There was a bug. A lady bug. She was the promise of life. She came in the time of flowers and first figs. She brought with her the dream of smiles and ruffled hair and laughter.

In the winter she was not to be found.

There was a wolf. A rabid wolf. He was the harbinger of death. He came in the coldest, darkest times. He fed upon the fear of each day’s change, and broken things, and words that were spit at the night.

By the coming of spring he had all but eaten himself.

It was a late frost the first and only time they met. Savage and silent, having slunk through the barren trees, he approached her within the long reach of his shadow. The lady was slowed by the cold, and clinging to the first brittle shoot of the season.

“I am hungry,” said the wolf, “and you have broken our arrangement. Why should I not snatch you up and lock you away in my belly?”

The lady was too weak to open her eyes. She nodded instead. “It is your right,” she agreed. “I am in trespass upon your last morn. If you wish to eat me, there is nothing to stop you.”

She clung to the slender blade of grass. He loped closer to her, frosting her back with his heavy breath.

“If I eat you now, this world will not bloom. If I devour your life, no life will remain to be chased in its proper season. This banquet you offer can only bring more hunger in time.”

“What you say is true,” the lady conceded.

“Then you have set me a trap, and I will not fall,” huffed the wolf and receded back into the shadows.

The morning sun rose higher and the night’s chill melted away. The first fruits were soon to take life again. When she had warmed, the lady bug flitted free of the shoot and rode away on the wind.

They never met again, the lady and the wolf. The wolf made sure of that.

He tried.

Not once or twice. Not in passing, nor just for the show of the thing. He tried with the quiet, unflinching confidence of internal necessity: with certain fingers reaching after a thing that they must, at any cost, acquire. He tried with all he had.

And still, he failed.

He was made to kneel upon the remains of his broken promise. He had not enough left within him to express any anguish or grief. All such energies had been spent, if in vain. There was no more fuel to stoke a fire, neither for mourning nor for celebration.

And then, he realized.

The ground beneath him would have as willingly held his triumph as his failure. The totality of his resources spent, the result was beyond purchase. His travail, this moment’s attempt, was ended. The point of decision had past.

And so, he stood.

An opportunity had been lost, but that was all. The drive, the necessity, the inspiration: they all remained for him, ready to be assumed in each and every situation that would follow this singular — and so it would remain, no matter how many times it recurred — miss.

He tried again.