Accompaniment to train announcement #8

Passengers, I apologise for the shakiness of this ride and the breathy chill inside the carriage. To keep warm, please snuggle up to the stranger next to you, and hold their hand. I could make up excuses for this technical inconvenience, but truth be told, I have not stopped shivering since I heard the cop’s description of the woman.

When he first saw her strewn across the tracks, there was blood everywhere. But it was not the blood that spooked him, nor the fact that her limbs lay twisted under her body. What grabbed the base of his spine with urgent offense was the multi-layer epidermal canvas of strips on the woman’s back. Strips of words. Strips of embossed words. Like the one on her palm, but in the thousands. Some of the words still stood tall and sharp, but the strips that were partially covered by others, partially faded, were unadhering. They only hung on by the weaving bits of skin that had wrinkled, hardened and grown around their hard edges, knitted together by the layers of flesh that created an unwieldy labyrinth of words and stuff of nightmares. Nightmare of labels end to end, labels overlapping, labels clustered, labels braided, labels twisted, labels overflowing.

It makes me shudder out involuntary gusts of chill through the air vents just thinking about it. Again please accept my apologies. I will have to get the technician to check my temperature gauge before I lose control.

And hopefully before I succumb to my nausea.