~ a short story
The ocelot skulks in the cold. Over the skeletons in the snow, the endless swaths of rusting steel and buried ivory, the young predator scours and pounces, expending only a few small breaths. The effortless hunter, grey and white fur bristling from the northern wind, paces over its trail with steely animus in its gaze. Sighting for fresh marks among the wastes, never to be found, the cat cools its heart to the latest round of desolations unto its world, drinking them down without reaction or regret.
The ocelot pads over dead machines. Powerful and graceful beyond words, this little beast appears as the sole progenitor now. The only being either unchanging or not-yet-perished o’er these lands. Even still, from this present point of interminable terminus, the ocelot hunts. Underneath smog sky and collapsing ‘scrapers, she makes her way, smelling scents of acrid and unnameable and entirely inedible things.
The ocelot breathes in fresh annihilation and exhales stale vigor. She dawns over every horizon where the light has settl’d and the waters have calm’d, wherein the restlessness of immateria — the Real struggles for life — have been all but eradicated. Without concern for anything but her hungering belly, the ocelot leaps through these realms of peace. But it is a wayward peace, one borne of darkness and deathlessness, one that empowers and equalizes only the nothingness. The battles were fought long before she arrived; all the deaths predate her haunt. Her existence is almost entirely unselfconscious movement now, an ethereal drift from one sorrow to the next.
The ocelot hunts alone. But why? Not normatively, but metaphysically — not ‘why is everyone else gone?’, but ‘why did everyone have to go?’ Empty though it may be, she rules the world now; how did it ever come to this? The ocelot bein’ the only being left within this cold and windy world, it stands to reason that she may in part be responsible. For this end, for this world as we currently sight it. She is The End; the final incarnation of life upon a fallen world. The last bringer of chaos, the final mover and shaker, the ultimate actor.
For it is absolutely True: Every other thing that ever occurred ultimately led to her lone pathing over this particular oblivion.
Out here, at the moment, upon our world, this ocelot lingers over death. Assumes 死. Bears witness to entropy. Silently sings the end into being. She is the last piece of the puzzle that is this tiny era of existence.
For when her hunt ends — soon, as there is no prey to any longer satiate her fraying form — and she lays down for the last time, drained of her latent energies to continue on over the cracked and endless wastes of a stilled sphere, incapacitated from all possible conscious change thereon — it will mark the end. The finale. Final Death.
From the eye of our imaginings, We await the day. Not with anticipation but with dread-grace. With apocalyptic patience. Just as she hunts, we wait. And we watch. For in her final goofy and painful and exigent strides, we may suck out the last drops of mystic beauty this world has to offer, holding the flavor for our own little blip back here. ~
