RoadKill

A woman is hyper-fixated on the concept of roadkill (read by me!).

God must have hated her from the start. There was a large, dark freckle that sat right in the middle of her left cheek, seeped out of her pale skin like an abyss.

He must have hated her from the start to conceive her with such a form, a strike upon her cheek for the entire duration of her fleeting and pointless life since the moment of her creation. She was smited.

It’s true that God must have hated her because He made beauty, and beauty is symmetry. It’s the unnatural perfection of organic matter in reciprocal patterns. The world was created in entropy, matter smashing together in form to degrade just as quickly into a million particles again, atoms organizing and disorganizing in the frenzied polyamory of life. Her matter sat in the guts of her mother, they organized and re-organized to her full evolution, her DNA hand-picked in the chaos of gene swapping, cursing her derma with the black spittle of God’s order upon her face. That spot grew from a small seed, like her, a blotted mass, a clump, into a larger and larger form, specializing and adapting cells to the formula of her species’ genetic makeup. She was spelled out all along, the fate of her kind always as predicted and with no exceptions. She would die some day.

Her freckle would finally embrace entropy, splitting within itself just as it would from the rest of her unblemished skin, sinking into her face after the autonomous reason of her greater being ceased to send orders to the rest of the body. After years of unconsciously keeping her body in living performance, of being composed up, it would decompose

Maybe when she was a baby she was just that freckle, her consciousness now an extension of that dark mass. It certainly seemed to occupy her thoughts like it worked at the center of her being.

She scratched her left cheek absently, staring out of her windshield to the darkened world. The yellow lines were the only discernable shape to signal her movement in space. The darkness of the woodside around her was almost imperceptible, shielded from the weak reaches of her headlights.

She thought that when she started to degrade in death is when she would be most pure, more innocently and perfectly formed. Gross puss bubbling from her rotting core, her guts blooming into an extravagantly lawless microbiome, mold creeping across her body and eating her away. She wouldn’t be this composed mess, skin wrapping everything up so falsely neat. All those working parts, stuck together somehow, would be free. She would be divided into each cell, liberated into so many microscopic pieces and left to join her matter in the matter of the entire universe. To be indistinguishable from the majority of other living things that had died and had their matter absolved into.. Well into God, she supposed. The degradation of her penultimate form, that would be her sovereign state. Not this heap of flesh masquerading in a layer of social and ecological systems, an animal combating instinct and wearing godliness on their skin.

Her headlights illuminated a hunched shape on the side of the road. It was a tuft of mangled fur, some tragic and violent end to a skunk.

The stench of the dead thing was pulled into her car through the vents, and she insensitively covered her nose and mouth with a gloved hand.

That’s the smell of chaos, she thought.

What would the world smell like if everything sloughed into individual atoms? In a moment, what if everything that was something became nothing perceptible? Nothing to name the nothing, nothing to be named, and nothing to call it by anything anyhow.

And how would the world look? Like a bunch of bubble-gum pink guts strewn about trees? As if every atom was a magnet next to the wrong polarity and matter exploded out from all living things. What would the incompatibility of atoms, of complete entropy of everything be?

What was the compulsion of being made-up? What commanded order to be in its fleeting stability? To interlope for a lifespan in near perfect order only to inevitably cease being- what was the point of smelling good for only so long?

Perhaps entropy is only possible by restructuring energy, the rising and falling of organization, reaching apex evolution and dissolution in an oscillating pattern, seemingly random but all perfectly ordered and synchronized in a periodic graph of life. Being and ceasing are not mutually exclusive, after all.

Organisms weren’t meant to be beautiful. That’s just evolutionary selection. Organisms were meant to function, and even so they weren’t really meant to be at all.

