marked time

Dani hates uncertain feelings and now something like fear is weighing her down as she approaches the path marked by memorials to traitors. Battles of history were fought in this place once and the soil under her is soaked in lingering echoes of terror. She can hear them. There must be hundreds of ghosts scattered among the fields and trees silently reliving chaos and tedium. The memorials guide her into the thick. There’s a faint presence up ahead. She tries to play her part—the tough, world-wise take-no-prisoners kick-ass dark action hero, but she finds the façade of her personal fiction cracking as she walks toward her fate. Eddie stares out the window of his shack and wonders why he waits. The door is open. The fog is thick, it doesn’t move or burn away, it might be the best of escapes, an escape into nothingness. The infinite grey. A single day hasn’t ended or begun; everything seems to have slowed to a stop in the fine mist. His mind has slowed too. His body itches to run but his mind is content to float in the middle distance, so his body is locked there next to the window of indecision. The fog is beautiful, like a thick blanket covering the world, silencing all sounds of machinery and nature and softening the hard edges of reality. It’s a lovely ambiguity, he thinks. He loves uncertainty.