| | 3 | |

As she continues wandering the city, the mire girl comes across a small dilapidated park surrounded by blackened crooked red elms shedding bark. Plastic bags litter the branches and sound like flapping avian dinosaurs at the whim of the loose execrate urban wind. The trees encircle children' chain swings and broken decussate monkey bars. Purple paint flaking teeter totters and sunken silver slides complete the old playground. One slide is toppled and laying on the side of another slide, like a tilted corner worn crushed domino. Another slide looks like it's laying in the other's lap.

She imagines the ghosts of kids screaming and laughing upon the sadness that is the nostalgia of some sort of past. The swings rattle and squeak in her mind and fly higher and higher. The slides make quiet thunder as the kids hurl themselves down the shiny, wobbly little forty five degree gleam gray rivers of air and metal. The teeter totters grate and thud, jerking up and down between Heaven and Earth. And kids slap the jump rope against the permeable paving stones, almost whipping each other while others throw a baseball around, catching and releasing, breathing hard and talking about cubs and sox and laughing at each other in the tiny, high pitch voices of miniature humans.

There're two teenagers under a tree holding hands and smiling at each other, watching each other closely. Watching each other watch each other. The girl wears only gray and the boy wears only black. They're paying attention to nothing but themselves. They're happily infatuated.

She notices a man standing beside them, staring at her. Staring at her and not moving. A statue? How long has he been standing in the same spot staring at her? Maybe he's rusted and made of tin and in need of oil. He's old and gray and wrinkly pale, with long white hair and bushy curly eyebrows and he wears a gray suit with an unsized black fedora tilting toward one ear.

The vision of children playing games and having fun blows away like an old, dried out bucket castle in a sand box as she stares back at the old man. And the man remains standing by the disintegrating teenagers, just as she remains standing where she is. He's not an apparition in her head, at least not like the children were. He's not an effigy. And reality pushes against insanity and he does something the mire girl doesn't expect.

He opens his eyelids wide and his mouth clambers a clacking scream.

"Nooooooooooooo!"

The old man stumbles fromward and turns his back to the mire girl. His fedora tumbles as he bolts in a reaction of terror. She turns and prepares to witness danger from where she's come from. There's nothing prevalent in the hollow darkness. No monster. No beast to cause such a frightful display. Is she what he fears?

The mire girl yells, "Wait! Please, wait! Can you help me? I'm lost! Please!"

The man doesn't stop and so the mire girl removes her flip flops and chases after him, shouting like the burnt out echoes that the dusk has left behind.

"I just want to talk to you! I need help! Please!"

She runs behind him, out of the park and past the corpse skin trees and back into the cement and asphalt of the city. They run through a street that seems better maintained than any of the previous streets she's come across. No garbage, no skeletons in cars and the storefront windows aren't all smashed to fangs.

The man stops in front of a dusty, red tin dent panel building. The mire girl notices he has a skullet and he's begun limping and hollering imprecation and holding his knee like he's strained it.

The old man opens the single metal door to the building and slams it shut behind him. The sound of the door crashes upon its metal casing, bouncing off buildings and creating a dooming echo that fades with every vibrational reflection.

She stops in front of the man's refuge. She's twenty feet away.

The mire girl thinks about knocking on his door or maybe waiting outside until he comes out again. She doesn't want to further terrify the feeble old man by following him in.

I should knock. I should, but he's scared. But why? I didn't do anything to him. It was obvious that he was running from me. Am I that threatening? What do I really look like? What is it about me or what is it about him that made him flee from me? I don't understand.

She uses up ten minutes of her life waiting, pacing every so often as she thinks about wandering back into the depths of the dirging city. She shoves her wedge flip flops back upon her extremely blackened sole bare feet and shakes her head and can't understand why the man fears her. He's physically much bigger than her, though elderly.

