Canker-Gray

The woman in 316 drowned in a starless fog.

She danced herself dizzy and collapsed onto her bed. Then the fog moved in. She ingested too much of the antipsychotic. It altered her senses. The fog was impossibly thick—all at once—much too thick for this time of year. The air much too briny for this latitude. Seagulls materialized, much too loud and dimensional, like an overly rich headphone trip. She momentarily flashed back to a Pink Floyd planetarium laser show. She mumbled bitchin’ at an errant gull that darted dangerously close to her head. A blinding darkness seeped in from the corners of her vision, an hour later it ceded to a canker-gray and then a faint violet. At once the sound of a sick viscous medium—as if oil was washing up on a gray beach. The ooze swelled up around her. In this manner she was encased. In this manner she teetered under the influence.

Her room an obscure cube.

What I’m Reading:

“You can’t put a price on good sleep.
You can’t put a corpse back together.
One bomb dives into the sky like a rose.”

— Hala Alyan / “After Iraq Sweidan”