I
As I walk across the gravel, dipping the tip of my damp socks in the frequent cavernous wounds above, I can only think. I can think so much I do not recognize that my socks are no longer damp, but wet---and that the soles of my feet have smoothened like clay against a chisel. That they have smothered in the gunk seeping through the cotton lining.
I stop to observe her.
Her figure is beginning to chill and it seems as if all the passion she has ever had has been sucked from her heart—that every hint of life has been drained from her soul. She does not look as if she tastes very well. Maybe sweet, but followed by the squalid mushy fluids leaking from her crevices. There’s a hollowness in her eyes, a void where warmth once was and her pallid skin stretches over bones that jut out like jagged peaks on wasted land. I wonder how long it’s been since anyone has touched her not out of hunger or duty.
Surely, there would be an initial burst of bitterness, undercut by the metallic tang of desperation, like sucking on old pennies left in a damp cellar.
I can’t help but think of her as a specimen—something to be dissected, to be understood. If I were to peel back her skin, what would I see underneath? Would there be more emptiness, a hollow shell lined with the echoes of a fragmented dream? Or would I find something raw and pulsing, a core of agony preserved in the capsule of her body? I lean in closer, almost daring myself to breathe her in, to catch a whiff of whatever sorrow clings to her like a second skin.
I wonder if there’s anything left in her—anything worth salvaging, worth tasting, worth saving. Or if she’s simply a husk, waiting for the final gust of wind to scatter her to the corners of oblivion. She reminds me of myself, she serves as my reminder to continue on again.
If I eat her, could I begin again?
I close the mirror.
I lean in closer, almost involuntarily, and the stench hits me like a wet slap—a wave of sour decay that forcibly curls into my nostrils and settles at the back of my throat. Before me, it is mottled with sickly greens, browns, and purples, the skin is peeling away in patches, slightly showing the slick, gelatinous layer beneath. It glistens under the dim light, oozing a thick, yellowish slime that beads up like sweat on her diseased, infected skin. I can almost feel it clinging to my tongue, coating my mouth with a rancid, fatty film that turns my saliva to bile. Each breath I take draws in more of the festering stink, a nauseating cocktail of soured milk, spoiled meat, and something sharper—like ammonia or the fetid tang of a body left to ripen in the sun. My stomach lurches, but my gaze remains fixed as I see the deeper layers, where the meat is primarily liquefied, collapsing in on itself like overripe fruit, dripping thick, brown-red ooze. And then I see them—tiny, white larvae writhing in the muck, their slick bodies squirming in and out of the flesh like grains of rice, feasting on what’s left. The sight of them squirming and burrowing, gnawing at the rancid meat, almost sends me over the edge, the taste of them somehow on my lips—an imagined texture of wet, wriggling filth against my teeth.
“Mary,” I could hear a deceiving voice calling for me. “Mary?”
I will not turn. I now stand stiff in my tracks.
“Mary, you must return home. It is cold and wet. You will not find nourishment.”
Closer do I feel its presence—the goopy prints lifting from the mud as its hand nears my shoulder.
“STOP,” I scream back, my voice cracking, raw with fear and resentment. “Leave me, I beg.”
For a moment, there is only the sound of my own frantic breaths, then it had screamed—the most blood-curdling of screams I have ever heard, a shriek, jagged and unrelenting.
“Mary? My God, Mary, what have you done?”
The voice is no longer a whisper but a wail of horror, reverberating through the cold, damp air. I do not turn, I do not breathe. I can feel its breath on the back of my neck, it is hot and sticky. The scream lingers in my bones, a lingering threat that hangs heavy over the darkness, and I know, with every inch of my being, that there is no going back.
I have to leave this place, If I don't something precious in me will die. There was one point in time where nothing could rid of my ambition, my purity. We were inseparable. Disregard my isolation for my yearning for greater things has carried me further than nurture.
Years gone by, yet I persist. I persist because all I have ever dreamt of was experiencing life. I have not yet lived, and so I am not free to die. I do not want to stagnare here forever. I had entered this new stage with a light of hope behind my tired eyes, and days in already have relived the past. It has been a rough seventeen years. And I know I cannot heal in the place that made me sick.
