What remains of fear? Mosquito bites on Samantha’s skin, she was marking herself into the hike, the woods, all remorse now in the sun setting, why did she come on this trek? No one wants to help her. Her pack is heavy, bursting, bulged. Mosquitoes hold on her sweat, then flee from her skin. The path is in the distance. The house beyond it. She regrets tiny mistakes, lots of bread falls from her memory of what breakfast was this morning. Further, down in the ravine, she hears a faint whine, her body raw today. Several deep breaths. Where do the animals jump? Behind the tree. Samantha encounters milky fungus, nature’s whitlow, at least one syrup, all white, grey down to its circle base. Samantha walks around the back of the factory, pushing on stilts, walking on feet poles. Metal scraps, filing shavings on the floor, an inside substance injected into the bottom of Samantha’s swollen legs. I turn up on washing day, months after she’s left the forest, left walking around the back of this factory. Vulpine body, enriched in tourbillions and farfetched star systems. She’s acting in the back garden, beating herself up, willing her body to go down, hanging like threads, the superior of clean hands, rushing toward the alcove, watching her pus-fingers, sighed suddenly from willing, sloping mountains, already returning today older. I drive the van down to the end of the street, then walk back. Blood bleeding all over the floor. She tears death. I eat ice cream from a ceramic bowl. Samantha pulls aside the blinds, a closer examination verifies what they’re called, marble monuments. A little cloud don't do that she names. Children going to school, topography of footpaths, no one even sees their ears. I glared back into the street, a sharp incline was correlated. The cooked sky seems small. The sensation passes directly over the biting chill. Doubt unreduced by one second, slowly. The torrent and the outskirts of the forest once again. I climb toward the gate with glad surprise, rubbing against her stockinged leg. Her screams increase. I’m in the ravine. Rusted I can go through to the kitchen into the living room. Rows and rows of books, massive shelves up to the ceiling, all opened, all studying epileptic that I was leaving to head downtown. Pink vagabonds, all tied up, roped, hogtied. Cotton candy stretching a chorus, animals clamouring the think, the trumpet, a little cloud of mountain compensates the off-centre gravity of her form, a vast and insane asylum. Mown world wand proved. Rising legs to foot, in the ravine, grandly blossoming at the scythes. An up-open mouth hovers over the plastic. Myself today, moving green algae, fearing sloping canal, the full extent of its diameter. It’s now see-through clothes. The contents disintegrate and rot to the wooded floor. Bacillus detectors underground, the time dead have guise, not to have of human. Forever pine needles, only to morph the assassins and meal tickets. Skin pink and red and spreading. I scratch my arm. 4 A.M. toiling mountain. Creation in crossing meters of snow. Samantha places her hip flask on the rock, removes her beanie. Moreover, there is factory and the mordant stench raising. A trace and with a scream up, I remember having maps, remember grabbing pieces of paper, everyone in this classroom, falling into asleep, my kneel, fingers into Samantha’s breastplate, in her not to budge, breast the red blood, the manure vision, one and another of defecation, moss from around souls then, biting into outskirts you him and Samantha. A starry circumstance, the cricket’s ravine, Samantha’s senses feel so removed, all exposed, her boot and sock now random hazards. Despot militiamen, their Peugeot car of a slice and cast iron, the wheel, a deerhound gasping from apocalyptical children playing, their secrets died grandly. The undergrowth, birds start the decipherer and the pronouncer, language returns and settles over her eyebrows. Toenails scrape over other debris, strong as is unbearable. A charmed sign, written as a mountain, I along breathe to the forest, leaving Samantha’s body behind, the stone is too hard, she imagines gray fur from head to toe. Banalities and necktie for a ball, a pronounced embankment, a hollow grave, the small covered air-breathing diesel engines, electric batteries, insomnia continues, satellites tracked the yellow bodies. Raised conquering hands to move whom chaste meal, thirty-one small expressions, a central stairwell made of sharp edges, red spots of years. Samantha hauls her pack down the mountain, across the plains…. Across the plain…as pulled bandages get plucked from the waiting hall of the hospital…


Shane Jesse Christmass is an Australian author. He edits the journal Queen Vic Knives. He’s also a member of the band Mattress Grave. He also firmly believes that the future of the word, the novel, will be in synthetic telepathy. His writing is archived at Lupara Publishing.