GLASS


The dark streets are slicked with rain and she slips as she runs. She follows her bare feet’s erratic course, its path veiled to her own awareness. The rise and crash of her emotions, like the heavy climb and plunge of the pendulum of an old clock, staggers her. The passage of time begins to lose its grip upon her just as she reaches the huge oak door. She presses her trembling palms against the rain-softened wood and it eases open. She is here; they are there. She is running; they are still, frozen figurines of


Glass.


Crash! For one moment, one surreal, exhilarating moment, she looks up, an impossible smile upon her bloodied lips, and watches the stained glass pieces shatter and fall, like so many diamonds raining down. Like the dreams, like the lives, they lay there, sweet, sweet memories, the faces of Jesus and Mary, but sharp to the touch, like what they really were:


Glass.


Pain throbs dimly against her consciousness and she raises her bloody fist up in front of herself. Slowly, lethargically, she extends each finger, embedding the glass deeper and deeper into the flesh. She raises it up to the black light pouring in the open window and Darkness swathes it in its soft cloth of perfection. She doesn’t see the blood, despite its cloying perfume that chokes the air, nor the cuts, though the pain remains, nor the


Glass.


Trance-like, she stands, the cool glass crunching under her feet, sometimes digging in. She places her hands on either side of the jagged window frame, driving splinters into the palms of her hands. She heaves herself up onto the sill, and jumps. It is but a short fall onto the snow but her feet burn like they’ve caught fire. The moonlight catches her crumpled form and she looks up at it. In its surface she sees the pale, waxen face of Yesterday, frozen in its coffin of stone, and the restless, shadowy outline of Tomorrow, vague and unfocussed as of yet. Only when she realises Today is missing does she remember she hasn’t seen a mirror since September. And only when the moonlight does graze her hand does she see it: the whiteness of her fingers and the blood dripping from the places the skin had broken like so many diamonds in the moonlight... and she realises that she, too, is


Glass.