Footsteps

She gathered her chalkboards. Past and future. Each one too tall. Beating together erasers. Until what had been written was choking her. I don't need to breathe. When it's this dark. I don't need to feel. When we're already this close.

The markers land in momentous stabs of angry atoms. I've been here before. Too many times. I won't be coming back. To see the world end.

This flesh. My perpetual time machine. Boasts of the wolf will his belly cut open. Dead things crawl out of the wound as alive as ever. Stories linger in the sway of the blood. As it writes on this used up paper we mistook for touch. Vindictively cataloguing each minute we've left it to rot.

Her toes swell on the treadmill. Time has set under her. She steps off the device. Just long enough to prove. It's not going anywhere.