| | 5 | |

The slithering train passes along the crook crane flat roofs of crumbling, weather discolour brick buildings. Some erections are severely damaged at the upper walls and appear as poorly constructed crenellations. It's a long drop to the pavement from atop the perceived embattlements. And there're only so many roofs to run and jump upon as the train restricts, so she must hurry if this's where she wants to get off.

The mire girl wraps her poncho around her waist and ties it under her almost non-existent belly and backs up until she places a hand on the opposite side of the car wall anticipating the right time to run. Sweat and hair crust mingle her brow. The timing hits and she stomps her bare feet into the patter of skin and metal and dives out of the boxcar mouth as if the tesseract were spitting away a piece of gum.

She lands upon the unstable roof, scraping her palms raw and then flips into a somersault, standing straight atop the ruin with her hands on her hips, feeling triumphant and truly alive for the first time since waking up in the mire. The wounds on her hands heal quickly. The grin on her face is of authentic pulsing adrenaline.

"What a goddamn rush!"

She sprints to the opposite edge of the building and plants her feculent bare feet on the crumbling crenellation and flings herself into the air, flying above the fissure between buildings like running across an invisible arced drawbridge aloft a yawning moat. The blowing force of the air is a tiny tempest upon her cheeks and arms and feet and her smile is dangerous and alluring and gasping in relief. Her hair is coated with so much dry blood that it remains a sanguine statue upon her head like a myth of bedlam in mid air.

She lands upon the next crumbling embattlement, head first into a somersault and when she stands, her momentum allows her to do a front flip and land in a crouching position with her knees bent and one hand upon the cold cripple tar to balance herself.

She gets up, proud and satisfied and walks to the edge of the building, leaping up the ancient broken ledge without a care for something as pathetic as gravity.

People exist beneath her, walking below with a pre-morning purpose. The working class stand around outside yawning with arms stretching in the air and coffee breath mouths open wide like wild primates civilized by an urban jungle. There're wife beaters and exposed womanly breasts with solid pink and brown areola and nipples lingering in the darkness of windows she can witness as clear as headlamps. There's much urination and defecation on the breeze and a lingering bodily humour within her curious ears and city oder nose. Bicycles become unchained with the clicking sounds of combination locks. People are preparing for work, preparing to continue rebuilding a city that is dying.

She can smell coffee and fresh bread and bacon and eggs. All of it also smells like the insides of mouths breathing temperature and traveling through language.

Then she witnesses the purple beginning of the dawn creep upon the horizon. It's a majestic event pouring itself across the bright black sepulchre desert of cement topography.

A number of brittle bricks and chunks of mortar crumble beneath her feet and smash into powder upon the street below. This time she's aware of her body going stiff and for a brief moment, the thrill of falling. The thrill of dying while flying.

                                            ****

She wakes in darkness, feeling a metallic pearlescent chill upon her nudity. She touches her goosebump thighs and smooth hips and curve belly and rib breast chest. Dry skin and muscle and bone. She can't touch her feet because she can't lift her head very far without banging her skull into a ceiling that thuds like ductwork. The space that she's sardined into is like a wobbly smooth coffin on her flesh. She's stuck in and upon metal like sleeping a nude night on a pleather couch. The mire girl peels herself off its surface as best she can with nowhere to move.

She can feel a string tied to her big left toe in a knot with a piece of thin cardboard hanging like an execution. A horrible thought surfaces from the airless chasm of herself. She realizes where she is.

I'm in a morgue. Why am I surprised by this? It's a natural situation I was bound to end up in. This cabinet's where bodies are stored and obviously I'm dead. But apparently I'm not claustrophobic. This is weird but not terrible.

She hears muffle footsteps and the barricade of a woman's voice reprimanding a subordinate.

"You're an idiot! You didn't think to put our new arrival in a body bag before sticking her in a cabinet? This is standard procedure that we've had here since this hospital was built! Now you'll have to sanitize the cabinet. That girl was filthy beyond recognition and I'm not sure if I got all of the blood and dirt off of her."

