Fragments from the Vault #017: Dream Sequence No. 2

On one side, the shard is cold and faceless - but cast it against the light, and watch the universe expand its tapestry of sound...

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Game: Papo & Yo

Location: The World's Ether

More information: Papo & Yo | Wikipedia

A magical escape between realities. Photo credit: FetchQuester

I remember a girl who gutted out worn, faded speakers and wore them below the knee. She shape-shifted into a robot and clanged along the broken sidewalks, a metallic birdsong grinding her back teeth and straining her throat.

I would steer away and soon forget her.

I was swimming in a sky speckled and concave; I could inhale wet charcoal behind my tongue, and the pavements felt soft and rank as they crumbled out sodden ash. The clouds had dilated to release the rain so I invoked the long walk home. 

I passed the old town. There were cabal-like faces cantering through a quick-setting fog which cloyed up the facades of cadaverous buildings. They looked empty even though they were heavy from the bodies inside. People were drinking and when they fell out the gaping doorways steam would coil off their bulk, dissolving into smoke-rings as the fog stilled the sound in the corners of thresholds. They writhed and coloured the miasma around them; everything else was monochrome. A demon was watching over them. They tried to ask her for directions but she exploded into a mosaic of droplets which caught like fractals in prisms of light. I kept my distance and crossed the tracks.

I walked for a while, uncertain. It was the first time I began to hear music again. It was a macabre drone but the resin had cracked and the mechanisms had stalled into rust. Soon the spectre holding it would seize and jar itself into the silence that feeds on amnesia. The silence that chars my breathing like the grieving trees who have given their last burst of life before their decaying leaves settle into the dust, their declaration of love forgotten.

And then it stopped, and I had already filled my ears with nothing.

Finding solace and safety in darkness. Screen capture: FetchQuester

- Lucy A.

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Sources: 

Papo & Yo (Minority Media Inc.); wikipedia.com

*Dedicated to those who survive their nightmares.