The girl from the mire: part 2

Were we ever alive? Were we ever here? Were we ever?

Dormant grass grips the ground in patches like uneven paintbrush bristles. Soft blue grama whiskers. Brittle in clumps of archipelago. Grown through an ocean of sallow season. Husk flake loamy soil. It's the kind of loess, dirt skin sticky silt that Hell and Heaven might be buried under. Where judgment, in all its eschatology might be spade down in a place lightly closer to Tartarus. Lost and found forever as a Nietzschean eternal recurrence.

This place is a perfectly natural walking space for silver bullet gun smoke fog and old dying, mangy rabbits and forever bare feet. Here, the wind makes the dead elms chime in their own branchy way. Creak like floor boards in harmony with dead leaf shuffling.

It's still warm enough to spend the hours naked out here, but that's coming to an end, at least for the aging corporeal. Adam and Eve wouldn't be able to survive, even in their clothes. Not out in this nature by the end of next month. Seems like nothing would. Not even God. Not even paper. She will, though. She has since always.

Her name is Judith. Her grave's so old, it looks like a glacier stone sitting in the middle of nowhere. This locus. This necropolis, was a grave site. No one's been buried here in, well, a century. Maybe? Could be. Who really knows? Who would care? Judith? Nah.

Judith's only property is a shadow. Might be her's. Was her's? Who knows. Maybe another Judith casts from behind the other side of the dark reflection. Maybe all anyone can be is a shadow casting shadows of shadows. Maybe that's all anything is. A theatre of shadows. Behind every drawn curtain. Shadows casting shadows.

She can witness herself as she might've been. A memory. A woman. A human. Maybe someone's daughter. But others? Living others? The others who own more than a shadow? The others who own their skin? They can't witness her at all in any real sense. Except they've come eye to umbra with her long afternoon contour a few times. They've noticed her shadow and they've noticed it upon the corpse gray rocks and long twisty finger knot border trees. The living tend to run when they see her silhouette, adults and kids alike, as if they're all gophers leaping for their holes to escape hawks. She's tried to poke them and grab them but they can't feel her translucent touch. In those moments. However, they do witness a shadow without anything casting such a reflection. Maybe Judith's the noumenal of her living dark presence. Whatever she is, those who call themselves "living" are terrified of her.

And for those who call themselves alive, her silhouette's best noticed in the white blind winter sun, as when she walks through a type of annual snow field or upon a thick frozen river. Laughs at their panic and their fleeing terror.

Those good winter ways are coming soon with the tenebrous clouds tending to graupel and snow. For now, the inclement of death slowly sanitizes topography. Jaundice yellow and crimson and burnt brown are a beautiful decomposition. Everything drenches in autumn.

Judith isn't too sad about her situation. Alone. Lonely. Sort of likes lonely things in such a way. Likes herself this way. But she knows of others like her. She can touch them, so that's nice. Let her loins do the talking at times. Over and under and in and out. Men and their shadows, mostly. But it's always transient and fairly pleasureless. No one stays. They all eventually tire of this place and disappear through the moments that will never come again. Maybe they're the moments that never were.

So, Judith has the questions. Is she really dead? Is she alive? Should she leave as well? Does she partially exist within another world, while her shadow mimics her in this one? Maybe she's a shadow in the other world, and what she thinks is her shadow is actually the phenomenal "her" in this world, unable to be witnessed by eyes where Judith knows she's potentially visible. A reversal of sorts. Maybe she doesn't exist at all as one contradicts the other out of reality and into oblivion. Maybe non-existence is reality. Nothing is still something. Is she still...something?

But she can kinda feel things in the way that contradictions don't really exist. Dead leaves under her bare feet. Branches that scrape her belly. The feel of the bark on her chest and legs and ankles. Never touch as she thinks she might've known it. Barely remembers such sense.

Memory. Can't remember how she died or much before. Does remember the cold of winter, but she can't get cold now and like all creatures, she doesn't truly remember exact pain. Can't shiver but can feel the un-frozen wind. It's always nice, especially upon her back and behind her knees. And in winter, snow kinda feels like sand. A veridiction of sorts. The soul's authority upon the body. Maybe the temperature's always the same when you're dead...or whatever this is. Whatever she is.

Judith has experimented with her way of things. She once buried herself in the deep snow of fifty or so winters before. Dived her bare body down and down and down until she was skinny dipping. Apparently, when she went deep enough into the white depth, the snow became a whole new world. Underwater cavernous tunnel. Blue crystal light reflection off of who knows what. Full of life. Wide eye bluish faces. Nude beards. Bodies of cerulean breasts and teal nipples. Gill-ish. Talking to one another like floating. None could witness Judith. Couldn't see her shadow either. But she could touch them. They would shriek at the sensation of her toes and fingers. Swim away like a feather in a senseless wind rattle like old Satan's chains. And their skin was so cold, like living ice. Judith figured that she didn't belong down there. Swam back above the snow. Never went under again. She did remember how to urinate while down there, not that she remembers why or what for. Hasn't since. What a strange activity. Cold then warm then cold.

Other worlds have presented themselves to her, but she's declined their endless mysteries. Those adventurous riddles aren't her puzzle to pick at.

