The black of night is slowly, carefully, dissolving into the air; shadows seeping into the seams of the fabric of our world. As the black bleeds out, the pallid undertones of earth are revealed underneath. It is the time of early morning when the world is utterly colorless. Night has simmered away and with it, so has the opaque cloak that covers the slumbering land and shelters the creatures that quietly scamper in the safe embrace of camouflage. As the curtain of stars is lifted, an overtone of grey and beige settles like dust on the sleepy world that is slowly beginning to rumble again.

I feel the earth waking underneath my paws. It’s an indiscernible groaning, so hushed even my fine ears cannot hear it – I can only feel it vibrate through me, so restrained an awakening that I might have mistaken it for my own bodily shiver. My red fur stands on end, tense with the electricity in the air. The smell of mildew is so potent, I can taste the droplets on my tongue, making it heavy between my sharp, pointed teeth. My bushy tail wraps around my thin legs, coiled around the muscles overwrought in their readiness to dive into the waking world. My paws sink into the earth as it molds, as it moves, as it changes. The birds are singing - a ringing repetitive harmony that beats against the sky and bounces off the clouds – so light is the rhythm. Wake up, they trill. It is time for the world to change.

These are the moments I exist in – the in-betweens: when darkness has faded but light hasn’t quite settled in; when those who roam the night are retreating back into the safety of shadows but those who have slept in its embrace have not yet untangled themselves from its sleepy grip; the moments in which the colors are scrambling to paint the atmosphere following the brief lull in which they forget every morning that the earth requires them to re-introduce themselves once a day. When the world is waiting. When the world is changing.

The world is changing. It is perspiring from the effort; I feel the beads of water clinging to the grass that folds underneath my paws as I push them back into the earth with my weight. It is bleeding from the effort; a vibrant pink stain is beginning to leak into the sky; pulsing and flowing and tinting the tips of the trees just tall enough to brush against its vast canopy. The air breathes louder and everywhere, life is moving more quickly. The rhythm of the birds is beating faster. It vibrates with an urgency that demands to be felt, shoots through the tree trunks and into the ground where its whispers take root and tremor underneath every living, breathing existence. Wake up. It is time for the world to change.

The water is slowest to feel the change, harder for the beat of the birds and the paint of the sky to touch its slumber. The tremors of the trees barely rock gentle waves in the pools that have created their own little cocoons in the crevices of the earth. I gently approach a body of water framed by tall billowing grass. The wind picks up as I settle at the edge of the lake and the breeze becomes more urgent, thrashing into the stalks of grass and making their movements piercing and severe. The grass is frantically waving now, towering above the water and lashing with urgency. Wake up. The world is changing. Wake up.

But the resilient water cannot feel the world changing yet and in its bubble, its inhabitants are still slumbering. My eyes hone in on the one closest to me - scaly and white, eyes drooped and fins gently relaxed. Unaware of the world trying to warn him. Trying to wake him. The world is changing. You must change too.

The moment I strike is the moment he wakes and his eyes are so big and black that I fall into them. Too slow. We are both too slow. I am swimming in them. I am swallowed by them. When I open my jaws, I can feel his fear rushing into me; I can taste it on my tongue. It is in me like the beating of the birds, hot and flaying and violent and the urgency of the world changing is so loud now that it is screaming, screaming inside me. An entire sky of beating birds - the entire life of a beating heart - plummet into my throat and scream and the rhythm beats against the sky, bounces off the clouds, shoots through the tree trunks and tremors.

Tremors in the water. Where I can now see that the world must have finished changing because the pink of the sky has finally touched the ripples in the water. Pink swirling in the pulsing waves, staining the colorless pond into a brilliant, vibrant, red pool, amidst floating scales and shredded white flesh. Remnants of a soul that now resides inside of me. The colors have finished painting the earth. The world is done waiting. Too slow. We are both too slow. The world was changing and he was too slow in changing with it and I was too slow in waiting with it. The big, black eyes, which I must never look into. Because the enormity of the world in them reflects the beat of the birds, and the paint of the sky, and the tremor of the trees, and the lashing of the grass, and I can see the entire earth pulsing in his eyes. I can feel it pulsing in him in me. The world. His heart. In me. It screams. So hushed, I cannot hear it; I can only feel it.

I exist in the in-betweens, but the in-betweens do not exist only for me. It is light now. And I can no longer hear the beating of the birds.