Abrasion
Selection from the first chapter of Abrasion, Book One of my as-yet-unpublished novel Echoes of a Future Truth.
[…]
Reenacting childhood visits to the doctor, she lifted a hand to lay against her own chest. When she was a girl – nervous on a cold, vinyl-top table, half-shrouded in a hospital gown – a warm stethoscope revealed mysteries and the doctor’s wordless smile said all was well. Then, she felt safe. The grown woman was not so well equipped: her own hand felt cold against her sternum, and beneath its rising and its falling her fingers found no reassurance.
Nor did the nearly-empty spaces around her provide any relief; they were low-rent amusement park rides filled with hollow, mechanistic beings. And each facade in turn refused to give its secrets up; they always faced in her direction.
She understood that she also had been propped up, that she also belonged in the ground. She could sense the vast, cold network of tiny interlocking spaces beneath her, extending through the strata of broken stone like the absence of a nervous system that once animated the intercourse of living things. She again surveyed her own being for signs of life.
I should be dead, she thought.
[…]
image: Anonymous, 2015, paper sculpture, by Zoe Maddalena