The girl from the mire

14

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Everything leans and disappears into everything else and comes back again only to disappear into everything again. The trees in front, the ground beneath, the sky above. They blur in and out of internal and external intuition. Clocks don't really mean the time to her. She doesn't travel the earth, it travels upon her. She's upside down everywhere, she only thinks that she's looking up at the hollow stars.

Jane collapses to her knees at the foot of a crimson tree. Her eyes roll from the back of her head and she looks at her nebulous surroundings in the different directions of someone feasting her dying senses upon the senses of her vicinity. Everything around her crushes her brain and is smelling her like a vacuum and tasting her with razor sharp tongue teeth. The external watches her with the sight of a panopticon. Her right eye witnesses the bleeding world horizontally while her left eye discerns the grimacing boles vertically. She lets go of the dead, headless body that she's been dragging through an unknown moment and holds the battle axe hilt awkwardly against her hip. It's almost bigger than her body of exhaling and inhaling infinity mirror silhouettes. She's indistinct and bleary leaning on the demon axe handle.

There's a small manmade lake beyond the blood dripping trees. Her vision will allow this peek at the concrete world covered by the wooden world. She feels this moment and tries to catch her internal balance. It doesn't last long. She feels herself going blank and falling back down the hole of her abyss. She crashes into the chewed bones of her memory. Jane struggles out of the skeletal remains and reaches the inner wall of her unknown self. She knows she's a great climber and finds the footholds necessary to climb and pull herself up and onto the ledge of her existence.

Jane's now watching from the back row of her quiddity. There are, once again, two others similar to her sitting crisscross applesauce watching the Jane show. They look up at her. The raven hair girl frowns. The copper grey green hair girl gives Jane the most beautiful freckly smile. It's through this meaningful and authentic grin that Jane finds the strength to move past whoever they are and toward the green looking glass of her eyes.

She witnesses her body chopping a torso in random places, spraying syrupy blood on herself and the surrounding roots and trees with each arcing chop. It seems as if she's feeding herself the crimson through her skin and also through the bark of the predatory trunks. Then the senses within her senses notice someone else existing within her mind. A tall man with long black hair watches at the green looking glass of Jane's shatter window pane eyes. A stranger in her mind. She walks to him like a swimming flying escaping dream and touches his arm. He seems startled by her physicality upon him, like the wind has shifted a corpse upon the steering of a stranger ship. Then he's gone. He disappears like a nob that's been instantly turned from ten to zero. In that moment, she's no longer watching but actually chopping.

The mire girl falls to her knees and vomits blood onto all the gore already covering the ground. Her hands shake and she lets go of the battle axe. It makes a sound like a gravestone falling into a pool of crimson pudding. Jane falls back, her eyes roll into herself and she lets her head hit the ground with severe force. The scream that comes out of her mouth and into her hands is definitely her own. And now the uncontrollable tears and shuddering sobs fill the world around her.

What have I done? I have no memory of what I've done. Why couldn't I see? Oh my god...where was I? What have I done...

Jane lays in the gore for some time. Crying and shaking and mumbling to herself about blacking out and falling into the total darkness of an abyss. In this moment, Jane bashes her thoughts against the bloody wall of a very hopeless evocation. The fog of her disability surrounds the souvenir of someone telling her that she is not the "...serpent eating her own tail. She's the caesura between events." What does this mean? Who said it to her? Then she realizes that it's a recollection from before she woke up in the mire. It's a memory! It's a memory of someone telling her vague riddles while she was in unimaginable physical suffering, laying on a table...watching horrible people do horrible things to her. They were gutting her and she was awake for all of it. Then her thoughts fall and break into pieces upon the floor of her madness.