She was dressed in a dirtied Sunday dress, faded color matching her pale, emotionless face.  Her nails clicked at the frayed edges of the chair in which she slumped, broken like Raggedy Ann.  A tragic pose, a disposed sigh, she looks at the broken clock that reflected the light of the single candle that burnt behind her in the shadowed room. Like a peeping tom, the candle sat, watching her dirty helplessness, eyeing the tears in her dress with a loneliness she could tearfully understand.  Pins pressed into her cheeks, little stilettos drawing dots of blood that didn't run, but seemed to weep like tears over her dusted jaw. The needles crisscrossed her flesh, each eye looking at the patterns they collectively wove; a symbolic pattern that they had etched into her flesh.
	With a startling crash, the door to the room flew open.  The candle's perverted vigil was joined by that of a much brighter light.  Like a picture of an angel, her tormentor appeared.  Outlined with dust swept light beams, the angel stood, its face a mask of white leather, with the eyes sewn shut and the mouth drawn tight with a zipper.  Its arms lay at its side, like dead snakes hanging from a mongoose mouth.
	"Moma" Elaine frightfully cried, but the twisted totem in the light had no response for her.
	"Moma, no more..." Elaine half begged, half wept from her blood stained body.
	Still the figure in the white light stood, erect and immobile.  The snakes were asleep, at least for a second, and to Elaine, the angel didn't look so bad in this clean light.  Swishing through the air, on clouds of dust swept up by her white linen dress, long since unfashionable and far too long, Mother floated towards the bound Elaine.
	"Moma" was her last, strangled reply as her shouts were stifled by a rag of soothing anasthesia.
	Mother was a clown then.  The leather mask was soon Bozo's fright-white laugh... and the long, sharp sewing needles that jutted from Mother's hands were the longest sausages Elaine had ever saw.  The arms no longer looked like dead snakes clinging to the side of her prone statue's body... now they were dancing flowers, smiling at her, wiping in and out, with pointy sausage noses that struck her.  She laughed in flashes of red happiness.  Mother grinned through the zippered face, spreading piranha's teeth in a half-grin that stopped the clock, and sent Elaine on a blackened spiral down her own intestines.

				PART 2

	Elaines hammering fists were soon shredded by the cracked glass.  Her dress was soaked with sweat and blood, and behind her on the ground lay her shoes, haphazardly lost in her run.  Outside, the moon winked devilishly at her, laughing and grinning with sin.  The trees swayed in the moonlight, carried eastward against their rootings by a strong gusting wind.  The grass wasn't green in the silvery bath.  Instead it stood naked and bare; white as in bathed in neon, an exposed skeleton freshly picked by daytime's vultures.  Field mice stood transfixed looking at the window, and Elaine could see into their frightening little hearts.  Their hearts beat with hers, and the pounding of rushing blood in her ears could only be drown by the drunken shouting of her father in the other room.
	"I'll kill you, you little bitch", the drunken giant slurred.
	He spoke the language of the drunk, his body languidly composing the exaggerated rage his failing tongue could not grasp.  Across the room she could smell the poisoned breath, as the man swaggered into the door frame.  Within it he seemed to grow, the frames of the door not serving to contain his form, but to challenge it, making it rise to new horrifying heights and widths.  Elaine felt as if she were looking through a stained fish bowl, red with the blood pouring from her forehead. On the floor between them lay the mother, dressed in her blood stained corset and garters, a needles sprouting from her eyes like grotesque growths.  To Elaine they bent and weaved, as if they brothers to the trees blowing in the wind outside. 
	"You done it! Sarah, what has the little tramp done?" the disheveled figure yelled into the prone body.  Alchohol tears cascaded down his cheeks, he was in prime Vaude Villain form when Jack Daniels was the playwright.  Mock heroic poses he struck by the dozen, snarls of anger, heaves of anguish and stares of confusion played across his face, like duelling actors struggle for control of his actions. 
	He wiped one arm across his sweating brow, and returned his gaze to Elaine.
	"Now, you've done killed Sarah, Elaine... I can't let you get away unpunished for this..." he said, as his hand dropped from his brow to his belt buckle "you're gonna have to learn your lesson the hard way".
	He staggered forward on clumsy feet.  The lush red carpet appeared a sea of blood to him that he swan across to reach the screaming girl. 	Elaine had been pounding the window in fretful little bursts, and the field mice had scampered away into their mold smelling holes.  The windows seemed to be made of elastic rock candy. Each blow dented the surface, leaving a smear of blood to drip down the clear egg shell glass.  The clock tolled 2 a.m. and her father's hand trailed through her hair, knotting it and turning her into a whiskey stained candle wick.  Elaine's fear shot through her like venom, and the smell of her instincts fought with the stench of death, alchohol and blood.
Her father clumsily pawed at her face, murmuring whispers that he feared she would hear, promises of the night to come.  Glass matted the ground, growing in small transparent patches across the carpet and the greenery outside.  Her father's fingers were like gruby little worms, smearing her spittle across her cheek as they sought entrance to her mouth.  Like an adder she lashed out in confusion, clawing and scratching at the invading body.  His scruffy beard caught in her painted nails, and like velcro it snagged and she pulled.  Tuffs of hair and flesh cascaded to the ground, and the ceiling fan spun faster and faster, dancing to the vertigo.  They seemed a cartoon, bending and twisting as grunts and screams dripped like a leaking faucet into the air.  His breath was hot on her cheek, and she envisioned herself a cool mirror, lightly fogging under the breath. 
	 Her hands bled, she was pulling on glass.  His hamstrings fell to the ground behind him, trailing like a kite tail on the deepening red carpet.  His eyes winked out like the lone candle in the room as a shard of jagged glass dug its way to his skull.  Alone Elaine sat in the room, her tears could not clean her bloodied face, and no amount of distance would put her life behind her.
		
