He felt unnerved the moment that he woke, that tightening of so many wound cords, like a muscle ache. He'd gone for a walk in the quiet pre-dawn. He tried to jog down a dirt path but his legs simply couldn't carry him as fast or as far as his mind wanted to go. He'd pushed himself until he realized that his body would never be capable of the speeds he longed for when he roamed on four legs in his previous realm, his previous life; and that the place his mind wanted to go didn't exist anymore, just as his old life was as unobtainable as a wisp of vapor. When he returned to the farm of the two men who had found him and allowed him room and board in exchange for labor, they'd taken one look at him and sent him to the outhouse to rub one out. It hadn't helped.
They'd begun the morning work together and in the usual absence of words, tending the animals, feeding, milking, mucking, and in his mind everything felt mushed together as if all were excrement, all rotted into shit, all came from shit; he saw brown. They breaked for lunch, then, a thick slice of sourdough bread, an onion slice, and a slab of cold salted meat. The two men went on to pick some of the winter fruit and mend trellises, set protective bird-nets, assess frost-damage and determine whether they should cloth the plants depending on if it would freeze tonight; all of it in the usual amazingly efficient lack of words. There was plenty of work for three, but he'd been sent off by himself to mend a wooden fence. The wire was thick, cold, and tried to stick to his fingers, while a frigid winter wind whipped through, so that he couldn't feel his fingers.With gloves, he felt them again, but not the wire. It was frustrating work, as everything was and felt and he'd at last given up and growled at the stupid iron wire. It was an inhuman, wet sound with an ugly face. Dare had took the pliers, glove, and tool bucket, said nothing, pointed towards civilization, and given his back a gentle push in that direction. He'd been dismissed, and he bristled about it.
That was this morning and this afternoon. Now, the sun was lower in the sky, weakening with gentle rays of light that glinted on the households of those who lived among rubble. Smokestacks had begun to chuff from those houses and wandered into the sky, like so many offerings. The first hints of dinner preparations wafted through the lanes that tried to be orderly and geometric.
He wandered aimlessly, his hair not tied and his facial hair not shaved for added warmth. He felt different than Dare and Dylan, the farmers where he stayed, and he knew that they knew, and that today they had sent him away, to a place with humans, to a place where he felt he fit even less. In actuality, Dare and Dylan both felt his cabin fever and had sent him to civilization to cure his own ails, but Yll being new to humanity, young in heart, and as angsty as a teenager was too blind to see it.
He didn't realize that he had stopped and was staring into a crude glass window where a large woman with apron was cooking, cleaning, and setting a table all at the same time. He didn't care for her because she was a human, but he admired the efficiency and unceasing movement that comprised her bustle. He saw the shadows of a small human - a child, as they called them - playing in the background. He scowled a little in his heart, that the young'ling was old enough to help with such menial tasks but had absorbed himself in moving inanimate figures with his fingers back and forth, back and forth, accomplishing nothing but his own amusement. He mentally withdrew from the scene then, as one might stop reading a book even though the eyes still saw the page. His environment sunk back in with his mind's absence, as prevailing and unceasing as the cold. He felt the cold on his nose and the tips of his ears and in the center of his heart, and at last, he knew the word that had been creeping up on him since his stumbling through to this life unwittingly and growling through the whole day.
Loneliness.
At least in the fighting in his old life, there had been others. With teeth bared, wounds oozing, and the desire to live held as firmly beneath them as their paws gripped into the hot sands of that fighting ring, he saw his adversary in the eyes, and his opponent saw him. There was a silent understanding and in that understanding a compassion hardened into brutal sociopathy, which, too, was comprehended and exchanged silently in violent comradery. To live was to fight, to fight was to live, and all of it involved another being. He visibly bared his teeth then, but at himself. He was being a picky little bitch. He was human and there were other humans, here. The gesture turned into a Cheshire, unnerving smile. He would do as he'd always done: pick a fight. He still looked into the window of that house, but his brain wasn't seeing what was there, only the sands, the fur, the snarls, and the gurgling of life, bubble by bubble with ferocity to hang on...
