s a b i n e better the wind, the sea, the salt in your eyes than this, this, this If things had been abnormal before, they were positively fucked up now. The world is headless and skinless and altogether sick.
Or, she is going mad.
And she doesn't know what is worse.
Four nights have passed since Him. Four nights spent fitful in sleep and restless once awake. She sits on a carousel permitting no exodus; so round and round and round she spins, unable to dismount, until she could no longer recall the feeling of solid ground.
There are too many teeth in her mouth, too many images of Him in her left eye and Sabine knows that if she does not start to walk in a line that is straight, her mind will eat itself whole.
The dawn breaks like a gun, shooting bullets of atomic violet and blood-orange across the sky. It is with a hasty stroke of luck that there is nothing in this new day that reminds Sabine of His sunrise -- it is too fast, the colours too loud and she has never been so grateful for the snow that sings in blinding white.
So she marches across the cocaine-shroud like a bird without wings, white powder swallowing her feet with a hunger that is echoed in the very lowest rind of her stomach. She is starving for shelter, aching for reprieve; her shoulders feel like waning titanium beneath the great albatross of suffering she has carried since the first time her father slipped a noose about her mother's neck.
And she does not know how to shake it loose.
The girl is warm by the time Eluetheria slips the shadow of a stranger into her peripheral vision, like a confession it is desperate to purge, though the flush on her breast does not feel like heat; no, it feels like danger, and she does not falter as at a good distance she passes him by. For it is a warning of what might happen if she does not keep putting one small, shaking foot in front of the other. An omen to hail her fear. Because the world is headless, and skinless and altogether sick. Or, she is going mad. Remember? |