Mia did not have a destination in mind as she fled the house. She could barely see through the haze of tears as her feet moved along of their own volition. At one point she tripped over a curb and fell to the sidewalk, scraping her knees and sending sharp needles of pain up her thighs.
She screamed and cursed and pounded the concrete with her fists, unaware that minute cracks were spreading out like ripples in a pond from beneath them.
ten little fingers
She faltered to her feet, clawing at her ears with her fingernails.
"Stop!"
A step, then two, three, and she was running, running as if she could escape the memory that pursued her, escape the pain and the rage and the hate.
She ran until the breath in her body fell short, until her legs felt wobbly and jelly-like and she had to hold herself up against the trunk of a maple tree to keep from collapsing. And though she threw up twice and her stomach clenched in retaliation, it did nothing to dispel the rage that consumed her.
This is what it felt like, she thought. This is what he must feel, head filled with nothing but white-hot fire, electricity surging through veins. She wanted to strike out, pummel something, anything, into submission. The muscles in her arms were twitching, fists clenching and unclenching.
ten little toes
She thought of the COH and the coupling and his goddamn wry smile. She thought of her empty womb, this pathetic puppet body dangling at the end of its strings and she just couldn't control it anymore.
She screamed; with all the pain and rage she could muster she let it go, a soul-ripping cry that clawed itself out from the depths of her belly like a wild animal smelling freedom.
When her fist lashed out, the bark of the maple tree exploded beneath her hand, and though fire and pain lanced sharply across her knuckles and up her forearm, the pain only fed her rage. Each time her fist struck the tree, the shrapnel flew in all directions, each blow compounded with her screams.
When Mia finally stepped back and stared at the tree, her chest and shoulders heaving with exertion and spent adrenaline, she was in awe of the damage wrought.
The trunk appeared gouged, like some giant beast had mistaken it for prey and attacked it. Splinters and pieces of bark lay everywhere in a circumference as if the wounded tree had coughed up its life's blood following the attack. It was difficult to grasp the reality of destruction she had caused.
She looked down at her hands and saw the proof of it there; the split skin peeled back from her shredded knuckles and fingers, the blood-
-only looks like blood-
-that oozed dark and thick like syrup as it flowed freely down her forearms and dripped from her elbows. The pain snarled and clawed at her but she found that unlike the pain from his fists, this kind of pain came with a sense of empowerment, of satisfaction.
Mia squeezed her hand tight and watched with a strange fascination as the blood began to pour out in rivulets, the anger slowly ebbing away with each new tributary that was birthed.
An odd thing it was, this semblance of humanity. It had never occurred to her until now what changes there would be upon her revival. She had accepted the process a long time ago as a transitional part of her humanity, like passing into puberty; just another aspect of life.
YOU ARE READING
Akropolis
Science Fiction"Any thought you ever had; memories, desires, your fears and your dreams, are all recorded and stored safely in the Quantum Cloud for your eventual revival. Death is now merely a transitional period to the next stage of your existence. As a QUBIT...
