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

[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