezes tug at her pale hair. She hears it again, and again, and she goes blind to all else around her except finding the source of the sound.
Everything between her hearing the foal and finding him, his whinny drawing her near, is a blur. She was aware that she was walking by the Dens, but it was so early she would have never guessed there would be freshly abandoned children here. She whickers, a mother’s response, a low rumble in her throat as she reaches out for him. She says nothing, but all of her senses light on fire, her muzzle searches him for injury and begins to lick him clean, and keep him from shivering in the winter’s cold. Given that she gave birth, she can nurse him, and pushes him gently to where he may find the nourishment all newborns need.
Kota
those great whites,
they have big teeth
@[Corvidae]