"Sorry, it won't happen again."

"Rookie move. It better not. Not ever!"

She listens to a hand grip a lever and a turning, unlocking sound snap in her ears. The cabinet door opens and her drawer slides out.

"Ok. Let's do this. Lift her over the cart and we'll..."

The mire girl sits up very slowly and turns her head toward the doctor. She looks directly at the woman. A blonde with a braid who's wearing snotty green scrubs and a snotty green lab coat along with a disposable mask and a cap. The doctor seems startled like the rat was before she bit its head off, a shaking green leaf in the wind unable to escape from its tree. Maybe it's the glow of the mire girl's eyes causing such terror in this woman's face.

Again, only one word comes into her mind.

"Boo!"

The doctor pisses herself. Urine waterfalls from her pants into her sneakers. It's the only sound in the unsettling silence.

The mire girl turns from the doctor and looks at her own stark body and in doing so, feels fresh. She's been scrubbed clean. Her hair is long and blonde and feels wonderfully combed and brushed. Her legs are smooth and clean of any dried muck and street sauce. Her skin is pale like a freshly painted dull wall. She smells like rain with a hint of adipocere. They even scrubbed under her fingernails and toenails. Somebody loved her.

"Thanks for washing me while I was unconscious. I'm pleased with the service in this establishment. Doctor? Can you tell me who I am?"

The doctor stares at her, almost comatose, but manages to shake her head and spit words from her terrified trembles.

"But, I did an autopsy on you."

The doctor faints. Her head makes a thud when her cranium hits the floor and bounces, seemingly knocking herself out while unconscious.

The mire girl shrugs at this turn of event. She can hear the green robed doctor's heart and the thumping of its perfect beating. It seems the doctor's morgue life will continue. Maybe.

She takes a moment to notice the room. It looks extremely and forever sanitary as it gives off a pale malachite aura mixed with stainless steel upon stainless steel. The walls are flat mint behind many white semi-gloss cabinets. Four autopsy tables stretch the room with all of the necessary accoutrements; scalpels and bone saws and shears and scissors and forceps and rib spreaders.

The floor's an empty railroad chess pattern of four digital-ish green vinyl tiles in a sea of white vinyl tile breaking upon an accenting, darker green six inch by twenty four inch tile bordering the perimeter.

The mire girl leans back and sits with her hands behind her back and her head tilting toward the centre of the wall that's in front of her. It's taken up by the cabinetry for the dead. Her eyes track the compartments from right to left in an arc. They're marked in sections of four beside sections of four and in categories of so-called main types of death: murders, suicides, natural and the category that she was placed in: unknown. Is it because she's unknown? She wonders how many cabinets have a body within and how fresh such bodies might be. She purses her lips and licks them. A hunger tickles her appetite.

Footsteps echo for a moment from behind and she feels a pain in her head. She twists her body to lay on one side of her buttocks with her legs curled beside.

Her right hand reaches for the top of her head and finds something protruding from it. The handle of a scalpel. She feels the curve of the steel and softly runs her fingers along the scalpel handle. The orderly moves slowly backward as she reefs the blade out and blood faucets down her face. The mire girl makes eye contact with her attacker. He has a name tag attached to his shirt. "Sheppard."

His eyes become wide in the face of her glare. Sheppard turns to run but he trips over his own feet and lands on his nose, breaking it. The scream he makes might scare other screams.

She's quickly on top of him, straddling the back of the terrified orderly. With a handful of hair, she yanks his head up and brings her face underneath his throat and rips his Adam's apple out with her crunching teeth. And she guzzles the dark red from the human fountain. Her hair becomes black carmine blonde and her face a flush sanguine by this act of instinct and destructive pedagogy of memory loss.

When she comes back to what's left of herself, she releases the orderly's head which falls at an unnatural angle, for the spine is severed and is really only attached by tethers of muscle and skin. The little stringy bits are what keep it from rolling away.

