‘Living Things Are Always Burning’

Becca Miles

Here you go again. Two steps towards the cave mouth, and you’re planning your retreat. Even the hope of sunlight horrifies.

Of course it does. You’ve mapped these tunnels by touch, felt every crevice in swallowing blackness, crawled through shale ‘til flayed knees turned to blood-red ore, carved a bed from rock and laid in it, let your back grow hard and grooved, let the embers of ambition fade, let frost drain the colour from fingers, limbs, face. All that time devoted to fossilising, and now you want to want to be anything but a golem of stone and bone and ice?

Yes.

I want to want to be my own Prometheus, set myself on fire to guide my journey, let burning light unite with metabolic alchemy, unleash

free radicals to dynamite the elements, oxidise my guts with every breath, shed cells that can’t be regrown, every reckless division inviting mutation, a fragile tower of biochemistry, daring entropy to bring it down, to howl; to weep for what is lost but not what could have been, blackened footprints where I stagger, scratch a message in the ashes where I fall:

‘And yet she was glad to be anything but that calcified thing, to be one of the hideous living.’