Escaping Ground Zero

There was a tunnel, deep and long and gray in the peripheral. The exit was black not white. Black ghosts swam in out, melting, peeling, cracking, and swirling through her, pulling at her wrists, her fingers, her toes. No she cried, I don’t want to go. There was no light, just darkness. It was black. She fought, they pulled. The beings whispered and sneered. She opened her eyes. It was all still there, the struggle. She was dying. They were laughing. She wanted white noise, her bed, silence and peace. Their whispers grew louder, they pulled harder. Her body grew weary, she ached, her wrists tender, sprained. The tunnel dispersed into particles fading into the shadows of her room. The whispers stopped. She sat up right in the pink of her bed, gasping deeply for air. She choked and sobbed and popped some pills. She would not sleep for days. She couldn’t. She wasn’t ready to go.

There was a party, a bonfire; a hole in the ground and stones and dirt and drums and white rabbits. The air was crisp, a tingle to the skin. Sweaters and caps and boots covered in mud. She was walking to the end of the world. There was an end. She could hear it, smell it. She knew where it was and she searched, for hours. A train track began. She followed. She tripped over the slabs of uneven wood. It was an old track, rotting it appeared. The track ended and she wandered until she found it again, this time in another direction. She followed, she knew she would come to the end of the world. Was it a cliff, an empty abyss, a tunnel? She didn’t know, only that it was calling her name, waiting, expecting her discovery. Time passed. She became lost. The night grew colder the snow began to fall. White flecks everywhere. White noise. White tracks. Footprints amiss. She looked back. They say don’t look back. She did. Tracks descended behind in every direction. Her tracks looked askew. They made no sense. She grew weary, frightened, confused. It wouldn’t end. Hours before she would come to wake in the field, in the snow, shaking from her bones. Wetness beneath her spine.

There was a dream, a belly, swollen. She stood before a double window, naked, bulging breast and stomach. There was a dagger in her hand. She gripped. She stabbed. Upon her head and arms and legs and in the center of her rounded abdomen she cut X’s. Her chin to the ceiling she screamed. There was no pain, only astro-turf digging into her knees. She slipped somewhere in between and fell onto a pad of lawn that padded her into sleep and wrapped her wounds and erased the Xs from her body.

There was a street, on which beggars and prophets roamed. There were speeches in graveyards, idealism, heroism, rank unshowered beings enveloped in the stank of stale cigarette smoke and boozed body odor. They blamed society, claimed society, wanted to change society. They were all crazy, insane hypocrites. It was a joke. She laughed. He had a knife. He put it to her neck. I could kill you. She knew he could, she knew he wouldn’t. She choked on her stomach. She ran. Escaped. Escaped from it all. Made it out. Into the light, into the day, the reason, the right.