Chapter 22: A tale of coyotes.

Once there was a female coyote. An endless March of belated mating led to a set of nameless fears spawning from her entrails. Consequent late delivery, in May. All and every one of them were sterile males. Gregarious, they were not —maybe once deprived from the ability to reproduce, Nature deemed that it wasn't necessary for them to have any social structure beyond the violent fights among siblings, quickly forgotten by the survivors.

As pups, most weren't even cute. They were oversized and their facial muscles contracted grotesquely. Not due to fear, but due to unyielding aggressiveness. Extremely aggressive traits in a species already primed for the hunt. Every one of them was keen to completely devour whatever they killed —including the ingestion of skull, brain and bones. Not as a instinctual way to honour the kill, but in order to end all hopes and potential from the victim to leave a mark in the world and have a resting place.

Despite its great mass, in number, it wasn’t a big litter. One might say that it was because their voracity made them eat their siblings during gestation, in utero. Of course that would be absurd —they were mammals, not littermate-gobbling sharks.

Every one of them was late at finding independence from their mother. Mother had defined them. She had created them to their most minimally defined trait. She chose them. In absolute control. As if she was completely aware and meaning every aspect of what she infused in each and every one of them. As if she had been fully able to predict the exact nature of the victims that her litter would create —completely cognizant of the ultimate consequences, insanely rewarded by her blood-thirst by proxy.

Out of the males that had grown in her entrails, the first born had the ability to transfer the lonesomeness he was doomed to live in into their victims: they were instilled a glimpse of sempiternous loneliness with every bite, a projection of a forlorn self quickly becoming the only vision they were left with in their death throes. A sight that was projected in front of whatever afterlife they had hoped for, rendering it irremediably unbearable. The fate of the coyote —that we'll name Alur— wasn't different to the one of their victims.

The second one from the litter wasn't as aggressive nor its bite was as grim. Its bite —however— meant a sudden, utter lack of connection with what was considered an acceptable behaviour. Rabies without death. A decay into the luxuries of a violently loveless life that had absolute control over the sadness created by the contempt towards everything and everyone. Named Mirg, he would understand as well that the misery he spread was the same misery he lived in.

The third, Liev, would instill decrepitude with its bite —or rather, a sense of timelessness in which a period of twenty years would be rendered irrelevant. None of that aging would have a compensating trait nor experience. Twenty years lived under a bleak veil of an unfruitful routine. Decay without a meaning.

Xela, a fourth one, was the biggest in size —almost the size of a dire wolf. You know, like those fossils in La Brea Tar Pits. He had a very strange shape, typically contorting and captivating the attention of whomever was meant to be the victim. Morbid fascination. He would be seen in every horizon —making sure that the victim didn't have the comfort of unawareness, of oblivion. This ever-present beast invoked self-awareness whenever it implied pain. And obsession. The fearful memories at night. The traumas that can't be forgotten. It would also be the monster that attacks Alzheimer's sufferers in the first stages of the disease, hitting them with the awarenes of their state and their condition. It showed the sheer bleakness in truth, with all its pain.

It was the fifth, when ordered by the sequence in which they had been born, the second to bite. Bite that engendered Alice's work reputation demise. It was never her fault, but the unlucky bite's that made them accuse her of what she was only partially to blame. It was a bite amplified by what Mother had nurtured. The final push to her trauma —a dramatically weighed impression of the importance of her reputation. An irrational view on how society was a block ready to judge her from the eyes of Mother.

The whole pack had been coordinated in their attacks —be it by fate or by the malevolent mother's desires. I won't say that their attacks were easy to evade. Just that Alice couldn't.

And there, the body lay, mutilated by the failures she failed to appease. Flesh scrawled with signs of failure.