Inner Life

Her chest beats with all the vibrations of an apocalyptic earthquake. It slowly began to rumble, only an hour before. Just small tremors at first, she hardly thought anything of them as she lay in the warm folds of her soft bed. Her legs were spread wide, hands lazily splayed over the tops of her pillows. Her hair was a tangled mess, long brown curls lay in repose, covering every color of the soft cushions beneath her head. A barely detectable smile was spread across her face. To an untrained eye, she appeared stoic, but the corners of her mouth were turned slightly upwards and she was indeed relaxed and calm.
As she lay in the sweet waters of stillness, faint tremors began to rumble across the landscape of her mind. Little demons, just three feet tall and covered in short coarse hairs ran across the deserted inner fields. Skipping and dancing, holding carved wooden masks with disturbing upturned mouths, they taunted and laughed. They flashed for barely a second, she noticed them only in hindsight and quickly forgot about their presence as she turned her head to the right to gaze out her window.
There was a bright blue day that moved just beyond the borders of her glass windows. "A beautiful day" she thought with all the openness of a young undisturbed girl, but almost within the same breath, her face contorted as she felt another demon storm across the sweet smelling fields of daisies and honeysuckle.
Its voice was louder than the others that had come before. His voice, she could hear. And his words caught her imagination. She began to think of what was happening without her, upon the bed of her shared lover. A twisted tree had grown quickly to fill the contorting inner space, and the powerful demon lurked near its shade. The calmness of morning fields was quickly becoming overgrown with dark trees and distorted pools of murky gelatinous fluid. She felt these changes, deep inside her chest, she felt the pools turning and twisting, small waves giving birth to larger demons with tattoos of murdered nuns and sharp axes.
The creatures emerged from the dirty waters covered in a shiny brown coating that smelled of rotten inner earth.
She lay on the still soft bed, but she didn’t feel the satin sheets beneath her smooth white body. She didn’t relish the beauty of a morning that held the power of time immortal. She lay, quiet and twisted, wincing and turning more heavy and dark as the moments passed. Her chest turned into a weighted ball of steam and iron, barely able to push the surrounding oxygen in and out. Tears licked at the inner corners of her eyes as she thought of words she could say, but they all tasted of dirty money and copper coins, too ugly to be spoken, too foul to be birthed.
"Take the weight" she screamed, but not a sound moved.