It's all gone to the dogs

Glimmering and pale on the storefronts that were now just litter and tattered signs, everything must go un-spelled in shredded ribbons, rust-clatter cages pulled down over them. It was as if a long rain had come and washed all their insides away but the shells remained, which made it more miserable to drive past if you couldn't avoid it- there were promises there, not quite broken yet without a doubt never to be realised, because nobody cared enough to kill it all off, for certain. They could have brought it all crumbling down. They could have swung a wrecking ball at every building and roof until not a single brick was left standing upright. A pile of dirt would have been more settling. But the ambiguity that hung over those forgotten places left it sickly and unfinished. Groups of anonymous drifters in hooded sweatshirts huddled over crack pipes in the alley between what used to be a dry cleaner and a once-whitewashed estate agent's office. At night, the darkness disappears down the drains and into the sewers. The air forgets that it's made of oxygen. They say a girl was cycling down that road one March midnight and dropped dead. The coroner said the cause of death was drowning.

There was another death by drowning a couple of months later. Mr Rubens was taking his dogs for a run in the chilly mist of dawn, under a sky so silver-white with cloud cover there was no evidence of the sun having risen at all, except for the lights that were beginning to flicker on in the windows of nearby houses, the sound of car engines starting as commuters pulled out of driveways, and the birds. You could always tell by the birds. He thought it was a swan at first, or a bird at least, with white feathers. When he trod down the reeds by the water and got closer to what one of his dogs had dragged from the shallows with its teeth, he saw it wasn't a bird at all. It wasn't even an animal. It was a woman's nightgown, dirty, sodden. Mr Rubens' head frantically whipped from one side to the other, he thought about yelling but the thought was fleeting and a silly one anyway. He walked his dogs down to the police station and told them what the hounds had sniffed out. The area was taped up in yellow for a few days but the barriers were cut before the week was through. No evidence left behind. No body. No crime. 

//

Thoughts in dream textures. 

Too scared to write anything down.

Nothing is obedient enough.

Fluttering - breathing - praying -

I watch my eyes change colour like the sky, from black to blue to purple to pink again. 

Staircases looming towards me. Walls falling into me. I crack against them. 

I crack and I heal, which means there's some power left in me.

While he sleeps I daren't close my eyes, but for a moment I do, and I do not see the non-colour of my eyelides. I see a field, I see water, I see weeds gently moved by the swell of the stream, and mud, sinking sands, and sky, stretching farther than this world. Another place, another pathway. I see another person, she's running. In another time, another space, she could be standing in the shallow surf of the sea. Perhaps the planet is an entirely different one. Wherever she is, she's unreachable. The waves crash around her, blossoming and booming. They whisper. She can feel the water when she stretches out her hand, right there, where the bedsheets should be. A small gasp of air is drawn from her lungs- 

in that second, she decides to become a ghost.

//

One house was abandoned, without warning, the same week the dogs found the nightgown. There was no reason to believe the finding and the disappearance of the inhabitants were connected. There was nothing untrustworthy about them. The head of the police department knew the man of the house from years ago, when they were both on the police force, but marriage, his colleage had said, changed everything. He said he didn't want to carry a gun anymore. He said he wanted to keep his wife safe, make sure she never had reason to fear for her safety and want to move elsewhere, want to leave. He left out the part where he ought to have added 'with or without him' but they were old friends, they'd been cadets together, they drank beers at the local brewery most nights, they went to the run-down, unpeopled strip club once in a while, where the music was melancholy and the drinks were flat, but that's not why they went. They stumbled home, parted ways, with a lot of back-thumps and hollered praises. When his friend had disappeared, the head of police knocked on the door, looked in the windows, but didn't stay long. He'd look him up in the pages, figure it out, when he had the time. There was too much to deal with right now- drugs being sold in the old part of town that used to be all yellow and blue and pink, sunny, uncluttered, and glossed-over, like it was all new and for sale. A long time ago. It didn't take him long to stop wondering about the sudden disappearance of the couple in that house. Maybe they'd just moved, maybe she had felt unsafe, and had reason to now the town was falling apart. Maybe they'd gone on a trip. Maybe someone's relative was sick. There were so many assumptions, so many dead ends, and he was too busy to find answers, and it wasn't his business anyway. He was watching the sky from his bed the same night he'd checked the house, watching the moon swinging amongst the drooping clouds. He had a fleeting conviction, all of a sudden, that he hadn't checked the back windows. He hadn't gone through the gate in the fence and into the yard to check the back of the house. And he wasn't going to. He steeled himself to sleep, thinking soporific thoughts of the cigarettes he'd like to smoke, the women he'd like to see in that slip of a nightgown, standing there in the moonlight, and the summer that existed, surely, just out of sight. Things must be easier to forget than they are to remember. Surely he could let the heaviness in his chest and stomach slip away by just forgetting the thought, forgetting where it had come from, retracing his steps backwards. In his dream, he walked through the fence and saw the back bathroom window was broken, stained with blood, and strips of pale fabric, the same ribbons of satin that had been missing from that dirty nightdress, were clinging to the edges of the glass, gently murmuring in the wind.