Paid subscribers can find the narration here.

The night thins across the forest, a shroud of shadow and old, cold air. Moonlight drips between branches, pooling on the leaf-rot below. The air smells of wet bark and something faintly sour.

I perch on the splintered beam of a broken trail sign. Listening to the crickets, to the echoes of half-dead pines, to the skitter of a small mouse—yum.

Names—pft. Why bother naming the trees, the creeks, the camps. They do not stay. Our little two-legged friends replace them on a whim. It’s fine. I endure without such niceties.

My feathers settle.

A pang of hunger. A quiet longing. Capricious little me.

Below, that mouse, clutching and munching on a crust of white bread. Shivering, soft, silver—he misses me. A smear of mayonnaise cavitates on his face, white as the moonlight. Yum.

A dive should be clean. An old-world descent—head tucked, wings back—a jackknife through the night. A debt paid to dinner, to this mouse. Alas — that’s how it should be.

Now, even the sky feels cluttered. The constant grumbling of distant engines. The peace and ceremony of it all. Gone.

I breathe. Once. Silence.

My dive is simply a fall. I fall away.

A whisper in my feathers.
A faint, startled cry.
A final honest design.
Yum.

When I rise again, the forest is quiet. The bread, abandoned. Mayonnaise muddies at its edges, a sticky, stiffening scab.

I return to my old signpost. The darkness and I are in collusion, it seems. It makes the night, I give it grace.

Thanks for reading. This story was based on a prompt to use the words: nicety, jackknife, mayonnaise. Drop a prompt in the comments and see your story come to life.

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