Giving What You Deserve

Part II You Used to be my Beauty Queen

The twisted ship is hard to leave, but finally Dina feels fresh air filtering through her mask again. It is dark, the sun was now dead. The envious moon reflecting its pale light down upon the twisted mausoleum. The sprawling shipyard, long ago turned into a greenhouse of vicious fungus, makes a soft tiny feeling fill Dina's stomach.

    She looks at Ellie.

    That tiny feeling thrashes inside of her.

    Scared.

    It takes a long time to find a way off the skeleton of what once might have been a ship.

    A long silence, broken only by thunderous thoughts.

    Rampaging through Dina's head.

    A million forgotten dreams, a myriad of repressed nightmares, and so many fragments of thoughts that make sense only to her.

    When her feet touch the ground again the thoughts don't leave, they starkly remain.

    Cruelly.

    "You okay?" Ellie asks.

    "I'm fine."

    Dina's voice is harsher than she meant it to be. For a moment she wonders if she should clarify, but anything else would just sound harsher.

    Part of her wonders if she meant that steel in her voice.

    Ellie nods.

    The walk out of the shipyard feels longer than the rush in.

    It feels like eternity.

    One step.

    Then another.

    Thoughts morphing with each step.

    A step.

    A shard of a memory.

    A step.

    A broken thought.

    A step.

    A mutilated resentment?

    A step.

    A wounded forgiveness?

    Another step.

    The eternity writes itself into Ellie's face with each step.

    Once, a long time ago, Dina might have asked her if she was okay.

    Right now she is too bothered trying to keep her feet moving step by step forward.

    She had to keep walking.

    The inexorable consuming fungus clings to everything around the two.

    Two small figures, framed by an organic tableau of Hell.

    Fungus growing to everything it touches, warping it.

    Consuming it.

    Stealing the ships that lay at dock further and further from any memory of what they might once have been.

    Ellie softly takes out her notebook and sketches the fungus as she wanders.

    Dina glances at that pencil flitting across the pages.

    Finally the two pass from the nightmare back past the veil. Returning to the world that only lives in the shadow of that clinging nightmare. The world shaped by it,never truly separate from it. As they pass beyond the last clinging mushroom a rustling leaps out of the bushes.