A mile…

That is all it takes to run out of time and feel out of place.

With each passing step, each tentative stride, you find yourself disappearing into the alluring strife of the fading tarmac river. No, it is not the colour of the bitumen that leaches away… it is the curse that winds the stone into searing tar… and eventually SNAP! nature takes back what is hers.

Your cracked soles discover the leer of the roughened rock, and the spite of the belittled silica. Only now do you regret not heeding the sign at the junction…

Except there was no junction.

Where there once was nothing, but an expanse of furry trees and curling carpet of decay, now reaches out in an elusive swath of promised path.

It was a quandary that your mind cannot unravel, nor think its way out of. Instead, thoughts buzz with the chirruping buzz of busy cicadas through the hollow corridors that rise and fall inside your creamy cranium.

Alas, it is far too late to dissolve your stubborn resolve and retreat to any notion of elusive safety.

You set the wheels into motion, and you must go along for the ride.

That is if you survive the night… that is.

Sly is the seeping escape of the enlightening warmth, it dilutes and runs away with barely a fanfare of curdling flare of licking fire, or sweep of wonderous hues. Until once where light had hung darkness remains, a stern reminder that nothing is permanent, and the only thing that is certain is the final fall of inky sky.

Steadily your assured foot placement descends into panicked stumbling, as if your upper and lower body are having an argument over what speed is appropriate for being lost in the drunken-

The forest.

The path.

Gone.

Nothing curls itself into the comforting nooks, and each microscopic cell that serves as a temporary abode.

You shudder, you shiver, you shake.

How could you-

There!

A grating clack of busy beak… or is it a flintstone growling steady rebuke at stripped bare bones?

Whipping around in an inebriated stupor your ankles lock together, anchoring themselves in reassuring contact, and you are felled like the last great red wood.

Tightening with the fear of the grazing beratement of the ashen swathe of fractured dreams, you feel a peculiar emptiness… a coldness that is too polished to be Earth’s floor.

Sharp is the inhale that unzips your eyelids, which are tightly sealed against the fear of blurry demise.

Your lungs are torn apart by terror as you find yourself gazing up, not at the eldritch spread of leather obsidian but rather at the stalactites of emerald and jade. Brushing your cheek, you chase away a grain of sorrow, a melancholic storm begins to stew.

Stray beyond the realm of norm, you are sure to befall into the arms of spun distortion.

Where once was you, now is they…

They did not live happily ever after, not by a mile.