Prey

A fold in the top sheet of a spiral bound pad of lined paper, like a bed sheet pulled back to enable easy entry into a single bed on a cold winter night. The branches of the trees are laden with snow. The street lights reveals footsteps on the path below. Everybody has left. They went today or yesterday. Their faces are obscure to me. The mountains are hidden beneath a pall of darkness. I walk up each of their steep, pine-bound paths simultaneously. My breath spreads though the night. Demons rise up from their hutches. They drag their long, filthy nails through the snow and across the rocks and the trunks of the trees. Limited creatures – they imagine that they are predators when they are in fact prey. They are prey to the disappearance of the forest, of the mountains, of the cold night itself. I withdraw everything I have given them. I can no longer even recognise the bed – only the folded blank page.