Torchwood drabble: Mercurial

[littledoglaughed]

Title: Mercurial
Author: rustydog
Characters: the Rift
Rating/spoilers: rated G, no spoilers
Beta: mad_jaks
Notes: Written for tw100's challenge #102, "endangered words"


It appears on soft paws: its dexterous tentacles choose one knife from a drawer of dozens; this child but not her sister; the husband from bed, leaving the wife among the sheets, the tinny taste of ozone ringing her throat.

Or it is a lightning cloud: mercurial as a tornado, it skips this farmhouse and devastates the next, no pattern to its swirling atomic trail of debris. It deposits the flock on a grassy hill a century hence and drops the lamb light years away on the shore of a poison sea.

Without conscience, the Rift gives and takes away.

Comments

[rustydog.livejournal.com]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, possibly?

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys.
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

I wasn't thinking of that specifically when I wrote the drabble, but any sort of cat metaphor for a nonsentient entity would have to have been influenced by that passage, I imagine. :)

And thank you very much! I'm so glad it worked.

[rabecka.livejournal.com]

Talk about late comments... But, I just tripped over the poem I was trying to think of.

THE fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on
- Carl Sandburg