Buttercup

I died once.

I was pulled out of a river, laid on mud, and a stranger pressed my chest until the water came out and the air came back in.

I vomited. I coughed.

Something that had stopped started again.

This is how it happened.

🐾

Warmth first. Her smell — milk and something deeper, something that went into me before I had words for going or for in. The press of small bodies against mine, their heartbeats distinct and close — four of them, five, each rhythm slightly different, all of us breathing together in and out in and out without knowing we were doing it.

I hadn’t opened my eyes. I had no reason to. The world was smell and warmth and the low sound she made, the sound that meant: keep breathing, I’m here, keep breathing. Her breath moved across my face warm and milk-sweet. The whole universe was exactly the size it needed to be and I was at the center of it.

She licked us. One at a time. The rasp of her tongue, the pressure of it, the warmth spreading where she touched. I felt myself become more solid under it. More real. Each pass of her tongue saying: you are here, you are here, you are mine and you are here.

I did not know what happiness was. I had only been alive for days. But I was in it.

🐾

Then her breathing changed.

One beat different. A held quality entered it, a listening I could feel through the vibration of her chest against mine. The warmth of her shifted — not gone, just changed underneath, a new smell rising through the milk smell. Sharp. Wrong.

Something.

I didn’t have the word afraid. I had the smell of it flooding into me through her, and my body responding to hers before I understood anything.

Footsteps outside. Wrong weight. Wrong speed. Not the footsteps that came with food and warmth and the gentle hands that sometimes counted us and smelled like soap. These smelled like nothing warm at all.

She made a sound I had never heard from her. Low and urgent, vibrating from her chest through the floor through my paws through my whole small body. She pressed herself between us and whatever was coming.

A hand — not careful, not slow. It grabbed without asking. I heard her fighting, the sounds of it, and then her sounds got smaller and smaller and then there was nothing where her sounds had been.

Nothing where her smell was. Nothing where her warmth was.

Find her. Get back to her. Find her.

🐾

Dark. Fabric closed around us, rough against my skin. Her smell still on me but already fading, the cold taking it. The others pressing in from every direction. All of us breathing too fast. The smell of our fear rising inside the sack — six small bodies terrified together, that smell filling every breath until there was room for nothing else.

The world lurched.

Not swinging yet. Moving. A different kind of motion — continuous, low, a vibration rising through whatever we rested on and into our bones. A sound started beneath us, a deep mechanical rumble unlike anything I had ever felt, going into my chest and staying there. And a smell flooded in through the fabric — sharp and wrong and nothing alive in it, nothing I had any name for. The rumble changed pitch. We were moving.

The others pressed into me. I pressed into them. The smell of our fear kept rising.

One of them started crying. Thin and desperate and continuous, and then another joined it and then another, all of us crying for her, crying for the warmth, crying because the rumble and the motion and the sharp wrong smell and the dark were all too much and there was nothing else to do with any of it.

The blow came without warning.

Something hit the outside of the sack — hard, enormous, the impact slamming through the fabric and through all of us at once. I felt it in my ribs. In my teeth. The crying stopped. All of us stunned into silence.

Then a voice from outside. Not low and patient like the voice that would come later. Sharp and annoyed. Short sounds that meant nothing to me except their tone, and the tone said: be quiet, stop, I don’t care about your noise.

We tried to hold it.

But the crying started again — not all of us, just one and then two — the terror too large to fit inside our bodies — and the blow came again. Harder. The sack swung from the impact and all of us tumbled into each other, claws and fur and the warm smell of urine sudden and sharp among us.

Silence.

This time we held it.

The rumble went on. In the dark we pressed together and breathed and made no sound, each of us holding our crying inside us as tightly as we could, the warmth of each other the only warmth left in the world.

The motion slowed. Stopped.

🐾

A new sound — air, open air, a rushing cold through the fabric. Something vast out there. The sharp wrong smell faded and something else came through: green and cold and moving. A smell with no name yet.

Then we were lifted.

My claws went into the fabric. Found nothing. The floor was gone. Whatever we had rested on was gone. Everything that had ever been solid was simply gone, and there was only the sack swinging, back and forth, and the others pressing into me and away with every swing and none of us making any sound now, just breathing — fast and small and fast and small.