The Shell

…Now, three years later, on the train towards Strakonice, everything comes to a halt in the middle of the grey.

Through the misted-up window, she anxiously watches the thick morning fog covering the landscape, waiting for something to emerge from it.

A few slow seconds pass, and something flashes in her eye - perhaps the sun - and she looks away. She notices the ground trembling slightly in the spring wind. As she focuses more closely, she no longer sees the ground, but a surface of water with neither beginning nor end.

“Why are you reminding me of this today?” she sighs aloud, nervously crossing one leg over the other…

“…Are we finally going to leave?” she asks, replaying the question in her head a few more times, tilting it slightly to the right.

On the fog, or perhaps on the water, a dark swan sways. With every movement, its feathers burn, and tiny particles gradually disappear from the world. She stretches her long arms through the glass window, trying to catch the vanishing pieces in her cold palms.

“I don’t want to… When will it stop hurting?” she whispers, placing her grimy palms over her face.

Face to face with the past, she tries to mend the swan’s shell, one she will never be able to put back together.

And just like then, she saw it, held it for the last time.

The water is dark - you cannot see yourself in it.

Mud trails along her legs, and somewhere inside me there is  longing to be wrapped up and sink to the bottom. Once, they told her she was running away from her own skeleton, the very thing everyone else clings to.

A point of anchorage, in the form of a settling duck, overtakes the reflection of the figure in the bathtub, where she so often lies and dissolves.

A tablet thrown into the water, coloured like the feathers of a duck, fizzes beneath the hot steam, until the suffocating bathroom leaves the woman unable to breathe.

She seems confused. Can she still recognize a pond from a bathtub?

She forgets… just like that time in the meadow…