Her raincoat didn’t fit her as well as it used to because of the pointy things growing out of her shoulder blades.
She felt her heart sink; she couldn’t die before her chihuahua, the apple-headed, dappled one who slept in the curve of her neck and carefully pawed at her head like a cat. She let him knit her hair into wonderful plaits like the bread she shared with him at breakfast everyday, and woke up with a crown of them on her head. He would nibble at his buttered roll and stare at her until she offered him an extra nob of butter. Unsalted, because a dog should never eat too much salt.
The ill-fitting raincoat helped not a whit: not from the incessant acidic rain, nor from the stares in the market. I just need some white asparagus and perhaps some pepper, she mumbled hoarsely, knowing she sounded mad, but hey, who cares? She wasn’t sure what to eat lately. It was all chemicals anyway.
She stomped out of the store with her spears, the people’s pupils searing into her scallopy back. Oh just you wait, you’re next. Nobody escapes from this.
When she got home, she ate a few spears – raw because there was no power again – and then tried to do yoga because that is what they always said to do. No shavasana, however, because it felt terrible to try to lie on her back on protuberances.
After days of rage, she decided that she would go to the Gods, to ask for an ointment, an analeptic, some regulations, some laws. Oh anything will do! Just do something! The pavement cracked under her feet from the heat as she walked to their offices, threatening to swallow her up into its fissures. It really was nasty weather lately, she thought, as her mottled skin peeled right off.
They looked at her unblinkingly and adjusted their spectacles; panjandrums, all.
It’s just anxiety.
And then, they handed her a bill which she could not pay. She would have to sell pictures of her feet again, and perhaps style the remaining asparagus into a bouquet which seemed chic, and almost certainly – no – it was a guarantee, the chihuahua would have to become an influencer if he was going to insist on eating so much butter every day. Earn his keep, she thought, holding a patch of her skin that peeled off.
She scattered it hopelessly and watched it drift; like ashes on the destroyed earth, it wafted. She tried to picture her thoughts riding the fragments, to let them flow, but instead: my back hurts.
And then, hopefully: oh, but perhaps they’ll become wings.
