47094: 47 The World on her Shoulders
What she didn’t want to do anymore was hold back from the sufferings of the world, which was what, in the end, she thought these marches and movements were all doing, and she wanted the freedom that seemed to be hers only, the freedom to cross into the desert, for example, at a certain pace even if the desert might be inevitable, and she wanted life, but couldn’t go back anyways, and now wasn’t who she had been when she started out and decided living was what she wanted, and this, it seemed, was what it meant when people told her that she had to come to terms with things.
But she knew the simple cell dedicates itself to immortality whilst the complex gets bored, unable to persist in its own essence, and likely in the end to blow the world up in fire, gas, plague or some such idiotic horror. A bell was ringing somewhere, sounds splashing out like a free glossy rush of mountain water and it seemed to tell the entire history of humanity, like in each swing you heard the first pain of a deep fall when boundaries get utterly removed and you’re no longer left as a person but just some sprawled, defeated gone-ness.
And as she moved the fusion of bones is extensive, reducing weight, increasing rigidity, which admittedly would be helpful were she to decide to measure the length of the road, on her belly. Afterwards the shoeless sides of her pelvis widening for the attachment of muscles, spreading in to laterally spreading wings, curving downward to enclose and protect her abdomen, a backwards-sweeping arrangement of bones like a bird or lizard-hipped Theropod. She felt her preeny feathers and long enough neck, with the power of a spear and a driven flexibility which summarised, so it seemed, her whole motivation not to know, because knowledge, when it became a goal, was just a symptom of a person’s exhaustion. Placing all responsibility for the world on her own shoulders, perhaps this was her greatest fear, where counterweights to the sheer complexity of its actual reality left her with the choice of being that responsibility, albeit most of the time limping, dazed, crawling, insane and infirm like someone assaulted by kisses.
At the corner of the park the Geirfuglasker aukman was standing, with his upstrokes and downstrokes, flightless but still large keeled, broad and flattened, maintaining strength but reducing drag with a narrow leading edge, a depression in the skull above the eye socket where the salt excretion glands are, and perforations in the bone as if he knew you have to shed your nakedness and then everything underneath that nakedness, everything that it hides, so to speak, until you get to the core, and then go under that, and under that too, going on and on not to shake yourself off but to consume yourself.
With his bill sheath in place, long fleshy tongue and horny spines protruding from the upper palate, forward-facing webbed toes, absent hind toe, short tarsus, rounded cross-section, she recognised it at once as being her father’s posture, just like she knew when lilacs burn it’s the end of summer. She thought of the marching groups. They were like prisoners who had looked out from their cells and seen a chain-gang, assumed it was for them and so broke out to join it, as if their fate was marching in step.
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