Mar 31, 2011 20:27
[Everything is gold.]
[Above you the sky is a vast dome, cloudless and glittering with honey-yellow light. Below you a rolling field stretches out infinitely in all directions, warm with cherry red flowers. Poppies, or wildflowers, something you can't really name because you never paid much attention to that sort of thing. But you know them by smell and by texture. The shape and feel of the petals beneath your bare feet, and how they smother every blade of grass beneath them, carpeting the visible world. If you pick one you can see the shape of them: twin stalks entwined, petals pressed back to back, and two delicate little white leaves, like wings.]
[You feel drowsy. Warm. If you step, the flowers around you are crushed under your feet.]
[But there are plenty of flowers, aren't there? Enough to waste so that it doesn't matter where you walk, so you do. It's such a lovely day for a stroll. And as you do you remember what you failed to notice before, the thorns. Little icy white thorns that tear at your feet and freeze them, and soon they're streaked all over with cherry red, stained by crushed flowers. It's unfortunate. And now you feel cold.]
[You get numb.]
[You taste blood where you walk.]
[The gold sky turns liquid copper and your toes are so cold they burn when they bleed. To hell with sweet little flowers, you can just stomp on them. Crush them. Vicious, worthless weeds. What good are they? They taste bitter, and you think you remember that your mother liked them, maybe, but she doesn't really like anything anymore anyway.]
[So you stomp the flowers into the dirt, thorns and all, until it looks like you're wearing burning red slippers and you taste blood so much that it spills from your mouth and chokes you. Overhead the sky is a cold, cloudy iron grey, but you aren't looking at it anymore, are you? You haven't looked up for ages. You just tear at the earth with your fingers until you wake.]
stephanie brown,
!luciela,
sousuke aizen