It was with vaporish slenderness

It was with vaporish slenderness, spawned upstream from this, magic reservoir, that the distant terminals of my body cut through harder veins of metal strewn up from the groundcover. I felt like an illusionist who had forgotten her secret partway into the performance. No method of retreat arose and no desire came to fight the survival impulse that drove the toes to push her forward when it should have been her rib bones undulating. These ribs were now part of another body laying across the room attempting to contort itself beneath two (2) columns of stacked chairs. The insistence on creating a seamless and defensible configuration is overshadowed by the strain of twisting around the ganged legs that finally forces some fingernails to grapple forth for a composition close enough to the goal that the mist now emanating from the heated body can mask any discrepancy.

It was with refrigerated velocity that my limbs, seen seemingly segmented at several points per limb by each upended steely vein, settled from the vibrations of strain as if carried by, but merely having a velocity congruent to, the moist darkfall. In this vantage back across the hall of legs, the outflowing blood effluviating from the breaches scored by exhaustion tinge the cloudscape, backlit, a pearlescent mauve and rendered the becalming limbs fleshy as they progressed in their automatic action. The outstretched fingers and the ankles had the same cornflower pallour as my neck and trunk which I could just apprehend with a lubricated labor. Although barely construing the continuity of my gaze with the envelope of my neck and clothed torso I could identify these as under my control, even as they shivered without communication their distress. The extremeties, though they pursued my gestures throughout the day and came to rest here beneath these chairs, were foreign and pointless to me. These characters, which could be seen to emanate from my trunk, did not register in the cruciform catalogue of my territories. In dusk, when gazing out to see an arm reaching toward the round foot at the terminal of a metal chair leg, this arm, seemingly attached to my trunk, was not in any way my own. With this vision the gaze shifts on a current of damp from the oblique, downcast vista to one that is distant and detached, as if through liquid gauze.

For brief instances, looking out across the configuration of limbs, I could see that they were of one body. The cornflower and beige pallour, the similar clothing of corresponding colours and level of wear indicated a unity. Yet, at these moments when I recognized one body, it was from across the room; perhaps it was seen through the astragal. When I saw the composition of this body it communicated no sensory qualities. It looked silly and strange, foreign and pointless.


Critical Response:

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