She crawls off the decimate corpse and sits on the messy warm puddle floor with her head between knees, blinking at the scarlet gore that's quickly drying on the palms of her hands and forearms and chest and she wraps her arms around bent legs. She looks at her feet and notices the yellow rectangular blood splotch tag strung around her left big toe and wonders if it shouldn't have been strung to her in this way from the very start from the depths of the mire. She fits a pointer finger under the string to yank it off. Her foot and hand move in opposite directions and the string breaks. She picks up the tag and reads the words printed on it.

Name: Jane Doe
Age: Sixteen
Sex: Female
Height: Five foot four
Weight: 103 pounds
Cause of death: fall from height
Place of death: FVR
Place of birth: FVR

Jane Doe. Of course. And it's a name that my body will allow me to know because it means nothing to my memory. I guess "Jane" should be my new name.

She remembers the cement barricades overlooking the car lost in the tall grass and the distant shed. One of the blockades had "Jane was here" written on it and one had "Proctor was here" splashed in a similar hand. She thinks for a moment, about the old man who came out of his red dent tin mausoleum as if he were trying to protect his civilization from her, hating her for its demise.

Maybe the whole city is a mausoleum because of her, just like the old man said. Or maybe it was always destined to crumble no matter what he or she did or didn't do. Maybe the mire girl and the old man were never opposites but fellow travellers upon a ship of fools, madness riding the madness of life's currents.

I'm a lost island in a sea of lost memory. Is this who I truly am? The dream of a nightmare? The horrible, endless final words that mean nothing? No! I can't be. I'm not a ghost. I exist! I just exist differently than other people. And I have a friend who I must find. Rist! I'm supposed to meet her in a park outside of a hospital. I'm in a hospital! I've got to get out of here!

Jane stands and looks down at the unconscious doctor. She pulls the lab coat off the comatose woman and wraps herself in the thin cloth, buttoning it up. Then she saunters to the orderly and grabs his waist and unfastens his belt in a whip motion.

She doesn't feel too bad for killing him because he certainly tried to kill her and he probably thought he would succeed. But then again, his reaction to witnessing what he thought was a moving dead body could've been a gut reaction out of fear for his life. It's the kind of unnatural terror that instantly turns hair gray. Well, he was right to be fearful. But regardless, the scalpel was a bad move on his part. Really bad.

Another unsettling fact about the orderly's murder is that Jane had control when she heard her teeth crunch his throat. She knows it and accepts it. The monster wasn't there. She murdered him herself. Maybe Jane is also the monster.

She wraps the belt around her waist and buckles the black strap by chewing a new notch in it; the taste of leather in her mouth reminds her of being gaged and beaten and almost thrown over a cliff for some reason. The belt itself was much too long for her waist, so she improvised.

Now she has a sickly pale green lab coat with a black belt accessory loosely constricting her waistline, letting her hips show curves.

Jane ambles to a sink and attempts to wash the blood from her face and out of the tethers of her hair. A mirror reflects the room behind her, and of course, she still doesn't exist in the reflections world. She places her right hand upon the looking glass, perhaps hoping to fall through.

It's really hard to clean up when I can't see what I look like.

This feeling is familiar. More familiar somehow than being ashamed of nudity, the nudity of a short, muscularly skeletal corpse of a girl. Something flashes in her mind, the feeling of someone behind her, cutting her hair. Tears sting her eyes for a moment and she feels the back of her head, her hair. Jane turns slightly around but knows no one is there. No one who might love her enough to freely cut her hair and let strands fall on the floor in a dull, blond ring. No one is breathing except the doctor who has begun moaning.

It's time to go. I'm afraid of what I...what my body might do to that woman if I remain here.

Barefoot, she tiptoes through the morgue double doors and hears them move back and forth as they open and close like a slowly descending pendulum coming to the end of it's motion.

She notices a blue exit sign twenty meters down the dim white wide hall and makes a run past other closed rooms as if someone is chasing her by watching her. And step by barefoot step, Jane doesn't slow as she crashes through the metal safety door and hurls herself down what seems like four stories of stairs, hurling herself from landing to landing until she busts through the exit door on the bottom floor and chases herself into the night.