dog fight

I fell into the dream as if my bed parted and the floor opened up beneath me. All at once an quickly I was on Forestview, on the hunt, walking through the thick blackness of spring's nighttime. A call came out, an area where the fugitive was last seen, not far from my prowling. I tracked him down into a dilapidated house sloping lazily to the west of the river that slices the town in half. No one had lived there for some time and inside it smelled of dust and animals and air that had been deprived of sunlight for too long. He heard my approach and I watched as he ran down a hallway and slithered into a hole in the drywall, small and scared and like a wayward country mouse. And in the next instant we were outside, feet digging in to the slipping mud, thawing snow guiding our tangled limbs down into the swollen river. And then, it was just churning water, and nothing working, and fighting, and mud, and being carried quickly away. The flotsam and jetsam of the lake sluicing past as I struggled for higher ground, to just not be pulled under.

And then I woke up and it was early morning, my clock tick tocking in the corner and the world outside still dark, and pure. And my first thought was of him.