1. Night Light

Maggie rolled to her side and groaned. She put a pillow over her head. She tried two pillows. She got up and grunting, hauled the bed to the back wall, as far from the window as she could get it, bashing her shin in the process. "Shitty shitting shit shit SHIT." She hissed, hopping around the little sparse room in the dark, and thusly bashing her other shin on the desk chair. 

She flicked the lights on and fell heavily onto the bed, gripping the tattered old quilt tightly, teeth gritted, eyes screwed shut, and waiting for the sharp yelps of pain from her shins to ebb back down into the constant dull ache that she would forever need ignore. As the pain faded, the original irritation became all the more...irritating. 

"Move to the country" she grumbled, her voice almost inaudible under the shrieks of swamp night life pounding through her closed window. 

"It'll be peaceful, good for you" she muttering darkly eyeing the window and the massive howling swamp that stretched beyond. 

She lumbered to the window, threw the sash wide and bellowed "SHUT UPPPPP!!!" to the natural world in general. Two breaths of absolute numbing silence followed, and then "SHUT UP YERSELF Ye EJIT BANSHEE!!" a slurring voice screamed back, possibly a drunk pixie, judging by the heavy west-shore accent.  

She slammed the window shut again. That was it. She'd had enough. She had work in five bloody hours and hadn't gotten a wink. She'd been good lately, but this was madness. Maggie stomped to the little pine nightstand, rummaged a bit, and with a sigh of success, pulled out a rather large, heavily engraved, sterling silver flask. She took a long pull, wincing at the wonderful burn all the way down her throat. 

Better. 

Pulling on battered black thigh high boots, and a ratty t-shirt over her cotton blue and white polka dot shorts and sports bra, she left the room to wander out into the clicking, screeching, buzzing, hooting, hissing, ribbiting, quacking insanity that was a lively swamp in high Spring, in the hours that held morning at bay. 

'If you can't beat em. Join'em.', she thought sourly, taking another sip from the flask as she took the winding stairs two at a time. Out of the lonely dark of the tree stump that was her temporary residence, out into the kaleidoscopic swirl of cherry blossoms, iris, reeds and weeds, lightening bugs and glow worms. She hopped the distance from stump to shore, gasping in pain as her wings instinctively tried to move and settled into the soft moss at the water's edge to stare up at the sky.  

Much better. 

Sometime later she stumbled back to her bed, drunk and exhausted, but for once not in pain. It was in fact, the only time her wing didn't hurt; when she was wrapped in a lovely fluffy blanket of booze. Nothing hurt. Three hours of sleep, she yanked her boots off, that'll be enough. She tucked the empty flask back into the nightstand. Must try again to quit tomorrow (today?), she fumbled and rolled to her stomach to ride the waves of the spinning room. 

 Dawn is by far the loudest hour of the entire swamp day-cycle. The night creatures get their last word in, the day creatures shriek themselves awake, both are pitched against each other in a vocal battle to achieve the honor of loudest bastard you've ever heard, and into that cacophonous symphony came the rhythmic creek of Maggie's snores.