The grass was limp and faded under the moonlight. Evening had come and gone. The grass bent as the night breeze carried salty air over the ground. Crickets wheedled in the weeds and when Muse shook her paws, sand rained down. The sky was brilliant though; away from the city, stars glimmered like gems in the pure black soup of night. The tracks were empty and the cats sat morosely on the cold sandy ground, waiting for a train to come. To take them in the other direction.
An unfamiliar distant roar sounded faintly under the sound of the crickets and washed over them by the salty breeze. It was the nearby ocean. They had gone the wrong way.
Contempt sprung upon a rustling in the grasses and emerged with a crushed rodent on her jaws. Muse immediately smelled the meaty drips of blood and her stomach growled.
Is that a mouse? she said hopefully. Watch, who had begun to pace, stopped long enough to stare at Contempt's catch.
"Rat," said Contempt through her mouthful. Muse's stomach soured in distaste and disappointment. "Aw, come on, it's just a baby," mumbled Contempt, crunching.
A baby?!
Watch groaned through clenched teeth and immediately wheeled away. "Not so loud, Muse," he cried harshly, shaking his head in agony. He regained himself and padded to the cluster of dune grasses where Contempt had sprung and deftly caught a baby rat for himself, too.
Contempt swallowed, satisfied. "There were three in the nest," she said. "And if you don't get the third, I'm going to."
But a baby. Even if it's a rat, I usually don't –
She broke off listening to Watch's wet, smacking sounds. The fresh blood smell tingled in her nostrils and she felt herself moving towards the nest against her will. Meat, juicy and young, she thought, and she reeled with hunger. Muse shut her eyes and sprang and bit before she could change her mind. The baby rat died without a squeak, and she devoured him silently.
The cats were sated: Muse guiltily, Contempt rapturously, and Watch stonily. He was staring at the tiny discarded bones with a dark expression on his face but with a relaxation beginning to creep into his opaque eyes. His tail slowly went from twitching to swinging in long, slow arcs through the grasses behind him, flattening a swath across the balding, sandy field.
Nothing seemed to grow well by the ocean. The ground was too sandy for any kinds of plants, even weeds, to thrive, and they grew only in scraggly patches. Insects seemed to be the only creatures that liked the salty air. The crickets and roaches were tinged a powdery white from the stain of salt drying on their thin clicking shell bodies, but they disregarded it and crept on the ground the same as always. The rodents, however, had been thin and weak, and none of the cats caught a whiff of any other creature on the air, the air that was buffeted by the ocean's night winds.
The train tracks in front of them were a different color because of the constantly wet air, rusted into a deep orange where color was discernible by moonlight. A station was nowhere nearby; the cats had leapt out of their car during a lull, and the only light came from the moon and the stars in the sky.
They regarded each other in the darkness. Watch was carefully aware of the others' presence, though he let most of his attention be absorbed by the still little bones before him, which were already whitening and glistening in the ocean air. Contempt kept her eye on Muse, trying to read any kind of expression on the younger cat's face, and Muse sat only trying to keep her anxiety in check, fearing that no train would come the other way and that she was stuck in this empty coastal moor. She knew Contempt was unafraid, however, which reassured her somewhat.
"Get some rest, little one," whispered Contempt, nudging Muse and sounding uncharacteristically maternal. Muse nodded and tried to relax her body until she was lying down, eventually lulled into a sleepy doze by the swish, swish, swish of Watch's tail. Contempt stayed wakeful, her ears keenly poking into the wind for any sound of an approaching train.