She kicks

She kicks her shoes as she walks on each vertical rising out of the concrete, some tall enough to strike into the white sky, others just barely high and stiff enough to resist her limp motion, metal street sign posts, black iron security fence struts which she merely drags her leading left foot across, the legs of mailboxes, wire uprights of disposable for-rent signs, marking out a linear pen that stretches up to the horizon and diminishes. She is bound by external impulse to tap each with her foot until her shoes have disintegrated, are clean, in the same way that the impulses from beyond the horizon, beneath green dusks, march her forward away from the sea until she crumbles into dust under the rattle of endless footfalls. Each step toward a new reflection, a lengthening shadow, is a new doom, a new logic to satisfy. In her reflection are endless lists of scorned surfaces to erase and incompletions to amend. She presses her palm against the breast pocket of her smock. The stack of paper relieves a soft rectangle out of the fabric. Each card and folded sheet explains a failure, a lost world, a boundary. Papers drift into the canals from vaster seas upon weak tides that draw up only the most base of concerns, the elementary shortcomings for her to find, second-hand. On a landmass that is always sinking into that sea she climbs continually. When she finds sleep in dry secureness she awakens drowning in rising shadowy dampness. She watches through the pickets that line her canal the doors of apartments hanging open, shade, carpet, and mirrors, and the dropping sun in auto windscreens, stopped and still burning white. She kicks her foot across grey battens and silver weathered boards that bound the sidewalk. The boards run vertically up to her thighs and stop. She stands on the sidewalk side of this wall just a few paces along its length in the darker intersection of the long shadow from the apartment building she had just passed with the front of the new shadow she has just stepped into. All shadows make their way toward the horizon, marching in unison and slowly turning pale, transparent, before being all washed into dim beneath the great shadow of the sea. She drowns there, turning fluid, and drifting beneath the surface she settles into some alcove or beneath an open shelter, draped in marine umbra.


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