Dark Shard 6. Summer Mood.
The city groaned under a myriad of breaks. The thin weaves of its bright streets turned into a black charred mess, bright buildings flew apart as torn fragments of life, thousands of trees on green boulevards turned into burnt matches, and the blazing summer sun sank in clouds of black acrid smoke.
A black cat with white opal slithered between gigantic blocks of concrete, smoked with cluster bomb explosions, painted with scarlet flashes of blood. Her little pink-nosed face showed no emotion — just another day in her tiny, unsteady life.
But she remembered those good times when she had a warm, cozy house, the mistress’s hand gently sliding on her back, delicious hearty food, and her favorite window sill with soft bedding. Then there were many sounds — loud, grinding, immeasurable. They made her run — as far as she could, to stop feeling them with her whole tiny body. She remembered how sharp fragments flew everywhere — a few even tore her thin white skin, leaving wounds that still sting. She also remembered how the mistress’s face was distorted when sharp fragments tore her body into many pieces in an instant.
The cat felt a slight fluctuation in the air — IT flew again. She knew very well what would follow. Caressing hands, cut into pieces. Moving quickly with her tiny paws, she galloped to a dark, safe break in the concrete mess — but did not have time.
The fire engulfed the entire street in one brief moment. It was not cruel. It just did its simple thing, for which it existed all its short life — destroying everything it could destroy. Its hot touch heated the metal of multicolored shiny cars, affectionately licked the front gardens, lovingly planted by already dead grandmothers, warmed the cold bones of the inhabitants of the city, and painted its dreary gray ruins. The short lives of small black cats with white opals and pink-nosed faces were interrupted.
The city groaned under a myriad of gaps. The only thing it wanted was to save at least someone. It could not protect from the fiery hell neither a mother of many children, nor a first-grader with a funny knapsack, nor an old man with shaking hands and a brave look. It died in a senseless dance of fire and metal, but it could not close the defenseless flesh of his children with its concrete flesh.
A black cat with white opalines looked with its huge gooseberry eyes at a large, sharp piece of concrete. It fell right in front of her, drenching dusty blood. It fell before her, shielding her from the swirling, roaring, impassive flames.
The city groaned, burned, burst, and died in fiery agony. Its path, no doubt, was sealed.
But it was able to save at least one small black cat with white opalines. And it was happy, dying in the glow of two fires: faceless and meaningless, flying from the sky directly into its asphalt veins, and pre-sunset, noble, bright, eternal, deciding, as always, to remain indifferently in the slowly smoldering sky.
