flash fiction

Aloha poets,
Flash fiction from my novel,"The Outpost," inspires today. Enjoy!


... rustle in the tall Banyan quickens the heart, in the mist a distant echo of giant trees. Haunched in the shadows, fresh perceptions open to the faint percussion sounds on the jungle floor.

She is a young creature less than a year old, her scent exotic, pheromones a prelude to heated battle. She is beyond sensual. Her nakedness didn't matter to the jungle. Blood in the shadows primal against any intruder of territory. Claws razor sharp, and white teeth the only discernible signals, if signals at all. Her athletic musculature contorts, eyes embroiling for attack, a noble beast imbedded with nature's most direct order. Tonight she carries the sound of the hunter--silence, teeth shown, claws erect, survival's final solution.
.
No time exists now. Instinctive hormonal rage, this meeting an inevitable crossroad of the evolutionary trail. She is art in motion. Fine tuned by eons of genetic connections, an intrinsic balance between available oxygen and gravitational detriment. She has nothing to learn. Her skills are all here--the same genes offered by the very trees that hid her and--the ones given her by someone, or something else.

Her eyes shift now, looking for a passionate kill. There would be no division of urge, an ancient directive-- pure focus. Tonight it would be...