A narrow denim jacket with bronzed snaps, enclosing a long column of reptilian conflagration: the jacket was warmed. Sheaves of sparks stiffened the sleeves. Each spearhead scale matte as ash, and the uncanny body was crowned with no face. The fingerless hand clasped a milk carton, with no where to drink the milk: the carton warped and charred, newspaper in the grate, but not a white drop was shed.

The broad, mottled carpet of rust pounded and rolled to a level finish, the walls festooned with silent chains, giant links to hold the weak and the strong alike, bolts and cuffs and yokes, all roughened with the same texture and hue of decay.

The faceless flame sought to pass through the bars, thick as bottles, but it could not without leaving behind its threadbare jacket and crumpled brown milk carton. A dog, vague in the floor shadows beyond, hated the faceless thing’s fierce light, and bit the bars, seeing no ankles. The biting broke the bars, and the flame passed out with its treasures, and a thank you to the savage dog, which snarled and sneered, but dared not worry the squid’s head tail of the departing fire.

2023/03/14 #DailyWrittenOOM

She set out to walk across the lawn – the tangible thing had reached it first, and wove itself throughout, as though the meshed roots were up rather than down; the shadow of every grass-blade was a cluster, of circuited machine devices, sticky with intricacy. She set her bare foot down, pancake batter simmering onto inky hot grease; drawing her footsteps up, caterpillar treads of outlets peeling off of plugs on spring-loaded wind-up extension cords, or molasses. She walked on nails like the fakirs: every nail full of mouths, every mouth full of teeth as a shark or lamprey, every tooth serrated, jointed, shivering. The lawn a flat panel, the grass a flat sea of hiding places, blinds full so that they cannot conceal the seething overflow in every minute point, the darkness of concentrated coarseness of detail: the skin of her feet clung to it, drank it up, and the hairs on her arm rose. Unseen honeycombs crowded, filled, packed with larvae, which mature, hatch, and crawl when crushed. She drew her foot off for the last time from bristling, climbing stings that had rooted to the marrow in it.

She had crossed the lawn, and sat down on the floor to rub her feet, which were numb and flushed. She ran her fingers through her hair.

2023/03/13 #DailyWrittenOOM