She wheels backward
She wheels backward with nothing to lean against falling away from the streets and predictability, the genetic orientation in which her feet can lead. Away from the roads are passages without definition that dip beneath dark solids with continuous overhangs, the shadows of sea blanched timbers silver in the borrowed moonlight, and emerge, possibly, into winding valleys between windowless walls, or where walls would be is dark that she dares not reach into to break her fall. She ever deeper as the distant light, still lapping at the blinds in the front room, is lost in the curving mess of her descent, back to the earth, where it slumbers beneath the vaporous and dingy sea in an open space created by her breaths falling slower above her. The open air cells, through an enfilade of doorless portals are separated by more featureless gestures. These apartments are only the dark space between two doors. She falls to the ground, through a door, in a brick wall, lit green, at the mouth of an alley that lets onto a broad asphalt parking lot. Back west into the alley is that grey twilight filled with temptation and the surrender of the day. In greyness you awaken on a beach, back on a beach westward. Although the night eastward is drenched in gaseous green light, it is in that direction that the sun waits. She lays on her back in the alley, pointing north her left cheek on the asphalt sticking to fine sand with the night above her bespread it claims the firmament.
She turns her head against the sand to look directly up to the sky with no inclination or focus. The city is sinking. You can feel it with your back and with your equilibrium. Around the perimeter of your field of vision are the cornices of low apartment buildings flanking the alley to your feet and to your head. In the starless mauve sky from which the arc lighting of the parking lot has eradicated the momentary hint of moon off of sea you walked away from it. Perhaps it still streams through that window, or others abandoned, but you will not find them again and you watch the sky. You look into solid colours and into blank surfaces for change to arise. Everything else is complete, the brick, the dust, the lines of your heels dragged through the sand to where you lie, but those blank spaces, so rare in the day, where you find only dim, slow rolling over or finished lives, are not yet real. They do not coat this world or drape into it. Through their endlessness your eyes swim rising bouyantly up from the destitute slick of earth and dust. You as dust are carried with the hot vapours that cut through the heavier air and you fall almost back to earth again. With each night sky dropping down again yet not quite to the same depth, the ground, silty ground is falling away from the sky. As you are flat on your back you watch the emptiness above for it to change and awaken with imperfections that you might hold fast to lift you where you might see the rooftops, and the grid of streets, to where they end at some other sea.
In the absence of imperfections, colours from your eyes bloom in the sky, soft edged taupe and gilt floating rings and clusters. You close and open your eyes to fix them in space. Your eyes are dry and cold tears collect and run into your ears. The discolourations of the sky are frozen and the rooftops and cornices begin to drift outward from them, exposing new imperfections that are not yours, clouds wheeling out from orange streetlights, edges of moonlight, full fissures to brown black beyond. The sky is expanding as the city sinks and the dust your hands claw slips away. In years of days these streets and alleys will run with the tides to inter the dessicated corpses of dry eyed afternoons, to give us respite from the heat of the sun and float us out face down and deeper into the full ocean on a power other than our own. This evening we are afloat in a sky as far as the wheels of her eyes can twist. Brown with orange stars.
She is on her back across the smooth striping of an asphalt parking lot. In these higher grounds bodies touch places for years leaving no other trace but a lack of dust. Things will touch places forever that she will never apprehend, things that are not hers in an empty world hardly belong at all, or things she has relinquished do not exist to her any longer. Such things she carted along with her, once no longer with her they were something other, on their own, without her ceaseless mobility, and there forever starts for them, at rest.
You awaken on your back. You cannot fall asleep on your back. You fell asleep elsewhere. How many chambers in this platted land shelter empty and unmade beds this dusk? You awake with the full sky, which so many havens obscure in this city, spread in intimate proximity to your cheeks. Hesitating, the night is a pliable mask for you to wear. With its streaks, furrows, blotches, and sparks, it radiates the imprint of your face out beyond the space of your gaze, around which a strung chain of luminous and burning night lights throw spumes of orange gas into conflicted bodies that cluster in the air.
The sky stretched outward from the center of her vision. She was afloat in it. Your feet touch places forever. They never leave the pavement. Do the spots where your sock feet smoothed aside the dust on a hardwood floor remain? Forever? Does the pavement miss the soles of your shoes? For how many days will the minute traces of brown rubber remain ground into the concrete? For how many dusks have they been there? In how many will you float directionless with them, submerged. You now with your toes against the sky. The sky is yours each moment. Each moment it changes in your eyes. Each time you blink the dusty light of night suns flies out from your lashes in radiant haloes around your eyes. The night swirling with orange clouds is dry. On the shores of a great sea is a desert and your eyes are dry. They ratchet through your head tracing clouds of vaporous dust that pulse outward and then down, then catches up from its counterparts in a downtrodden wave, then is driven hard down and it is on you. The tangibly orange night, when you awoke you were cut from it, now it mummifies you in its growing dust storms. All around the parking lot glimmers of orange bloom in drifts against your flanks and across the pale white flowers of your dress arise the lilies of night sun and they too are buried in the night. Your body, right now, touches this parking lot forever because you have left it here. Your body is an imprint in the night, embossed in its material. As you awaken, you become part of its scheme. Night freezes parked autos in lots, it freezes sleepers, you, and the sky wheels on around you, spinning on axis with your eyes but not revolving about the earth to bring you the wet sun of morning whose sweat washes the body from the dust that buries you. In a spinning sky where will you find the morning? With closed eyes you can chase it down. She closes her eyes pressing out brown tears.