cushion,
snuffled out by Millie, late at night. I didn’t believe her when she said she’d found a ball and would I please throw it for her.
By morning the hedgehog was long gone, alive and well, not like the one in Philip Larkin’s poem:
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
