Work Text:
The ground is soft, warmed from the sun filtering through the leaves high above head. The fallen leaves are damp from dew and yesterday’s rain, clinging like wet jeans to the moss covered rocks below. Those mossy rocks, much like the leaves, are damp, cool to the touch under the canopy of branches. Worms work their way through the dirt, searching for some of that sunlight through the leaves, munching at those fallen leaves, the wet moss. The ground moves as if it’s alive, breathing and shaking from the life awakening for the morning after the storm.
A robin chirps from a far away branch, signaling to its flock that the wind has passed. Only a moment later, birds are heard through the forest like the ricochet of bullets, tweeting, singing their calls to the morning sun. Water drips from those high hanging vines, suspended from branches, down onto the leaves of a blackberry bush, down thorns and branches, into the ground to be soaked into the roots. A brook babbles nearby, responding to the birds and the drips and the shaking of the worms with its own song. It flows quietly, swiftly, carrying fallen sticks, leaves, small patches of moss blown off trees by the night’s wind. Taking the storm and all evidence of it away, washing the forest clean and new with the day.
Near the brook, in a small den, lays a single brown fox, who has been waiting for the call of the birds, the rustle of the worms and the leaves. It rises from its sleep, stretching far its hind legs, before padding small, white paws out onto the forest floor, where it yawns quite abruptly. It shakes off any rain it had gathered the night previously, makes its way to the brook slowly to drink its fill. The water tastes clean, as all rain water does. When the fox is finished it turns to the forest, waking and bustling with small critters, and prances off to begin another day along the forest floor.