Journey

| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |

She heard the dull thump of flesh behind her, but she did not look back.

She walked, naked of skin, of past, of connection, all sloughed away with the decisive turn of the knife, still clenched in her stained hand.

She walked naked, yes, but cloaked in the viscera of night, teasing her tendons and soaking into her bones: a new, nocturnal membrane.

She walked, propelled by the loss of her incarceration. She was the legacy of the night: a quite vesper, a carnyx cry across a dusky moor, a midnight howl.

She walked, metamorphic, blistering with the tactile tales transmitted from the darkness by her new skin. The sky burned with myth, her ears with stellar siren song. The night called into her, and pulled the vacancy from her reeds.

And then she falls silent.

Around, she sees eucalypt and wattle scrub; she feels sand and dirt between her toes. Ahead, the crunch of tyres on bitumen, the flicker of high beams.

Her clothes fall back around her skin, her bag around her shoulder; the knife aches in her grip, leaden and profane. She gasps at the air like blood. Somehow, clothed, she is more exposed; lost from the current of night, her mind and shame return.

Step two.

She had an address, a name, picked out, but all that remains is an impulse for shelter, an impelling recollection of fire and famine, deeper than will.

She drops the knife in her bag and starts walking.