She turns to walk away at the exact moment the door violently slams open, creating a tinny echo in her brain. She turns back toward the building as the old man thunders out of the entrance, holding a Smith and Wesson .357 magnum and points it directly at her expression. He stomps slowly with the severe intent of hostile bravery. Now the mire girl is terrified because his eyes are a molten hatred.

Fifteen feet.

Thirteen feet.

His mouth foams as he yells at her, "I fucking know you...you destroyed all of us with your incompetence...your narcissistic saviour delusion."

She's frozen in a chilling fear. A statue. A rat that has smelt predatory cat piss. He's like a Gorgon forcing her to witness his grunting malediction.

Ten feet.

His steps ricochet within the humid cave of her fear soaking mind.

Eight feet.

He walks closer and closer, sweating profusely and growl breathing like he intends to eat eternity by eating Iscariot.

Seven feet.

He's wearing foul rage and determination upon his scowling face. Tribulation grips the magnum closer and closer to her outstretched arms that are waving the universal sign for, "stop!"

The black hole of the barrel seems to suck all of the courage from her.

Six feet.

"You!" The old man spits. "After all this time, it's you!"

The mire girl's body shudders and sweats like the hand of the ancient jealous God has come to crush her on Judgement Day.

"I killed you and here you are...I hate you...for what you did...what you did to me...for your friends...your lowly friends..."

The mire girl shakes her head and wants to back away but her body won't budge an inch anywhere. She can't move. Her legs won't let her.

"Your mother was a good woman...I loved her...I let her go...she died...and then you...you narcissist...you ruined everything....this city...my life...for nothing....are you happy now?"

The wind swirls for a moment between the two of them, collecting dust and the molecules of what was in its grasping, blowing fingers.

"How dare you ask for my help...I'm going to kill you...again."

Five feet.

"Please...don't...I don't know who you are. I don't want to die...I don't know what you're talking about."

The mire girl is quiver lip sobbing and panic shaking.

Her eyes move to his eyes and it's the barrel of the gun that becomes a blur.

Four feet.

He smirks and unloads the magnum into her chest.

The girl from the mire is thrown from her feet. Her back and head crack and scrape into the hard, concrete street. White hot pain sizzles throughout her torso, engulfing all of her mind in a burning darkness. She can't breath. She can't move. She can't know anything. She just lays in the street as a corpse, murdered. Paralyzed by death. The circular vignette surrounding her vision closes and darkness within darkness swallows her. The pain remains like lava soaking through her. The memory of biting her tongue to keep from screaming peeks from the fissure of her memory and witnesses it's shadow and sinks back into the sunken depth behind her emerald eyes.

And then the pain slowly subsides. The lava no longer burns but fills the decimation of her body. Her vision returns and she can see him standing over her. His smile seems to extend past his face. Perfect teeth grind with maliciousness. He bends down. His face is very close to her face. Then she takes a breath and blinks. The man jumps back, scowlingly shocked and fumbles will bullets in an attempt to swiftly reload the magnum.

She can feel herself sitting up but she doesn't feel in control of this action. She feels like a passenger in her own body.

Her corporeal form reaches an arm toward the man, her fingers curl and contort and she feels her mouth smile and then something horrible speaks from her wide grinning orifice. She's laughing. But it doesn't sound like her laughter. It sounds deeper and more crackly, like a horrible vinyl recording on the slow wobbly platter of a record player. Her voice is almost entirely inhuman.

The man spins the revolver closed and pulls back the hammer and unloads his freshly loaded magnum into her chest again. Then he reloads and superfluously expends the next rounds into her nearly unconscious body; brass jackets plummet and collect on the ground with each re-load.

The last round of bullets turns her mind into nothing. Not empty. Not darkness. Not nothing as something. She's a non-existent recollection of her proud mother as the snake eats it's tail, forever stuck in the entrance of the exit. Where the immaterial exists in the gaps of the material. Whatever she was is gone.

How does someone know when they're dead? Is it a Sorites paradox? At what point does science no longer matter? There're far bigger and far smaller planes of existence beyond the microscope and the telescope. We're merely one universe pretending to know what we are. We know nothing. Right from the beginning until the end, we know nothing.

