dancin' on my own

Josie the elephant had gone down first. She wouldn't ever forget the noise her friend had made - a startled, earsplitting trumpet before the earth crumbled beneath her and the resulting dust cloud and disturbed silt had made everything impossible to see. Mabel had done what she'd been trained to do: slit her eyes, ignore the crowd, eyes on the prize. The prize this time being much more valuable than applause: her very life. Earth crumbled beneath her wide fluffy paws as she sprinted across the collapsing barrens, digging her claws in for traction where she was able to. Her chest was heaving with the effort, sweat soaking her sides in no time at all. Every time she leaped, she kept her eyes slitted and trained only on the next safe place to land.

There wasn't time to look back. There wasn't time to let her heart break into a million little pieces. Best she could do was throw it all in a metaphorical sack over her shoulder and hope the broken bits would still be there when she felt safe enough to peruse the wreckage.

With seconds to spare, the ground disappearing into a pit behind her in an erupting cloud of dust, Mabel hit the ground running on the other side of the Barren Hills and didn't stop. Once her throat, screaming red from exertion and all of the particles she'd inhaled, begged her for some quarter did she finally relent and slow to a jog, then a stumbling walk. She let out a few wet, hacking coughs and spit up some bile. Her eyes were blown wide from the adrenaline of it all and her heart wouldn't quit, pumping so hard and fast that her vision began to blacken at the edges. Marvelous Mabel Royale, though she would never admit it, was too scared to look over her shoulder at her family - the travelling circus, her entire life - swallowed clean up by the earthquake she'd narrowly avoided. No. They were smart. Quick on their feet. Everyone talented in their own right. They couldn't possibly all be lost.

She wouldn't think about her father, bastard he was, but she knew she'd hear Josie's panicked scream coming from just behind her for a long, long time. Shivering madly with the last dregs of her panic shuddering through her body, Mabel began to soothe herself by trying to clean her dense, fluffy pelt from all of the filth she'd picked up in her mad dash. It would take hours to become clean again.