She thought of the skunk again, a blip of an image barely braised upon her mind. In recalling it, she envisioned the details that she perhaps couldn’t even see at all, the exposed flesh crawling slowly out a split seam opposite her car headlights, willed by the slow urge of gravity. She was unreliable (what was the perpetrator wearing?) in recounting the event and she embellished her glimpsed view for the fun of speculation. That dark red-purple strip of exposed muscle (she supposed), starkly colorful in contrast to the black and white fur, was the reveal of chaos in an ordinary world. Sort of how the sky never looked like it was a part of the landscape, but instead were two separate factions. There was something unearthly about the clouds in context to the creatures that crawled upon the soil and objects condemned to contact with Earth’s surface.

The skunk was unzipped.

The muscle wove itself into bone and adhered itself to inner-skin, a complex textile composition masked by a more palatable coat pattern. The striping of a skunk was interesting enough to the naked eye, but what intersection of texture, color, and lines would be unveiled through a slice-view of the organism?

Life was organized in a hierarchy of beauty, the sky the most beauteous end of the spectrum, bordering ethereal. Deep in the core of the world was molten nothing- destruction- and imperceptible, perfect entropy. The sky was inspiring, a mimic of human beauty standards but almost tauntingly unachievable by physical forms. Humans, on the other hand, were as lowly as they came until they were even lower in death, eclipsing the perceivable beauty realm by slipping under the skin of the Earth to dissolve into its core.

It’s so interestingly human to protect our living forms, our perceptions of importance, shielding our decomposing bodies from the elegance and judgement of the skies by prematurely placing our bodies 6 feet in the ground to slip into entropy unabashed, to be destroyed piece by piece in peace. It’s a practice as much to protect the collective society as much as the individual (victim?).

It was so delicately handled by humans, as life is the only sacred thing we have.

But how callously are other lives destroyed by our ignorance? We shield ourselves from the rotting corpses on the side of the road, but we are the same. We just pretend more than animals can by some evolutionary quirk.

This skunk was rearranged by high-impact collision, the perfect order of an active, autonomous being decimated at the blow of a speeding vehicle. Its form was enacted on by another energy.

She wondered, upon impact, how close the tire was able to get to the ground with a mangled body below it. In that violent instant, did the tire treads touch the pavement, inserting its rubber matter betwixt inside and outside matter of the skunk? The car was an unorthodox blender, diversifying the organic matter for an instant and speeding up the decomposition process. As much as we prolong our own descent into entropy, we strip that prettied privilege away from other organisms. We must borrow it from other beings of the Earth, steal away their proximity to beauty, to the sky.

She didn’t want to take part in this human ritual. It would be one thing if she was a part of the ecosystem that feasted on the flesh of these casualties. Instead, it was more akin to a byproduct or consequence of human existence.

Persephone, her cat, was perhaps the only perfect thing whose whole was well worth its parts. In a social sense, she was pure aristocracy with her white fur and pale blue eyes. She was status and luxury.

She was enthralled to be reminded of her companion back at the apartment, and envisioned Persephone curled up close to her while she re-read the fall catalogue and ate stovetop mac and cheese.

Luxury, the word came again. She would never make a good model, she thought, with that freckle on her face to distract from the assessment of the symmetry of her features. Eyes would wander straight to her cheek and get sucked into its mysterious darkness.

She pulled into the driveway of her apartment, a small house in the woods with several add-ons protruding from the main frame that were subdivided into apartments. Aggravation livened her blood as she parked in the adjunct paved driveway, outside her permitted spot.

Her asshole neighbor had been parking in her spot the last few weeks. His rejection of unspoken order was eating at her.

She heaved a sigh as she closed the car door and walked past his car, a plume of her regret lingering in the air near his vehicle.

When she opened the door, Persephone was at her feet, no doubt excited from her slumber by the sounds of clinking keys against the doorknob.

“Hello my sweet, how was your day?”

The cat followed her from spot to spot in the kitchen, from sink to stove and back with her eyes intensely trained on her owner’s hands, eager to get affection at the chance of their idling.

Persephone sat looking up curiously while the pot of water came to a boil and the macaroni was dumped into the pot. She was to bring the pasta to the brink of near dissolution. After all, she didn’t want mash and cheese for dinner.