She comes back to darkness and pain. She feels the same white hot paralyzing burn in her torso. The mire girl hasn't begun to think yet. Her thoughts are pieces of pieces bubbling to the surface of her emotions as the pain leaks out. Her brain switches back on like house lights are a simulacra of the daytime and her vision blurs into focus.

He's very close to her face again. She feels his sweat drip onto her forehead and his rancid minty wine breath petrifies her nostrils. Then her dead, doll eyes blink and she inhales the air around her. She feels herself open jaws and snap her teeth together like she wants to rip his face off.

The man, from her perspective, is moving in a worry of slow motion. He's been crouching over her, probably making sure that she's truly dead. This not being the case, he sits up on his knees and lets out a sigh. Then he places the barrel of the gun in his mouth. His perfect teeth clamp down on the long black metal and he pulls the trigger and blows the back of his head off.

His eyes roll behind his sockets and in the background of his death a red gore spray fills the air with bits of skull creating a kind of slow motion primary red Jackson Pollock art piece without a canvas. Then gravity compels what's left of him to fall on top of her, his un-face landing on her belly.

She watches herself peer into the back of his head and then poke two fingers into the pink gelatinous void. She feels her digits squish into the gore up to her knuckles. The mire girl's body mixes them around like batter in a bowl and then pulls her two dark red fingers out. Blood oozes as she moves them toward her mouth. She sucks on her fingers as if they have the grease of chicken or the paste of pasta sauce coating them.

She listens to the other voice, the deeper crackly vinyl voice.

"Fuck you, old man. Your blood is tasty."

Her body then bites into the freshness of his leathery lizard neck and guzzles until her atoms are somehow satisfied. And though covered in blood, she's also somehow happy, like she's endured an unendurable situation, which she clearly has. She laughs to herself in her relatable voice and the horror and absurdity of the situation numbs and her body engulfs the final remnants of the sharp shrapnel burn pain like a cast shadow in the final moments of dusk.

She touches herself under her clothes in the many places that he's shot her. Her skin is smooth, unblemished, as if he never pulled a trigger in her direction. She hikes the dress over her head to witness herself. All normal, or at least as normal as things could possibly be. Chest still intact. Breasts still intact. Heart somehow still beating. Lungs still enjoying breath. Blood mud dust filthy.

She looks at the contour of the old bullet wounds and remnants of tattoos. Dead birds that look like they've been squished by the action a trigger shot at her back. She wonders if feathers had flown out of her body when the tattoo had been blown away in a previous life because these gun shot scars don't have enough insincerity to disappear.

As the mire girl looks at the blood on her hands and lap, she begins to feel control of her body again. It's a scary situation when her own flesh takes the joystick reigns of her physical movement beyond her own will. Or at least she's supposed to think that it's her body to control. Maybe we're all marionettes who dance upon the tangling whim of strings.

He knew my mother and said that he mourned her. I guess she's dead. Ok. But I've friends. He didn't say anything about them dying. He said I saved them. Maybe I can find them and this is the city that he was referring to. The city I saved. The city I killed. But my poor mother...I think I need to know who she was...who I am. Who I was through who she was. Maybe I can catch a glimpse of myself in her, or find someone who knew both of us.

Then the dawn squints through the buildings and she feels her peripheral vision darken until black. No lava pain, no drawn out inner horror. Just the light of death shining upon her face, upon her invisible truth, her visible secret. And she dies.

                                           ****

She wakes in the same spot just as the sun performs it's paper thin line vanishing trick upon the horizon. It fades out behind the annihilated mounds of rubble and partial buildings of art deco and gothic revival and modern which protrude jaggedly in the sky above her. And she still lays under the bloodless corpse of her murderer. The old man's body is paler and smells like bacterial interactions.

