She is a small girl. Her limbs are frail and her eyes are sharp like cold breath on your neck at dawn. She stands on a wooden step, stained with alcohol and feces, staring into the faces of her stepsisters. They’re squashed in the doorway like festering sardines, glaring at her from faces caked with powder and suspended over doily dresses; gaudiness veiling inadequacy. The girl stares blankly as their words shuffle by her in shame. Then, without warning, she turns her back on their calumnies and dashes down the twisted street.

As she runs the buildings morph, changing size in the corners of her vision, growing closer and closer. Soon she realizes the doors, then the windows have come eye to eye with her, and she forgets why she was running and pushes her way through the now endlessly shrinking city. Eventually she reaches a bridge just wide enough to crawl under, and crumpling up she shoves her way beneath. Coming through the damp the sound of crusty footsteps shuffles unsteadily, with watery interludes as it encounters precarious potholes. The weak light of a coal bounces gleefully into appearance and wobbles up to the face of a wrinkled man, its dim glow red on his five o’clock shadow and rusty nose. The coal lays creviced in the jowls of a primitive pipe, emitting a sweet perfume that fills her nose enticingly, like sweat and burning leaves and home. He places the pipe in her mouth and she inhales.



…



The mud cakes to her feet. Stones cling like nails to her heels and wet foliage whispers tall-tales in her ears. Grasping at moss coated tree roots, she pulls herself up among the grasses. As her head protrudes above them a soft, murky fog her mutilates her vision , leaving her eyes watery and cracking. Branches snap beneath her and she feels their soggy moss come loose and cumulate on the forest floor. Suddenly the back of her neck prickles and she shivers. Turning, she hears a low growl, heavy in the pit of her stomach and vibrating up her spine like footsteps climbing stairs. She runs, thrusting snapping branches from her path until the ground begins to slope down and she slips in a landslide of rotting leaves and dew-drop ferns. Shaking and pale her fingers brush the debris off her skirt and she looks around. Before her unfurls an empty clearing where fungi lounge surreptitiously, their dripping noses craning over festering vegetation. Twirling among them, her hair clinging to her cheeks, she finally collapses upon a mossy boulder, turtle-like and damp in the mist. She is no longer frightened, only tired, as she reaches forward, hands steady now, to lift a ladybug off a dandelion stalk. It plunders the water droplets along her fingers until it flutters off, landing back on the flower. Glaring suspiciously at the intent fungi clinging to the trees, she spots a swift wingtip disappear behind a magnolia just off to the side of the clearing. Approaching it, smelling the flowers lustily, she hears a rhythmic humming. Thrusting a branch from her view she gasps: another ladybug clings to its trunk. However, unlike the last one, this insect looms waist high on her, with snapping pincers and twitching antennae. Its wings are sleek and crimson, their bulbous dark circles empty and mesmerizing, enticing. It nibbles delicately away at the lichen infested bark accompanied by a steady hum and the click-click-click of its mandibles. As she watches, water droplets, seemingly magnified by its own disproportion, slide down its shell with confident elegance. Sucking in her breath, she tiptoes by, slipping between a gap in two silvery trees.



…

After wandering for some time in a gloomy forest of ironwood, she tumbles upon an extensive curtain of lustrous leaves and flowers. Their stems snap as she shoves though, spraying her with warm, rainforest steam. Beyond looms a stark cliffside, casually immense and impenetrable. Walking closer she sees bodies draped across it, thin, waif-like, and moving listlessly. They are the bodies of girls, hollow and opaque. As she watches they reach long, vapid hands into their mouths, down their throats, and pull from their stomachs heavy, fluttering organs. Holding these before them momentarily before returning them to their mouths to devour. Jutting cheekbones smeared with blood, teeth silvery and cracking, they stare forward, eyes sockets empty and desolate.

Staring up at the emptiness above her, she expects fear but instead feels solace, realizing that among these girls she would find not alienation, but connection. They disturbed her, and yet they were eating, and she was hungry. With this she begins to climb their cliff, weaving between their bodies as they waft away until she finds a resting spot to herself. Her cough syrup like pink fingers, soft and slippery with dew, reach down her throat. She tugs at the first thing she feels, smooth and round, her left lymph node. With a delicate popping it separates from her neck and soon wobbles in the palm of her hand. Fingers shaking, she nibbles hesitantly. It fills her mouth with salty lust, and searing pain as the blood burns her gums. Before long she has eaten the other lymph node. Next her intestines, teeth cutting through their thick skin, spewing blood across her dress and legs. Each time she swallows her hunger only grows more persistent. She eats her heart, nerves, lungs, brain, tongue, even her larynx, the muscle that orchestrated her voice. Her throat tears like dirty rags and her skin has grown pallid and hollow, steeped in the scent of the foliage, the blending bird calls, and the glances of the other girls. Her stomach growls.



Raising her eyes, she watches the stars glint distantly, like travelers trudging through the fog to reach her eyes. Her head, empty as a roadside bottle, quietly conforms as she reaches within. However, this time she hears a faint rattling, and her sandy fingers catch the crisp and folded edges of paper. Snatching at it, she produces a bundle of letters, scrawled in varying degrees of disarray, and tied with a strand of twine that still sticks somewhere inside her. Across each page dances every passing worry, wonder, fear and speculation she has ever thought. Following the twine up towards her mouth her fingers stumble on trinkets of her childhood, broken toy, faded ribbon, hair clipping, smoothed stone, each tied tightly to her memory. When she reaches her mouth she pulls, but the twine holds, anchored deep in her abdomen. Quietly, she reaches towards her face and slips out her left eye, placing it on her tongue, her right quickly follows. Swallowing them whole, she watches them descend into her emptiness, and soon spots the twine. It connects securely to the base of her stomach and expands into a wide network of nerves. She closes her eyes at this, and they disintegrate, leaving their last images echoing in her empty skull, her sockets shivering. A sharp pain rattles through her body then in racking jerks, and she snatches at the earth, frail bones splitting under the strain. Snapping down on the twine in agony, she swallows a bit and it lessens. Quickly now she chews on her memories and they nourish her. When she reaches the end, the papers spill unceremoniously, and she grabs them with dirt crusted fingers, shoving their ink smudged pages up through her throat until they fill her skull, rattling distractedly. Holding her head up under the new weight, she feels around with her hands. Digging into the dirt she begins to stuff hand fulls down her throat, feeling it gather beneath her fingernails and in the crevices of her lips, calling blood back to the surface. Her teeth are gritty and stuck with moss, musty and summer tasting, but she doesn’t stop until it replaces the weight of her intestines. With the new weight, her spine aligns, and she stares, sightless, with a straight back. Breathing deeply she catches a passing cloud with her tongue, sweet the way flying rain should be. It wanders throughout her and fills the space her heart had abandoned. Other clouds soon follow, and the sky opens up with rain. She lifts her lips and swallows, filling her ribcage with lungs. Choking and spluttering, she takes a shaky breath, resting her hands in the mud around her legs. As she stands, the rain rinses the mud and residual blood away, leaving her skin stark and pale, but clean.

With a turn of her head, she begins to climb, earth crumbling and sliding beneath her fragile feet, her body straining under the effort, forming new muscles. At the top the land flattens out, dry and stiff beneath her worn soles. The edge of the plateau cuts off where it meets a dense wall of fog. Standing on the edge, her toes curling over the side, her breath sharpens as she wonders of this unknown descent. Then, with a deep breath, she shuts her eyes and relaxes. Opening them once more she inhales, and steps into the fog.