The cat’s meal was smooshed with a fork into the small cut-crystal bowl, which she garnished with a bit of tuna juice from an opened can in the fridge. Persephone was mewing incessantly, dancing at her feet.

Grabbing her own bowl of food, too, she lured Persephone to the living room to dine with her. They ate together in near silence aside from the occasional slurping from the cat and the scrape of her own mindless forking of the mac and cheese.

She grabbed the fall catalogue fashion magazine and flipped slowly from page to page, as she often looked at releases many times before the next issue was available.

She examined the gaunt frames of all the models, slenderly filling the pages and making interesting sects of negative space with their lanky limbs. She brought the magazine closer to her face, trying to examine their skin closer.

The print was just a culmination of colored dots. From a distance they perfectly imitated beauty, but extremely close they were just an arrangement of small points. She couldn’t see any blemishes in the fuzzed impression of skin when looking closer.

The dots enmeshed and layered to make a perfect form, like the inverse of our biological compositions which aimed to make something beautiful but failed to coalesce as perfectly as a print. This captured beauty was perfect. Maybe that is where beauty eludes the organic form and only permits it in death, that unconscious stillness, unable to err.

The human body was even enacted upon by death, imposed on by small invisible worlds. There was no reprieve of motion in life.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a steady thumping sound from above, smooth and persistent.

“Ugh,” she drew in a sharp breath while looking at Persephone.

She abruptly grabbed a pen from the coffee table, jostling the other utensils in the jar and Persephone who was slipping back into slumber after a hearty meal. She turned her attention back to the perfect composition of dots in the magazine.

Starting on the first page, she looked at each model closely, then placed a circular mark on their cheek. She sometimes circled the pen several times, almost at a single point since the spots were so small. She flipped through every page, marking each woman with a black spot upon her cheek, discordant from the rest of the printed dots. She impressed herself on these glorified forms, her human life interfering with lifeless beauty.

With each flipping of the page, the upstairs neighbors accelerated in their lovemaking, loud moans now audible through the floorboards. She grew frenzied with them, matching their cadence. Complying to their orchestra almost by the principle of an inherent need for organization and the inevitable dissolution, to join them in their joyous celebration of entropy.

Persephone was the one sighing now, yawning and looking at her.

She flipped the page and was stopped suddenly, her pen hovering over one of the models faces before she slapped the pages closed and hurried her nighttime ritual to bed.

Laying in the dark with her eyes closed, she could still see the glowing white complexion of the last model and the small mole juxtaposed on her upper lip. Her sleep was haunted by the imperfect skin.

She awoke fitfully to the morning alarm on her phone. Wiping her left cheek and eyes of sleep, she rolled over, opened her eyes, and stared at the crease in the pillow next to her.

It was one thing if she was proud of her routine, of her contribution to the organization of society, this unnatural order and compliance to it. But she was ashamed of her expendability. She was nothing after all. Just an extension of a lineage of specialized matter, and perhaps not even that specialized at all.

Slipping out from under the covers inspired instant regret from a cold morning greeting. She grumbled and shuffled her feet to the bathroom, where she pulled her lower lids down into her cheeks with her fingertips and stared into her uncannily shaped eyes, the pink flesh distending down from the white bulbs, unveiled by her pulling fingers.

She cleaned herself up, slipping on a white button top and a red cardigan, pulling the scalloped collar embroidered with black flowers out from being tucked under the shirt.

Persephone started churriping for food, signifying that she was taking too long to get to the next segment of the morning routine. As yesterday, both human and cat meals were prepared and they ate in the company of the quiet morning.

With her jacket equipped and her keys in a gloved hand, she opened the door. She stared intensely at the beaten car in her spot in the driveway as she walked across the frozen ground. She turned to look at the window overhead where her neighbor lived and saw no movement through the curtains.