The mire girl sits up on both of her elbows and leans back, torso twisting spine cracking. She pushes the almost throat-less dead off of her lap and stands up, slapping her blood grey dress and faded torn pants to get the sooty clinging city dust out of the ladder stitch fabric. The particles must have accumulated upon her empty body during the day. And there's nothing that she can do about the very obvious blood stains, the saturation is of a thin to thickening molasses.

It dawns on her that when the sun graced the city with its burning light, she fell unconscious and woke up as the sun descended, placing the city back into darkness.

I'll have to pay attention to the time if I can only be a nighttime creature.

Then she leans into a crouch and goes through the dead murderers filthy dry piss drench pockets to find only the lint of nothing. Not even a ticking handless watch. This is disappointing. She was hoping to discover an entire world. Her world. A piece of her former self. A hint of her mother, someone relevant to her. Is that too much to ask? There's only the gun.

She doesn't want the magnum, though she isn't afraid of guns. It sickens her to think of holding it. Something about the caliginous contraption of death lingers in her empty memory and what she can't remember weighs on her and makes her feel regretful. It's the apparition of a feeling. A noumenal dead memory. She lowers her head and gazes at her dripping tears as they drop into the blasted hole where her fingers had stirred the night before.

This is so frustrating. Why can't I remember? I can't even remember why this hurts so much...

She stands and decides to search the building that the man came from. Maybe there's something in there, something within his home that's of value to her.

This is an unsettling idea, rummaging through my killers belongings to find pieces of myself. Perhaps he kept trophies of me. This sounds awful, but maybe it'll be worth it if I can find something useful.

She steps over the dead and walks flip flop slap heel hastily toward the red dent panel building. When she figures the door and grabs the handle, her hand stings of electricity. The shock pinches her molecules and she jumps back and rubs her palms together in an attempt to relax the pain. The door handle is somehow electrified. She's been electrocuted. The man must have had a way of opening it safely. A trick that only he would know. But then, what is the mire girl afraid of? Dying? She was just pumped full of bullets. But still. She doesn't really want to get electrocuted again. She doesn't like pain. And she figures that the man was wearing gloves, so maybe that's the underwhelming trick.

She goes back to the body and takes the gloves off his lifeless fingers, slipping them onto her own hands. Then she goes back to the electrocution door and clasps the handle and pushes it down and opens the entrance easily. She doesn't get zapped in the process. She nods to herself, watching the crust of her hair fall before her eyes like ashes as she enters.

It's pitch black beyond the swung metal opening, but she can see clearly. The mire girl walks into the room and closes the door behind her with a cavernous thud.

The place is pristine. Organized. There're desks with computers and glass holographic image walls throughout the room. Nothing is on. Then she finds that some of the image walls are cracked and some of the computers are hollow.

This place is a ruse. These are artifacts of another era. Maybe there's another room in the back.

The mire girl walks through the entire place and finds next to nothing. No other room. Nothing other than well kept garbage. The ragged remains of a circus leotard lays disheveled on a table next to a dirty red dress with yellow polka dots that might have been white at one time.

In her disappointment, she stomps on a discarded keyboard laying on the floor. A full bent wooden smoking pipe falls off the leotard table in front of her due to her stomping strength and she notices that it isn't actually a keyboard that she's stomped but a well drawn keyboard. The floor is also hollow where she stomped. She kneels on the old grey floorboards and fumbles around the gaps and cracks until she finds something that doesn't feel like wood or gaping. And the number four feels different on the un-keyboard. So does the number six. She presses both at the same time. They're the only real buttons to press. Something clicks in the hollow underneath. Immediately there's a whirring pulley sound and part of the wall to her right cracks and breaks and folds apart like concrete paper and then disappears into other parts of the wall, creating a doorway.

She stands and folds her arms and bites her lip and gapes at the transformation for a curious moment and nods and walks through the new entry. It's a small room with a single bed and a tiny clean kitchen. A horseshoe that looks like a jaw hangs on the wall above the bed. There's a flat dark oak wooden simulacra desk with a table frame picture of many people smiling. She recognizes the old man in the picture but who are all of the other people? There's ten in total.

