She crawled out of a crevice, having not been anywhere before, but with the slight memory, like a gentle residue, of having spent the afternoon with her father, listening to the entirety of his Beatles music collection. She had the sensation that this memory had been somewhere deeper. Somewhere that moss would’ve grown had there been water and sunshine, but this place lacked them both. There was the distinct feeling of relief as she emerged into the daylight, as though the sixties pop music had been resounding across a landscape blooming with cracking and rusty train tracks, overlapping and colliding and leading only back to themselves. Crawling out of a crevice she wondered what sort of giant hole she had gotten herself into now. A hole with a sky, but she didn’t know what a sky was. All she knew was that it hurt her eyes. The trees here were earnest. They spoke to her like John Lennon. As she pushed herself up from the ground and dusted off her clothes, she noticed her hands: imprints from blades of grass, and she decided her body was a canvas, an Etch-a-Sketch, a womb, a tree with rings. One ring, she points, a woman was born. This woman was born from the spot where rust ate away at a car and the wood bees gnawed at the log cabin. She was born from an absence, much like everyone else. She knew this: an empty space can be potent. See the tree branches lapping on the shore of a brick landscape, lapping onto another brick landscape, brick chimney chutes exhaling brick chimney chutes, and behind them an empty factory because people don’t need cartridges for typewriters anymore. She sticks her finger in her ear. It’s empty too except for the yellow wax. She sticks her finger in her nose. At least this abscess has hair. She wraps her fingers around her other fingers and realizes she can hold herself. She can identify her organs, the way her skin is her novel, showing age, a rust-colored tinge, somehow a reflection of her very own sky, of her birthplace, of the people and things that have been discarded in her lifetime.
Michelle Gerbershelley7342@yahoo.com
Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Aimee Bender