By Graham Rapier, Death, death@surrealtimes.net

There is no longer any pavement. The road to the market is now just overlapping footprints carved into long sloshes of mud.

Sticking out from two small freshly pressed shapes of heel and toe bone is Rowan.

Their mother has told them "your siblings will starve again unless you get the milk from the market. So come nightfall, slosh in haste for they and you know what happens to those who sink too far in the mud."

So Rowan wakes up from a sleepless night early and sluggishly heads due market, each step their body sculpted of jagged bone sinks into the mud, feeling warm magots carving constellations through their femurs.

Like shadows drenched in anticipation of sweet milk they sweep further into the mud. Sneaking through dark, as the matted roots and violent soil above them gift no light.

In the dark that falls while the luminescent shrooms sleep things are known to grow in the mud.

Up through the deep of mud from rot and mineral what you'd call a carrot grows up in front of Row.

"Greetings fellow sinew-walker, what reason do you have to bear this other side's dark." the carrot burps.

"You tricksy fleshy, I'm no sinew-walker, my bones face proudly out in the dark, carvings and all. "

"And I'm the tricksy one, huh. You boil milk and tell me it's ice cream. I can plainly see your bones are hidden beneath a thick pink."

Rowan looked down, not feeling themselves, but panically patting meat and blood and fur.

She looked up at the mangles of roots, preparing to long for their wondrous dark expressive shapes.

Rowan cries in breathless ghostlings of screams formed in their invasive new lungs, buried while floating, tearing wet, live, grass roots as they fall upwards. Rowan awakes lying on a plain of fresh green grass, their raw corneas shutter as they are battered with a bright blue absence of beautiful dark mangled roots.

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