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She wakes from herself at the bottom of a mire. The murky darkness surrounds her fetal position which is sunken beneath the muddy floor. Everything in her world has shifted and the bottom is somehow no longer the top. Confusion gives way to survival.

Her eyes are water white wide as she panic gasps her drinking drowning screams that rise like sentences of bubbles trapping slow motion word spheres forming from the tips of her mouth and disintegrating before her unknown face into the oblivion of her memory. She sinks her prickle tingle feet deep into the warm muck until the feeling of her toes find stable ground and push off and away from the sloughy bottom. And as she ascends through the dark water, she waves her legs back and forth in a butterfly kick while pointing her arms up toward the surface. Her eyelids are full of pressure and her lungs plead for air. What seems like an eternal moment of looking above at her own bleary silhouette arms becomes her hands finding where the sky meets the water. Her face penetrates instantly after.

She takes numerous deep breaths, wheezily inhaling bits of oxygen and exhaling throat croak coughs in such a way until her breathing relaxes and in doing so her body calms into a less shudder shake quiver. She rapidly blinks and begins to focus her vision upon the festering material world and treads water with helical ease and opens her senses to the unsure newborn dead wordy night.

The marsh, as some singular autonomous being, phenomenally penetrates such senses. The air is alive with the ringing pulse of malediction. Wispily buzzing swarms of arthropods filter out the sundry volume of other nighttime things. Tiny anxieties with wings collect together to become the head hollering hum of one giant buzzing insect, gripping and tearing apart the focus of her concentration. She watches herself in the moment as the moment watches her back, telling her that what she senses is really and maybe truly transpiring.

Everything blooms into a stench of mud bland shit along with the perfume of cordgrass and elm trees and marigolds and bonesets and archipelagos of prickly bull thistle weeds growing in a sea of bluestem and switchgrass and dirt that the soft wind stirs together as if a gentle and ubiquitous invisible crucible pours melting contents upon her. It's painting the Grimshaw smell of intuition.

There are many other smells that she doesn't recognize. Maybe she knew of them before whatever happened to her, before whatever unknown event dropped her memory into the giant abyss of her thoughts. Or maybe she couldn't smell any of them before. That might be why she has no taxonomy for such things. Another thought is that her damaged memory still knows how to be sarcastic toward stupid presumptions versus obvious answers. She can't remember certain things because she can't remember many, many other certain things.

She re-submerges like a Pickerel frog and swims from the centre of the pond and rises underwater into the thick muddy shore. The mire girl breaks above the leaden murk up to her nose, watching the darkness of a summer susurrate landscape in front of the loud insanity of her mind.

She knows that her body is completely bare under the water while kneeling in the roiled quicksand mud. She hugs herself tightly and hard and then releases herself and wipes her face. She isn't cold or uncomfortable and doesn't physically hurt. She feels across her body and finds three old bullet wounds along her collarbone among other scars on her legs and arms but nothing stinging. Nothing sore or cut. Nothing to categorize as new.

Her instinct is to stay in the water because she is apprehensive about her fleshy exposure. Something triggers in her thoughts. A memory that haunts within the back of her mind like a word on the tip of her tongue. It just won't emanate. It's something that could explain her apprehension but she can't remember. There is a flash of the sound of bare footsteps slapping on concrete and the shame of laughter and a thought that it doesn't matter. Then it's gone with the seconds.

What was that? Why did I feel like that? Why do I feel like that? Was that me? That was me. Does it matter?

The moments become the shadow of a serpent eating its tail. Does it matter? She shakes her head like the motion is supposed to make it true.

Am I damaged? Missing? I'm missing from me. Who am I? How long have I been like this?

She moves her head right and left creating small ripples and then slowly brings her water filled ears and lips above the surface of the pond, squirting the taste of grey water from her mouth.

