Aeolia

2: Morning

The woman awoke with a hole in her stomach.

     She woke, slowly. The first thing she saw were the cypress trees above her, feathered with traces of dew. It had misted earlier, but the mist had risen away, a detached voice in her head mused. She took a breath in through her nose and let is out from strained lips. She laced her hands across her stomach but made no other effort to move.

     Her skin was damp—from lingering perspiration or traces of morning dew, she didn't know. Her knuckles were rusted, her ribcage a prominent form on the thin, flat plane of her body.

     She wasn't hungry, she wasn't sad. She didn't feel like crying anymore or feel like doing much at all. She didn't want to kill herself, either. She was empty. There was a leaden space lodged between her ribs. Almost like a bullet.

     The cypress trees shifted gently in the cold wind, but she didn't shiver.

     Reflecting on her night of sleep, she realized she hadn't had any dreams, and she was thankful for this. The nightmares would surely come later, would plague her till she woke, trembling so softly, all alone in the vast and unknown world. Where shadows slunk like soldiers waiting in the brush.

     She'd always been prone to nightmares, ever since she could dream—or could remember dreaming.

     In her dreams there was a presence, though she couldn't quite name it—or see it—but she felt it. Sometimes it bled through in tones of blue and it could fly, and sometimes it was sharp and black and it always moved like liquid.

     The nightmares weren't about them, but they were often in the back-ground. The nightmares the woman meant, they weren't explainable. Sometimes she saw cliffs, spires of red stone, yawning cobalt sky below her. Sometimes the ground swallowed her blurry form and churned her till she broke.

     Sometimes she had no dreams at all, or she did have dreams, but in them there was nothing—an absence of color or plot. That had been this night, the woman thought. And that was her whole life, now. An absence of color or plot. Wasn't it?

     The trees said nothing. The wind said nothing. The sky had a passive mask.

     Finally, the woman tired of her position and stood. She wiped the encrusted tears from her face. The salt was coarse against her fingertips. She lifted the hem of her dress, saw the swollen bruises on her legs. She pressed her knuckles hard against them, felt dull pain thud in protest.

     She let her wrinkled dress fall past her knees and began to walk again. Where to, she didn't know, and didn't care at all.