Turns out I replied to this challenge, too, except I wrote for an hour and a half and it was propelled by a dark rage at Chuck Palahniuk more than anything else.
So, uh, when I say "post-apocalyptic fun with Tara", I mean "these cadences are satirical".
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This is the way it starts. You wake up, and your hair is black again.
You don't notice until you're already in the bathroom. You flicked the lights on automatically, even though if you had taken a second to think about it you would have said, I do not want to see my face in that little bathroom mirror.
I don't want to see the lines across my face.
But your wrists still remember a time when electricity came with the touch of your finger to the wall, and you lived in a house with the girl you loved and the girl you half-adopted. Your fingers still grope around the floor near the couch, when you wake up after a night spent on the couch in dirty bombed-out living room, because they think they need the remote control to turn off the television that must be what lulled you asleep there, made you spend the night in such a strange place. Of course.
The old yellow couch with strange dark stains on the armrest.
The floor of the kitchen.
The walk-in closet.
These are the places you sleep, now. Your soft cheek knows the pattern of that linoleum. You wake up and its lines are all over you. Describing your skin. Just like the veins inside your face, rubbing through.
But it's too late for that. Isn't it.
You wake up with patterns on your face, from sleeping on someone else's carpet, someone else's recliner with the torn cushion and broken spring. Plastic insides leaking out.
You could ask the person who owned it why they kept such a beat-up piece of furniture. But you don't know the person, because you've never met. Because you just woke up one afternoon inside their house. Because the person isn't around now, and you know this for a fact.
Because all the people there ever was or ever will be are vanished, gone, vamoose.
All this leaving aside the fact that you wouldn't need to ask in the first place. You're no stranger to need, or the sight of ugliness so daily it fades out of notice. Until suddenly you are saying, Why do I have a blue leatherette recliner with yellow zig-zag trim.
Until you are waking up with its imprint in your face.
Is this really mine? Is this really me?
These are questions you're used to, because you asked them over and over again, in your old old life, so many chrysales ago your memories of it are watery sepia-tone. You were a little girl, and you played in hot dirt under a bright sun. Your mother had long red hair and when she sang to you the air twisted open and flowers moved behind your eyes. The walls of the trailer were brown and there were places where the metal rusted through.
You escaped. You found money dangling from the sky in the form of a scholarship, you found a girl with short red hair who couldn't carry a tune but her voice turned you open, dropped you flat on your back with your breath lost. The magic moved through you. Both of you. Together in bed, a real bed, with sheets and pillows.
It keeps coming back to that, doesn't it. The fact is, you don't know where you are. The fact is, you are trespassing, you are stealing your sleep from someone else's furniture and any minute they might come in the door and shoot you for being there. The fact is, you know they won't.
Vamoose.
You don't know where you are and you won't know you where you are tomorrow when you wake up again. Early afternoon, late morning, half past midnight. Your circadian rhythms are huddled in a corner whimpering.
You might be able to figure it out-- country, state, climate-- if you went outside. But you don't. You lift your head off the couch's ratty arm-covering, and feel your cheek. You walk to the bathroom. Limbs still heavy with sleep. All you're thinking is, you need to pee, and maybe the plumbing here works. So you don't notice it when your hand hits the wall where the light switch should be, and your eyes re-focus in the sudden brightness.
When you stand up, you have enough time to take a good look at the décor of this bathroom. You don't have anything better to do.
You have plenty of time to notice things like, the mirror isn't broken here. Your own face blinks right back at you, skin luminous white and hair black like a bad dye job, like tar on a new asphalt road.
You have time to notice things like, the light switch has been ripped out at its roots. Wires dangling loose. A scrape on the wall where the metal panel used to be.
Home sweet transient home. You have time to notice things like, there is no real electricity, and that brightness filling the room is sparking from your own fingertips. Swelling the lightbulb on top of the mirror.
You brush the wall again where the end of the wires hang, and the lightbulb glows even brighter, then smashes apart.
Vamoose.
It's dark again and now there's broken glass on the floor near your feet. The fact is, this isn't an unordinary day.
You walk back out to the room with the couch and stare at the dead T.V. in the corner. The glass screen is broken but maybe you can mojo it back together long enough to see whether Channel 50 is still auto-piloting reruns of '50s family sitcoms.
If wherever you are even gets Channel 50.
Instead you decide you'll give yourself the grand tour of this cozy little domicile. There's a rubber band on the floor in the hallway and you pull your hair into a ponytail and snap it around.
The kitchen is dirty, but it looks like the kind of dirty that means no one has been here in months, not the kind of dirty that means someone made eggs and left the pan in the sink and then spilled orange juice on the floor and let it dry sticky.
You think about who might have lived in this apartment. You think it's