No sirens.
Dark.
Blood slowed. Set an eyelid.
Then something new. A lifting, gentle. From the shoulders almost, but without them. As if by hands, but without them. I draw away.
Nothing touches me. The body doesn’t hold. So weak, stiff, all its physics limits. A negative, a mould. I draw away. Aware of some loss of material, of self as shadow, the remnant pattern left in thought. Feel something, the body commands. Feel this. But it’s a phantom, like time is. I go untouched.
The pattern forms an afterimage. Of harm. Of theft and.
There is a swarm of anger, a brief blur of pollinating fury. The air expands with it, swirling and spreading. I am this dust burst forth that wants to flame. Nothing contains me; I can’t contain myself.
I come apart.
This is not what I was. Not what I wanted. This is a new arrangement, something much more loose and numerous. Particles expand, their bonds weaken. The moment expands with them, it vibrates newly, and the fury, diffuse, lights away.
Unremembered, unbodied, the I becomes they.
There’s no pain. Pain’s in the body, a lonely place. It is past harm; the heat of it’s going. Nothing lies down beside it, curls close, enters from behind. They are out here, buzzing over, up, around. Something other. Present. More. A cluster, a slow burst, a release from old compressions. This complicates and simplifies. Breath and not-breath. They are returning (they will return) to the ah the air.
The end. Rare, perhaps, to be awake enough to witness this. Thought somewhere between as they disperse. Loosen. Everybody might go through it. Body, no. Every whatever-this-is. A remnant of a fading awareness. A vapour, or a mind in shift. What was taken, what passes away.
Hands come and attend the body. The hands turn it, and lift it away. They go with the body, carried close. Something to which they still might belong.
It doesn’t appear to miss them.