Surrender

          The wind was much stronger than her flesh and bones, and she found herself taken, bodily, into the air. A force mightier than the gravity which secured her feet to the earth, it hurled her up and up. It turned and twisted her like a hapless branch fatally loosened from its mother bough, until she could no longer tell up from down.

          She ripped through the emptiness, and the emptiness ripped through her, raking at her skin like thousands of needles and pins. It tore into her eyeballs, turning the sky black, so that to her, it seemed she was hurtling through the darkness of a vast and unfriendly space. Air soared into the cavity of her mouth, down the tunnel of her sandpaper throat, into her lungs exploding with breath. She wondered, briefly, if this was how it felt to drown.

          And then, as is wont to happen when something is swept away into untold heights, there came the inevitable pull of the jealous earth. The wind that had so brutally taken her, mangled her, and stormed all her senses to the point of numbness, relented. What followed was the plummet, the quick descent.

          The fall.

          A sea of green so dark it was almost black, the forest below awaited her, hungrily. Like monsters, the trees rose up to catch her, their leaves and spines the merciless claws that shredded her skin and yanked at her flesh. The ground rushed at her at an impossible speed.

          She came, at long last, into contact with the earth. The rocks splintered her skeletal structure, sawed through her organs, split her skull, and smashed her brains into a slimy pulp.

          Her mutilated body skidded to a stop.

          Silence and stillness.

          One of the benefits of being already dead, is that you can never really die.  You can have your eyes gouged out, your heart skewered on a stick, and your soul flayed sore and thin and then laid out in the sun to burn, but nothing will kill you. There will always be pain, yes, but pain eventually subsides to be replaced by a deadened numb, or at worst a lingering discomfort, like the phantom ache of a severed finger or an amputated leg. All wounds end up as scars, leaving only an ugly trail for your soul, on those strange, lonely nights when all the world seems so dead and hollow, to follow into an even uglier memory.

          So she picked herself up, brushed off the dust and the bruises, and began to gather up the pieces of her broken self. Tomorrow she would mend herself, glue herself back together, a cracked porcelain doll version of before. And then, once again, she would submit herself to the power of the wind, and begin the cycle, anew.