Date: July 26, 2026
Location: Cream & Amber, Hopkins
Prompt: Write a piece using these words (Dawn, Ice cream, Safety, Heat, Human)

She was still hungry. Hungry enough to devour the morning.

Dawn poured over the horizon like melting ice cream, all peaches and salmons and tangerines. The sun emerged from the edge of the world, a single scoop of vanilla, quickly casting everything in a hazy Dreamsicle light. She had mostly forgotten what food tasted like, but it came back to her in moments like this. She watched from the relative safety of the cave, the yawning entrance narrowing to a crevasse toothed with rock icicles, where the sun’s rays could not reach.

The sunrise looks different, after the Change. Like it’s not quite meant for your eyes. Because it isn’t, not anymore. One step into the daylight, and she would be dust. No one – not even her Changer, and he was old – no one knew whether that process of “becoming of the earth” was painless.

Others would call her foolish, or that she was tempting a terrible fate. But she made a point to watch the sunrise every morning, before retreating for slumber. It was the last thing, the only remaining thing in her life, that reminded her of what it felt like to be human. She could practically taste the heat of sunkissed skin, and it made her salivate. For the last fifty years, she hunted her meals by the light of the moon, the cool of the night, and there was just always something lacking.

The sun rose higher, and she could feel her retinas starting to toast. Vision wavering, she retreated to the depths of the cave, resigned to yet another sunless sleep under the earth.

Until she heard it. Quiet at first, but then louder. Footsteps. The sound of metal against stone. A trickle of laughter. Her Changed eyes could see the dim edges of a beam of artificial light. Her Changed ears perceived the melody of a beating heart.

Waiting, she inhaled, teeth bared, and tasted the morning.