AUTHOR'S NOTES: This was a short ficlet I wrote while listening to 'BEFORE DAWN' by Isaac Shepard, I reccomend for this story that you listen to the song while reading it to get the desired effect (Can be found on YOUTUBE). Thanks!
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue.
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- Before Dawn -
His pale features are drawn into a crushed squint, eyes black slits under the heavy orange glow of the near-dusk sun beaming over the field that seemed to stretch on to the end of forever.
Wisps of black hair swaying in the wind. Rising and falling as deep as the breaths he takes, exhausted from the run.
Lifting a bony hand to fustily scrape a thread of hair behind his ear, the boy looks down through the foot-high unkept wheat of the abandoned farm, a lump of uneasiness forming at the back of his mouth.
The bird had probably been dead already, he thought, looking at the tiny crushed form at the tips of his tattered old shoes. It could have flown away if it was alive, but it didn't... Yes, it had to have been dead, the voice in his head reasoned quietly.
Looking up to gaze out across the field, to where a lonely, decrepit old barn teetered on the line where the sky met the earth, he coughed, not bothering to raise a hand to cover his mouth, something his mother would have quickly given him a lick for had she seen.
But she couldn't ever see him here, he remembered, drawing his lips into a tight line.
That is why he came, after all. Running as fast as he could through the grided farm land, arriving before the intense blue of twilight could push the tan glimmer of the fading sun into submission as the hours rolled by.
Swallowing, he looked down again, to where the mangled, feathered form had not moved an inch. But what had the boy expected? For the small, blue figure to sort itself out miraculously and chirp a bit before flying away? He shook his head, feeling bones crackle in his back and he leaned downwards, lifting his left leg up to the knee of his right gracefully, not swaying a bit in the slightest unbalance.
"Oh."
His youthful features contorted further into a wince as at the bottom of his shoe, several clumped feathers lay stuck, smelling ever so discreetly of rot.
The lump in his throat grew an ounce or two and he lowered his foot, toeing off the offending shoe, and then the other, adjusting to the unpleasant feeling of the hard wheat and dead grass digging into the soles of his feet, the thin, worn socks being of no protection.
He lowered his whole body now, crouching as he scooped up the little body in both hands, as if he were cupping water from a stream, and it, much like water, weightlessly joined his hands in the center, feathers ruffling slightly as the wind blew a heavy breeze once more.
Into his shoe now, the dead bird went, right up at the end were the boy could see it, and he held it carefully as he causally grabbed his other shoe with his free hand, standing again and looking to the condemned barn ahead, then down at the once-brown bird.
One step. Then another. Towards the horizon he walked, to the barn he would put the bird, with his wrecked feet as penance.
If he walked fast enough, he figured, he could get home before dawn.
-END-