Coming Back

The hour was early, the world still shaking off the last remnants of slumber. I had just concluded my morning ritual at the gym, muscles humming with the echoes of exertion, when an unexpected sight caught my eye.

A creature swift, spectral, and draped in a coat of gray slipped across my path. The golden fingers of dawn did little to expose its true nature. Was it a fox? A coyote? Something else entirely?

I paused, instincts sharpened by curiosity. The gray fox, that elusive acrobat of the wild, is known to prowl at twilight and dawn. Agile, keen-eyed, and possessing an uncanny ability to climb trees, it would not be unheard of in these parts. And yet, something about its movement—a peculiar stillness within its grace suggested another possibility.

A coyote, then? These wily wanderers, often mistaken for stray dogs, have been known to tread the edges of human habitation, their coats shifting in hue from tawny to silver depending on the morning’s embrace. But a coyote would be bolder, more deliberate. This creature carried with it an air of mystery.

Could it have been a mere trick of the morning haze? A lone dog on an uncharted errand? Or, dare I suggest, something more enigmatic an omen, a spirit of the dawn, slipping between the veil of the known and the unknown?

The morning had cast a puzzle before me, one that even now lingers in my thoughts.

Tell me, dear reader have you seen such a thing?