The girl from the mire

4

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The raised track rolling train doesn't quite come upon a complete stop as four streaming blurs of white drift like a paper wind out from the shadows within the dark depths of one of the corrugated unfurled box cars. They disappear into the topographic tenebrosity and reappear as if chased from the lacuna afterlife to the earth. The white apparitions flow slightly up past down past up as they proceed toward the mire girl's position. And as they close the distance, she blearily witnesses with a squint that they're contours of floating hallucinations in the certain forms of glabella and sphenoid and anterior and mandible. Skulls. Their hollow eyes appear to be transfixed upon her, watching her, laughing to swallow her whole into the depths of their staring un-smiles.

Then she hears the running patter of boot steps underneath the apparitions. They are, in the contiguous world, people who are hooded and dressed in black wax-less cerement body suits with white glowing paint outlining the facial features of their masks. They're a macabre ballet of two dimensional vertexes and orbitals from the view of her criss cross applesauce position. The skulls are like plastic Halloween ornaments dangling in front of her from multitudes of invisible strings.

She wonders if these undead beings are mocking her, taunting her to remember the faces of the dead that she's forgotten. The faces in the pictures. Maybe they're the friends that she can't remember. The friends that she would never know even if she witnessed them as she was in their eyes.

The bright skulls seem to be fifty feet away and slowly sprinting. Closer and closer. Forty feet and thirty feet and fifteen feet.

It's not long before the storming spectres are upon her. She tenses her body and lowers her head into the gray dress surrounded by the black poncho hood and prepares for contact. However, they don't notice that she's sitting directly in front of them. They run like the past, as if she doesn't exist. She's a blind spot in their reality. It's ultimately too dark for them to notice her. Their eyes are no match for her eyes. They pass her and their footsteps fade away behind her as if they had never really existed. Or maybe she never existed.

She smiles and shakes her head at the ghostly absurdity that she's just witnessed, wondering if she's witnessed the object in itself or the endless interpretation of reflection.

Who the hell are they?

She notices the slow train begin to speed up. Excitement builds in her belly.

I would love a train ride. I feel like a hobo in my life. This seems right.

She heaves herself up and runs after the heavy metal in motion as if she's a blackbird about to take flight. And she becomes barefoot as her flip flops fly off within the first few steps, flinging back gravel and stones with her toes. She moves faster and faster until she's close enough to one of the rectangular tesseracts and launches herself into its deep tenebrous mouth.

It may be a Stygian husk but it's definitely not empty. She lands with a loud thud in a crouching position, steadying her balance after the height of the great leap and stands and views the shaking moving room. More floating skulls inhabit the box car swaying back and forth with every little hiccup motion from the car. They all turn to witness her in unison. They're bone white on black with human eyes watching from holes that look like they're carved with dull pocket knives; ripped cloth cut by an ancient tool poking at a human head in exactly the position of the eyes. They're wrapped in black clothes like the others who ran past her wearing tatter cerements. The horrific skulls silently stare and it's as if the train has lost its voice and rolls sickly and heaves soundlessly. She can think of only one thing to say in this moment as she pulls away her grim reaper hood to reveal her face.