Falling out of the ground, bonjour!…perhaps tomorrow, though I can’t be sure.Time slips through my fingers like damp soil crumbling from my palms. The air feels thick against my skin, charged with something restless, something unsaid, as I wander these empty hallways cut into the earth, their walls pressing close. There’s no stairway here, no steps to climb toward the sky, no way to dance beneath the fractured moonlight that barely reaches through the dirt above.
Fingers, cold, press against my shoulder, tugging at the frayed edges of my cardigan, as if trying to pull me back into a rhythm I no longer remember. The music drifts in fragments, Earth, Wind & Fire warped by distance, by time, by the weight of the ground pressing down. Footsteps echo somewhere ahead, but they’re fading, receding into the dark throat of the earth, descending deeper toward a place I don’t dare name.
The River Styx exhales its chill into the air around me, the temperature dropping sharply, like a blade against bare skin. I wait, motionless, for the ferryman, his face obscured, his hands rough with the labor of centuries, but he never comes. Or perhaps he’s already passed me by, leaving me here in the thickening twilight, its weight settling heavy on my shoulders, on my shoes, pressing me deeper into the mud. So I walk on, though there’s nowhere left to go. The ground gives way beneath me again, crumbling, dissolving, and I’m falling, out of the ground, back into the dark. Bonjour!
