She lay silent on the forest's splintered base. It didn't even seem like a forest. It seemed like an unruly sick game created and played by an unruly sick child. A child familiar. One perhaps that shared hot cocoa on days like this. Days where the entire sky was a blank tongue bitten gray. Like the blank stare of the child.
Her thoughts stopped there, like a train happily chooing until it realizes it is going no where at all. She didn't know children, didn't have friends. All she had was this forest that looked like a mixed mess of dark threads that you throw away when you find in the dryer.
The fact that she had run away did not bring any sort of feeling. Which is worse than the most anguished of feelings. She wasn't human, and that was okay. Absence of pain was ignorance. And ignorance is bliss.
No...she is human. That was why she felt terror residing in the moment. Her name is Adelaide, and she is never satisfied with face vale wisdom and happy lies. So she is in this forest
why?
Adelaide tried to remember what she was doing there. It seemed as if her mind was floating somewhere up in the mass of gray above, and was having a much better time alone in the sky than in the hell called her mind.
Brain must have dropped a thought down, for suddenly, it all came back.
She wasn't searching for anything. Rather, waiting. Waiting to see if she would be sought. To see if anyone would notice her odd absence for two days now. She should have written a letter. Not that it would ever be found because no one ever went in her cave. But still, then, she would truly be able to say the world was indifferent if she had left a letter and still no one came. Now, she might just have to blame her future isolation on the fact of life. Busyness. Which was understandable.
Wait...no, that's not understandable...that's a wheelbarrow piled with lies like dung. Work is not that time consuming. We're not in Chinese labor camps.
But it was an excuse. And the world thrives on excuses like methane.
Groaning, she pulled herself into a half moon sleepless position, and tilted her face towards her shirt so as to see if a foreign smell of one she loved was present. Deirdre was the last one she had hugged, and even she was incomplete, broken, a misfit. Her nose was far too chilled to even smell, so she concentrated on breathing, though unsure why she even tried.
Between fits of shivers and an empty heart sending pulses to a mind that had run away, she fought herself into sleep. Sleep. What a joke. Sleep meant peace, and there was no peace. How can there be peace between the hammer and the anvil? When one is gone, the other is useless. Useless heart without the mind. Ugh, she should have given into that minds every impulse, instead of disregarding the reassuring it tried to give. Perhaps is she had done this, it would not have flown away.
From her repose she could hear a raspy droning heaving, like the echo in an empty house of a killer. She tried to awake, but her comatose never gave her up easily. If there were men here, I would not be able to differentiate them from the trees, she thought. When at last her charcoaled eyes grew accustomed to the gray air and black sky, she wished she were asleep still.
Less than a foot away crouched an enormous lion, breathing in stridulous, so it sounded as if broken glass were being walked on with combat boots.
He was not kind.
She began to cry. Because her mind was not present at the moment, her heart accepted the job of assaulting her, telling her of her stupidity for even trying to find a way out of the apathy in which she lived. It was better to be alive and anonymous than a tragic story never told.
Upon seeing her tears, the lion's face changed, and his entire being went into a calamitous state. He knew he should attack. The only people he ever had experienced had taken whips to him, and he winced at thought of the crusted infected gashes on his hide. Resolved, he growled lowly, and took another step towards her, his prey, his proof that he was a man, his reminder to men that he could fend for himself. But as he stepped to strike, her glassy almond eyes struck his with more pain than the whips had ever succeeded. Ashamed, he collapsed on the wiry ground, and in penance began to lick her dirty feet with his great pink tongue. He had no voice, but her pain was too great for him to bear. She stared at him in bewilderment, but did not stir in the least. When at last she ceased to cry, he dared to edge closer, and lay his great head in her lap, and kiss her beautiful hands. To his incredulity, she lifted his scarred face, and kissed above his eyes. He made room for her at his side, and nudged her politely. In an exhausted collapse, she fell still beside him, eyes fluttering with the weight of all her ulterior hell.
-the anonymous misfit
0 comments:
Post a Comment