somewhere in an autumn field
By Sofiya Sharova
You wonder when it first arrived.
This pervasive sense of slick, sickly rot creeps up your skin with all the tenderness of a forgotten corpse in a field dyed scarlet by late autumn, reaching out for comfort with shaking fingers gnawed by vermin.
Surely there must have been a time before it—when the caverns of your memory were not haunted by its musty stench, when they did not hold its cloying voice in their crevices, letting its slithering roots break them open further to expose the blackening flesh beneath. It sits in your mind now, lounging on a throne it built from the stones it took from your walls, leaving gaps infected with a graying, whispering twilight.
You don’t try to take it. It reaches for you anyway, wrapping its hands around your legs, sinking its nails into veins of scarlet blood.
You try to ignore it. You look towards Spring’s new growth instead—towards the shy green buds on the old branches of the crabapple trees, towards the way the sunset bleeds across the sky in watercolor testimony, and toward the sunlight reflecting a smile. You watch the gentle fall of rainbow light over the face of one whom you try to save, but the decay is still there in your veins, isn’t it? Hand over hand, it pulls itself along, letting your own blood stain its lips.
That which it has touched turns gray and old, as if has lived through all the ages of the world. You can only feel your ribs crumble to cold earth within you while the twilight of decay grows until it blinds you, until you learn to see in shades of ash, and the rot trickles through the pathways of your mind in inevitable desecration.
Withering turns from nightmare to eternity. You reach towards the weightlessness of the sky, to the soft, blessed hush of the snow as it drifts lovingly down on midnight streets, and yet the decay grows. It snaps up pieces of your thoughts with predatory glee, painting your mind in bitter shades of rot in return.
You can pretend it's not there, waiting over your shoulder, threading its claws into your spine in muffling embrace even as you cup a rose in your mortal hands and call it meaning. Even as the crucifix swings over your head in sacred echo, and you grasp for a light you are forgetting how to reach, because the decay is always there, breaking apart your vertebrae one by one, slicing at the sagging flesh on your hips with a seeming finality.
Try as you might to escape it, it finds its way into the pauses between your breaths, letting its withering, curling, hideous petals force themselves into being in the caverns of your heart. They claw their way out of your throat until their roots burst through your heaving chest, searching for more to consume, and you crumble to the ground, your insides cleared out by decomposition, yet still the decay yearns for more. It grows stronger upon the elixir of your vitality, whose rotten weight you can no longer bear. You sink to your knees, not in prayer, but in defeat.
Because try as you might to look away, try as you might to have hope in the promises of spring, the lecherous growth that lies waiting in the depths of your skull will gut Hope and string its wheezing harp with what remains of her tendons, playing its mournful song on the remnants of your will.
Try as you might to look away; that corpse still lies in that scarlet field, gnawed hands curving on your shoulders, raising itself from the earth by the frame of your back.
It opens one eye as one who awakens from long slumber, turning your head to meet its hollow gaze–its pupils are an eternal gray; eons have fallen in their embrace, and you will be no different. There is no outrunning its silent demand for recognition, nor the grotesque elegance of its cadaverous patience as it pulls you in, sinking into its gaping eye that waits with horrifying certainty.
It clears a space beside it. Yet another beauty withers in your sight. That space, that open grave, has been echoing in your mind for as long as you care to remember. Molded to the contours of your spine, laid lovingly with the detritus of rot, a soft bed of overripe apples and moldy leaves.
You stare into its eyes, inexorably. More of the caverns wither in your head, dissolving to the dust you came from, the dust you make oracle, making gold in your shaking hands.
Dust pours into the graves, amidst the waving flowers of the field, vivid red against the gray sky.
The decay whispers, taking your vertebrae and placing them carefully into the slots it has carved.
The corpse wraps its hands around your waist, whispering of all the gaps it has found—all of the excess that will hang from you in rotting sweetness. You feel your sternum begin to cave inward. The decay is blooming, stretching petals into your heaving lungs.
Yet, you still turn away, searching for gold in the dust beneath your bloody knees, saying you are praying.
About the Author...
Sofiya Sharova is a junior at Denver School of the Arts. She enjoys using visual art and writing to explore the relationship between humanity and nature, on top of being a circus acrobat in her free time.
About the Artist...
Zoë Wagner is a senior at Savannah Arts Academy, where she majors in visual arts, an opportunity she's very grateful for. Her favorite medium to use is acrylic paint, but she is inspired by the master oil painters of history and is starting experiment with it as well. She hopes to continue creating art and developing her skills!