A dark thought crossed her mind just then. If she put a small hole in his tire, let the air out as it does from herself on this cold morning, it would be a small consequence of disorder. She could be an accomplice, an accelerant for entropy, a catalyst. A living being to enact on another- that was her privilege of consciousness. As is the nature of the human experience, she was supposed to be non-compliant and disruptive. Personally, she figured she had no grace to gain anyhow.

Let the skies see, she thought. Her imperfections had already seeped out by the blemishes of her skin.

She rushed back into the house to grab a tack from her sewing bin, surprising Persephone with her short absence.

“No pretty, I still have to work,” she said, frowning at the cat with sympathies. She traced the socket bone above her cat’s eye as she petted her head. The soft flesh of the eyeball was juxtaposed with the hard brow bone, so temptingly giving way to the light weight of her rubbing thumb. She had an impulse to push down. Suddenly, repulsed by her intrusive thought, she pulled her hand away and hastily headed back outside.

Glancing back over her shoulder to assure her neighbor was still sleeping, she dipped low behind the rear tire opposite the house so she could commit the crime concealed by the car body.

She hastily plunged the pin into the cold, stiff rubber hard, like she was taking the life of something and cutting into bone. She made such a poor shot of it that she had to wiggle the small pin back and forth to make it worthwhile.

There was no whirring sound. No sudden release of air from the tire.

She gave one more small shove of the pin into the tire while standing to her feet and ripped the pin from its place, removing the evidence. She harboured the pin (fugitive?) in her pocket, a reminder of her tour into disarray and disorder.

After quick steps to her car, unlocking and slipping down into the driver’s seat, she thought that she had gotten away with it.

She inspected the house in the rearview mirror as she drove away, not seeing a light turn on or other signs of awakened stirring. The still image captured in her mirror seemed more like a page from her magazine than a reflection of reality. It was as if she made no difference at all, hadn’t impacted the landscape, no perceptible dot made on the image by her hand. She could be half-convinced she was never crouched by the car now captured in her mirror, drifting further away as she drove the length of the driveway.

She drove to work in silence, acutely aware of a creeping migraine. She was hoping that a lack of caffeine was the driving force, so she sipped hot coffee, slipping one hand from the wheel in repeated motions to the cup holder, warming the length of her esophagus.

The light was slowly illuminating the waking world, unveiling the perceptible realm by emerging from the ground and brightening the sky. The sun was the only being that could be unearthed and retain its perpetual beauty.

Leaves scuttled across the ground, starting and stopping as encouraged by the wind. They looked like little mice teetering their weight slightly from one side to another in a quick, balancing movement of limbs- in actuality the leaves were teetering on the rugged surface of the asphalt, scraping by and emphasizing the uneven texture of the road.

She was blinking hard now, trying to combat the pain in her head. She was approaching the bright flashing of cop lights, which didn’t help abate the split forming in her brain space.

In approaching the cop vehicle, she noticed another car haphazardly parked near the ditch in front of it. The cop was standing with his hands on his hips in full uniform, nodding sympathetically to a woman in hysterics who was thrashing her hands about.

She was eclipsing the tandem-parked vehicles, and could see now that the front end of the woman’s car was badly misshapen with half the lights flashing the hazard signal, but there wasn’t another car on the roadside.

As she approached the front of the car and inspected the full scope of damage, she noticed a large figure in the ditch, its long neck bent at an unpleasant angle.

The woman had hit a deer.

She drove at a crawl, transfixed and trying to take in every detail this time, inspecting the roadkill.

…except the deer hadn’t died yet. Large heaves of breath were escaping from that mangled form. She pictured it shaking with each gasp, looking up at the sky in a frenzy. She thought about what the last moments might look like in an animal’s mind, perhaps a reel of memories playing before them in their dying moments, like they say humans do. Was it a flood of gratitude, of acceptance of the natural order of the world, a pure, innocent experience of dying? Humans never seemed to have that sense of peace. People are never satisfied, thrashing through life resisting death in ignorance.

