s**t. s**t, s**t, s**t.
“I told you not to eat it, didn’t I? I told you so!” Nergüi hissed to herself, even though it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the truth. That little critter she had eaten a little while ago – she couldn’t even really remember what it looked like anymore – had been an absolute pain to catch, and was, unfortunately, proving to be even more of a pain now that it was in her stomach. “That little bugger…” The bright lioness muttered darkly, even as she grimaced from a shot of pain in her midsection. Ohh, great. Now she was going to spend the rest of the day collapsed under a tree while the world paraded by and jeered at her idiocy.
“Why, why would you eat something just for the sake of eating it? Why?” The lioness lowered herself to the lush forest floor, leaning against the trunk of one of the numerous massive trees that made up the jungle and pulling deep breaths to alleviate the stomachache. And, of course, she already knew the answer to her own question. Anyone who had been around Nergüi for about five moments would know: just because.
It had been that way all her life, because that was just the way things were. Nothing bad had ever happened to her before, no matter how far she stretched herself or how much she pushed the limits – of anything. Because, she reasoned, her mama had done her a huge favor at birth and given her a name that she treasured beyond all things material in the world: Nergüi. No name. And, as such, invisible to the malignant forces that ruled the world. No name, which meant, technically, she didn’t exist. At least that was what her mama had told her, and she must have been right, because all her life, Nergüi had found that unusual good luck followed her at every turn.
There was the time when, playing hide and seek with her siblings (all brothers), she had decided to hide in the stream. Her reasoning, at the time, had been that, being blue, she would camouflage perfectly with the running water. What she hadn’t taken into consideration was the fact that she would be in the running water and that she was but a little bit of lion and it wouldn’t have taken very much at all to send her spinning downstream with the current. And of course, what she hadn’t foreseen was exactly what happened, and she had lost her footing in the water, only to be carried into a small cluster of smooth rocks that had caught her and held her safely from the rushing water until her father had arrived to save her life.
And there was also the time when, out on her very first official hunt, she had gotten herself caught in the oncoming stampede of zebras and wildebeest, and had had no other choice but to curl into a ball in the tall savannah grass and hope that everything would be alright. She emerged from the incident unscathed, save for a severe blow to her confidence.
There were other moments too – too many to recall – from which she had miraculously been saved by a turn of good luck, and, as she grew, she began to take it for granted. And why not, after all? Why not savor the fact that she had been blessed with an extraordinarily fortunate life, and run with it as far as it would let her (she suspected this was as far as she so desired to take it)?
Now, though, she had been proven wrong. For the first time in her life, Nergüi was suffering the consequences of something she had done. It was… She couldn’t say she particularly enjoyed it.
There had been a certain, inexplicable joy in being invincible—or feeling like it, anyway. The idea that nothing, absolutely nothing, could touch her no matter how hard anybody tried was liberating and one that awarded such freedom to her life that in hindsight, she figured she must have been the luckiest creature on earth. Life, or something like it anyway, had consisted of courage beyond the point of foolishness that had allowed her to chase whatever dreams she might have the creativity to conjure, to dare to attempt just about anything on a whim, and to do it all without a care in the world.
Now, though. Now it was gone, that unfounded invincibility of hers. She had been wounded, she had bled (figuratively of course), and for the first time in her life, she had been faced with her own mortality—as close to mortality, anyway. She wasn’t dying yet, and she wouldn’t, if she had anything to do with it.
And it was devastating. It hurt, even more than the pain that had her curled up shaking on the forest floor. If that made her feel as if she had been kicked in the stomach, the pain of knowing she could feel this way hurt a million times more. Her identity, everything that had constituted her, had rested almost solely on her defiance of nature and the law of mortal suffering, and in a mere moment, one measly moment of bad judgment, it had shattered into countless pieces, and she had no idea how she would ever be able to put it back together.
But more than that, what was the point? If it could be shattered once, it could be shattered a hundred times over, and that kind of heartache… that was something she couldn’t, wouldn’t take.
As it was, though, any efforts she might have conceived to glue herself back together would have gone unnoticed. In the wake of the cramping pains in her stomach, she was utterly indisposed. She could barely even twitch her tail, and she floated in and out of consciousness, half aware of her delirious thoughts and the injury to her psyche. She barely even noticed that by now, it seemed as though the pain had spread throughout her body. It was an aching soreness that enveloped her, constant and merciless, until that alone became her world.
Pain.
Word count: 1025
