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underneatH thiS thornY busH danceS thE elderlY youtH.

He looks down at her sleeping body through cloudy, brown eyes. He cradles her head in his hands. Her pulse is regular, breathing average; her eyes are closed but her skin retains its natural color. He kisses her shut eyelids. He prays. Down here, even Jesus prays for help. With the lights off, Jesus sits in his attic and holds a soul-less girl in his hands. His eyes snap shut.

He could say he was in an underground cavern, or a world made of shaved ice. He could say He didn’t know what it was, where he was, why he was therse. But he’s been here before. He’s been dropped into a world without any skies.
His eyes opened. Not he opened his eyes. His eyes opened because they wanted to, not because he asked them to. He no longer had control over his eyes.
His eyes opened, and showed him a strange blackdrop. His neck turned to give his eyes more space as they trailed up and down the mountains shaped out of ice. His hair swayed in the absence of wind as he noticed the throbbing spider web-like material underneath his feet. None of this seems out of the ordinary, rather, it seems more like coming home to a place he hasn’t been a long time. It’s a dream, Jesus can tell; the fabric-like quality is just too similar. Behind him, to the right, feet walk barefoot along the sticky ground, making a thwapp noise every time she moves. He turns to look at her.
           This woman walks with the solid grace of an anarchist. There’s something that used to be a black dress around her waist, ripped and torn into fragments. Two belts hold this skirt-like dress to her body, worn sideways. Her shirt, black and purple with red dots of color, has ripped sleeves and ends, and the belly button peeks out from wHise the material used to be. Her bleach-blond hair goes all the way down to the roots. Jesus almost forgets to notice the girl walking next to her, head down, eyes closed, brown hair covering her eyes and her soft pink lips slightly parting. Something about her says that Jesus knows her from somewhere, but he doesn’t know where.
              “Hey babe. Would you hate me if I said hello?” Jesus looks back at the woman. Her breasts protrude only slightly, her long legs strangely shaped, as if out of clay.
            “No.” Was all he wanted to say. He was done here, already. This dream had lost his interest a while back.
           “Well, hello then. Good timing. Your friend here”—the woman jerks the hand of the girl and the girl, dangling at her fingertips, shudders accordingly—“doesn’t remember who she is. I would send her back, but, see, I can’t. She doesn’t want to go back, and anyway, something’s in the way. Who knows how she got here in the first place.” Jesus glances sideways at the girl. “So, don’t worry about her.”
             “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. She can handle herself.” Jesus talks with his head sideways, on his tip toes. He knows that face from somewhere, and the girl looks up and yelps at his gaze. She takes her fingernails and pulls the two sides of her rib cage apart. Then, her head goes in.
           The woman sighs. “Stop that. Stop. I mean it. It’s nothing…nothing big and scary out there.” She points a finger at Jesus, and says, “Jesus, I can understand why you’re here, or at least more so than her. But, you’re not needed here. Go. I’ll be here when she takes her head out of her chest. Take care of her body? If her body died…especially now…”
         “Alright.”
          Jesus’s brown, cloudy eyes begin to fog up into an icy blue. The world around him blurs as if in a whirling vortex. He closes his eyes to a woman and a child, and opens it into the scene of a man of wings, and a brick wall, which happens to have a man tied to it by chains. This man, he is yellow and turquoise and made of velvet, the tiny soft hairs clinging to the wind in a futile escapade. The man with the wings has purple and pink feathers. He was born in this world, he will live in this world, and he will die with this world. He’s in between being born and living, and doesn’t understand his place. He is a better lover than a fighter, but right now can only accept the fighter.
Jesus blinks at this knowledge.
           The man with the wings puts his hand on the head of the man on the brick wall. They fuse together for a moment, and then the hand reforms and the man with the wings pulls his arm away. “Why…” he mutters. Jesus closes his eyes. He opens them again to a new scene; the mountains are deep in the background, saying or muttering nothing. There is nothing here. There is no wind, there are no people, there are no corpses, there are no trees and there are no screams. Nothing. There is nothing here. Jesus closes his eyes, and dreams of a pristine flower, white and glistening. This flower is eaten by an ugly, bleeding wolf. The wolf snarls, dark with matted fur, and Jesus opens his eyes again. Still nothing, still nothing. Jesus sighs and deflates.
          Jesus wishes he knew where he was, as the word is on the tip of his inner tongue. He blinks; closes his eyelids, opens them, closes and tightens them, opens them again. He isn’t waking up, and he’s wondering why. Usually when he gets tired of a dream, the dream pops and doesn’t bother him any more. But, for some odd reason, this one’s staying. It tastes like it will come back.

          Josh opens his eyes, and his hands immediately go from beneath a body to on top of the brown mess. He tilts the head towards his, looks at her face. After sleeping in his arms, she should be a little better. He takes his index finger on her jugular, puts his ear in front of her mouth. Yes, she is still alive, but…not  moving. He kisses her lips lightly, picks her up and puts her in the closet again. “Sorry, Carolina, but you know my mom can’t find your unconscious body…she’ll think bad things.”
He walks back to the couch and checks his watch. 6:23, perfect. Three minutes late. He closes his eyes and snores ten times louder than necessary, waiting for his mother to ‘wake’ him up. Twenty-five minutes later, he walks out his front door.

           And then he walks back in. The entire day has been a blur, colors zipping by him as he stands still. It seems the only parts of the day he can remember are the beginning and the end, waking up and going back to sleep. He’s cold, his veins pulled tight against his skeleton. He trembles as he pulls the covers up from his knees. He winces as he closes his eyes, transporting himself into a different, new land, this time knowing where he’s going.

The wind blows against his arm hairs.