The abyss lay beneath her skittering fingertips, beneath the eternal clicking and clattering of shifting keys, of words emerging from no where. The abyss yawned wide, grinning a little wider with each passing word, with each passing note. She sat, sore from a day’s mundane plethora of dull, painful excursions. Boredom, a day without expectations and no clear idea what can be done to pass the time, the thought alien and strange.

She sat, and thought, fingers skittering unceasingly, clipping and pecking out the words, unwilling to stop. These words, unclear, coiling around her fingers and her throat, she could not let go, the silk rope beneath her feet over the abyss. She stood, tall, still, upon that silk rope, too scared to think about what lay below her feet, the blackness beneath and the darkness that crept in and around her, the darkness that nagged at the edges of her bones, her marrow.

Golden words, so clear and bright upon her tongue, her lips, came silver and iron from the her fingers, unyielding to the beautiful dip and apex and curve of the strings of glistening letters, of rhythm and cadence and cacophony. She strung the pearls together, one after another, spilling each drop as she fumbled the knot, the pure constructs scatting and slipping away.

They skittered down and gone into the abyss and she lurched.

Bent, still, aquiver and a-shaking, she bowed low and took one step, arches slipping around the slick threads. Glossy eyes closed, fingers reaching and probing each key, one leading to another to create the beginning, the next, the first, the last, the middle, the one before, the one later, to create an order to the mess of tangled threads of silk embroidery that made no sense on the inside of the pillow.

Upside-down she swung, ankles locked and link as her fingers clutched the dangling rope beneath her. The pearls lay below, one, two, five, eight –they all lay below her, the light above, the dark stifling as she slid, burnt.

She picked one by one the shining beads, counting over and over the numbers unceasingly in no order, in one order, in order to count them all. She swallowed them whole, swallowed each shining word, the coat dripping against her tongue and coating her teeth, beautiful words, perfectly formed, borned, torned from her lips, coming incessantly unceasingly incontrovertible and inescapable.

The abyss melted into her skin, the pigments drained and gone and set deep into her blood and bones as the curved brightness stretched beyond her quivering fingers, her pulsing eyes, painful like the dark never was.

With an ugly word, a clunk a clunk a clunk a clunky word, the brightness torn and gaping, the darkness and colour spilling back out, one and the same as her flesh construct, hair, teeth, lips, the same as her words and nails and words.

She ran through the staining white, to the bright darkness, from the dark darkness, to something above and below and without, within and around.

She tipped, feet on the ceiling, music on her brow and words in her ankles, the world gutted and pulled inside out, her hands on the rail as she runs down the stairs, down, away, spiralling towards the new, shining night terrors, nightmares, away from the comfortable night and shadows and cobwebs of grimace-grinning skeletal princesses in locked towers and locked minds, moths lifting the hair, following and ruining and feeding, hitting into once and again into the lampposts and damnable orange glows.

The world slams into her muscles and bones, settling as her fingers snatch back from the horrible modern glow her words, her sharp, dripping words of sharpest tongue and sweetest tooth, mad and madder still for their perfectly incoherent coherency, mad and madder and madder still, grinning wild, rank, wild, from the depths of the sanest corners of the undeveloped psyche, lost and at home and wrong and certain in their uncertainty and courageous insecurity.

Reddening hair dripping, cold against the threatening pillow, cold to the mind and to the neck. The moths returned, returning the jagged letters that tore apart the fragile sphere of cold warmth, dropping the little letters into her curling hands, her wide sleeping eyes and tired lips, reclaiming the golden child of brilliant light, skin glowing in wavering pulses as the moon crept into her room, his fingers brushing the edge of her feet, her fingers, her hair, taking back the child slowly as she fell from the sheets, the room, back onto the silk ropes, scrambling across the yawning abyss, reclaiming that perfect, pure child.

Fingers coiled in sweeping chaotic order, beneath her chipping nails, clinging to dead skin stained blue and pink and raw and clear and muddled. The air so sweet, clear through her nose, her skin, as she descended the cliff to the hidden room to release the horrible thing, the pulsing mass of emolliated night in shining notes and grinning liar’s teeth. Tangled together, apart, one, no where in the world, still and moving, breaking, cracking, slipping, moulded, melding, oozing, separate. The grass slipped beneath her fingers, stained brown and red, all of the dead missing and gone, lost from her fingers and soul, the soil sullied and reminding, always reminding, the distant-near battles of magic and hate, slipping through and under and into the undercurrents, breathing and choking on her own remedy.

Fingers skittering forever, pulsing out words forever spoken-unspoken. Twisted and false and true and beautiful, ugly were the words, poisonous iron, a curse upon the demon smiling and kissing the cut all right.

Folding and crashing together, the sheets a-tangle, words tumbling and slipping over one another, ghosting over scars of stories best forgotten repeated once and again and over and reiterated into dead tissue into sparks.

Fire crackled, burning the edges of the muddled light and dark, detestable, awful, beautiful, grinning purple and red and blue, fangs sunken into flesh unyielding-yielding, running with the escaping child, the well-meaning girl feet hell-bent on skipping over the stars and lying in the arms of the moon, cradling creation and fixing its broken bones, cleansing the blood and clearing the furrowed brow.

So awful was the silk rope that she sat, fingers no longer skittering, the pearls lost to the gutters beneath the world, thoughts trembling in her head, opening and breaking her skull as her heart, so wide so weak so small so broad so scared, spilled from the sternum plate. The abyss burnt and blackened the edges of the sensitive tissue, waiting for that choice, that skitter of nails to begin.

13 Nov. 2008