A Retching Roar

A yawning, aching, retching roar spills past the top hills and falls on the fuzzy fields, swiftly brushing toward us, sweeping my ankles, chilling me and tensing me. Though the sky above cheers in bright blue and the wind agitates my blood to action, the decrepit mess of scrap metal bunched here and fallen there weighs on the muscles in my neck and shoulders as if they are resting there and not deep in the mud.

“Where are we, Lord?” I ask. 

He turns back toward me, unrushed, pained.

“Isabel, don’t you know?” he says.

“No,” I lie.

Very lightly, he lurches one shoulder backward, almost like he’s been hit by a bullet. He reaches a hand to each of my shoulders. A heavy, flying bug zooms by my head. A beastly growl hides somewhere behind crusty piles of filth, teeming with stench and sharp, discarded parts of things.

“Darling Isabel, we can clean it up. It’s not impossible–believe me.” he says.

I look down at my feet. My rain boots sink down. Fowl mud, no doubt soft to the touch, inches up my boots. Higher.

I lift my eyes to his face. He’s stable. I sink. I grab his arms.

“But what happened to that red room with the flowers growing for a ceiling? The pretty window with the view?” I say.

“Isabel,” he points to my feet, my boots. The mud is almost spilling into my boots. I have a moment to gasp before my dry, socked feet soak and squelch, deeper in the brown grab of mud. It fills my boots completely.

“What?” I say. “Why?” I say.

He’s backed away.

“Where are you going?” I rasp.

He points to a familiar object sticking from a pile close to us.

“What is this?” he asks. Bloody fire gathers in my mouth and spills out like an eruption of expanding cotton.

“You know what it is, Lord,” I spit.

The mud reaches above my knees, reaching and holding my legs until I tip, forward and out, barely with room away from a pile of rusty knives.

My entire front splats into the gross mud. A simple cry falls out of my mouth. It’s human filth.

I rise on my hands and knees, sloshing the bloody fire in my abdomen as I glare hatred at the filth on the ground.

A honey-sweet boom of a man’s voice says above me, “You know what it is, Isabel.”

I scream, caught, with no escape.