This Story Has No Title

So she sits in the dirt hallucinating. LSD has nothing on her brain. She has dominion over everyone and everything when she does it. She follows shadows like a lost puppy, inching closer and closer to the precipice of self-destruction.

It didn't always used to be this way. She was college bound, any college, a four year, not some scoundrel ridden community college. She had brains that seethed inside her skull and her mouth oozed words that smelled of it. Philosopher she was, writer, scholar, do anything go anywhere gifted girl.

Now, she's a penniless mendicant. Stricken by rages and traumas that burst through her chest like some unwanted alien, moaning and sighing, smelling terrible and putrid like death.

If God exists, which he doesn't, he would have had mercy on her. He would have carried her through the sand as the plaque insists he does for his children. He would have given her a terrestrial father, a kinder mother, an older brother, a better body, less rape, no crazies- a chance. Would that have been too much?

Would it have been too much to lift the cross off her back and give it to someone else more deserving? Who on earth does less deserve than a child? A child? A child, a child, a child……….

They watch her, scald her skin with hot eyes whose stares run up and down her body like lice. Is this it? Is this all there is? Pain and more pain, anger and no reprieve from the depression that strikes almost daily? Can there be no earthly end?

Can she ever have another chance? Can she get her life back? Can the ones she loves the most forgive the transgressions that were not known to her when she committed them? How can a life like this be? Where is there a will to move forward? She hasn't found it. She is looking. She is aging but looking. Backwards. On the top of the precipice, over charred and truncheoned remains. It is finished.