The Last Hours Of Annie Flynn

She kept an honest miracle in her pocket.

This was her understanding, her personal amends to a finely slimmed future of being. Her mind was a tomb of stolen ironies painted in the reverie of psalms, her thoughts residing in that sacred creche whose language resembled ethereal spells birthed by runaway stars. The fates swam through her bloodstream in long toothed vespers whose notes breathed fire and whose meaning willed the night into being.

Annie’s face got stolen in the days and weeks preceding. It was collapsed inside that endless night even as her words tried to disguise themselves in daylight. Everything she promised was a lie shepherded into being by the clouds that were slowly drowning her. The harm of invisible renderings would peek out from behind her ivory stare in miniature portraitures of crimson and fire, but the moments were scant evidence of the plan she had been hatching.

The truth is, she was gone from us before she ever left. Where once her eyes behaved like almond sunsets whose joyous dance allowed us to believe in foolish hope, they were now empty tenements that teetered in the dust of memories. The lyrical voice that had once summoned the most harmonious compositions our brains had ever known had been reduced to a ghastly coil.

Our last walk was in moonlight as the shore lay to our sides like flattened mountains teeming with green ink whose hocus swept our bodies clean of temper. A quiet wind caressed our skin with its warm breath full of shipwrecks and dragons unseen. We constructed small talk as our naked feet teased the sweat of cold foam before retreating to the damp and blunt granules that stretched time into nothingness.

I think I sensed that the world was moving in the wrong direction for the girl with the Tiger lily bangs made of topaz. It was in her bearing, closed off yet bereft of a mood that might have explained her reticence more punctually. Being in her company was akin to watching the first act of a play and being able to foretell its denouement. Hers was the unspeakable mission whose language was written in the silence of shadows.

We banished these thoughts from our consciousness as human frailty had taught us to do when it comes to such matters. Our defiance of the awful truth fed the impermeable clutches of darkness, abetting its ravenous tide until the only thing that survived the fire were the agonizing relics of all those evidential moments we had chosen to ignore. Our destinies no longer belonged to us.

By sunrise she was gone to the lonesome void. Her existence had been transformed into a mist whose Godly reach cried inside our stomachs like sour wine. She achieved her absolution in one small dose while we were left with the bad habit of growing old. And now the inscription on her mortal bones reads of a tortured poetry whose end has no beginning, and whose beginning has no end.

The haunting is ours to keep.

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