The girl from the mire

17

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Jane sits upon the splintered floor with her legs still submerging the murky water. She looks around at the same floral flock and roots and monochrome funeral picture. A raven feather lays before her nudity, reaching for nothing. The table and chairs are back in the positions she initially found them when she went walking through the Kafkaesque disappearing door and the two contraptions for sitting are somewhat crooked at Rist and Rhie's simulacra kitchen table. Her wooden chair is as it was, somehow whole again, like she'd never destroyed it. Jane thinks this place has already started over. If the serpent hasn't eaten its own tail for her, it seems to have for this situation.

The stranger sits in his seat and his columbarium eyes are closed and he doesn't seem conscious. Jane thinks maybe he's waiting to come alive when the next "her" arrives in the timing of the eternal recurrence; the next Jane or Terra.

My name is supposed to be Terra. But I'm not her even with her memory. I mean, I am, but I feels like it's too late for me to be her. I'm Jane. I'm the Jane from the mire. I'm Rist's Jane. I feel much closer to this name, this identity. I don't need Terra to complete me anymore. It's too horrible. I know too much about what this place is and what she went through. I want to be Jane.

Jane watches a black ant climb out from under a floor board. It stops to notice her, moving its head around in its "ant" way. She watches while slipping her wet legs out from the hole murk bottom ceiling of the mire, accidentally splashing the tiny curiosity. The ant panics and runs back under the dull chip polyurethane. The mire, without Jane dangling her feet within it, becomes more and more murky until it's no longer water but dirt. The hole becomes like a fresh grave in the middle of the room. The mire girl was much further down that hole than six feet. She was at the top of the tallest building and that was a long way down.

Jane places her wet feet behind her mired butt cheeks and peers down at the earthen floor of the hole that she crawled out from. She feels the ground with her hand, touching its calumny, its silty reality.

Are simulations real? That's what this was. A simulation within a simulation within a simulation. It was an infinity mirror. Maybe none of it was real. Not down there. Maybe not even here. Maybe not even before this place...no. No! That was real! Rist was real! Rist is real! Oh god...maybe that wasn't her body in that cabinet...maybe...

The wheels traveling through Jane's mind rumble into the land of "hope." She decides that this's where she'll set up her life and not in the darkness of the storm in her rearview.

Then Jane feels creepy. Someone's watching her. Someone who's responsible for all the suffering endowed upon her.

"No! How did you...?"

Jane looks up at the table. The stranger is awake and staring at her with long tooth disbelief etched across his putrid face.

Words like slime ooze from his black tooth orifice. "It's too soon! I thought I had more time!"

The stranger stands and comes around the table, never taking an eye off Jane.

"I don't understand. How are you here and not crawling out of the mire for the thousandth time?"

Jane smiles like Terra. "I'm happy about the state of your stupidity, you motherfucker!"

The mire girl startles herself with that word. What compelled her to say it? She can't tell but she notices the effect of that particular single profanity has upon the stranger's countenance and body language and she smiles a nodding crimson lip grin in response to his scale tipping dichotomous shock.

He frantically eyeballs the room, terrified as nystagmus twitch shakes upon him. He jumps backward up onto the table like he's in reverse and crouches, waiting and watching. Eyes twitching in different directions.