Sam opens her eyes, disappears from behind them. Pain swarms in front of her, shadows her sight. The world is dense, her body a gesture. Nothing is as it was. This isn’t the now she knows.
She is neither on land nor underwater. There are metal bars, and they are tentacles, then waving grasses; they bounce and cross and tangle. She takes a long swig of water, empties the jug and lets it fall to the ground beside her head, which is not earth but rust. Light pierces the sky. Sweat will coat the edges of her face. Hot and, before that, cold. The breeze on her skin, on the tiny particles of sweat against the hairs, prickles with an awful, dispersed intensity.
She’s got no sequence. It’s all connected. Detail derails. The bars will spangle and have quivered.
Only a migraine, which was important in the past, a long time ago. Going forward.
She swings from having swung to will be swinging.
Below, the chains and bars and cables that suspend her in the air are also moved by it; they sing in the wind, and it hurts her through until her bones sing with them. But slowly, as she listens, there is no wind, no singing, has never will never be anything other than a drone song enfolding. Her head was filling with blood which is only machinery. Will be a leak in faulty machinery. Faulty DNA, fatal genes, a waste. Something wet and skinless rose in her. Now is whirring. This whirring has always been, like a heartbeat, the mumbling of an organ, its awful, automatic constant. The creaking comes and goes, the mind deletes itself, forgetting. This noise sounds nothing like music. A brutal hinge: risk-noise. Risk-noise. Rocking like a boat.
She wanted air. She wants what’s next. Not for herself. Just – anything. Forward.
This is something else.
She was pulled beneath, will sink and struggle in deep water.
Her body elongates, it contracts and folds, pressing itself through its new form: blood and piss and rot and ink and asphalt. She has no bones now. The cage widens around her. Light disperses, breaks against a surface that withdraws overhead. Sam’s down in the dark, moving into hiding.
The sequence of things, the sequence of things, it is sediment, a trap. Time bends, and she’s pulsing out through the crack of the plastic eye into a living sea. Life turns and shuffles past itself in another form. Transform, transform. The elements are time and light and water. There is a camouflage, so close to blood. She is all pulse. Won’t fight the current. Has let, has to let, the water rush through her, in all its tenses.
Tentacle-stretch, a reach before consequence. The knowledge of the body in a body of water. Know not to get in the way. Be like sea, surrender. That’s where it’s hiding. Voices speak to her aquatically, from rocks and humps of grass or what resembled them. She touches what disintegrates. White dust leaves clouds.
Inside, a rare mind dimly calculates its sudden bandwidth. Contemplates the new proportions of its body, proportionately water. Figures out the weight that counters density. Wonders at the minority of land, seen only at edges and at death’s edge. Sees the solid of rock as a darkness past living, down deep. And then it flicks its skin, and shimmers. Forms papillae, and light.
This isn’t her mind.
The small Sam part of that mind is a head that turns on a body being buckled into a ride: wait, wait, I want to get off
There’s no time, not now. The time’s already turning.