Returning

The days are growing lighter and I’m spending too much time staring out of my window. Think I’ll pack a knapsack and head south to meet the spring. (Sure they’ll understand at work.) I can’t shoe a horse or sweep a chimney, so I’ll just knock on this cottage door here and offer to tell a tale – a whole life in one hundred words – for my supper.

Returning

Born under the shed, behind the compost bin, the little vixen’s first smells were the fecund scents of placental blood, mother’s milk, mushrooms and leaf litter.

When her mother was hit by a lorry reversing in the lane, she escaped to the park and shared the dawn with a locked-out drunk and two teenage lovers. Many times she raised cubs herself; one long summer of plenty with an old dog fox who stayed.

Skin and bone now, today she hobbled back onto my lawn, raised her dark snout to a sudden swathe of blue sky and sniffed the spring air.

M J Lewis ©2015

Please click on the LINK for a whole glorious dawn chorus of stories from around the globe. Thanks as ever to Rochelle, our very own conductor of the Friday Fictioneers. Photo prompt by Erin Leary.