Animal Instinct

Stop and look at the little girl lost in the crowd. Forehead wrinkled like a piece of crumpled paper: you can smooth out the creases but they will never be erased. Shoulders slumped forward, lips pulled down with the weight of being alive. Take in her clenched fists, knuckles turned white with anger and fear. Hate. Do you see into her heart, see the scum coating her beating pulse, the hands of her life-clock encrusted with the thick strangling cords that are growing around her spine, tighter and tighter and pulling taut -

- until she is bent backwards like a nutshell cracked open, bones breaking with the burden of expectation. It is not worry about the colour of her dress or the ice cream stain on her cheek that plagues her, but of the remote possibility that in this crowd she has lost herself, her tiny footsteps becoming ever more silent as she ceases to be visible to passers-by. Always smiling, always pleasing; but if you only knew that each curtsy masked a dance of anger waiting to be performed, you would realise that behind the child's mask there is a monster who is feeding on obsessions and impossibilities. Behind this facade of laughter and complacency the little girl is dying. Watch the veins turn blue with cold as the blood ebbs away from the skin, backtracking right to her beating heart, as her fingers fold in on themselves and she is bent over like a boomerang. Watch the writing on her skin slowly disppear. Watch her head turn sideways until her profile is silhoutted against the glaring red skirt of a woman behind her, and then watch as she enfolds into a thin line.

Stop and look at the little girl lost in the crowd. Stop and look at me.