The girl runs, her feet tracing circles along the curves of the round and spinning time machine. Ponies glare menacingly from their platform and bare their wooden teeth. She pays them no attention as she watches the dust glitter through the moon-silver air and watches until it turns into dirt and watches the dirt turn into capes.

She runs so that her footsteps are the only sounds in the area, and so that each echo is allowed a mate. It is, all in all, the jarring effect of looking through a mirror into another mirror or perhaps just staring up into the sky too long while repeating one word over and over again like a mouthful of ooze.

Her favorite place to vacation is the Southern States. This is probably because of the swamps that curdle and bubble as they quietly regurgitate the dead. The slithering pools watch the strange men with the tanned arms build mansions for the corpses not even they will house, and she watches the pools.

She always played with her grandmother’s funeral gown when she was younger, dressing in the black velvet and falling to the floor as she held her breath and imagined sinking through concrete and moldering wood and deep into the earth with the smiling worms. Her grandmother is a racist. Louisiana was a very beautiful state.

Her mother found her there once with her pale fingers wrapped loving around her own small neck. Her lips were melted into a white-ish grin that was certainly not one ever seen on Janie Jones Next-Door’s freckled face. Her mother acquired, in the way one who has watched a person die and been disappointed by the lack of a soul fleeing from the remnants of his kiss, a small tick in the corner of her lip. That constant clock-twitch made ripples in her cheeks and created a little dimple that looks like an extra grimace lying near her mouth.

Mommy never used to cook, but she baked sweet sugar-coated cookies that smelled like death and made the girl gag with a pleasurable awareness of decay and an appreciation for the glycerin-taste of ruin. Everything in the South is in a slow slide of devastation, strangled by human morality as the plantations and ball-gowns and plaited braids unravel.

The girl’s hair is shiny and thick, but her skin always cracks like a tiny map of the world. In a way it is, for the cells that thrive within her have grown a tiny metropolis that hums and whirrs as they careen through its systems down a subway tunnel of blood. When she showers, she imagines great floods sweeping through the skyscrapers of her arms and legs and she concentrates with all the strength of a schizophrenic on trying to hear the screams of each citizen beneath her skin.

Scars are her favorite possessions to carry. She wears cut-off shorts with the loose line of fringe that feels like eyelashes and brushes her thighs in a friendly manner so that she can present them to her audience. A blemished beauty queen, she smiles and waves a cupped hand dribbled with raised tissue. She has fallen too many times to count, and her limbs act like eyes when she wants to view the world from her knees.

The carousel is silent as she continues to chase circles around it, pointedly ignoring the sonar of her soles as it beckons without a voice for her to mount. She defies the soundless whinnies with just as intentional a nonchalance, because she knows that even though she is continuing the circle, she is closer to finding its end on her own feet than with her thighs pressed against a stallion’s saddle.

They lie when they say they are flying, anyways. Especially the ones that go up and down, because the only real reason they move is the metal pole between their sylvan bones.

It is an artificial lift.

The big clock in the middle of the spinning platform ticks like the droning of a fly, its blood-sucking Seconds smacking their lips with deliberate thirst. She sends it pitiful glances every now and then, muttering depraved but hopeful excuses about how chewy her tendons will be from all the running away she is doing, but it continues to slurp with a steady determination.

She is able to grin though, and it is the same expression she wore as a child when she had died but not been dead. It is the same as when she had mocked her grandmother for actually letting Time, who was greater even than the poor, dehydrated Seconds, gobble her up in a long and drawn out swallow.

She is smiling because she is doing what the tree-horses have never been able to figure out. She turns around and begins to flee counter-clockwise, into the caverns of her heart and along the sullen highways of What-If.

She will never believe that her hair is gray until the day she dies.