L’âme de l’homme est fait du papier

Paper Kid haunts the locker-lined hall, all crumple and shred inside. Crow-coloured clouds overcast her heart. The sun’s tawny tongues lick the cinderblock walls. Some lockers loll open, many more closed, cool as coffins. Paper Kid angles past these shrines to shoegaze, sweat, and other kinds of kindling. Crisp and slight as letterhead she slips around doorjambs, vanishes in profile. Her sneakers squeak and stutter.

Up the hall ahead, a classroom door opens and and Glass Girl walks out, glittering as moonlit snow. She touches the sun-warmed wall, smiles as wide as an errant rabbit spilled across the road by careless cars. Paper Kid sees Glass Girl, notes she’s wearing her political lipstick. Paper Kid, compelled, chases her in slow motion, crinkling like carbon copy with want. The long window at the end of the hall overlooks the dead-grass playing field, has twelve tall panes, and twenty-two housefly husks on its sill. Paper Kid follows Glass Girl, watching her walk like an artless underwater waltz. The kid picks up her pace, starts to glow like eucalyptus in the furnace of the excommunicated century. Starts to burn, slow, an ant under glass. That arsonist, lust, lights her shoelaces, her shirtcuffs, her eyelashes. In the slipstream behind Glass Girl’s stride, Paper Kid steps faster, drinking the summer-beach scent of her silicon skin.

Glass Girl turns down the stairs and Paper Kid can’t stop herself any more than an oceanfloor flatworm can stop itself getting trawled up to the surface. The gridded wide window yawns ahead at the end of the hall. Paper Kid’s arms curl like news clippings. Consumed, immolated, immaculate, she crashes headfirst through the window. Black flakes float and scatter into the still indifferent April skies.

A murmuration of ash starlings drifts down to the dead grass. Where Glass Girl soon steps, softly, coolly, and fleeting as a midsummer momentary rainfall.