Nothing ever changes here, the sky is still a milky white that drips like a wet watercolour painting and the only sound one can hear is the murmured lie that promises a new and more vivid world. There is no real light here, or none that anyone can see. Though the landscape is of blinding, bloodless white sand, the explosive luminescence is only an illusion that solidified everyone’s collective presumption; that there is no sun anymore. It isn’t hot, not even warm…in fact there is a constant zephyr that blows the bitingly frigid sand in circles around the desert.
There was once a city here. The sand that knew the people then was still cement and real snow settled on compact, sympathetic ground. Once this snow would melt on the skin and offer water and the warm reminder that life is not missing, only departed for a 100 todays. Now the snow has been replaced by sand, which obstinately bites and tears the skin and clogs the lungs and eyes. It throws itself against the ruined towers, as if in inconsolable sorrow.
One woman journeys here. She does not look human, she looks like a white phantom that sinks and drifts through the violent breezes reappearing once in awhile like a mirage. She is covered in sheets that lend her their warm embrace against the mourning sands that cry out their sadness in desolate screams. The woman carries herself carefully through here, as sand is not the only thing that can be blown against razed, and no more merciful, buildings. These buildings thrust their misery unto this figure as well, as if blaming her for their slow and painful reduction into the very creature that is eating them away. She turns to one, examining it’s gaping mouth that is howling through the sand that is caught in it’s concrete teeth. She kneels down and picks something up. She turns it over and examines the front. A nude girl, as pale as the sand that suffocated her, grins up at the woman with ruby red lips that are wearing away into nothing. Her blonde hair, which is freely abandoning her tough plastic scalp, whips across painted baby blues. Through the sheets the woman smiles at it.
“All my relations,” She whispers fondly.
She rises up and suddenly hurls the doll into the bleak sky. It smiles pleasantly at her as it is whipped through the air and slammed into the building.
The woman walks on, clearly staggering into the wind that whirls around her relentlessly. It whimpers into her ear, blaming her for its eternity.
“All my relations.” She breathes heavily in response, her voice scratching its way up her throat.
She almost cries in relief as she finds a mountainous building that once pitted itself against the sky. She throws herself into it and stands collapses against the floor for a moment. She notices a picture that still clings on by a nail driven deep into the wall. As she removes the bright, framed Polaroid carefully it looks up at her with such overwhelming melancholy. She sees a mother and two children that are looking at each other with limitless affection. They embrace each other as if they would never leave each other’s arms. A ferocious gale hurls itself into the fragile frame and as it flies away the woman commits the family to memory. As she sleeps that night she joins them, forever locked in such a beautiful moment.
“All my relations.” She whispers in her sleep, reaching out for someone who has long abandoned her.
She drags herself back into the deluge of sand, tripping over the sheets that are slowly unraveling themselves. The wind almost carries her as she runs away from it. As she runs she can see papers being propelled around her. They all paint the colourless sky with almost coordinated precision. They all say something that doesn’t matter anymore. They ask the woman if she wants to buy perfume to make her smell beautiful, or shampoo to make her hair longer, or pills to make her skinnier.
The woman is already skinny, she is too skinny and her body breaks as if bent in half. Papers swirl around her as she accompanies them into the sky. Her sheets swirl around her too. At the last moment they turn against her, whipping her body and tearing her into shreds. But all she can do is smile. From here she can see her entire city that softly crumbles as she does.
“All my relations.” She sighs into the wind; briefly silencing it’s anguished sobs. The wind and sand sigh with her as they remember what used to be. Then they return to their endless tears that pour into the desert and reduce everything to dust.
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