Prep-pear-ations

The bits of arterial fluid formed into disruptive bubbles against the dull brown.



A sense of power seemed to bore from their riot against the neatly tucked corners of crisp kraft.



She wondered if the paper workers had ever theorized the destinations of the long strips of brown. Wondering if their hours of labor would clutter the isles of stationary headers to be later tucked away as mementos; or if they would just line the cold metal of butcher shops, the leftover bits of red dotting the perfect folds of what was now rubbish.



She used to find solace in what were considered imperfections, rarities she once lined an old notebook with, until her teacher had found and confiscated it. She remembered watching the pages grind into slits in the headmasters office, not remembering the words he spoke as she recited the imperfections in her head. Her mind was the only safe haven for these sorts of thoughts, but she missed the way the letters formed together on the page, the black ink against the bleached white strips; she was almost certain that was never a theorized use that the paper workers would have accounted for.



This safe haven of theories and daydreams were all she clung to anymore, the only thing keeping her from becoming like the rest of the lifeless droned out corpses that muddied the halls. She was grateful, as it hadn’t always been that way. She had learned over time how to bypass detection against the cups of colored capsules, perfecting the shallow swallows that let the pills rest in her throat just long enough before they started to dissolve.



She let her thoughts float to the deciduous limbs, the narrow crown with its simple leaves. Her days used to be spent shadowed in it’s canopy, the comfort of oval leathery leaves and the shadows they would draw on crisp pages trailing over the inked book bindings. In early August they bore fruit, she always enjoyed the first bite, the soft skin tearing away from the flesh, crevices of teeth marks lined up in neat little lines as the juice puddled to fill in the empty spaces.



This was before she knew what real puddles were, the puddles of the mind. The haziness and contusion that swam under pools of purple, the veins that had been tethered to routine and spurned to nurse a lifetime of lies. The way her body would heave as she gagged from the coppery taste of blood, the taste of withdraw from pilled out lies. She ached for the familiar hazy jarring of colors, the innervation of bliss. It had been three days since the last injection, the longest she had bypassed detection, and the most she would be able to protract for this rebellion stretch. The pain felt good, the pain felt real, and for the first time she felt emotion. She had never felt anything close to torture before, and it caused an affliction between running back to the sanctity of utopia and running towards wantonness ingresses.

Her thoughts flashed to a halo of trunked out limbs hung wildly over limbs of a little girl. Lips curled up, as her eyes fluttered to meet, a pair of blue swirls mirroring into one another. A lid of long spidery legs shadowed a milky horizon of perfectly concealed veins, forming a rounded face with a constant astute grin. Ruddy lips were dyed a current stain of the leftover pear from the day before; the sticky residue forming an edge of pink in a brim of highlighted gloss.

The trunked out limbs with their leathery canopy were feeble in the wind as the pear dropped and rolled, a small hand still clutching air where the pear once was as new limbs carried her down the hill. Her sun leathered skin and freckled kisses being the only reminder that she ever lay under the tree at all, until they too faded under florescents.

Slips of paper hid small doodles of pears an insignia of innocence and imagination, they served as simple reminders, rooting and preparing her to bear against conformity and the rebellious waning of plasticity.