I submitted one work for the October 2025 issue of Moss Piglet - Hidden:
Homage to Prana
Touch and smell before sound and sight. Two days of life, surroundings hidden behind unopened lids. At that age, things should be simple: suckle and sleep.
But that wasn’t your story, was it? You were found lying between curb and car, hidden from ready sight. The needles you threaded to get there, each of them, a triumph.
Dragging yourself with awkward limbs along textured concrete soi [Author - a soi is a Thai side street]. Merciless tires driven by oblivious drivers didn’t treat you as one more piece of road debris.
Did you hear clouds cover the sun? Or smell the shade? A sunny day, a pleasant day, would have been a roasting day, your last day. Grey sky was your friend.
The unanswered cries for aid, for companionship, for anything familiar, lasted all night. While no mothering figure arrived, neither did predatory visitors swing by for dinner.
Hours after you were cradled in a thin blue sarong, the heavy clouds that had protected you released relentless rains. Your dry resting place became a drowning hazard.
What prompted your journey? An escape from danger? Your sibling, metres away, fly food, draped across tree roots, will soon disappear, becoming part of the earth. When the tree blossoms, you would have been related to a flower.
Prana, your life force was so strong, your determination to finally be found admirable.
But your body wasn’t as indomitable as your will. Seventeen days, your lifetime. That short time manifested as an orphaned street cat touched many lives; the impacts are still being revealed.
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