Clear Red Palpitation
By E.L. Winston

There are times when one first awakes from a night of degenerate acts to an hour of clarity. The air in the house settles with the dust in all corners, outside the winds mate with the sun and the wild rose bushes give their thorns a little more length.

The clarity multiplies like a virus into the body, spreading into and opening the cavity at the middle of the chest, leaping up the neck, then the face, and finally behind the optic nerve. Stacking itself up like a blackberry in small proportions of bulbous fluid. It settles like dust and covets every optical vision you come across. Illusions become people with moods, and preferences. They have faces and skin color, moving in different ways. But they hide regardless of this, fooling the eye without clarity into an ominous monotone lying to the four chambers within the beating vessel begging rest in its cavity. The vision starts to dissipate when the hour is almost upon you. The bulbous fluid in the brain is starting to burst, one small proportion by proportion. The body becomes unstrung, like a puppet master cutting her marionettes strings. The limbs swing down to the torso, the hearing goes insane swinging to different sounds and vibrations. One millisecond listening to the broken backyard gate hitting the side of the neighbors’ house only to swivel with the sound of a mouse hiding in the kitchen’s small pantry.

The marionette master touches with invisible fingers the cold burst of internal flesh residing within her individual brain. But she has lost the ability to see and her hearing has developed a mind of its own; leaves her without the senses you take for granted.

When the degenerates lit her afire she lifted tan arms to the sky while being both blind and mad extinguished the flames with the water leaking from her skull. By now the blackberry had burst from within.

Now she sits charred next to the river, still blind but the madness isn’t what it used to be. I lie next to her and she is happy to speak to someone who won’t judge her slightly mad mind. I am her confessor, yet so are you, you and you… Only she thinks we are all the same when she touches us. Our scents have been captured by the river's breeze when she rests her head on our shoulders. I crease her blouse with my hands, and she touches my hair when the white noise floods her ears. She reaches both elbows out as she grabs her ears, then forces me into the same position.

I reach to touch her but she refuses, running down the river bank. I would have been driven mad upon hearing the white noise as well, but I have been deaf for years.

 

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