She sees the sun leaking from the sky as she gazes out of the window. It pierces her eyes with prisms of dust particles, whilst she squints at exoskeletons dancing in the web on the glass. They beam light from empty centers, a glowing mockery of life. Blue smoke engulfs their crumbling demise before drifting with the aroma of hops.
In the gradual twilight, she sees last signs of life. Caught in no-man's land is a late bee, lethargically heaving itself around the dying buds of spring and flowers of summer. Those not yet succumbed gleam a cold white amongst the deathbed of leaves.
She moves into a different room.
Staring into her own eyeballs, she is distracted by the dawning realization that her surroundings are not as pristine as the off-white tiles suggest. Three tipulidae dance upon her back. One from before, one for now, and save one for later. Their wings tickle her with Time, as the glitz bleeds from the tips of her split ends.
She can feel the mud on their leatherjackets, smell the decay on their breath. Her fragile limbs spin her around, away from her reflection.
But then there are spiders. Big and intricate as the lines on her palms. They survived a tedious journey through dark places and scum, but they cannot touch the light. They have seen it looming above them in the fan-tailed, outer bliss, but they are trapped in the slippery slope of an insipid-grey purgatory.
The daddy longlegs are in her mind now, although she can still just smell the hops. They clatter and batter against the membranes in her skull, breaking their legs in search of light. But the vapid sun has abandoned the day.
Flailing down the worn staircase, she plunges out into a swelling of heavy, smoke-coloured clouds and a twinkling new sky that pulsates above her thought-ridden head. The door thuds behind her, rattling the dipteratic knocker as if she wished to get back inside.
She sees lightning, but she cannot hear the thunder.
With the eyes of a vampire, she sees life and death with startling clarity, as she wades through the excrement of spring. Stumbling along metallic pathways of ink, cobwebs swathe her face, rendering it mask-like. Only the smell of hops seems alive on a night when seven slashes of cloud scar the moon.
She can feel the longlegs implanting eggs in the rotting root of her brain. She knows their panic in the dark, she feels it too. Clumsily she continues on her way, trying to avoid the puddles of a season.
Time has escaped her. How long has she been out there, smelling the hops, with a mind full of tipulidatic cycles? It feels like years.
To be continued.