That recap in death is probably nothing more than a human romanticization. Maybe it was laying there in labored pain, more afraid than it had ever been in its life, not knowing reality nor what happened, but aware that they were alone and they would not be saved. Maybe it was lying, paralyzed and wide eyed, waiting for the maw of some creature to start tearing at its flesh while its breath attempted to reach the sky and plea a deal with God. See me, see me, see me, she thought it might be thinking, taking in the surreal beauty of the sky in its final moments.

She couldn’t look any more, the clouds of air seemed to be getting less dense, less forceful. Life was leaving its body.

She sped off finally, driving rather quickly now that the scene had passed. Her blurry eyes obstructed any further viewing anyhow.

A gunshot suddenly rang out and she refused to check the mirrors again, wanting to leave the outcome unconfirmed by evading the aftermath.

She started sobbing fully, picturing her poor Persephone doomed to the same unknowing fear of pain and agony for which no comforting words could soothe her anxieties. She would be so animal, so afraid and alone. Perhaps she could offer a modicum of comfort, so that her last thoughts were happy ones. Like she could play God for a moment just petting her head softly to assure her that everything was by design and played out exactly how it was supposed to.

Crying exacerbated her headache. The pressure was so immense. She felt her head could collapse, hallowed inside so the shell of her face would crumble in, melt like wax. She felt it could implode like a balloon whose fate with a needle spiraled random fragments rapidly, violently inward. Her brow felt like it sunk half-mast, bisecting her pupils, heavy down her face and pulling a malformed dome to fruition.

She thought if she rolled her eyes just far enough, they could sink down through the hole in her throat and vortex her face down with it.

It was as if her head had been centrifuged, and her brain matter smattered tight against the inside of her skull, opening the space in the center, her mode of intelligence now insulation to empty space, an industrial, carpenter’s media

When she pulled into work she was no better off and isolated herself in her office for the day with the door closed.

She could only half-invest in her work, as a part of her brain was preoccupied with the deer. She wondered if the corpse was picked up yet, moved out of sight so passing drivers wouldn’t have to be reminded of death in the mundanity of life.

There were always signs, though. It was never a perfect crime scene, with bodies sometimes dragged a half-mile caught under tractor-trailer tires and flopping out of the wheel wells after being rocked free by the momentum of the vehicle. There were little bits of matter, skin and hair smashed into the ground. It was inherited by all the passing drivers of the road, smattering to each travelling tire until the ground was licked clean by the gripping treads, hundreds of cars lapping at the creature adhered to the road.

There was nothing slow about human living, but rotting was the act of savoring, holding life in its many forms before completely diminishing into mere particles.

Road kill… was the deer truly killed by the road? As a natural consequence of the pavement and the intent of pavement? Was it swallowed into its metaphysical tar pit? Or was it, instead, the fault of the paver who laid the asphalt? Perhaps the civil engineer who mapped the location of the roadway?

Was it simply the effect of the culminating modern society, which demanded rapid, unrelenting order?

Humans inherit disgrace. Born damned, like sinners, their imitation of beauty was as much their fall from grace as it was their attempt at closeness to divinity.

The freckle on her skin was a mark of banishment from holiness.

All the inconveniences of being creatures of Earth were overridden by societal innovation and ruinous to their harmonization with the inherent beauty of their being. Their artificial figuring, their organizing affecting all other things in the natural order, was forcing entropy- their abominable attempt at exercising the power of God (phonies).

Just as she was considering closing out her work station for the day, she jolted at the vibration of her phone on the desk surface, ripping her from her intrigue with death.

It was her spot-taking upstairs neighbor calling.

Her brain jolted to alertness at the memory of her actions earlier in the morning, having stuck a pin into his tire to deflate it and cause him some mutual anguish. Shit.

He couldn’t have known it was her. She would have to answer to avoid suspicion.

“Hello?” She tried to sound non-chalant.

