Gravity’s Victory

Kaday Jarra

She swears she's coming down with strep, a pox, the plague, everything all at once. Her body, it pains her. Causing rumbles in the depths of her tummy, cavernous echoes. Shaking the bed as she lies in the fetal searching for her own body. Holding her own limbs for comfort, stability—that slips away between every tick, every breath. Her nails, red stained, from fear of losing grip of the reality of her own body. She presses, digs into her skin—refusing to let go, not even to wipe the sweat that has escaped her body and reinfiltrated the openings of her eyes. She feels the things around her start to give way,

the legs of her bed trembling, splintering as the ceiling quakes, sprinkling the filaments between the bricks as they too, begin to give way. Tremors replace sounds consuming all that is still. Rumblings growing like a tumor, stemming from the flickering, as she flickers out. Decaying inside then out. Atom by atom collapsing in as rot spreads. 

She whispers prayers. Begs for pain’s mercy. For the time to pass through her body quickly. Reduced to the simplicity of what it means to be alive, desire. But time is unaffected by her wants and continues to flow beat by beat for millions of years until the walls distort. The fabric between the air curves into her and the light in her body gives out. The light that encompasses everything surrenders, 
drawn into her. Inescapable as the world falls into the caverns and holes that grew out of her stomach. 

Outside of her, time has stopped. To an observer, she lives in this moment forever.