Purgatory

Wandering through the deserts of purgatory collecting bottles as the sun burns through my shoulders, brittling my bones. Squinting at the horizon line, there is nothing here but endless dunes of burnt ochre sands and half buried glass. Metallic salts shimmering in the sunlight. I inspect each jagged shard carefully in my palms, displaying them as if they were a prize from some turn of the century fairground. Bristol blue bits of old dinnerware from my grandmother’s kitchen. Bottles with half torn off labels; Boodles, Basil Hayden’s. Robbing the graves of bourbons and gins, filling my pockets with their empty bodies. Mirrored glass reflecting off the sun in all directions, it’s amazing I can see anything at all. The silence has become a tidal wave of static ringing in my ears. The sun tears at my lips, turning strands of hair to straws of hay and there isn’t a breeze, just textured layers of blinding light and radiating heat. I am not entirely sure if I am breathing at all, lingering here for what feels like decades. By now, the agony of life has turned to a dull ache in my chest. Frothy tides reach out and scratch at my legs, the salt stinging my sunburnt shins. Seaweed and clamshells drifting toward me in the waves. Inhaling the sudden ocean in front of me, the color of the Aegean sea but heavy with the brine of the Atlantic. When I exhale, layers of flesh strip away as easily as pages of a book with a broken spine, my ribs spread apart and I start to untie like a pair of shoelaces. Collapsing into the sand, metal plates and screws protrude out from the dying skin and talus bone of my right ankle. I watch my blood twist and turn away from me, staining the water red. I thought I might be alive, only for a second, but it occurs to me that I can’t feel any of this. All of my bottles and bits of broken carnival glass, they bury themselves in the undertow, and I watch myself disintegrate into the sea. Decomposing femurs and tibias, knees knocking in the water, repetition in the current. The knocking gets louder. The riptide, the great grim reaper of this place, moving with ease somewhere around five miles an hour pulling me further from the shoreline, the knocking gets louder and louder still.