“Hey- It’s your upstairs neighbor. I wanted to let you know that as I was leaving the apartment I noticed that your front door was open. I closed the door but also wanted to tell you because I’m pretty sure you have a cat.”

Her mind was reeling at this unexpected news and she grappled for words, only managing to utter a small throaty sound to fill the space.

“Hello, are you still there?,” he beckoned for response.

“I’m such an idiot- yes I do have a cat. Thank you. I’ll leave straight away to check on Persephone.”

“Alright, well let me know if you need anything. I hope it turns out okay. Just call.”

“Thank you, I will,” she said, resenting her words and simultaneously her morning deed.

She must have left the door open in her haste for justice.

If Persephone made it out the open door, she had the entire day to meander away. How could she find a cat in the woods? And especially now with the approaching darkness obscuring visibility?

Panic was starting to scatter her thoughts as she left the office and made for the apartment.

Speeding home, she kept glancing at the lights of the cars behind her in her mirrors, like soulless gaping orbs stalking after her. The horde of eyes droned after her, equidistant apart and shining with a hallowed emptiness that marched synchronized to the shape of the road.

The animals in the woods would have those same glinting eyes, heads alert over the vegetation trying to locate her crunching presence in the dark woods as she searched for Persephone. Only once her flashlight swept the ground would those eyes show back, reflecting the beam like a natural imitation of her fake illuminance, not some respectful imitation but more a defiant ridicule of her own mimicry.

Taking her exit, she flew onto the main roadways, barely reducing speed. The trees were slipping from the foreground and looming after her car on both sides of the road, stretching out from her high beam lights like snatching fingers, crawling after her car.

Maybe Persephone would be hungry, and she could leverage that primitive need to lure her home. She could only hope.

The skunk carcass came to mind as she passed the spot where it laid the day before. There were so many roadways that intersected the woods, it was almost certain Persephone would have to cross one if she was wandering about outside. She could feel her face sink and half-expected it would recede below the pedals at this thought.

How could she be so foolish!? Her poor Persephone! She hoped she wouldn’t have to see that perfect being by the roadside. She was agile and swift, soft and beautiful. She captured the femininity of humans in that idealized little form. Even when she threw her leg over herself to clean her asshole did she manifest an erotic perfection in her flexibility and contorted silhouette.

She was so perfect she didn’t even know of her own mortality, her imminent demise that inherently flawed her. She did not ask for mercy or relent time wasted as a mistake in the very finite amount of time she has been granted. In some ways Persephone was closer to God than she, although she was supposedly made in that murky, conceptual image.

She stifled another cry.

She didn’t want to see Persephone in the road, jagged and raw. She tried to protect her from the judgement of the sky and the ground that wanted to swallow her whole for nutrients, keep her safe in the dark of her home. She wanted to distance herself from the fullness of their relationship, from seeing the full course of their existence together like she could with any other human.

When her parents died, she wouldn’t need to find the bodies, drag them to the grave, and pile each shovel-ful of dirt onto their staring faces, pointed up and stiff. She was so removed from death. It was supposed to be more respectful, right? She wouldn’t even have to touch a dead human, not ever, in her life.

She didn’t want to see Persephone dead and have that moment etched upon the memory of their perfect life together. The grief was so great, weighted with the sure anticipation of coming across a cat carcass as she drove closer to home.

Her eyes were blurring with tears now.

Turning the corner, a bright white spot low to the ground dashed onto the road in front of her car.

The tires wobbled at her swinging hands on the wheel. As much as she tried to avoid it, she heard a hard thud as her car smacked the thing.

“Fuck!” What did I hit?

The car came to a dead stop and she parked crooked in the middle of the roadway.

She was trembling. The tears collected on her lower lid nearly slipped over her waterline with the turbulence of her shaking frame. She stared straight, beyond the lighted roadway and into the darkness.

With shaking hands she opened the car door, staring down at her feet to let the tears fall onto the pavement. She didn’t care if another car came to knock her down right then. She deserved the fate she doled out.

