Lost Breadcrumbs

Her ears ringing. No one to answer. Her velocity constant. The distance not so much. What of this faded coat. That the winter wore me as. A brittle shell. Stiff with the echoes of a transformed larva. And melted snow. Long since dried up. In this drought called life.

Trying the numbers. Patient equations populate the scabs. Counting backwards from zero. Until, if ever, they should reach one again. The obvious shortcomings of words themselves. Evident in the tumult of memory. The pen pricks the skins. Delivering that callous remedy. A dubious elixir of poison and stubbornness.

Her feathers wilt. Her tail, but gone. Her eyes sink into her cheeks. The dead refusing to die. She attends her funeral. She stares as her body is lowered into the ground.

Arguing with time on the finer points of circumstance. The cork in the bottle. The pressure of the liquid inside. The eruption of cells that designates life. A pound of flesh she was told. But she believes it requires more. A body is profound with holes. But very few that actually let you inside.

She pities the worms that will feed on her flesh. As she decays from meat to skeleton. She greases the zipper at the back of her neck. And waits. For a hand desperate enough to pull on it.

She constructs her time machine in a mist of placebos. Confident her sickness is more symptoms than it is illness.

A breathless wolf. A homeless pig. The grim fairy tale of flesh. A walk through the woods. With no way home again.