networked.art: Cry Toward the Pale Sky

She had been running for so long that the ground no longer felt solid beneath her. When her legs finally failed, she simply stopped and let her head fall back. The sky above was the color of old bone, endless and empty. Her mouth opened, not for air, but for something older than breath, a cry that had been waiting inside her since before she had a name. The darkness that lived under her skin rose to the surface, twisting across her chest and arms in wet, violent strokes. It wanted out. Her eyes rolled upward, white and wide, searching the blankness for an answer that would never come. Paint and blood and memory dripped from her fingertips into the nothing below. In that moment she was neither rising nor falling. She was simply the cry itself, raw, unfinished, and still echoing long after the body had gone quiet.