Three Minute Stories #1 - Dust Particles in a Sand Storm

Chiyo ran a thin pale hemoglobin sucked out finger across her supple body inside the run down caravan. In the broken shards of the decade old travel mirror, she could see her image spilt between tens of flowing images and in none of the cascades was the whole. This caravan was her salvage against the ever-altering world outside. She faintly remembered being sold in a market, doused beneath rags and dirt, when she was still sucking her thumb. Her memory of growing up was transient, just as her stay in rooms with the bourgeois' gush at the month's advent and the rivulet that courses at its dusk.

But the glass shards though, gave her vivid stories every night. She could see vivacious images of her reality and her reverie - the Chiyo in front and the one beneath the flesh. The seductive lip rouge and the makeup splattered forehead of hers had seen sweat and blood of countless people, reeking of marijuana and cheap liquor, ever thrusting with their various animal grunts and the ceramic gleam of satiated libidos deep into the darkness and yet, had told her their share of battered dreams and lost love. She had long realized that life had an inherent duality in it, and that men were fragments of nature poised in a suspension of guilt and trepid innocence.

The girl in her was a mere gray echo; the clang of a rusted pail when it hits desolate waters deep inside the hollow well. She had fast grown and adapted to the horrors of the flesh, a self-assumed reality of stillness in defeat so often done and heard about, that the ignominy of the trade never rooted upon her damned senses. The imperceptible cerebral walls around her made her choose to remain; made her a drug to the covert passion of the society and in fate's vicious circle, she was both the pawn and the Queen.

After the cursory detailing on her moon shaped face, she hurried across the boulevard lest she caught the eye of a wandering policeman. She feared them more than her degenerate customers; the law was bent on making her a scapegoat. And behind the darkness veiled tavern, there stood a pockmarked boy just out of his teens, shaking in the December cold. As she neared him, she could nearly smell the fright etched on his pale visage, probably contemplating the sordid deed he was about to commit. In the dizzy lights of the sodium lamp overhead, she couldn't but feel sorry for the kid.

"First time?", she asked him, in the saccharine tone of hers.

"They seem so beautiful", said he, never raising his glance from below, "Our shadows. I love the way they kiss over the asphalt floor."

Taken aback by surprise, she stared at the ground for meaning. The shadows indeed were kissing; conjoined together in the pale light and flushed over the corners of the street so much so that she never could distinguish between the darkness and the shadows.

"Sometimes I wish I was a shadow myself", murmured she, as thick pearly tears cascaded down her face and onto the tarmac, as the night's silence smothered the salty echoes of the past and of her future's continuum.

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