The sky is falling and no one has noticed. It's because the descent is gradual, piecemeal, raining down one satellite at a time when eyes are sealed in sleep. She sees, though, she watches with her snout to the heavens as they come unraveled, tumbling down to where the world ignores the pockmarks of its tantrum. One night, a mote of it drifts close to where she sits, growing larger, more dangerous as it approaches. The doe feels the reverberations as it lands, striking the soil and igniting any nearby stalks of grass. After a heartbeat, she steals through the fire-eaten twigs and orange-curled leaves, stares down at the glimmering thing that caused such chaos in so quiet a place. In the sky it had winked and held promise, but that regal heat is lost to the damp ground. Ashes rise from its charred surface, coating her delicate senses, sticking to her in patches; the blue that sits on her shoulders bubbles from proximity, the liquefied color dripping down her chest, mimicking the sight it has witnessed. At the transformation's end, two prongs sit empty above her heart, as if inviting a new entity in. The broken chunk of sky smokes and sputters all the while, darkening, spat out like a rotten tooth. She grins at the sight, her own teeth blackened by birthright, and silently accepts her kinship with the corpse of the star.
