UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Gabriella Thomas, Art by Isabella Karmis

You sit in a cubicle and trace ammonites on the desk. Your forearm rocks forwards and red-ink scales spill from your sleeve, then back. Your wrist rests on a wrinkled laminate edge. Charcoal rubbings of General Sherman are tacked up and down the chipboard walls. It is quiet, within this cracked chrysalis. It is as it always is.

Still.

Here, you are pith.

You have settled on the floor by the time the vision rushes in, over you like a great silk stole pulled quick and light across your skin. Faded carpet tiles flex and swell to coarse relief beneath your spine. The vision streams through you, past you. It strips you smooth as a heron’s beak.

Your cheek presses into damp stone and your eyes are closed against the sudden scouring wind. Sharp and cold, it coats you, now raw, with brine. Nails on bone. You contort, gulping for the brightness beyond your eyelids. Thighs find ribs, shoulders twist. Sternum on stone. Ears in elbows. Like a leaf underfoot, you quiver in wait. The breaths in your throat are siphoned into the swelling gale. Next, your being. Wisps, in the beginning, gossamer snagged on unseen fingers, then stiff sinew as you are unravelled. Bloody gristle carried away on the air, the little droplets absolute against the surrounding blurred blueness. With each new heartbeat, a great glob is drawn further up your chest. Your eyes strain against their sockets as you writhe beneath the bulging pulse in your throat.

Beat-beat.

Your tears are swept away before they can collect in the corners of your mouth.

The wind gorges itself on the memory of salt on your cheeks.

Beat-beat.

Even the pain, red and tender, is funnelled away, towards nowhere.

Beat-beat.

Your arm is bare and inkless.

Beat-beat.

You. Bare. Inkless.

Beat-beat.

Your eyes, tearless but not yet stolen, suddenly discern vast shapes. The blueness coalesces; a sky, a sea. You grit your teeth. The mass, warm and turgid presses against your bared incisors.

You hiss into the squall.

Water weaves between the cobbles of a causeway, long and thin and leading to nowhere you can see. The wind sweeps from horizon to horizon. Kneeling, you shield your eyes to stare down the incessant gale, then twist and track its course. You watch the water. The smear of blood across your chin drips to the stone.

You stand.

You make a choice.

You sit in a cubicle and scratch ammonites into the desk. Your forearm reaches forwards and a shoal of red-ink scales spill from your sleeve, then back. Your blazer hangs over the monitor, its blueness straining against the polyester pall.

You stand.