I'm keeping this. One of the women in this picture could be my mother.

She pulls it out of the frame and folds it and places it in her tight roadside jeans pocket. Then she looks at other pictures hanging on the wall. They're of places that she doesn't recognize. Of people posing with dogs and a single man leaning and at times flexing beside cars. There's yellow wooden frames with paintings that look like vacations. One painting stands out because of it's dissimilarity. It's a scene with a group of medieval characters staring at the fourth wall. The painter is watching while painting upon his canvas. In the background is a mirror, giving away who he's portraying. The woman in the painted mirror is a skinny, wide shouldered, pale skin blonde with rosy cheeks and crimson lips. She has a frown. Behind her it's raven feather black. And her eyes are, in a way, an eschatologically streetlight dim sickly pale horse green and also, surrounding the pupil, an Emerald City bright malachite green.

Next, she rummages through the desk drawers and finds a picture of three young people, all wearing black next to old notebooks and ink-less pens. There's a boy with long black hair holding and resting his face and smelling a smiling girl with long blonde hair and eyes that would be noticed in a crowd. Beside them is a taller girl with brown hair and big sunglasses looking away from the two lovers. At least she gets the impression that they're lovers. She decides to hold onto the picture because she has a good feeling about it. Her body is relaxed just looking at it. What does it mean? Who are they? When are they?

Then all of a sudden her body feels nauseous. The sickness builds and builds within her stomach and she can feel it in her throat and she cusps her mouth but at the last moment moves her hands away and she vomits her murderer's blood onto part of the desk. She manages to save the picture and place it with the other in her pants pocket. She feels like her body won't just let her find herself, like it was intentionally trying to destroy the picture with crimson puke. It's going to be a fight to figure out who she is.

The mire girl stays in the room for a few more moments, watching pictures be pictures. Then she decides to collect her thoughts on the exterior door and how to disconnect the only electricity she thinks exists in the building.

On her way out of the little room, she spots a big black hooded poncho laying on the bed. She lifts it up, sizing it in her mind. It's big. It was the old man's poncho. She likes the look and feel of it and slips it over herself. The hood on the poncho is pleasantly massive and it covers over her head and there is a nice wide front pouch. She decides to keep it. Not as the spoils for surviving the old man but as what she feels she's owed for losing her life to him before he saved her the trouble of what her body intended to do to him. She would have tore him apart, like the rat.

She leaves the room and steps across the man's world of technological simulacra to find and figure out the trick to the electrocution door. She finds nothing. No wires. No cords. No evidence of anything that would be capable of electrocution. It's just a metal storm door.

If there's nothing to find with the door, then what electrocuted me? Was it all in my head?

She opens the door and looks outside. The body is still there, rotting in the ubiquitous shadow that has fallen like ash and settles every night upon the world, upon the street. Stygian.

The mire girl steps outside and closes the door. She pulls the man's gloves off one finger at a time and throws them to the ground. Then she quickly grabs the door handle like ripping off a bandaid or a wax strip. Nothing happens. The outside handle is no different than any other door handle.

She smiles and shakes her head, laughing in her own voice, recognizing the sounds that she makes as her own sounds. She doesn't know what her face looks like but at least she knows her own voice and the terse vinyl crackly version certainly isn't her's. She is convinced that whatever that is, it's a reaction to her body being destroyed. Maybe it's a self preservation mechanism; her body protecting her mind. But it also may account for her being electrocuted by the door. What if her body is making it seem like the door was electrocuting her? What if her body was trying to keep her out of the man's home? She doesn't know how or why but whatever's going on, the electrocution may have had nothing to do with the external world.

And the vomiting episode was her body's way of telling her that it doesn't like what she's finding out.

Is my body it's own entity, separate from my mind?

