Rosy Cheeks

She was the bouquet of flowers people would glance at, but were never willing to reach out and pick up. They could see that a few of the plants were unmistakably wilted, and no one wants something that is clearly dying and no longer whole. The worst thing with falling to pieces is that she did it so quietly. There was something flipped around and upside down behind her ribs. Something all tangled up in her organs.

She looked vulnerable, breakable, as though she was made of delicate parts that barely fitted together. Graceful limbs that bruised easily and forgiving ligaments that tore quickly. A confused mind map that had lost its train of thought and had whorled off into a different dimension. She was cracked at the edges and would become nothing but shrapnel from the slightest pressure.

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Fingers gently hugged the metal bannister as shaking feet caressed each step. The light footfalls resonated throughout the empty building as she ascended the stairs. Heavy breathing clutched to her ears, attacking at the drums they carried inside. Her heart pounded faster with each gradual step, as her eyes honed in on the door at the top of the flight. Trembling hands lifted in front of her and pushed against the entrance. Her eyes flitted about, taking in the surroundings, when a gust of wind almost knocked her off her feet. She grasped to the door for support as she regained her balance and let out a quivering breath she didn’t realise she had been holding.

Tucking her hair behind her ears she took a few paces forward, gingerly moving towards the edge. The city that surrounded her was distant and ignored her presence. It had encased her in a suffocating bubble that just would not pop. It had turned in to an endless painting with half the colours taken away. It had become silent like a folded sheet of tissue paper, not wanting to decrease into the truth. It had turned in to a pavement littered with shards of glass that cut painfully into bare feet, but did not bleed. It was a stare that held out like lungs deprived of oxygen, burning, until a wash of air temporarily soothed the scrape of pain. The air would not come. She hung her foot hung wearily over the edge and caught her breath. She remained silent as her heart thudded. Closing her eyes, she dropped. Collapsing in on herself like a house of cards finally toppling.

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She fell, a violent smack to the ground. Her skull crumpled as it attacked the earth heavily, reverberating along the grey tarmac. Her ribs were crushed and her lungs deflated. Snapped bones jutted out of pale flesh as blood bubbled from her delicate lips. Smudged black makeup surrounded her bright green eyes as they summersaulted in to the back of her skull. She was a melting puddle of soft features and a breaking branches. The tremble in her hands and the buzz of her thoughts stopped as soon as she flew off the building. The brittle snap of a heart no longer beating, a blank piece of paper floating softly to the ground. 

She did not float though. She pummelled with full force in to the concrete with nothing to cushion her fall. She was fragile glass and delicate porcelain, shattered to pieces, lying numbly on the ground. Her bones were overlooked relics of a skeleton sunken city, her mouth, a bone yard of teeth, broken from grating down against themselves. Her ribcage, a hollow auditorium that swooned with echoes of a heartbeat.  Her spine, interlocking jigsaw pieces that cracked and no longer match up with the rest of the puzzle. Her flesh, mottled with greens and blues, and harsh scrapes of red that litter a pale canvas of glass bones, soft lungs and breakable skin.

The problem with a solid surface is that it does not mix well with rosy cheeks and gentle fragments of soft flesh and hard bone.