Alice and the idiot had left. He moved out of the road that coughed and spluttered into Amendment Street. He opened the only door to the house and followed his hooves inside. For now there was a cramped room and a stallion nested inside of it.
The stallion wanted to drink. The thirst of it battered him and was dragged across his shoulders. It fell to his hooves and if he held them up they would shiver and shunt. The door was open and the sky had become overcast. All along the street, light fell down in bruises through the clouds. Dimness.
There was a silence. He paced inside and struck the door so that it bounced off the frames. There was a bucket of paint, so he kicked it over and put his hooves through his mane. He struck the wall and a dent bloomed out of the cheap wood. There was no sound and no frown on his face. It was only a stallion and his failure.
Although it came hard to him a distant anger was dripping over him.
Nothing to be done. Ah well. Nothing to be done.
He said the words in his head and then to himself aloud. He wished it hard but the words didn’t lessen anything. He reached over to make the bucket upright, and then silently closed the door to the room. He carefully made the bed sheets on a ruined mattress on the floor and sat down on it.
He took off his officer cap and stared at the dent in the wall. A stare that lurched further than the walls. To where? Dark rooms. The camps in the north. Somewhere else.
Nothing to be done. Still the words hang in the empty room. Those words always followed him. Ever since his first raid the words grew larger and larger. It was there when he watched them herd a group of them north and it was there when the idiot left with Alice. In the tiny room the words were pressed up next to him. Nothing to be done.
A bumping underneath him. The unmeasured quiet then another thumping. Finally a frown was found and stamped to his face. He rose in a cloud of dead air and ruined mattress. He lifted the mattress above and then spun it to a corner. Panting.
The floorboards lying dead. A polite quiet followed by the smallest of creaking. The boards crawling across a crack, then the boards peeling open. There were hooves and they would be bent over the edge of the hole in the floor, the planks heaped on either side. A tremor of dust came from the empty floor.
The hooves were black on the end of a black leg and shining in the dimness. A changeling.
The silence became a dull panic. Lazily it reached out, wrapping itself around the stallions head.
The hooves moved up and doubled into a body. Only smaller than expected, with a frame that we could only describe as tiny. The changeling hobbled out and was limping between hunger and exhaustion. But of course something was wrong. More wrong than it could be.
Because it was a child.
It must have been his imagination because he’s never seen a live child changeling. It must have been.
The changeling was small and its carapace was an inconsistent black and grey. It wore a sweater and a coil of worry. The child held a knife to itself and its breathing melted around what it held tightly to its body. The eyes were green and they were large and they were beautiful. There were tears, but they’re long passed, and they leaned into tracks on the young ones face. It’s sweater groaned into dirt and wool all around it.
The blade and the child shriveled and waned.
“You going to kill me child?”
The words were blank, corrosive and tossed at its feet. Except it was obviously more a she than an it. She had the larger eyes and the slender neck that can betray such a thing. The parts of her are curved and they point to the beginning of adulthood. The potential of beauty. A wolfish sorrow hangs around her hooves and occasionally strays into her eyes.
“You going to stab me with that knife child?”
The child made no moves. The brevity of his words still tumbled around their ears.
She trembled again, although now it is at the eyes. It soon tore down to the mouth, the lips if you like. It was five seconds of this then her face was still. The loud taste of dried paint smeared on the floor and on the air. A moment of stillness then she nodded her head. She had answered yes but they both knew she had no intention of killing the stallion.
The stallion crumpled up his voice and threw it out his mouth.
“I’m very bloody tired about this”
She answered in a clenched stare. Despite it the stallion had come to a decision.
“Alright. Alright. This house is empty” A voice that hollowed and filled.
He circled around the mattress then straightened it out. He sat down and picked his cap from the floor. Once again he had gotten into the bad habit of thinking. He followed it up by taking out the notepad and sighing inwardly. He sucked the air sourly and in chunks. To the child it seemed as though he had decayed into the mattress. A funny cap discarded on the mess of him.
I can assure you that he’s alive even if his spine was spectacularly slack. He’s just tired.
“This house is empty. No one here”
Again he seemed to slump and again he sighed. He had one hoof full of notepad and another hoof full of his face. The hoof slid down and he tried to pinch the headache in his skull. The child loomed over him.
“This house is empty. You understand kid?”
She did. She kept the knife to her and opened the door. A creak of light and then the door was half closed, and then opened in the wind. As is the nature of these things she was crying but silently, with her head bowed, so no one could see or hear it. Her body was hunched as much as a young body could while standing.
It was late noon. It was dour. It was the last time she will hide in the floor. It was a green flash and she was the shape of a filly with a burnt out blackness good enough for hair. There was still a girl and there was still a sobbing. The water falling. Blueness scattered from a sky and laid upon the tiles and the roofs and the strands of smoke from chimneys.
He watched through the half open door. He scribbled a note and swore to himself. He managed to untangle himself upwards and he went to the changeling. He was sweating and the note was heavy. Amendment Street was silent and fearful.
Above them a sparse sea of clouds started raining.
He was breathing through his worry and the water kept falling.
“It’ll end soon”
It wasn't known if he was talking to the girl or talking to the rain-clouds. Both of them stayed silent.
Slowly little pieces of her emptied out with the rain. In a strange hunched choking the last of the weeping had thrown itself from her. She stood solid now, against the puffed red eyes she held in her sockets. Soon, he realized it was less of a child in the rain and more a question.
The question was a growth. It grew out of wetness of her tears, the stillness of her body and the shaking of her hooves. It wasn't sorrow he felt for he knew of that creature and he had trod over its path, but a question. The child. The rain. The question. Will one be left with the other?
The stallion shuffled with his cut down conscious. He thought of the idiot and Alice and strange disappearances in the night. He thought of a child conjured away and buried. The thoughts hummed, then buzzed, then cut. Oh let me think. Please. Let me think. Let me live my small life with my small sins and my small things away from this.
He had the note in his hoof. He spat out a curse and the note was pressed into the child’s hooves.
“There are steps and they go upwards to a door. There is a flat. There is dinner.”
It was his only answer. He loosed then tightened the cap then walked across the street to sieve out of Amendment Street. That was that.
The house’s door was open and spewing it's stale taste of spilt paint. There would be teams, one for processing and one for political forensics. There will be a handling of the small things that made a home. The there will be a fire and these things will be sacrificed in a strange way to the new gods of society.
For now the girl was alive and hungry.
Behind her it rained and ahead of her the stallion swayed into falling drops.