The blood, as dark as the pavement below it, mixes with the rubber and oil left behind in a screaming hurry from ghost cars on their way to ghost towns and ghost cities, with ghost people talking in hurried, hushed voices.

And she is the only thing that's real.

Back broken, blood and mud-caked bones and torn away flesh litter the once-new asphalt that is cracking and hiding secrets. The blood pools into the gaps of the scarred road. An angry wind whips the trees and what's left of her hair. Above, the sky is darkening, as below her eyes lighten and the soft fluid solidifies to a mirrored glass, trapping what is within.

Soon the wind will hush its ceaseless rage to allow the rain to wash her body away, like all the others, mercifully.

Underneath his skin,
She can feel his heart palpitate.

Two beats fast, one slow.
He loves me.

Morse code denotes his love for her.
Pressed up so close that his hot breath
Produces beads of sweat
Along her neck.

She shuts both eyes closed fast
And is swallowed up by whole darkness.

Suddenly it's cold and she is suffocated
By the fear of this vast empty space
That seems a vacuum
For her heart.

A shiver runs down the back of her neck,
Cuts across her spine.

In sleep he hugs her gently, wraps warm arms
Tighter around her small frame.
And she can sleep easily -
The darkness suddenly full of warm, sweet things -
Promising possibilities.

Her quivering heart slows to
Two beats fast, one slow.

Hold the cool glass on your tongue, he said - his voice whispery and crisp like wind across water. Let it melt like ice.

She writes down the dreams of weary travelers, war-torn lovers, and sleeping babes on cue cards which she shoves into old romance novels on the shelves of used book stores. She wears hats that are too big and scarves draped low of many colours, to shade her unseeing eyes from an ignorant world. Her lips are chewed raw and bleed to scabs from worried habits of youth. Her name is a compilation of scratches across old records that played in times of love and birth - but now are forgotten as dust. Once, a loved jewelery box ballerina, she still wears the shoes with the fine, expensive lace that run up to her thighs. But now are stained dark crimson and soiled from long marches through trenches ankle-deep with blood. Meticulously spilt by long-ago enemies and frustrated lovers.

She dreams of papercuts covering her skin - from a million paper crane hitting her tiny body over and over again as they race to an unknown destination. She cries against white sheets in the night, holding on to nothing, yet afraid of letting go.