By Rejamrejam

She was Transformed in the Summer, under a sweltering Georgia sun leaning into a sweltering Georgia dusk, with cicadas screaming and fireflies dotting the shadier parts of the treeline surrounding the farm.

Summer was busy for the farm, and lurking unseen and ephemeral beneath the farmstand she watched the coming-and-going of flip-flops and cowboy boots amid the smell of peaches and melons and the farm owner's prized heirloom peppers; amid the sounds of money dropped into the box that was left untended. Almost no one had taken anything for free the year before, and this year, the farmer noticed, not a single piece of produce had gone unpaid-for. Sometimes a visitor had reached to steal away a beet, a handful of blackberries, only to withdraw very slowly with the idea that someone, somewhere, was watching them with an extreme sense of disapproval, the sixth sense of a growling feral animal hanging over them as they backed away and thought better of petty theft.

It was not for the sake of the farmer that Choux bared her metaphysical teeth, but for her own. She felt the thread that tied her to this place, and that meant, of course, that the place was hers, hers, and how dare they think that they could with impunity remove any of her things without compensation. Some of them underpaid, of course, or such was the impression received by the farmer, unaware of Choux lifting a coin gingerly from the box and stashing it beneath the stand, jealously guarding it.

The coins were a rare shiny thing, a rare elegant thing that became more rare as Summer gave way to Fall, and with its leaving went the flowers, the bright colors, even the windchime on the farm porch coming down after the last summer storm tore it in two and left the lawn carpeted with leaves turned silver-side-up in a final sparkling goodbye to the season.

The farmstand was overrun with pumpkins throughout the Fall, sprinkled with jars of preserves that were bright and pretty but not nearly so much as the fresh fruit had been, and Choux surveyed them dourly and with familiarity. Had anyone asked she'd of course say that she had the finest colors and most beautiful organic shape growing on her back, but compared to the delicate strokes of Summer she knew that the things were stumpy, inelegant, banal.

Her stash of coins increased, but her interest in collecting them dwindled. She roamed at night, sometimes rolling a coin in front of her down the road until she felt the thread in her heart, the one connecting her to the earth here, growing strained and thin and delicate. Here she would hesitate, looking down to where the road twisted off out of sight between two sheer rockfaces--the product of some long-ago dynamite blast--and she would lift her paws, considering, only to turn back with her coin, sending it rolling along ahead of her back to the farmstand and to what she felt--for all she was ashamed--was safe.

What is it to be new, and to know everything? Or at least it felt as though she knew everything, at least the vague shapes of it--of other places, real and beyond, and of other times. She knew of Spring despite never having seen it; she knew of this animal or that and of these trees or those, broad strokes looming up in her memory and her instinct and pleading for finishing details which she was too afraid to give. Summer had gone in a flash, but Autumn was an eternity.

There was no final storm to see the season off, as Summer had had. The carpet of silver leaves had become one of russet and now of a moldy brown, raked away from a dormant lawn and blowing into moldering heaps on the shoulders of the road. The farmer put up decorations of ghosts and monsters, unaware of the one living beneath her very farmstand, and by the time she came to take them down again the air was only just beginning to turn towards a chill.

Winter was not beautiful in Georgia. Choux knew, somehow, of snow, and she longed to see it. She reclined beneath the farmstand as the last of the autumn gourds were sold off, looking out over the dreary grey-and-grey of road-and-roadside and thinking of snowfall that she knew would likely never come to this place. The best she got was early frost, and this was almost but not quite silver--just enough to torment her with the potential of something beautiful to see.

With the frost coming in the farmstand went down, shuttered up until next Spring's earliest offerings, a little "THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATRONAGE (:" sign hung up on the peg where prices normally went. Cars passed without slowing down and certainly without stopping, and the countryside nestled into a restless, uncomfortable slumber. It was sleeping without the blanket that snow would give it, she knew; she was not sure how she knew, but she knew that Georgia in Winter was a restless child kicking its legs, unable to get comfortable between warm and cold.

A day rang in unseasonably warm and drizzling, and Choux crept out from beneath the shuttered farmstand and made her way up the road, rolling a coin before her, until she could look back at the uneasy sleep of the farm. Listlessly she pushed the coin into the ditch, followed after it down to the creek and sank it down beneath the muddy water. Crouching on the bank, she considered the farther edge--a place that she had often seen, and never been. The thread in her heart was stretched to its limit, but there were surely new things to see on that farther bank, and maybe--maybe--some of them were beautiful.

She rose, and she waded into the water, one cautious step at a time, until it had rose to her ankles. She could have walked above it, had she wanted to; somehow, the idea did not occur to her. She paddled across the middle, and as she stepped onto dry land again, the thread in her heart snapped, with a strange sensation that was at once thrilling and terrifying. She stood motionless, fur wet from rain and her swim, feeling for the first time the severance of her connection to this place but knowing, instinctively and for the first time, that she had only to turn and regain that thread.

Such a thought was one to bolster a frightened creature, and also one to make that creature bold--defiant, even--and take another step out of the threshold.

The coin was forgotten behind her. With a tentative stride, and then a leap, she bounded up the bank and disappeared into the brush beyond to find whatever it was that lay before her. Maybe something beautiful. Maybe snow.

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https://www.deviantart.com/rejamrejam/art/Choux-Threshold-753422430