#super light

Like some hallowed hall, flimsy plastic tapestries festooned the site. I wondered if I ought to question the lack of a busy populace. No sentry nor construction drone could be seen throughout my jaunt. But somehow I was not surprised. I passed ragged holes in the walls, admiring the sight of a naked horizon framed by exposed re-bar.

The electrical whine of the building felt as though it were being overtaken by a warm humming, like some massive lung live wired to the building’s electrical grid. The chill I noted  upon entry to the floor was also ebbing away. I found myself walking through the broken cubicles and smashed meeting rooms. Picking my way over crumbled forms of chairs and computers, everything covered with a layer of plaster dust and paint chips.

Wires hung from the ceiling, hemorrhaging through sections of tile and hanging loose over head.

I wandered through the twisting guts of the offices until I came upon purple roots tethered into the walls and floor. Vascular, fleshy roots that clung to walls, plasterboard walls crumbling in their slow, questing grip. I began to see growths among the roots in tucked away corners, large bulbous growths of smooth semi translucent membrane. Inside the fibrous interior vague human shapes could be seen in reclining posture. Many in a fetal array, none appearing to be writhing or howling, all in a state like sleep. Each as though they had come home, as natural as petals to their flower. Some were empty as well, their contents waiting for their appointed charges. But none of them were mine.

I kept walking, aware that now there was movement in the walls, under the floor, at the corner of my eyes. Much of it was quivering motion in the roots and chambers of the alien… vegetation? Perhaps? But I knew there eyes upon me, though distance was kept.

When I found the chamber meant for me, I knew it sounding in my heart, in the aching feeling from ancient corridors of my cortex down the lines of my spine. It was sprawled over a shattered meeting hall, bulk rooted on the staging area at the epicenter. Perhaps they knew the room’s importance, or at least, appreciated the historical gravity of the amphitheatre like architecture.

I felt through the wavering, humid air that surrounded it. I swore it respirated, it breathed out a living air that clung to the skin. My fingertips found its surface and sunk into it as though it was kneaded dough. The sensation was pleasantly warm throughout, it did not pull me in, it simply yearned with a palpable desperation. It had waited for me, it waited still, its patience was glacial and just as immense in sheer potential.

The interior of the membrane was not dark, instead I was bathed in outrageous colour. Simplistic hues of pink, yellow and blue splashed and ebbed across my vision. I could look down at myself in the din of colour but the body I saw pained me. Alien in its awkward shape, its quotidian faults. It was distorted by the interstitial fluid, a substance I breathed easily if not eagerly.

Warmth spread through my lungs.

The first I felt of the change was a piercing strike to my forehead as though by a knife, or I imagined, perhaps an arrow. The shaft of which had sunk deep within what would be insensate grey matter. It was not a pressure, it was a release. My skull held an infection and pustulent humanity flowed from the wound. The heat at my brow was a tongue of fire and my body spoke the profound language of change.

Appendages twisted, new bones anchored to unwoven sinew, limbs I had never known but desperately desired took shape. Heedless to time, I gestated in that alien womb for a endlessly productive length of time. My eyes itched, and a shuddering touch popped the flimsy bulbs. A momentary bother, the widened cavities soon became filled with the vitreous humors that would behold the new world I would be born into.

When I emerged from metamorphosis, plasmic beauty dripped from a body hewn in glory. Membranes of my wings spread wide, drying in kaleidoscopic sunlight. I stretched a multitude of new limbs at the sky, now filled with the colour I could never have beheld with my once obsolete flesh.