She leaves to continue through the outskirt decomposing peripheries with this very question surrounding her thoughts like an atmosphere around a planet. In a way, it protects her and allows her to breath because she knows something isn't right and figuring out this mystery contains most of life's battles. Is her soul subjugated to her body or is her body subjugated to her soul?

As she ponders the new memories of the old man and his insanity to replace the unknown, she runs casually through the labyrinth of storm drain streets and shadow play alleys, easily climbing over polyvinyl chloride and horizontal fences and walls of grey metal and crenellate brick. She makes echoing slapping sounds with her dirty feet and flip flops while walking under a bridge. Eventually she stops to take better notice of her endless wandering.

She looks at a street that has a deceased factory aesthetic purchasing it. One structure has a store front office door next to a giant garage door with rotting pallets upon pallets stacked between the two. Its chain link fenced in parking lot has row upon row of tire deflated whitish orange brown rusty cube vehicles.

Past this place are many other structures adorned with pedestal signs and war painted burgundy tin sheet siding.

She can see the beginnings of an ominous forest past the long abandoned man made convolution and notices the remains of what looks like a burnt dog carcass below a street sign that points to an overgrown woodland. The street's name that looms above her in white capital letters on a black background reads, "Glanton street."

Her eyes follow from that sign toward the forest and she notices thick black trees seeming to curl in on themselves like the slippery tentacles of a kraken, watching the city with many knotty eyes that glare with the anonymity of an ominous predator.

Ravens squawk at each other from the tangle of trees. She can see them flying in hoards above the dark forest.

Why couldn't she hear them until just now? Why is her body blocking her from noticing her senses at certain moments? How many important events has she already missed in this way?

The mire girl finds herself hoping that the little flying monkey voiced blurs of black will come and carry her away. Maybe even away from her body, if only they could.

Some of the branches of the forest look like enormous spears and she can make out that there're skeletons impaled upon them. Not only skeletons, but what was not too long ago, a breathing human that is partially covered by a blue tarp. Its face is genderless in a tongue hanging death pose. Her night vision is exceptional if she can make out all of this detail from the distance between her world and whatever horrific world lays in wait for her if she so chooses.

Those poor people. I wonder who did this to them? Were they alive when someone ornamented the trees with their bodies? I really don't want to go over there but it's like my body is drawn to that place. The trees whisper to me all of the horrors in my mind as well as all of the horrors in front of me. I could face them there, maybe even die in those giant suffocating branches. Maybe the trees themselves killed all those people. No, it's the city that I'm interested in. I won't find out who I was if I go into that forest, unless what I am is death. I'm not sure yet.

She turns her head to look down different yet somehow familiar corridors of festering streets with decimated underground parking lots propping up the crumbling walls of two to five story remains. Giant orange letters protrude from the top of a deeper orange building. It's like a poorly carved jack o lantern with its square broken window eyes and busted in double door mouth. It's a pumpkin carved by a hammer.

Another storefront is a vegetable green that gives way to black. It was once on fire. A square plastic avocado that's been roasted and melted.

She doesn't know where she is but it's all familiar. Though the dangling cobra street lights and abandoned dulling cars exist in a fog of memory loss. The endless sidewalks are paths that lead to more and more endless sidewalks.

She imagines herself as that of a white whiskered, grey clad member of a fellowship. Every direction is familiar and yet completely unfamiliar, dropped and smashed into the bottom of her mind's abyss. Every landmark is indistinguishable and built of confusion. She laughs to herself.

Great. I don't know where I'm going and I don't know where I am.

She sits down in the middle of the road, criss cross apple sauce, between looming buildings and power lines and train tracks and splinters of trestles. She watches the surroundings and her stellar vision stops upon a concrete barricade and a six foot section of rusty exhaust pipe tubing laying beside the crack and crumble bulwark. There's a grassy field below the barricade which parallels the gravel and tracks and is like a hidden island between caissons under a rotting sea of city.

I wonder who or what might live down there.

