The girl from the mire: part 2
Were we ever alive? Were we ever here? Were we ever?
Judith exists in a graveyard. Her tombstone is so old that it looks like a smooth glacial stone. Protrudes into her dusty, dormant grass world. Inhabitants are terri...
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The city is a giant hazard of decomposition. Structural collapse post structural. Tilting away from a man made teleology. Ancient concrete has the likeness of corpse flesh. Flakes to dust. Holds its rotting form together as tethers slowly unravel like unkept promises. Every piece of glass is a shard. Every beam of bent metal is rust. Conurbations are husks. Not even shadows of shadows pass under the ominous whim of time's inclement. No past grand narrative survives. For anyone who once called this place home, nothing's left to lament.
But Judith laments.
Smell is of cloying sulphur. Odd, sickly, sanitary mint. Like the Terra torture room scent, sewn by the stitches of extinction into the topography. Mixes with the vast, leaking Hieronymus bowels of the earth. Full of death. No sign of another's existence. Judith feels like she's back in her dust bowl world. Invisible. Forever alone.
Yet, this city by the mire is not the ruin from her visions of Jane. Maybe this future is the late present. Time like under the pressure of deep water. Crushes everything.
Judith ponders recent events. Why so many of the Terra? Maybe each Terra revenant came from their own individual simulation. Stolen from their own worlds. Worlds destroyed by wars between ruling authoritarian classes against desperate homo sacer classes. And this world is the inevitable outcome. Maybe this is the outcome without Terra existing to lead the downtrodden. To lead the many ghosts of each world and help save them.
More thoughts form. It's like this place was a disposable whim to a different reality. A first reality. Maybe a reality within a particular reality. Maybe one Leonard regime is responsible for all. Then again, maybe every world is a simulation without a genesis. No teleology. Maybe it all just is.
These thoughts come from the memory of what Michael said about his portal to another world. A world manufactured by his wits and imagination. Technology. Knowledge. Certain blind fold luck. Infinite heads or tails. A universe where a single painting might be slightly different or an entire civilization might've never existed.
Judith wonders about what the chances are of all this. Like being chewed by a megalodonic in one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of man made existences.
"Motherfucker. Fucking fish..."
Judith's chin moves up. Eyes catch grisly sky. Shakes her head. Imagines that motherfucking tyrannosaurus fish floating above her. Heading her way. Its countenance and mouth and organs aren't something she'll soon be misplacing into the dark fissures of her mind.
The underworld and it's murky horror held an initial wonder for Judith. Ultimately didn't last long. Now, it's a memory of that fish and a recollection of almost being eaten alive by a hundred revenants. A hundred hearts and a hundred brains from a hundred stolen Terras. So it seems to the graveyard girl.
Judith trips and stumbles away from her thoughts.
The streets of the city are a walking hazard. Heaves of concrete high enough to climb up. Jump down. Almost like a labyrinth as she attempts to manoeuvre through such crumbling tectonic. Trees and light posts are a topple. Litter in bits and pieces of where they once stood. Tangles of dead power lines lay as if snares for giant rabbits. Bricks like jagged crenellations expose osteal furnitures. Bits of yellow ivory piano keys. Reflection-less shards of mirrors. Like the city is sinking into the earth and being covered by it. This place and the whole of its presence is a collapse. A disintegrating cemetery stretching for the flight of crows.
