Akshaya K. Rath 

Going Home

It was barely morning when she felt the raindrops and lazily stretched out her hands for the blanket.  The sunbeams were yet to glisten.  She tried to turn around and felt acute pains as she put some effort.  Without taking slight notice of it, she closed her eyes again.
When she came to, half a mile away from the railway line the dogs had already started barking, and the vultures were at the closure of completing a corpse.  She had great difficulty opening her eyes, and after many failures once she felt the scratches to her right, her eyes flashed in horror.  The thorny bushes had given much irritation to parts of her whole body. 
‘Ah, here!’ she tried to think; it was evident that the track led her home. 
The dawn was breaking slowly.  The short-flying birds were circling low and were scared of the predatory fowls.  Giving her a joining smile, the flies too were half-circling her breasts.  She tried to lift her head a bit and felt pain in her shoulders; she discovered her own body and it was covered with dark rough mud.  There wasn’t any sign of dry blood; it was just darkened mud.  The scratches she felt were slowly healing and she ignored the well-healed wound on her left foot.  She was least bothered by the pain but was trying to find herself amongst the circling vultures.

She felt like recognising the track.  Vague memories of playing by the track came rather accidentally like a dream.  That was probably just another track by which she used to take a short walk very early in the morning.  She remembered it was just another track.  All tracks looked alike in memory.

After the short rain the probability of a pleasant morning was darkening.  Had it been her bed, she would’ve relaxed and slept for a longer while.  ‘But whatever happened,’ she continued to think.

She waved her hands to the flies in protest and prepared herself to follow the track followed by the flies and flies alone.