Nightmare

Nightmare
Nightmare looks across with dull, green eyes. The landscape is bleak, desolate and dry, the ground cracked like old skin. Nightmare feels the dust on her feet, dry dust, white dust. It is powder to cover the ripped ground, make it look pretty with rouge and pencil.
Nightmare knows that no amount of powder can cover up the ugliness of this world.
There is a forest, far ahead; it looks ragged and burnt, the trunks bleeding brown blood. The blood was a silly idea, a futile attempt to cover the grey corpse underneath. Nightmare should know that blood never lasts. Now and then, one of those trees breaks free from the ground. It falls away from the fringe, and withers, dies in its own aged silence as it floats into nothing.
Just before the forest, Nightmare can see two pools. Oh, she remembers when those pools were bright emerald, a shimmering jewel surrounded by long stems of black. Now, the pools are dreary and the stems are nothing more than the spindly legs of a spider, protruding from folded seas of grey.
And those two lines on the horizon – they are thin and gaunt, a mere fragment of the plumped crimson pillows they once were. They look as if someone has taken the split ground and drawn two darker lines onto it. Those things, they are not what they used to be. Their time of beauty has long since passed, leaving them nothing but dark streaks on a matted canvas.
Nightmare looks upon this world and sighs, a long sigh like the stale breath of breeze that sweeps the dirt from an old cabinet. She bends down and touches the ground, the white powder clinging to her fingers – an unfaithful lover to the skin-earth if ever there was one.
She looks hard with unfocused eyes at the grey pallor she has revealed and pictures a fresher ground, a newer world that has long passed, washed away by many too-short years. She can picture it beautifully – the brilliance of the eyes that shone so brightly in the sun; the way that the hair bounced with every step, ringlets of milky-tea brown; how the skin was smooth and peachy, ripe like a new fruit. And she can remember oh-so-clearly the smiles that were given with those cherry lips, the people they enticed and the people that they kissed so tenderly.
Now, few kiss this thing, this fake ruin of a face. Few touch it or are welcomed by warm eyes or soft skin. Here is the wreckage of a train, a polished steamroller that has been left to rot and rust in a corner. Here is the handiwork of age and time.
Here is a youth long-gone.

Nightmare drew her hands away from her face and turned away from the mirror, ashamed at her own fall from grace.
In the corner, the clock ticked painfully.
Tick tock. Tick tock.
We can never escape time.