by Laverne

Created on: February 12, 2009

She stews in the bathwater. Bones crack and ache inexorably beneath shrivelled skin.

The hours sing to her, serenading a vacant mind long abandoned in the maelstrom of truth...and all that is condescendingly real.

The room creaks. Sparrows hop on the old window sill, scrabbling flakes of paint into the bathtub in their frantic investigation of the silent giant stewing below. The collar of her grandfather's shirt hangs sodden beneath anaemic collarbones.

Above, the cracked roses on the ceiling snarl bitterly. Thousands of sharp words emitted from human mouths linger long in the plaster garden. Brown and curled with dust, the flowers without fragrance have lost their beauty.

Her cigarette billows gently, its smoke punctuating the afternoon gloom.

She floats awkwardly in the little old tub. Here and there, in a fitful moment, long sloshy strokes carve up the blue grey liquid. But after it all, she is still. As always.

She has been this way, stationed in solitude, for a good while.

Memory offers little repose. Past encounters are vague and refutable. Times exist which are regretted but happily gone, and supposedly valued in the realm of experience. But all are hours spent uselessly on the cultivation of qualities which are of no benefit - she snides at them.

Sound and speech are pesterers, collaborators in the frightening social world. The human voice has a propensity to stretch and harrangue oxygen. Conversation, she believes, is the price of polluted and forlorn air. Fifteen minutes with chattering hominoids, and the air is deprived of it's loose, ethereal quality - thickened by the bark of human interaction. The scum hangs off their mouths like gold tassels on the velvet curtains which cover missing windows to human souls.

She spends too much time alone, according to her mother and sister.

The eyes mirror nothing. Such an impeccable sense of delusion does she possess, that she believes solitude her only reprieve from worldly awkwardice. Her glasses, the panes of frosted glass resting on titanium frames, float in the water beside ghostly fingertips.

She knows there is no glory to this. Only cowardice. Only more long hours to lament her stupidity and wait for something better.More time to let the waters break up her soul like sodden bread, so that she can piece it all back together. Then, perhaps, finally understand the strange machinations of her spirit.

But the water gets cold. She shudders. The sparrows have come to eat her dishevelled exterior. It is too late to know herself.

The water takes hold. Too long was she inside.

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