Desert Dream
The rabbit’s ears twitched. A foreign vibration nearby sparked alertness. The thing’s tiny heartbeat was jolted into double-time. Its crimson eyeballs bulged, suddenly refocusing on its sandy surroundings. The rabbit’s hindlegs ejected a mist of sand behind it as it quickly bound forward and away.
Panic manifested in its small rodent head as it made a great effort to distance itself from that intuited danger. The blur of brown fur made its way around, under, and finally, into a crack of one of the orange rocks that rose through the arid stretches of the desert dirt mesa. The tiny paw prints pocked out the prey’s path in the sand. The air was still, there was no wind. Not one grain of sand moved unprompted. The rabbit’s hiding place sat in the dark shadow cast by an even larger erected rock, and it turned out to face the expansive, sinking, purpling, sky.
Over the darkening still sandscape came the visage of that foreign vibration, that intuited danger. Tufts of grey hair and sharp, bony shoulders made up the outline of the hungry thing. It panted heavily. The old coyote had clearly been running long before and was now enduring exhaustion on top of its starvation. Its inky eyes surveyed the redrock spotted desert ahead. Its dry, speckled nostrils flared- searching for the sweet sweat-scent of rabbit.
The eyes of the animals finally made out each other’s silhouette. The rabbit was spotted. Muscles tensed, fangs dripped. A flash.
A blood-stained rabbit bounced away into the chilled dark desert night.
