Nightmare Fuel 2018, Day the Fifth - A Winter Vacation

Day the Fifth. Let's head south, for a winter vacation.

No, it's not you; I think these are getting stranger as the month goes along. This is only day 5, so I'm not sure where we'll end up.

Winter Vacation

Inana came to the great terminal, at the port at the edge of the air.

She awaited her turn, approached the first of the guardians of the air,

Was asked to remove her shoes, her sparkling bejeweled belt and her jacket, crafted from the leather of an ancient and long extinct beast adorned with bright brass buttons.
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The shoes and jacket were returned to her, but he belt buckle was sharp-edged, needed to be surrendered before she could ride to the skies.

She descended to the south, disembarked from another port, this one named for a sacred forest. She considered this a good omen.

She stepped into the oppressive heat, surrendering the jacket she'd reclaimed from the guardians in the north.

She traveled on, first by hired car (leaving her bag behind) then on foot.

Which each garment, each accoutrement she left behind she felt a bit weaker, a bit lighter, but certain she was on the right path. After all, she'd done this before. This was far from her first descent to a place too hot, too far, too much stinking of death and decay.

She left a single shoe behind in the grass, limped along a mile before discarding the other at the side of the road. She should have saved them for last, but the locals in places like this get strange around too much bared flesh.

Still, her clothes she discarded only blocks later as she neared the gates.

Of course there were gates.

These were faux-wrought iron, set in stucco towerettes with faux-tile roofs.

No sentry save an outdoor-rated dome camera and an RFID sensor.

No matter; there was form to such things. Inana removed the rest of her clothing, her body bared to the unblinking gaze of the camera as she slipped through the gates and into the community.

She strode past identical Spanish-style ranch homes,  shedding her skin at the base of a palm tree, leaving her bones piled up aside the next.


At last at her destination, she enters his home and settles in, alongside him, and waits.

That what this is for, after all.

Image by Hilary Truman

Perhaps when the waiting is over she'll recollect her bones
and her flesh
and her clothes
and that discarded shoe
and the jacket
and her favorite belt

and return North for the coming Spring.

After.