We are ghosts waiting to be ghosts.
This book concerns a girl who becomes conscious with no memory of her past. The world of this story is where the cavernous brutality of Veronica Roth's Divergent crashes over the parapet and into the stranding pa...
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She wakes from herself at the bottom of a mire. The murky darkness surrounds her fetal position which is sunken beneath the muddy floor. Everything in her world has shifted and the bottom is somehow no longer the top. Confusion gives way to survival.
Her eyes are water white wide as she panic gasps her drinking drowning screams that rise like sentences of bubbles trapping slow motion word spheres forming from the tips of her mouth and disintegrating before her unknown face into the oblivion of her memory. She sinks her prickle tingle feet deep into the warm muck until the feeling of her toes find stable ground and push off and away from the sloughy bottom. And as she ascends through the dark water, she waves her legs back and forth in a butterfly kick while pointing her arms up toward the surface. Her eyelids are full of pressure and her lungs plead for air. What seems like an eternal moment of looking above at her own bleary silhouette arms becomes her hands finding where the sky meets the water. Her face penetrates instantly after.
She takes numerous deep breaths, wheezily inhaling bits of oxygen and exhaling throat croak coughs in such a way until her breathing relaxes and in doing so her body calms into a less shudder shake quiver. She rapidly blinks and begins to focus her vision upon the festering material world and treads water with helical ease and opens her senses to the unsure newborn dead wordy night.
The marsh, as some singular autonomous being, phenomenally penetrates such senses. The air is alive with the ringing pulse of malediction. Wispily buzzing swarms of arthropods filter out the sundry volume of other nighttime things. Tiny anxieties with wings collect together to become the head hollering hum of one giant buzzing insect, gripping and tearing apart the focus of her concentration. She watches herself in the moment as the moment watches her back, telling her that what she senses is really and maybe truly transpiring.
Everything blooms into a stench of mud bland shit along with the perfume of cordgrass and elm trees and marigolds and bonesets and archipelagos of prickly bull thistle weeds growing in a sea of bluestem and switchgrass and dirt that the soft wind stirs together as if a gentle and ubiquitous invisible crucible pours melting contents upon her. It's painting the Grimshaw smell of intuition.
There are many other smells that she doesn't recognize. Maybe she knew of them before whatever happened to her, before whatever unknown event dropped her memory into the giant abyss of her thoughts. Or maybe she couldn't smell any of them before. That might be why she has no taxonomy for such things. Another thought is that her damaged memory still knows how to be sarcastic toward stupid presumptions versus obvious answers. She can't remember certain things because she can't remember many, many other certain things.
She re-submerges like a Pickerel frog and swims from the centre of the pond and rises underwater into the thick muddy shore. The mire girl breaks above the leaden murk up to her nose, watching the darkness of a summer susurrate landscape in front of the loud insanity of her mind.
