The girl from the mire: part 2
Were we ever alive? Were we ever here? Were we ever?
Judith exists in a graveyard. Her tombstone is so old that it looks like a smooth glacial stone. Protrudes into her dusty, dormant grass world. Inhabitants are terri...
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The girl from the mire: part 2
Were we ever alive? Were we ever here? Were we ever?
Dormant grass grips the ground in patches like uneven paintbrush bristles. Soft blue grama whiskers. Brittle in clumps of archipelago. Grown through an ocean of sallow season. Husk flake loamy soil. It's the kind of loess, dirt skin sticky silt that Hell and Heaven might be buried under. Where judgment, in all its eschatology might be spade down in a place lightly closer to Tartarus. Lost and found forever as a Nietzschean eternal recurrence.
This place is a perfectly natural walking space for silver bullet gun smoke fog and old dying, mangy rabbits and forever bare feet. Here, the wind makes the dead elms chime in their own branchy way. Creak like floor boards in harmony with dead leaf shuffling.
It's still warm enough to spend the hours naked out here, but that's coming to an end, at least for the aging corporeal. Adam and Eve wouldn't be able to survive, even in their clothes. Not out in this nature by the end of next month. Seems like nothing would. Not even God. Not even paper. She will, though. She has since always.
Her name is Judith. Her grave's so old, it looks like a glacier stone sitting in the middle of nowhere. This locus. This necropolis, was a grave site. No one's been buried here in, well, a century. Maybe? Could be. Who really knows? Who would care? Judith? Nah.
Judith's only property is a shadow. Might be her's. Was her's? Who knows. Maybe another Judith casts from behind the other side of the dark reflection. Maybe all anyone can be is a shadow casting shadows of shadows. Maybe that's all anything is. A theatre of shadows. Behind every drawn curtain. Shadows casting shadows.
She can witness herself as she might've been. A memory. A woman. A human. Maybe someone's daughter. But others? Living others? The others who own more than a shadow? The others who own their skin? They can't witness her at all in any real sense. Except they've come eye to umbra with her long afternoon contour a few times. They've noticed her shadow and they've noticed it upon the corpse gray rocks and long twisty finger knot border trees. The living tend to run when they see her silhouette, adults and kids alike, as if they're all gophers leaping for their holes to escape hawks. She's tried to poke them and grab them but they can't feel her translucent touch. In those moments. However, they do witness a shadow without anything casting such a reflection. Maybe Judith's the noumenal of her living dark presence. Whatever she is, those who call themselves "living" are terrified of her.
And for those who call themselves alive, her silhouette's best noticed in the white blind winter sun, as when she walks through a type of annual snow field or upon a thick frozen river. Laughs at their panic and their fleeing terror.
Those good winter ways are coming soon with the tenebrous clouds tending to graupel and snow. For now, the inclement of death slowly sanitizes topography. Jaundice yellow and crimson and burnt brown are a beautiful decomposition. Everything drenches in autumn.
