disconnect :: cheyenne
One does not appreciate the distractions, the myriad subtle comforts, of the world surrounding them until they've been stripped away. You expect to miss indoor plumbing. You expect to miss cable, and cell reception, and electricity, and central air, and the comfort of your own bed. But you can't anticipate the things you'd hardly taken not of before. Like the steady thrum of passing traffic--cars humming like summer cicadas as they speed down freeways--or the intense, comforting glow of distant cities on the horizon that once made you feel like you were living in your own constellation. Naomi certainly didn't think she'd miss any of that. Not until she was swaddled, uncertain, and scared in darkness; wholly disconnected. Her back pressed against the trunk of a tree with such force that she thinks a particularly large knot might drive itself through her skin and bury itself in her back. For a moment, she imagines herself sinking into the tree. Soft, fallible flesh hardening into something tougher -- the powdery white bark of the towering sycamore.
She should be inside. Dean and her Mother would flip if they knew she were out here, but she's slicing the skin off the rabbit who'd wandered into her trap earlier in the evening. She's never had to skin anything before, and it's messier work than she thought it would be. She leans back over it, knife clutched in a fist, the rabbit's back open and bloody. There are footfalls and her heart leaps into her throat, and she carefully peers around the tree, the approaching figure silhouetted against the large, unwelcoming, concrete military base she now calls "home." It's just a member of her group. She breathes a sigh of relief and turns her attention back to her work. "Do you think they're like sharks? Attracted to the scent of blood?"