Here the press of bodies ground to a halt, squashed without gaps into a hard, sticky mass that sucked at your hands and knees as you strove to be free of it. Leveraging off incoming bodies you pushed hard against the heavy current you had been obliviously following for weeks.

You climbed across the flow towards quieter space, where bony bodies whose first deaths must have been in famine flocked together in familiar harmony. Wide toothy grins flashed as they touched others’ faces in apparent recognition and then flicked away to another rapid happy encounter.

At each smile they released a thin, sour liquid from their flesh. They swam in this liquid, their thin forms flickering and shifting without pause.

At the border of the smiling matchsticks a membrane formed, the crushed flesh of the stoppered flow puckering away from the sour sea above. You pushed your way forward, piercing the thin veil between the two spaces and feeling your own flesh quiver at the touch of that pale liquid. The rotten skin that had draped itself around you jumped with a life of its own, leaping off you, tearing itself to pieces as it reacted to the chemical soup.

You found pleasure in the tingling in your skin.. you felt your joy grow. The sea stripped you, washed away marks, cleansed your hair, soothed your eyes. Any dead flesh clinging to you dissolved away.

You felt the bloodlust leave your body, felt the craving but could ignore it. It became part of the hard rock you built your self on. Solid and atomic. You lifted your feet away from the floor and began to drift up, towards the shimmering clusters of skinny bodies. Stick figures darted past you, flicked against you in the sea. One touched you, touched your face. A dark, shrunken head flashed a fierce rubber gummed smile at you but you couldn’t keep away from the eyes.. the eyes that burned with a white-hot belief that shone from beyond right or wrong. A sooty ichor trickled from its mouth and as you floated eye-locked it entered your nose and soaked into your blood in the faintest of dilutions.

A black speck of protein crossed the waters within your skull, touched lightly on the deep red jelly of your brain, quietly whispering new instructions to every cell. You tightened the muscles in your face .. and smiled back.