Autolysis

389 Words of Fiction.

“Autolysis”

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The path is not its typical beaten crimson. Its bricks shift in static flecks, shades of gold and maroon. I want them to stay red. So they do.

I skip. Air carries my hair, my dress.

The sky is still, suspended above dusty flats peeling up into amber mountains.

Yellow light, not from any sun. Through me.

The pit is somewhere ahead, out of sight. I skip faster. I want to be there already. To lean over the lipped edge, stare into the grey spiral descent. I want inside.

Mid-hop, one leg lifted, and I’m touched. Taken. Warm liquid, sudden, total. It moves back to front, swallowing. My eyes close before it can finish.

I let it take.

My drowning is immediate, but not violent. I don’t fight or thrash. I am still, floating. Light, extinguished. In this water, I am alone with the distant sound of beating.

Then, erupted. Ejected upward without choosing. Turned. Drawn toward the only visible opening: the surface of a glowing pond.

I reach it, breach at its center. Turquoise water. The space resolves around me: a sweating cave chasm.

The noise is louder now. Too loud. I cup hands over ears but it barely muffles. The sound is structural, inside the walls, inside the space. My eyes follow, climbing along a ridge of rock until I see it.

An indigo heart, whale-sized, bulging through the cave wall, pumping. Pulsing.

Arteries web outward, rooting into the slick stone, threading it, burrowing like pink worms in dirt.

Captured by its deafening force, pearl saliva pools in the corners of my open mouth.

I am lifted.

Rising toward it, limp bodied, weightless in the dank blue air.

We become level, face to valve, close enough to feel the pulmonary pull and release, the glossy heat.

I embrace it. My limbs wrap tight, inelegant, insistent. Child on the playground who will not let go. Who will not go home.

We are two wet bodies, clinging, coalescing like watered blue paint.

The beating intensifies.

Sound turns visible, waves shooting out with each contraction, bounding off the cave walls in blinding, iridescent rays. Everything begins to shake.

The heart’s system thrashes. My grip loosens. The muscular mass strains, swells, splits. Collapses inward, combusting under its own rhythm. The walls follow.

This place cannot hold shape.

All squelch into grey.

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