The sounds pour into her mind as she focuses beyond the insects and the painting breeze. In the distance there may exist the sounds of music and voices vibrationally echoing and caught in the undertow of her sharpening curiosity. She catches words at first, then phrases and then conversations. A tribulation of emotions in the form of screams and laughter and crying fill the space of her drown mind. Someone whistles a tune and someone argues with someone else about politics and someone laughs horribly at someone else's humiliation and on and on and on like a spiral until she tries to block it all out and submerges her head. She screams underwater at the dizzying voices in her skull. In the next instance, she drags herself out of the water, crawling onto the loose dirt and wet grass and she lays down on her back in a fatigue of frustration.

I'm alone. Afraid. What has happened to me? How did I get here? Why do I feel like this? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who! Am! I?!?!

She slaps her hands over her face and confusingly screams a release of emotion into her palms as the marsh water tears spill onto her already wet cheeks. Her own shrieking sobs of vexation fill the night. Frustration drips onto her body from the abyss of her memory and the horror of the situation saturating her soul. She has no idea who she is.

When she sits up, criss cross apple sauce, the mire girl peeks through her fingers and witnesses a faint glimmer in the distance. Her hands drop into her lap. That must be where the voices are coming from. Maybe they aren't in her head. It could be a far away place with people who she can't entirely shut out no matter how hard she tries. And she can't scream her blank slate away.

It occurs to her as she calms down and begins reasoning with herself that she remembers a lot of things like language and what specific words go with specific objects. She understands day and night and what a city or a marsh are. She knows that the abstract needs a material face.

One plus one equals two unless there are two rectangles. Place them together to make a third rectangle and then one plus one can, in abstraction, equal three. And since numbers are already an abstract model of the universe, the thoughts make sense.

These concepts still exist in her mind even if she can't remember herself. These concepts are now a priori to her. This is her spawning point. It's a beginning that seems to have endowed her with extraordinary senses because she's far away from anyone else and can somehow hear conversations. The voices centre in a mass of one loud position and seem to fade out into nothing as if there are peripheries. The definition of insanity would be to analyze such unlimited prattle. With her "reason" intact, she blocks out the bright fuzzy white noise entirely. It's a sweet silence after the barrage of chatter. She doesn't understand how she blocks the voices out, it only matters that she does.

She wipes the tears and pea soup mire water from her face and rubs her eyes. She stares up at the sky to find no moon dimming the lonely cosmos; the silent stars. They're a billion bright points twinkling at her. She knows that they're remnants of what was and that the stars don't exist anymore from where the light began. Perhaps she knows how they feel, burnt out and yet continuing.

I am the withering light of a dead star...and yet, I feel like I'm free to become whatever I want.

She remembers this feeling of strength folded layer upon layer as an armour and wraps such self control around herself like an invisible blanket. She could remain in anxiety and confusion but in this moment, she decides to get up and run. The mire girl jolts through the crabgrass and thistle and along banks of powdery dirt and liquid mud. She jumps over short brush and into switchgrass and bulrush and cattails into the dull leaden liquid to breaststroke underwater until she crawls palms and knees and toes onto another soupy embankment. There's more sloppy mud that becomes dusty dirt and then thick wet bluegrass. The mire girl crushes bindweeds and white clover under her feet, turning her soles a mixture of dark goose green and black shit hare kibble brown. A thick nature covers her snow pale skin. And not once does she become physically tired while on her naked adventure through the mire. She breathes hard and her heart pumps at light speed intervals. She loves it.

Eventually, the mire girl stops running and bends over and places her grass stain hands on her dirt stain knees. She watches her squeeze mire mud between toes for a moment and then brings her head up and witnesses the ominous distance of the faint dreary sodium lights reflecting off the sky. She stands her spine straight and bends her back in a stretch and can see the silhouette of a city menacing the horizon. The light renders the firmament a ghastly and all seeing centre of orange. Most of the city, or at least the parts that she can witness from where she is, exists as a burnt out husk of lurking darkness.

She realizes that her destination is the pitch black edifices in front of her. The marsh will soon become concrete and sharp edge metal. The mire girl will need to find clothes and shoes when she finds her way into there.