pale, black

during those hot early summer weeks, Jori spent most of her time by her granny's bed in claustrophobic room 418. ward corridors were empty most of the time. only an old grumpy nurse shuffled her weary feet along past their door. loneliness, tugged at by gravity's childish hand, billowed downwards permeating every inch of the place.


in the late afternoon, the heat was intense, sticky. the nurse came over to change the old woman's diaper. Jori was always asked to leave the room when the nurse aided by a caretaker went through the  fastidious motions. Not today though. either through neglect or, rather, more probably, maliciousness, they allowed her to stay. Jori knew the moment she saw it that the nurse had instinctively been aware of the effect the nipple would have on her. it was just that, though, the centre of a sick woman's breast but it looked like a greyish tumourous dummy. once a sexual trophy and a chunky nourishing hose. the woman's life socket had turned into a black hole.

Jory's vision playfully deconstructed her grandmother's tainted whitish-pink bosom, successively blurring the woman's blackened spiral by bringing the whole thing into focus, then sharpening the black nipple, bringing the whitish-pink bosom out of focus... out-of-focus white, sharp black. sharp  white, out of focus black. she played this blurry-clear-clear-blurry game and her mind went blank. time warped. the heavy rythmic clash of those two colours shook her very core.

phases we go through, they say. life looks you straight in the eye and waves goodbye.