Below the grass

On the plains where early humans lived, a feline creature enjoys her life, and at one certain heavy night experiences a glimpse of deep self consciousness and understanding of life.

The lioness' senses are external, aimed towards to plains, stretching wide and to lengths that reach up to the slopes of the distant mountain ranges. Restless paws play with her cubs that refused to go to sleep. Just like her. The magnificent sunset has left her body almost feverish with excitement for the night which is now on it's way, while the warm air still lingers short in the night. She lies with the rest. She is blessed with this herd and their den. For the last years they have lived prosperous. Many bore cubs. The lion pride has grown and flourished.

With life on the plains being, with plenty of game, and without conflict or loss of lives over last years, this has allowed for the fruition of strong social bonding. Leaving the safety of the den alone is always a potential farewell, and even this gentle day with an unspoiled night is no exception for a tragic fate. Although this reality dwells uncomfortably in her unconsciousness, the conscious memories of it have faded. Her spirit is far to violet to stay in this night.

Under the cover of the silence that the pads on her paws provide, she sneaks out. As soon as she's out of range she kicks in a draft, down the slope, dodging the shrubs and tree trunks in play as if the view of the valley lying downhill invites her down to explore it for the first time. Like it has just been given to her. Her legs begin to warm up from the idle state of staring at the sun, and her pace fastens. The downhill slope allows her to accelerate effortlessly at her will with surges of adrenaline.

The neural pathways that fire every day over the years of her life have so well learned to tell her all the degrees of freedom her physique possesses. Tonight she spares none. Jumping over rocks, climbing trees, she challenges her body to the limits of it's abilities. She loves the feeling of the speed and agility that her body allows to race at. She loves the touch of the wind sliding over her chiseled face, and through the fur in her ears. She loves that soft repeating sound of her paws striking the ground as she trods down. She loves the patches of loose bright dune sand shooting up behind her in the moonlight as she grips the earth to suddenly pull tight corners.

Inhaling the sharp cold down-valley air, her nerves crack open. Her senses are heightening. When she suddenly brakes to a stand, the silence of the night allows her to feel her heart and hear the jolts of blood powerfully surging through her neck arteries like gusts of wind. The balance in her blood is striking. Her joints move effortlessly. They have grown well to shape. Exercise has paid of in the form of strength her eyes, agility in her silhouette, and a spectacular fur that catches even the reflection of the moon in its shine. Her body feels vital, ready for performance. Her physical condition could hardly be more ideal.

Staring up, the reflection of the night sky fills her face pale blue. Does the night sky watch her? Does the sky watch over her prey as well? Does it see her now? And if it sees, does it see where she is in her life? Does it only see her youth, or does it also she her old age, her death, her cubs, her mistakes, and her last mistake. The bottom of her thoughts drops down, going as deep as the gloom hiding in her pupils this night, so black only a mere few of photons it catches from the stars, traveling the lightyears distance across nebulae and galaxies, makes it out again.

A single interstellar photon is perhaps to return on the journey all the way home again, if the poetry of reality grants it the angle of entry and return to be mathematically perpendicular to the reflective layer beneath her retina. It's visit on the earth would be a insignificant fraction of the time it spend traveling here from the star it was born.

Like the reflecting light that would normally make the eyes of the feline species stand out like glowing orbs in the night, such an interstellar photon might reflect out again. But it would have go through the unlikely sequence of events to travel through her retina, reflecting of the tapetum lucidum, the reflective layer beneath, and traveling back through her retina again to leave their eyes in exactly the opposite direction. A tiny fraction of photons traverse this path and avoid absorption by one of the two retinal passes - which is exactly what gives the feline species such superb night vision. Given that the poetry of reality grants it this unlikely path, this star will escape her vision by not being transfered into an electrochemical pulse over her optical nerve. Even having made it out of her eyes on perfect course with it's incoming path, our photon must pass through all the space yet again without getting caught in some nebula and being scattered of direction. And perhaps in the direction of some other distant planet, perhaps inhabited by life, and perhaps a pensive eye that it would instead land in.

It's an equally rare occurrence, but with such clarity of mind as this night, her consciousness rises to extraordinary heights. In a moment of clarity endorphins shoot through her, her thoughts shoot across otherwise unpenetrated membranes, crossing cortices though new pathways. The brightness of her thoughts rises far beyond than of any other known creature in these lands, and in this lightning storm of the mind, for some split seconds her reflective faculties surpass that of self-consciousness. The touch of the grass between the pads of her paws trigger every nerve, and the scent of stone and vegetation fires shivers.

All this time she balances on a large boulder on a cliff of ravine that runs beneath her. She feels her body extending from her paws into the rock, the rock she stands on, the rocks which this rock rests on, the rocks that are kinetically connected to those again. Linking through the touching surfaces her mind iterates over the connections, pressures points, weak rock, strong rock, the web unfolds in her mind. There she stands on top of the stable branch of forces that holds her body up without falling. Suddenly she realizes deeply how her state of life or death is directly tied into the immovable nature of the rock. What chance exists there that through erosion one link could crumble out just now and the branch she rests on would collapse, taking her down with the rumbling and smashing of the larger boulders and the dust of the sharper fine rock. She can picture it. She can picture everything. The sound and feeling of falling, the rush of fear. Her body almost instinctively reacts to jump for safety. Her consciousness only barely suppresses it as she wobbles on her feet. All the different jumps and slides that she could perform in the moment run through her mind, and as they pass almost instantly she could feel wish a flash which ones would take her down to her death and which would save her body from falling.

Crouching on the boulder and looking down over the edge the run of her mind arrests and suddenly is devoid of thought again. In this moment she embraces the natural fear of her instinct and retracts her claws. Slowly her wide eyes glide up, her focus goes from her paws to the rock she stands on, to the edge of it, down into the ravine, up the other side again. She slowly lifts her head, and feels her eyes focus infinity. With the depth of the dark ravine and the pale moonlit land stretching into the horizon all in one wide angle view, her thoughts dive inwards as she feels a glimpse of deep understanding of the plains. Her emotions run of in a wildfire in some blissful splits of time, and her appreciation of the land, the moss, the sun, the rain and her body becomes a magical memory she later cherishes in a slight bewilderment of what she was so shortly able of conceiving and feeling.

Author's Note

I've got like 0 knowledge and experience when it comes to writer ... the first story I've ever written. A bet with a friend got me into it. She liked it. so I'm curious about serious critique and if it's really worth anything. It's actually the second part of a story, but I'm afraid the first is to abstract and full of anthropomorphisms.