The girl from the mire

16

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The room encapsulates Jane within the decimated emotion of an evocation. It's like a memory of a souvenir of an echo of a place that can only, and will only ever exist in the stupor of a forgotten abstraction. It's a concept that always fails to be a concept.

As she walks, the floor sinks and creaks. Expansion and contraction have heaved and loosened the hardwood from its fasteners. Footsteps are a hazard in this...home? Was it? The memory of an emotion lives and dies like a stranger in Jane's mind.

The mire girl breathes in the aspect room. The air is coloured with a strong overpowering crushed pennyroyal mint. It sickens her as much as the colour blue.

The concrete walls have a cindered girth and have become a crumbling, powdery attenuation in certain spots, like the cement was unfortunately mixed upon the house's birth. A hovel constructed with poor materials by poor people to have a home to manage their oppression.

There's flayed floral wallpaper on one wall, vertically meandering and flaking like birch bark and iron wood. The dim floral yellows and reds and blues curl like a simulacra of songs; the paper flowers are protruding petals of flock.

The other walls are decorated in knotty gnarly curses of fissures and roots. They're like giant wooden pipes of woven stacks in a tumult of aborted ligneous darning that weave through an entire wall and part of the crumpling ceiling. This side of the house is claustrophobic in its exposure. And some of the roots breath like they funnel a deep whistle of vanquished blustery moans clawing and agonizing and rattling ticking shudders like the armless clocks of passing trains.

A picture in a frame still hangs on a strung hook like a noose above a blackened, rotting, water damaged grey dresser. Jane peers at the tiny, dirty glass window separating her from the print. It's a monochrome scene of four people grieving a fifth. A man lays upon a sheet that rests upon a catafalque with flowers rotting on his robes, as if the blossoms are being grieved as well. A woman has thrown herself down in anguish, hiding under the sheet of the tomb. Her feet linger, exposing ankle and toes at the border of the cloth. Behind the inconsolable heap is another woman. She kneels and watches the deceased. She holds both of her hands by her cheek, wrapping them in the hand of another that's resting on her shoulder. The person behind her is standing mostly in the shadows of the periphery. And a final, kneeling woman hides her face in her hood, unable to look upon the tether of what was. Jane is awed by its ceremony and saddened by its reality.

The mire girl realizes that death is where she stands. The door is gone and she cannot escape. And there's a small table close to a window. It looks eerily similar to the table from Rist and Rhie's kitchen. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it was.

Jane finds that two chairs are empty for sitting around the laminated fingernail tapping table top. She tip toes past the dresser and sits, positioning herself facing the window. Jane watches the outside world, full of the previous fever dream topography and then the sunless dawning of many malachite eyes. They gaze toward her in unison, moving frantically and creating wet macular degeneration of streamers within Jane's vision. She realizes that they're afraid. Then she notices someone is already occupying the other chair to her left.

A face peers from the shadow of a dangling giant root. The stranger is young. His hair is black and long and straight. His nose points like flesh made of wood. Jane wonders if it'll grow with a fable or a myth or more bullshit. He slowly opens his dim pale larghetto verdant eyes.

"Hello, Jane."

The stranger pulls something out of his robes and slams it hard upon the table. The object has a worn handle and dark to light orange serrated teeth. It's an olden rusted bone saw.