Short fiction: Buried Girl Transmission №3

Adapted from an image by Francesca Woodman (1958–1981),
courtesy of Archive.org.

I have met someone or something, but for convenience we’ll simply refer to it as if it were a person, a man. I feel like I should know who he is, but trying to put my finger on it is like trying to bring the same poles of two magnets together. Whenever I have been around him I have felt entire lifetimes of other people’s of sadness, anger, and fear whooshing past me. It is as if this man(?) is a black hole swallowing all of the innocence of everyone around him(?).

Remember how you told me about that moment in a young person’s life, when childhood is taking its last valiant stand against adulthood, or “striking sparks”, as you put it? You’d said that is why my memories of River of Tears from 27 years ago have been imbued with a vitality and resonance they otherwise wouldn’t have had if it had all went down even a year later.

But what if it wasn’t like that for this person? What if he couldn’t reconcile the remaining vapors of childhood with that final step into adulthood? Rather than nostalgia and a sense of something magical in the air, is it possible that he simply raged against the inevitable, and that his own tension between childhood and impending adulthood was more like a violent and hateful collision? Perhaps his rage was directed at another person, and therefore, by default, also at himself. Rather than being reconciled, maybe each of his…