copyright secret not for distribution

A computer screen viewed from across the room. I try to blur my eyes so the words will never reach me, but it's my eyes against a shrill blue breeze blowing out of the stars, blowing me away from the shore where I sit alone with geology.

Instead I am alone with biology, my eyes frozen, focused. I am stuck with my self, avoiding reality, swimming in reality, drowning in reality. Frozen in it. Still refusing. Still.

Still, I thought I would thaw by morning. I thought the sun's warmth would remind me of the earth. I thought tomorrow's candy would help, but it's always tomorrow's candy. And I was no closer to the ground, and the smiles were frozen, and the sun gave blue light like that damn computer screen. And the ground was cold now too, so there was no point in its company. Like poison without taste.

I tried to blur my eyes so the words would never reach me, but it's my eyes against a shrill breeze blowing out of the stars, blowing me away from the shore where i sit alone with geology.

You taste the cold for poison, not knowing that it has no taste where you were expecting something different. You're always expecting something different. And the thaw brings only floating peaces of mind, and they are not for sale to the self as long as it remains stubbornly fixed in the real. So I watch from my blur, sewing together the leaves of my life into something acceptable.

"Do you think I can return this," he says, showing me something I expected, but not from him. I record it on the next leaf and release it to the wind and the static of the blue light, the leaf that is shaped like the scar where you stabbed a promise.

"You're a wolf," he says as it vanishes from my sight, still frozen to the shore.

Relinquishing its cold grasp, the ground gives way, leaving only the plate-glass.

But as bones assembled into two articulated piles on a plane, we are still no clearer. No biology. No geology. You were right - I can see now by my canines exposed - I am a wolf. And you a deer, so why were you the predator?

The predator is the quiet trap. The rusted teeth that nestle soft in the rusted leaves. The rusted teeth that sit lonely for bones in an empty plane of ice. The leaves that fell once out of sight, to dry and crumble into powder, or to soak and rot into sludge. Like seaweed stranded on the shore, exposed and brittle: mocked. Except that here there is no-one to mock, nothing to be exposed to. Just brittle static and harsh blue winds that say "thaw if you will, this is what the thaw will get you."

I am the seaweed deep under water, then. I am the green leaves, stitched together to form a mask, then, I am tomorrow's candy and I am hope. And I am not embarrassed to be washed up and mocked. I am tomorrow's candy and I am hope, today.

The blue light fades as she switches off her monitor. But she leaves the air-conditioner on, and cradles herself, cold in her underwear, rocking in the straight-backed chair.

see also ColdInnocentRocks