Northern America

The night is bright and this land is poisoned.

The heiress fell violently ill in her bathroom, overlit with the vanity and overhead and tub all reflecting together off granite and drywall as she wavered and shook, sitting on the lip of the bathtub, perched ready to lurch forward and vomit into the toilet. She was nauseous, headwise, her cheeks swollen blushing, her throat spittling up in microspasms. It was a brutal comedown, jitters of hunger and insomnia riding on the overdriving of herself, another speedbinge alone.

She hadn’t done this for months, only having an opportunity to do so when she was forced back inside, to inhabit the lonely country home, idling in the shadows of unbound chains hanging from the walls, shadows of strictures they claimed she outgrew. She had done it like she always had, driving her body past its limits like climbing through pain up a mountain, a rush she had been forbidden to touch now opened to her. She felt alive as she did so, flexing through a cocoon membrane around her skinless flesh.

But she had been in the cold for months and hadn’t notice her skin had grown fully hard around herself, an enclosure she hadn’t notice as she hid it in darting stealth from her family. She had reached the top of the mountain and like a snowball rolling down it, had developed herself, had come into possession of a full corpus and thus, only made herself violently ill. The rotten material of this poisoned land, that was so instrumental to her to come to this stage, now returned as alien to her after she had separated and became whole, no longer wedded to the piercing soil as she was in the first tentative steps into her own light in those youthful imbibings.

The night is bright and this land is poisoned.

The dirt was sandy and fruitless. Their shovels were weak and frail, fake metal and half-liquid plastic. There was motor oil saturated between tiny grains of sand, mixed into the earth. The sun was too bright, baking them through shirts that disintegrated into fibers of paper-like nothing as they baked. They ate styrofoam lunch as wind blew cancer through the dying sticktrees.

She nervously smoked under the stands of the dirt-track, her bruises still smarting. They discussed something as the crowd above screamed and pissed and drank. The night turned plastic-purple through the window of the repair pit as they descended into the egg-shaped convention center where all manner of engine and oil was displayed. South City motor teams made sport of it as a fight broke out in the parking lot, as another drunk died in the arms of a loving wife beside another famous garage.

She had come back from wandering on the railroad tracks that led through overgrown trees and tall grass in a long line across rusty forest to nowhere, deeper inlands of meth-fueled sawmills beyond her fentanyl wasteland city of empty factories. The sun was setting and rock played on the radio garbled to nothing by the speakers. Charred meat burned deeper on a grill. Paper plates stained with beer. A screen door slammed and someone got behind the wheel of a sedan that could barely get up to interstate speed. She leaned against the fence and poured her soda into the toxic dirt. She looked up at the sky. it was bright. She knew there was something beyond that she was destined to find.