Episode 5: Depression

She was standing. She could feel mud on her bare feet. She was naked. She saw her house in the distance. Was it on fire? Was it floating just above the ground? She went to wipe mud away from her eyes. She could feel the beating heart at the core of this miserable earth.
Where were all the other houses?
The land had become a primordial swamp.
She began to walk toward her house.
The tree limbs made like a skeleton hand against the dark sky––they opened the night like a curtain.
In the distance, just outside the house, she saw a shape sprawled along the ground––heaving. A dark figure. Heaving. Wounded. Fighting for its life. Jake, she thought. Relief. He was here, maybe just wounded.
Or––maybe she’d only woken into another plane.
The figure’s breathing grew louder. She realized she was moving without touching the ground. Her feet were clean, just above the mud––the landscape of filth.
The organism, her disease, the terrors––it was abyss within her, and without her. It was everywhere, it was everything. The very air was the worm itself.
When she finally got close enough, she could see that it wasn’t Jake. But she felt OK. Her heart did not race––although it occurred to her that maybe it should be.
She looked up to see her house, floating above her, out of her reach. It was on fire. Ruby red flames reached out of every window and climbed up the roof. She could feel the heat. There were babies crying inside––she felt helpless for them––there was nothing she could do to help them.
The figure heaved in the swamp at her feet.
It was a wild boar––nearly as big as her house.
Fog crawled along the ground––as if it was moving in and out of its large snout. Its tusks were moon-white.
She knelt in the mud with the beast.
It spoke––but its mouth did not move.
“Lay your head on my heart,”
So she did. She could feel its lungs––rise and fall. Thick smoke twisted through the sky.
“I don’t want to be stuck here forever,” she told the beast.
“You don’t have to be. None of us are stuck anywhere if we don’t want to be.”
The beast tried to lift its head up from the mud and, slowly, used its tusks to bring Ashley’s attention to something.
It was the sugar gum tree.
It was a silhouette against the dark. But she knew it was her beloved sugar gum tree.
And there coiled below the tree was the long, orange extension cable from the kitchen.
The house was like a great burning sun suspended above them. There were no shadows.
The beast lay his head back down into the mud. Ashley placed her palm where its heart might be, as if to say thank you.
“These images are only assembled to keep you stuck here,” it told her.
Embers fell from the house singing the beast’s tough fur. One landed on Ashley’s arm––and she flinched. The heat grew hotter and she placed arm hand over her head as if to keep her face safe from the heat.
She left the beast and made her way toward the orange cable. She could smell the blood on her hands. Smell the house burning. The voices calling out to her from within the flames.
The only way to flee the heat, she thought, was the shade of the sugar gum tree––the sugar gum tree with its star shaped leaves.