Underground Writers Network Forum the beautiful and the damned

It was a glorious day as I sped back home from the coast, having spent a few days of bliss away from it all, a few days in a little coastal village with Lloyd George’s ghost by the sea, surrounded by mountains and hills and fields.Then, passing through a small village, I saw a young beautiful woman, a girl really, just standing there, holding her baby, deadpan face.  She was looking at all the traffic.  It struck me she was making some kind of protest, or maybe she was just wishing to be one of those faceless faces that pass by year after year, that came from someplace else, any place else, but there where she lived, where she had always lived, not having known more than the little Welsh village that had been her whole life, until she discovered the faces that stared at her as they flashed by in their big expanse of otherness, far removed from the corner shop and the little church on Sunday and the book-smell school where her life evolved from.And who had she got the baby from?  Where was he?  I wondered this as she stood there, with her ragamuffin soul, wearing dark eyes and bare feet under a flowery dress, not seeing but staring.  As if her defiance could turn back the tide of life perhaps that was filling her world with rushing noise and unbidden eyes, so many eyes, anonymous in their numbers, invading her dreams, encroaching even to her secret places.  Nowhere left to hide.  So she stands and watches every day, the horde of an existence she cannot grasp, and everyday a little more is taken from her soul and every night, a few less tears left to fill the inexorable desert, where life should be flowing, lies something slowly dying.But I may be wrong, perhaps she was just waiting to fall under a wheel, and then again maybe she was just waiting for a bus.  Whatever she was standing there for I don’t know, but she filled my soul with a vision of her dark eyes that began to invade my sleep at nights and conquer my secret defenses.  I have taken to standing on pavements watching with unseeing eyes the death’s rush movement encroaching from a place I can’t push away.