When it plunged me. When they were plunged.
by Flo Fitzpatrick
When it brought me out the wardrobe, I didn't know it put me on me. But it put me on me, and so my eyes unchained themselves – so too my lungs alongside them, as the trachea gates came down and let the sandpaper air flood in.
Eyes: the depths of the forest; a canopy straddling the sclera
Pili: in tufts of a dark hazel, shooting from the follicles fully formed
Limbs: short and slender, binding 280 bones
Though it coated me in pruney beige, the lady towering above me was draped in blue. I felt her rubbery hands clasp mine, and I felt me on me.
Time: 6:33pm Location:
Leeds, St James, Gledhow wing.
19°: the cirrostrati slide across the sultry front, tossing their ice crystals into wispy halos around the sun.
I could feel me on me, I could feel me in me; the outside cascading inside, nitrogen and oxygen hurtling down my larynx, the oxytocin from the sides and from above, dousing me, in me
They felt themself. Their mouth gaped and their eyes widened. The bronchi led the air into the alveoli, in turn passing it into the bloodstream. The waste carbon dioxide was thereafter carried back and exhaled. They felt two pairs of hands exchanged.
INVENTORY
Select time: x am/pm
Select loc: see drop-down list
Select date: dd/mm/yyyy
6:33pm, Northumbria, 03.07.502 A.D.: see ‘A’
6:33pm, South-West Eurasian Plate, 2300: see ‘B
A
And so it coats me in the warmth of early July, the first graze to my skin. But wet, wet and sliding down my cheeks, and suddenly in my mouth – but again: the summer tickling me, in me; the smoke helter-skeltering from beyond my nebulous peripheral, torrid and fighting the stream that blurs the panorama ever more. More and more, but again it clears, and – oh – the smoke again, and water and smoke and more: a carpet of linen, soft, but something else, and something cupped, cradling me, me, and me among this smoke and water and linen? Smoke and water? And linen? Not me? Me?
B
It sears me. But it soothes me. Me, seared and soothed, into the light, light but heavy and the weight sits on me, like the weight just came out too. Too much, I am too much, am I not a fireball too? Yes, no, the flames in my throat, wide open and so is the expanse, tilting, why is it tilting? Casting away the sky of white tiles, sweeping me up in a whirlwind of hot air. Me, undulating, like the waves seeped through the casement screen, to carry me the seething heat encased within the tide. To carry me as it sears me, before the roofing panels thrust me into mercy: and here the waves crash onto my face, and now I know to rock my way through the blur, before the blur becomes a hand, lowering and disappearing, disappearing like the waves and the screen, the screen another screen, the tiles and panels again above me and polyester beneath me, and a yearning so acute it dents the pressure front.
Flo Fitzpatrick is an amateur writer whose work has been published in Bending Genres Journal and Hot Pot Magazine.