Accelerating Particles

Maybe a touch. Or something like it. Empty hallways. In a deluge of broken dolls. Their tiny fingers all pointing. At ghosts I can't see. The lurch. Her bones. Solving mazes in her muscles. The clench. Ringing bells as the nightmare loudly pursues. Deaf orphans.

The rush of the future. As it collides with the windows on my time machine. No one goes there. Cooking dead animals. Still too rare to swallow. The pulse of the demon louder as I listen for the cue. To enter that brash open stage where all is revealed.

The past draws its tourniquets on simple wounds. Sacrificing the limbs to save a few drops of blood. The motor thunders. As loud as it is ineffectual. The stiff arms of dolls draw the map. I engage the brake and ask where we've gone.

Just places she says. Conundrums of touch. A drop of honey to drown a mountain of ants. Stop lights at a time. We eventually get there. Life between the pauses. Just places she says. Where we've always been. Finding us.

Dials in our hands. The rod on the machine spinning unchecked. The particles that we are colliding. In a cautious dance. Sipping the future in crimped straws. The singularity obstructed. I wait to be lost to oblivion. And I am sorely disappointed.

The wolf in grandmother's nightgown impersonates the anecdote. Be careful what you wish. I throw the ladder out the window. But forget to attach it to something. We lose the building in our escape. The fall to the ground menial.

The Earth pushes into my skin. Like odd numbers. Long equations I don't understand. Like now. How is bleeds into the other chapters. Fragile gods on their tiptoes. Trying to see what I wish I didn't know.

It's not entirely our fault. That we go too far. Trying to measure the speed of machines that never take us to the places they've promised.

What time is it she asks.

I don't know. Too late for us.