Waiting For A Change

• Annie Xiong, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2018

The night was alive, swirling and abstract yet lucid to the point of a clean knife. I drank in the dusk, gorging on the flavour of undergrowth interwoven with fresh snow – icy-sweet and bitter tied together with cold. The world was sound and smell; a gate creaking idly in a nearby town, a seashore somewhere further. My senses blurred; I could taste the colours, smell the stars, drunk on the night air. The moonlit wind swept away the darkness soaking my fur making it pool beneath my falling paws. A maddening elation burst from within my chest; I could do anything. Under the moon, I will live forever. But there was her scent, decaying, on that chilling wind.
I hastily turned and traced back my steps. The human flooded in; her piercing, green eyes swirled with fear; blue in the dusk, the cool, metallic click and silver glint as her eyes focused, hand shook and missed, the sweeping breeze delicately shifted tendrils of grey cloud from the moon – it howled in my chest. Her red hair was twilight, akin to the stains blossoming through the snow. From afar, I saw her hand with fingers outstretched and relaxed. The dizzying world slowed with my heartbeat. Eyes staring past the overhanging tops of skeletal pines and into the heavens, her gaze was cast, unbidden, into the roiling void of grey cloud and stars, all crushed rhinestones burning against the night. I almost expected the world to stop and wait. But still the waves crashed, the night wind sang in my ear as consciousness trickled through the windows of cities and towns. We waited, almost alone now. Though she clutched to the thread of that fraying edge, we both knew that the desperation of her fingers would unravel all hope and change everything.
I paced, as wolves do, around her unfeeling form that lay cradled by the soft, white snow as if napping through a Saturday afternoon. And the moonlight crept back, ebbed away slowly as I laid down beside her lifeless shell.
There was a single picture buried beneath two lifetimes. We sat, once, unbound by time, under that same tainted speculum of night where the world was painted in bluish greys and blacks and muted whites. You could only tell her hair was red from its dulled, purplish hue pressed against the rest of the grey world. She said something that roused conversation, and we talked a while about our should-haves and never-wills and of the future. Not ‘ours’ but ‘the’. The future belonged to nobody.
“When I grow up...” I paused to think, “I’d like to be a wolf. Us both. And we’d just run and run and live forever in the woods.”
She grinned, “That sounds good.”
So, we waited.
Beneath the moon, we waited. Under fragments of decimating, time washed memories, we waited. The person in me cried. But wolves do not cry. So, I waited, alone now, for a change.