The girl from the mire

6

                                           | | 6 | |

The street that she finds herself running toward, away from the stench of the rotting wing bone bloody clot cloth garbage bin alley of the hospital, has a cement path bordering meadow grass and tangling rows of unnatural hazy blurring glowing blue simulacrum flowers. The neon petals grow high and along the wall of the hospital and horizontally past the border of the structure built of concrete and ornamented with roughcast pebble and shards of timeless dark bottle glass and broken ancient cockle shell sandy coarseness. The glow of the flowers force the wall to seem like the innards of a big belly moon aperture glistening cavern and when she arrives at the abrupt end at the wall's corner, the main strip in front of the blue glowing building is revealed. On the right side of the path beyond the hospital are sallow grassy mounds in lines of four and six. She wonders who's bodies are buried in such lumps. Black and grey flowers bloom atop many of the tiny hills creating a black and white effect in the dim growing wine darkness. Some of the mounds have white and black on the same flower along with other mounds of yellows and reds and greens. The colours look artificial compared to the black and grey. Even the blue of the hospital seems synthetic in comparison.

Maybe city founders are buried here. Maybe not. Maybe no one.

A raven hops and stands upon a mound as if it recently ascended at the distant end of the perceived hospital cemetery. It stares at Jane and she feels herself inhale like black feathers are in her breath. She exhales and looks away.

Many voices enter her mind all at once and touch her recognition. She turns and notices that the vicinity is full of people. Many, many people. The street in front of her is as alive and as crowded as an almost abandoned city can be. The sights and smells touch her brain and are many and her senses are filled with so much swirling dark light and molecules and vibration. She inhales so many unrecognizable scents because her senses are heightened beyond herself. She can somehow imagine touching taste and hearing smell. She can't put an abstract name to the unknown material blinking and humming at her awareness. Maybe she can hear and smell the noumenal realm. Maybe her noumenal self can sense her reflection. It's a settling and an unsettling thought. Her mind spins back to the morgue and she deems what's more troubling is that she still can't see herself in reflections. So maybe she's the entity existing in the noumenal beyond sense. Maybe this un-reflection is all there is of her.

Jane stops running and walks and listens to the sound of her bare feet on pavement and other sounds witnesses her and she listens and looks upon where she's going. There truly are crowds of people before her. Her eyes aren't lying. The masses are there; the lonely remnants of generations coming to an end. They wander and laugh and eat and drink and above all, smile. It's happiness that she interprets from the individual mannerisms culminating in this leftover of order, this loving celebration that spills it's alcohol and tries to get laid and pukes behind trash cans. It's a sight beholden to wonder. This brings about a reminiscence that she can't remember, but feels like she's been here before as a participant in the grinning and laughing and stumbling and fucking. No one's killing anyone, everyone looks like they're having fun and it's happening without a care for what may come tomorrow. Jane falls in love with all of the beautiful chaos despite her bubbling anxiety. It's a street party full of survivors encompassing all ages and fashions and class. The young and the nostalgic. The cool kids.

She joins the withered throngs of the many different people dressed in the binary camouflage. Woman and men who have long since drawn those faces in the sand to inevitably wash away at the tide. Perhaps there is a transgender woman kissing a transgender man. This is life and love not caring anymore about preconceived norms and all of the bigotry that comes from the authority of homogeneity. The creative spirit is powerful when it needs to fight and powerful when it needs to love. Though everything is war, there are spoils. People should remember that everything changes and norms are only interpretations and when everything flips, last becomes first.