The girl from the mire

2

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A song's echoing lyrics fill the air above the inauspicious absent sounds of the dystopian city. The utter sadness of the word smithing in her minds cordiform calms her like familiar fingers caressing the nape of her neck and down the spine of her back, turning her around to draw close and kiss her in the vicinity of butterflies and then strip her clean with a tongue of melting vocality. She moans her interior focus upon a motion of syllables and cadence.

A voice echoes in the rhythmic caesura of instruments, breathing a lost apparitional world down into her depths through the configuration of a stage built of an inner chasm. The music becomes louder and somehow more meaningful with every finger pick guitar string vein and bass pluck temper artery. The musicians grasp the tethers of her body's memory. This is all in time with the motherboard beat of a machine's perfect pendulum and the shadowy background force of sensorium's equilibrium and gravity. It makes a structure for the post structure hereafter. Her feelings and emotions are held in the arms of this music that builds itself into a crescendo and then abruptly stops in the buzzing nothingness as a euphoric aftermath of total silence.

There is no song. No extraneous vibration. It was never a member of the external world. Maybe it was her body's attempt to master her soul with beauty. Pleasure. She is wet between.

And then she wonders if the voices that burdened her ears while in the mire were from the same stage built of a chasm. Maybe what she recognizes as herself in this moment is made of the same empty material as the voices and the music. Is she real? Is any of this real?

She pinches her thin, muscular faint hair forearm and hurts herself. Is this another trick? She pinches her arm again. Harder this time. It still hurts and she's made a red mark on her skin. She watches the red mark on white carefully. First the pain disappears and then the leftover pinch fades back into the pale of her pigmentation.

I'm real enough, I think. If I'm not...well...what can I do about it?

She crouches on the crack and heave of a sidewalk, wearing ragged discarded garbage clothes that she found at the tail ends of the mire. The girl garbs herself in seam torn roadside blue jeans that just barely fit and a dusty blotchy stain tent dress that may have been grey in another life. She found the old dirty stitch rag hanging from a dead elm tree. And a little later she spotted black flip flops that seemed as if they might have been waiting for her, laying out of place, one on top of the other at the edge of the marsh like some kind of reward for beating the first level.

Sarcasm bleeds from her wound worn thoughts.

Wow, I'm so lucky to have found such treasures. What was I expecting though? For starters, if this is all in my head, I'd like to imagine better clothes.

She watches around at what awaits her body and steps. She looks slightly up at the empty shadows.

The city towers before her as a vast labyrinth of intricate streets walled by gaping edifices. Abandoned grey is the contrast of buildings against the black depths of its distance meeting the tip of the even darker horizon as she witnesses its endless periphery.

The city looks like it's breathing itself in, making itself sick. She walks and what she's walking through are the gangrenous limbs that were never fully amputated. Most of the streets are desolate with broken glass and refuse and crunched up paper grocery bags that make shuffling sounds when the wind blows them across the crumbling street. Such trash can be blown and caught through the partially broken windows that look like yellow stain translucent teeth within a shark's rotting open mouth. And every now and then there's a crash or a loud crushing sound in the distance, probably a building collapsing or one side of a bridge falling into its underpass. She notices the uselessness of the half cut plastic bottles that might have been used as water collectors swinging from strings tied to rusting traffic lights. It is an endless purgatory of cement barely holding up wood and metal and glass.