She sits at the sill, a carving of bone and gray fur,
anchored to the pine like a creature cast in lead.
No pulse along the spine, no shift of breath—
only the tip of her tail giving away the machinery inside,
a single metronome beating out the yard’s cold silence.
Out past the glass, the lawn holds its breath.
A shadow under the hedge, a dry leaf scraping the frost,
or maybe the ghost of a finch that never landed.
It makes no difference to the lens of her gaze:
the pupils dilate wide, swallowing the daylight whole,
then sharpen down to twin slits of amber stone.
The hindquarters shift, one calculated inch to the right.
The slight, kinetic tremor along the haunches—
a quiet calibration of weight and tendon,
gathering the spring against the sill.
Whatever stirs out there among the dying grass
moves entirely ignorant of its measured sentence,
held safe by the clear, invisible boundary between them,
the cold pane turning a violent arc into an empty glass reflection.
The silence stretches tight enough to snap.
Her chin drops low against her paws,
the stare deadlocked upon the target,
coiled for the fatal, elegant launch.
Then the yard stirs with wind; the shadow blurs to nothing.
The tension breaks like dry straw.
She lowers her ribs against the painted wood,
blinks twice into the empty light, and curls her tail around her feet—
the kill dissolved into an afternoon nap.
