The girl who sat in the corner. Day after day, wasting away. Never a kind word spoken. Sitting, sitting. Waiting, waiting. For what? No one knew of her existence. No one knew of the inner torment, the demons eating away at her heart. She was not human, that earthen maiden, that maiden of clay. Rather, she was a shade, a shadow. She lived-only to die.

Once, she had been happy. Once, she had smiled. But those days were gone, gone as the dead. Who’s dead? She’ll never tell. To tell is to bring attention to herself. To tell is to acknowledge that she has a voice.

Yes, she prefers this way of non-existence. There is solace to be found in solitude, in being clay from the earth.

One day, she slipped into the realm of the supernatural. A subtle change was noticed, noticed and discarded. No tomb was dug. No funeral was held. No tear fell. The day she was weakest, no one knew. Her body remains there, sitting in the corner. If anyone should walk by, he notices not the decomposing corpse, nor the worms that crawl through where the eyes once saw. If ever he does notice something, it is the dead rose that somehow sprouts from her dead flesh. A rose of clay.