The girl from the mire

15

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Darkness encompasses everything within everywhere. It's a world that seems void of any remnant of the other world's light. All except for Jane's eyes. They glow like Christmas without the red and gold. She can witness their dim shine upon her hands and the fading distance before and beyond her palms streaming back and forth beside her face. Her beautiful, terrifying eyes seem much brighter than before, like a guide has come to take her by the hand to maybe lead her down the back stairs into a Ballard style fender flesh cutting crashing no man's land.

The world has drastically changed since her body's performance at the Ghosts Holden street slaughter. The butchery left her broken and misplaced. But now, she feels herself, whatever that is. Whoever that is. No. She knows. She knows she's someone and not just "whoever." She's the girl from the mire. She's Jane. She's a vicious fighter. She's an acrobatic climber. She enjoys thinking in circles. She likes the rain plummeting and splashing in torrents upon her naked flesh. And she's falling in love with her best friend. She's someone. Jane doesn't need to think of herself as lost anymore. She doesn't need to perceive her life as that of an apparition. Rist's found her. She's not lost. But it seems Jane has something she must do. An ending to the epilogue.

She can feel the gray tent dress and the tightly torn roadside jeans upon her snow white flesh. No flip flops, though. Maybe she didn't make it past the first level after all.

Why is this attire present and not the boots that she now views somewhat differently? Why not the knee high shit kickers? They were a gift from Rist. They were special. And even more special now. She can picture herself wearing them and nothing else in front of the skull mask lady. Posing her bare pale bone skinny figure off to overcast eyes and letting Rist watch every bend and goosebump and slight fondling touch.

I need you, Rist. I need you so much. You're my someone.

The mire girl remembers extreme confusion and horrific pain upon slowly becoming conscious in the aftermath of the bloodbath. She also knows awareness in her last moment. This's the second time she's died in Rist's arms in as many days. But now, Jane knows that she isn't conscious. Her body's dead. But then how is she thinking? Maybe she's conscious in some other way. It's a Sorites paradox. She asks herself a question.

"Where am I?"

The next moment opens a hidden world to Jane. It appears like a nob being turned from zero to ten. Her Christmas eyes look back and forth and up and down. The angles of what're horizontal flow back and forth with the angles of what're also vertical. Ninety degrees and forty-five degrees and twenty-two and a half degrees become wooden distortions. It's breathing is written in a language of its own cardinal lunger domain. The dark forest's literally alive, like such beastly boughs are living body motions of twisting and bending and contorting torso shoulder hip elbow limbs. The trunks sway and bend and shudder and flake. It's as if the crooked woods have hearts and are all in all  breathing in and out at different times. Serpentine roots slither and curl and grasp like giant worms. The sounds of their movements upon the concrete ground and up the bark flayed boles is that of heavy furniture sliding across a wooden floor.

Jane' standing in the middle of a clearing with four trees tilt looming above her. Waving at her as they sway. The mire girl watches around for Rist but knows the skull mask lady isn't in this world. She just wishes for her to be.

Jane exits the clearing and enters the forest's thick, throbbing innards. She stumbles a few meters past the borderline until constricting layers fold like pieces of paper into strangling walls and becomes impossible to move. And then a word comes into her mind for some unknown reason.

"Motherfucker."

Why did she think to say that? Jane shrugs and pays no mind to what she can never begin to figure out.