	
				PART 3
	
	Her sandals flapped like an exposed wound at the shimmering pavement.  On the roadside stood trees and bushes of all states of decay.  Gnarl specters of death, they sat as vultures, foretelling the death of motorized civilization.  Here on the road she felt primitive.  The sun was the same that had set on her ancestors millions of years ago.  The moon was the same ghostly phantom that had enthralled and frightened those same ancestors.  The spit she spat to the side of the road, dry and dust entrenched, was the same spittle that had fallen from hunting and mating animals' lips millennia ago.
	For two years she had wandered the New Mexico landscapes, looking to escape from home.  But home could not be lost, home could not be forgotten.  No matter what tricks she played, the memories of her upbringing haunted her every move.  Home was not simply a place, a ramshackle, alchohol fueled hut in the woods of Arizona, but it was Hamlet's father, emerging as a shackled apparition, a blemish on both her memory and fate.  To Elaine, home was not a location, home was not even a thought in her feverish, blistering mind...
	Home is where the heart is.
	And her feet fell further and further away from the place of her upbringing.
	Like pebbles in a lake, her consciousness grew more divided and further away from its origins.  The brambles that caught her shoes were enemies trying to hinder her escape.  Cold desert winds in the night froze her to her blanket, pouring liquid nightmares into her sleeping mold.  The night air was a scream in her mind, the coyotes were hungry, and her mind yearned to feed them.

				PART 4
	It had been three weeks since she had seen a living person. The cactus stood, lonely sentinels in the dry air. It seemed to her that the sand was alive; maybe it was just hunger.  In its convulsions, her stomach spoke many secrets to her, each whisper stronger than the last, fighting to be heard in her fevered mind.  Like an egg on a hot summer sidewalk, Elaine's mind was melting and frying in its own juices.  Her eyes saw mirages that were not there, yet she felt compelled to wonder at each passing hallucination.  Jack rabbits danced by her slumbering body at night, and she could feel their whiskers scrape across her skin.  She was reminded of her fathers course beard rubbing in lust at her trembling cheeks so many years ago.  The rabbits were hopping faster and faster, and she counted them like sheep to attempt at sleep. In the night her day cooked brain attempted to cool.  An overheated car of flesh and synapses, it let off thoughts strange and wonderful, steam that cooled the rotting inferno of her mind.
	"Bitch!"
	"Die bitch! You're gonna die!". Bottles flashing red.
	A crack opens in her easy chair, and she falls into the sand.  Her mother is there, a white garbed nurse in leather.  Her hypothermic needles thrust at Elaine's cheeks, drawing trickles where rivulets should have been.  Like a raisin in the sun Elaine would lay limp and useless for hours.  Steam filled her vision, and in that steam was her fathers face, marring the mirror of her pupils with his hot breath.
	Her blanket was often covered with sweat, and she cursed her involuntary loss of water.  The days grew hotter. The road was no where in sit anymore.  Only the occasional rock stood as testament to life outside of the sand and the shimmering heat on the horizon.  Once, what seemed like years ago, she came upon a towering cactus sprouting from the deadened sand.  The wind whipped the specks of harden dust into her eyes as she gazed upon the monument dumb founded and in raw, animal hunger.  Her claws dug into the thorny flesh, tearing hunks of spiked peyote skin out in hurried assault. She fed, and drank, of the life that the tree represented. Then she walked.

				PART 5
	
	She screamed. She flew.  Elaine's body hurtled into outer space on waves of mystic energy.  She was surrounded by white cloaked men
	wearing hoods. like her father
	had
	her father had
	worn a hood.
And she flew and flew. Through the fish bowl of a world she flew, never belong to herself, always pummeled by the cosmic plan.
	How she hated to be green
				in this land
	of yellow sand.
	She came to a town. And ran. Right. Through it. Vertigo. Chaos. And yet
	Unity
	Of thoughts, actions, and emotions.
	She loved the tree, with the hanging black bodies, she had been taught to hate. She was sick.
	She threw up.	
	She fell down.
	She spun in circles and barked like a dog, and drank her tail.
	Life was good.
	She fell down.
	She fell down.
	Off the rocky cliff in the desert, she fell down, into a sea of her own blood, and a coral reef of broken bones.