She stands and walks to the barricade and sits on its decomposing surface facing the depths of the below and witnesses an ancient grassy field shuddering at the slight breeze that also catches her hair and tickles blonde crusty strands across her face. The mire girl pulls her hair back and holds it like a rope behind her neck. And her eyes focus on the roof of a destroyed car, maybe a Jaguar protruding from the tall grass; a dream of luxury like the pillowy interior of a fancy coffin. The torsos of other vehicles protrude from the switchgrass like silent predators hunting the Jaguar. Watching. Biding time like a handless pocket watch.

The mire girl turns her interest away from the stalking scene and focuses on another bulwark. The barricade just under an overpass sits as a warning that beyond its situation is another significant drop off. And a message is painted in who knows what liquid. "Proctor was here."

Maybe that was the name of the old man. That idiot. Maybe not but maybe I'll just go with it. He could have easily stood here and painted these words. I don't know. It doesn't matter because for all his fury, he's nothing now. And yet nothing is still something.

She shrugs in her mind like the air shedding its light.

On another barricade she witnesses more writing. "Mother don't hurt police." "Help too fast." "Jane was here." "I am the island."

That I am, stranded on an island of myself, by myself. Surrounded by memories that I can't remember. I wonder who Jane is?

She can hear people again as she decides to open her mind to her ears like a priest officiating at the eucharist of her own body. There're dim sodium lights in the distance that she was subliminally wanting to avoid but has since changed her perspective after witnessing the ominous dark forest. Maybe she should try to figure out who she was so she can figure out who she isn't. She's hoping that the "isn't" comes just before the word "lost."

The girl from the mire finds that she's apparently curious by nature, if such a thing as the human nature of curiosity exists. It's not something that has ever been able to be pointed to in history, only really as notions of concepts.

She doesn't really have an identity because she has no memory of her past, and yet, she also seems to identify with loss and longing and has taken such an identity out of necessity, perhaps like everyone else.

She's the girl who can't remember but who's feelings creep upon her emotions when something moves in her minds abyss, like losing her memories that are already lost. The movement triggers a reaction of mostly tears and frustration.

Perhaps she's walking away and toward herself at the same time. It seems so sometimes, what with killing rats and walking away and then toward her mind's destinations. Her mind's part of her body, though. Maybe it's not her body or her mind doing this, perhaps there is a third Cartesian option that she is only aware of as some kind of ubiquitous commandment. Some asshole who goes by the name of "God." She doubts that the great "It" notices itself, let alone her. She thinks that perhaps her body, more than God, is trying to tell her something.

Maybe I don't want to find out who I am. Maybe this is all that's left of me and I should figure out how to continue as I am now. I feel strong, like I don't need who I was to make me who I am or who I will become. But my curiosity and sense of loss seem to be winning, for now.

The mire girl decides to get up and walk parallel to the train tracks. She veers off her course when she notices more glowing eyes watching from the brick and stucco and rebar and rubble of ancient structures and their half fallen stories. She wonders what the creatures behind those eyes are. They don't seem to want to show themselves to the darkness or to her. Perhaps they're rats or other curious but terrified animals of some sort. Their eyes are like little green stars twinkling at her, complimenting the bright white stars in the sky. Perhaps they're also the ghosts of those who no longer exist.

She sits down in the street again, criss cross applesauce and pulls out the picture of the three young people from her tight pocket. She runs her fingers over their facial expressions and bodily confessions. If only she knew them, actually knew them as they were when the picture was taken. If only things were so simple to become so complicated.

On a billboard like a great rood above a rood screen of train tracks there's a slogan. "If you look back, you are lost." It's some kind of self help bullshit that holds no meaning for her.

I have nothing to look back on to be lost. I'm moving forward to look back and I am most definitely lost, but maybe being this lost is also, in a way, like being found.

She hears a rolling metal sound in the distance. The perfect intervals of thumping become closer and closer as the breathless silence fades further and further. She becomes aware that it's a train. She positions herself toward the oncoming noise. The sound is very familiar to her and a smile blooms across her face like spring advancing on winter.