Pollution

She was strikingly

green

in comparison to the dead wood

on which she found herself. She arranged

walls into what she thought was a

castle.

She hadn't enough material

to finish the inside.

She let him in, and scolded

the guards for trying to

stop

him. He embalmed 

the unfinished spaces of

the castle with his

permanent

fingerprints. Suffocation began to set in.

She burned absolutely everything.

Castles, she decided,

are just silly little cages.

One smudged brown fingerprint

stained

her striking green radiance, while the sticky

truth

of it all hummed

softly in her lungs.