She blinked fiercely and scanned the ground for signs of what she’d hit.

Through tears she saw the white shape starkly contrasted by the dark atmosphere, floating out like a ghost about the black-blur of her vision.

She nearly collapsed, staggering forward and planting her knees to the ground. She reached her hand out, stretching towards the thing.

Was it her milky white fur she was seeing? Persephone?

Full sobs retched out of her form and she bowed her head down on the loose asphalt debris.

Her Persephone!

Wiping rocks into and tears out of her eyes, she spittled to the ground and crawled, palms scraping, towards the small white space in her vision. Her palms must be sopping up so many particles, so many beings culminating and meeting on her hand.

It would be a composition of different parts, a Frankenstein, none of them able to form in proximity and compose back up with the catalyst of her heat. They couldn’t mold together like clay with the closed squeezing of her hand.

The white blob grew into a distinguished shape the closer she crawled.

Though her eyes were combating tears, she could make out little paws tucked together and stretched out. She instantly thought of her cat, stretching in her sleep, head hunched over her legs and her front paws wrapping her face, shielding her soft features.

It was limp, unmoving, but not yet stiffened by rigor mortis.

Her pink little nose must be tucked into those paws, concealing her identity in fear of recognition in this pure, vulnerable state.

She deserved the privacy of a closed casket.

“No, no, no!,” She whispered, afraid of calling the attention of the stars to her atrocity.

Still some feet away, afraid to confirm her suspicion which was growing into certainty with each passing second, she reached a hand out to touch the fur of the dead thing.

It felt just like Persephone’s soft coat.

She pictured all the times she’d run her hand through that fur, looking at the small variation of color in each fine hair. So soft.

The sobs were ugly and uncontrollable, now quite sure that she was petting her dead friend, although the teary eyes made it hard to truly confirm. It was probably a lot like identifying a body in the morgue, the brain wasn’t able to fully process what the eyes were seeing even when looking at the bleak gore the lifted fabric unveiled.

It seemed like a small blessing to be crying so hard. She really didn’t want to see anyhow.

She wound those fine hairs between her fingers by rubbing her fingertips in circular motions against her skin. She didn’t care if she got blood on her hands (incrimination). She thought maybe she could keep a part of her by wearing her, some of her nutrients absorbed into her own functioning frame.

With that soft fur enlaced in her hands, she realized that it wasn’t really ever the composition that made her valuable. It didn’t matter what Persephone was made up of, all that blood and being was nothing of importance- but it did have an important role.

It was the sentimentality of the composition- the finiteness of its being- the fleeting- that was beautiful. It was the ticking of the clock that made one aware of passing time, like the objects on the side of the road blurring past signalling movement.

The biological clock, those innards that spoil, was the value. Expiration makes living worthwhile. Beauty had little to do with how something was made up, but simply the fact that it was made up at all in this random world.

Life was a firework show, blooming light temporarily flaring across the sky in bright patterns, imperfect, holding out the big series of rapid explosions for the finale that is death. All that energy culminated in a perfect, orgasmic explosion.

It’s the way it always was, the way it was supposed to be, and the way it always will be.

A small breath came from the figure and she crawled close to comfort her.

She moved slowly towards her, closing the foot of space, and softly laid her form against the small white creature, careful not to squish her.

She let her warm breath blanket them and her tears fall between them, a salty substance to glue them and blend their matter together only temporarily, bonded just as they had been in life- shortly.

The muscles in her neck relaxed, she let go of all the strain she was feeling and tried to picture the two of them sinking together into the ground.

After some time, she bowed her head, steadied her hands to the ground, and pushed off to stand, not looking at her still friend. Instead, walking back to the car, she looked at the fur matted to her hands.

Those little hairs, stuck to her palms and scattered around the floor of the apartment, were all she had left of her.

Something would slink Persephone off the road, feast on her delicate frame, savor her again.