The girl from the mire

8

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The mire girl lays in the white chipped alcove porcelain bathtub washing soaking away the orderly's blood crusts and recent splotches of street sauce from her arms and legs and feet and face. The water stings hot and soothes on her pale snow skin. Her thin nude body is pink as if she's becoming softly boiled; preparing herself for the city's contingent meal. It hurts good. Her eyes tilt watch the hazy cataract mirror above the sink and she reminisces the word  "memory" and the recollection of waking drowning in the mire.

Her feet are sore and feel bruised as she's been barefoot for most of her recent existence. The steaming hot bath is a utopia of relief for her barking dogs. This's happiness and contentment and the retreat from the outside world her obscure Cartesian dualism seems to need. The physical lustration has her cogitating, though she'd like to drift off into immediate sleep. But she can't. For Jane, sleep is like a caesura set in stone. Her sleep is death.

It's not morning yet. The anticipation is a draining feeling, wanting to sleep, being so tired but at the same time, wide awake. She's unable to become unconscious. Unable to drift off ever again. All she can do is thud to the floor in a cloud of husk dust like a corpse.

Is she Emil Cioran going for a walk in the darkly dead of night through what's left of her mind, wondering if death always comes too late? She's not in control of this part of herself but she wonders if she was ever in control of her body. All humans die. The mind can't control the mind's death. Humans need to eat and shit among other bodily things; the mind can choose "when" to eat and shit like a countdown but it must eventually choose. The bipedal aren't in control of what the body does on its own without the mind. So, is having to be completely unconscious during the day that much different from the physical shortcomings of a vanilla human? No. Jane's limitations are just a touch different from everyone else. Her body is only somewhat more scheduled and definitive.

She thinks to herself in the way a crucified memorial statue witnesses the world. Her chiseled eyes watch epistemology through a tunnel of distance and will never notice the canterbury font eulogy carved below her feet. The neck of her memory won't budge.

Definitive...definitive as the blip of existence surrounded by an infinite nothing.

As she soaks, she thinks about the conversation after the blurring lips and unintelligible name.

Who is the guy who lost his mind because I died? Apparently he loved me and I loved him and then...well, Rist said we were both happy and really beginning to become something special. Then I had to save my friends and in the process, die. And that was that. I don't blame him for hating me. But was I really that hard to get over? I don't think I look like much...I wonder what he saw in me to end up destroying himself because he lost me? The whole situation sounds beyond sad...as if he were Sisyphus rolling my memory up hill for eternity and being happy to hate me for it.'

Jane tries to focus on the other nightmares Rhie was talking about and they're just that. Nightmares of horrific massacres perpetrated against wanderers in the northern periphery of the city. There's a blackened dead forest with rotting corpses nailed to the long arm spear tree trunks and the bigger branches throughout the ominously gruesome flora, which Jane already knew about.

What she doesn't know is what lies beyond that unnatural place. It's where Rhie considers Hell on earth, as if the desolate city isn't a type of Tophet already. There's an old slaughter house in the beyond, where people who survive the dark forest are taken to be tortured or whatever else the inhabitants have in mind. Hooks and cleavers and bone saws and racks of torsos that facilitate the cannibalism among the savage others. Rist and Rhie's group, the Ghosts, have lost some of their members in that unfortunate place while trying to rescue people, according to their leader and upper echelon people. Masks have been found upon unrecognizably butchered faces. Skeletons have been witnessed like giant swordfish tied to skiffs caught only to be hit and torn apart in the nighttime jaws of roaming sharks.