[open] send me back to where i roam, any

[spectra]

all i want is beaches full of dead birds. a flood of limbs
washed up onshore. seascapes sparkling bright with bone

It is a wasteland.

She has traveled from the Cove as an apparition might.
A ghost haunting the trails of those who have come before her.

She is a ghost because she cannot feel the pangs of hunger that plague her mortal form. How long she has been hungry, shunned by a mother who had never wanted her, had made no attempt to convince the girl that she was loved.

And love does not feed a child anyway.
So, the girl wandered. She a ghost, the rest of them just bones.

Bones with souls, it seems. Though she cannot tell if they’re dead. If she’s dead.
If her mother’s neglect meant that she never lived at all or if she had emerged from her mother’s womb already dead.

She does not stop anyone to ask them. Would they know it if they were dead?

She arrives in the meadow and steps into the sunlight, her form solidifying as she does. She emerges in the meadow decidedly equine, no longer just a specter. She breathes and blinks and lowers her mouth to the sweet grass and eats her fill.

And, when she’s finished, she lifts her head and studies the other souls here. They’re all just bones. She ducks her chin to press her mouth to her own chest, testing its solidness.

She is real, she is alive, she can feel the heart beating beneath her lips.
She lifts her head and waits.

S P E C T R A