But she was also once, for a piece of time, curious about the bottom of the old dirty lake by the graveyard, beyond the border trees. What was down there? It breathed an awful thought upon her like rotting leaves in the sloughy spring when she tasted the submerge. The light of the liquid world was murky like mermaids, especially and much more so in the scaly depths. But she managed to find a house down there. A light flickered somewhere in the back of the place. Drew her to it. Explored its broken frame and ancient, waterlogged accessories of bulbous wooden furniture and blackened, paint-less paintings. The place was made of long halls and peeling walls. Littered with single skulls in osteal masks. A few rust eaten revolvers and one wretched bone saw cut halfway through the armrest of a warped floral stem, art nouveau chair. A living slime coated a kitchen cupboard which had an indecipherable name of letters before the carved words... "was here."

She swam toward the back door and the back door wasn't just a back door. The naked light came from the other side of the exit. Such an exit. The door was an opening. A connection point into someplace other than her locality. Found that it entered into another world full of something else. Hoped for someone else. In the end, it was full of no one at all.

She swam through the upright rectangle. Splashed out the vertical water exit into a perfect horizon of sunlight. Dry ground. Turned back. Witnessed the murky water from where she came, like dirty, humid plexiglass. Her world of underwater didn't follow her tush through the back door.

Judith spent a long time in the new place by herself. Walked under an endless wine dark sky. Through exact streets built of exact cookie cutter dollhouses, painted pastel blue and pink and lavender, of which she'd never imagine could exist, let alone be constructed. The place tasted like a deep blinding Heaven white cotton candy contusion, swirled in the faded cloud gray of purgatory. Walked upon the perfectly mown emerald city style lawn which caused her a smile of wet feet tickles. The wet tickles eased for a moment. Scared her as soon as she thought about what they were. Her own smile filled her with trepidation about the act of giggling. Found it unnatural and weird and wrong. Saddened her to think such things but it also comforted her in a lonely way.

Maybe the dollish houses had other scents and tastes and portals to other worlds in them. Surprises like wet tickles and ancient smiles. Judith didn't want to find out. Backtracked to the portal house with the lake. Back to the apparition. Her old world. Back to her complacent beliefs.

As she entered through the exit of the water door and swam like a fairground vampire fleeing a sunny day, she gazed back like a pillar for a moment. Saw someone standing at the vertical water door. A bleared man of some sort, motioning for her to come back. She didn't want to. Flutter kicked out of the front door. Mermaided herself to the surface of the mucky lake like an old dogfish was giving her a hard, slick chase.

Even though she felt the water and knew its wetness from the memory of the grass tickling, other world, she never felt wet from the water of the lake. Judith was dry as a bleached bone when she swam out. The only time she could remember being wet in her graveyard world was with the others whom she could touch and who could touch her in the many humid ways that inevitably created finger motion moisture.

Gravity here is also like being wet. Only a theory now. An old epistemology. Judith only knows gravity as footsteps grounding her. She can fall, but it's like she doesn't. Can feel it when she hangs her legs off a big tangly tree branch. Floats nimbly when she jumps. Feet make no sound when she lands. No real pressure. Down is still inevitable, but is it really down? She can do handstands forever. Is it all in her mind now? Is "wet" and "down"only that of a learned thought? Something she remembers through structures of a taught panopticon which only affect her now because she can't unlearn it all? Maybe. Maybe there's no such thing as 'wet' and 'down.' Maybe they're words of a society and culture that are long gone or never were. What is society for Judith? Maybe there's no such thing as society. Maybe there's no such thing as Judith where society might be. Maybe it's only the phantasm in a mind. A metaphysics mistaken for epistemology wearing the clothing of phenomenology.

Fire is also an apparition upon her. Judith can feel the heat. Shallow like a puddle. Evaporates easily. Maybe it's nothing to her as she is to it.

Maybe everything in this world is a remnant to her because she's a revenant. The less real she becomes, the less the world knows her. Perhaps she's the rising sun viewed from the dusk of another place.

Maybe it's time to leave this border tree cemetery after all.

Judith sits upon her glacial stone under her overcast sun and listens to the thoughts beneath her usual way of thinking. They bubble up. Gets it stuck in her mind that the wet tickling of the grassy lawn in the other world wasn't so bad. Was actually kinda nice. Maybe she'd like to feel such a feeling again. Nods to herself again and again and thinks, why not?

"What's this motherfucking place ever done for me anyway?"

She stands and slaps her belly. Smiles. The graveyard girl runs to the lake from her cemetery. Dust clouds her bare feet. The tree line. The prickly dormant grass. The slight beach. Dives into the air. Arcs her torso toward the wet-less water. Splashes like an oxymoron. Swims under, toward the lake house. She's like an adrenaline heartbeat starting for the first time.

Judith swims through the derelict home of the vertical water portal. Faster and faster and faster until she blasts past the eternal boredom of her existence and through the bleary threshold. Tumbles onto the street of the wine dark sea sky world. Her body witnesses a deeper sensation of gravity.

She waltzes over to the grass and lays upon it, back and buttocks. Looks around. Certain she feels more alive than before. Heart still pounds as her body feels the wetness and the softness of the naked, comfortable grass.

Judith hears a buzz. Watches the vertical water entrance dry up like a time laps orange peel. Vanishes in a rotting disintegration.

Judith thinks of birth. Thinks of rebirth. Feels better about moving on because she's fairly certain she can never go back.