There is a green, green countryside.  And there is boredom.  I’m passing though the boredom in the green, green country, maybe Austria.  It is my country, but I’ve never thought of giving it a name before, because I’ve never had to see it from the outside, or consider what it means to others.  And there is a customs or border exchange that I have to pass though.   It is boring too, a real drag.  But there are two rookie cops there, and they might help me to pass the time.  One looks young and dare I say it, eager.  He’s rather thinly built and dressed in brown.   His style of clothing is indeed drab and not up to my colorful style of expression, but I will give him a run for his money – I mean, it will help to pass the time since everything is so terminally boring.  And here I am at the terminus, the place where I get to pass though.  “Pass through to what?”, you may ask.  From glowing youth to terminal old age.

So invite the young cop to show me if he can wrestle.  Yes, I know what you are thinking, but that isn’t me.  We are in fascist Austria, and everything is boring and repressed.  Yes, I realize I said that word a few too many times, but it is how I feel so why try to hide it anymore?  So, I invite him to wrestle, because in my youth I had already learned many techniques in martial arts.  Yes, I know I mentioned that I was still in the bloom of youth, but to be clearer, my youth is already declining.  One of those things I associate with my youth is my engagement in martial arts.  The young cop seems keen to wrestle.

So we are soon clinched in an entanglement of bodies, but the cop seems rather lame – by that I mean he lacked information and knowledge about technique.  So naturally, I showed him how moving my feet in certain ways, supposing that I did it right, and in a quick, forceful and timely manner, I could really damage him, as well as making my mistake.   He seemed to take this knowledge in, in a good spirit. 

Then I left to go through the boring terminal.   But I couldn’t make it through somehow.   The cop was there again.  This time he got me in a clinch and whilst holding me down he shot two jets of dirty water at me from his mouth.   Yes, I know what you are thinking – he wasn’t human anymore, but some kind of animal.   It was like a frog or a chameleon, but something repulsive.  I tried to break free, and I did so, but I could tell that he was growing in strength.  Also, he tried to stop me from crossing the customs border.  Why would he do that?  

I began to flee.  Actually, I ran onto the runway, but all the transport had been grounded.   I had to come back in the other way, past all the desks where agents did their work.  They seemed partly abandoned now. I got onto the back of a truck, where there were sacks of food in black material.  I tried to play dead, but my body was a light flesh color still – despite my declining years.  The sacks of wheat were black.   I pulled my toes into the shadows, but I didn’t think it was a good enough disguise.

We went fast in the wind, past greener fields that I had ever imagined.  On the highway was a bill board that showed a dog licking its lips as it ate a piece of roasted meat.  The slogan said, “Made from excrement, but still as delicious as ever!”

The truck was taking us away from the border I had been trying to cross, and back to the countryside, which was Austria’s heartland.   I was in a small village now, and should be safe.  It was safe in its anonymity, perhaps.  I had just arrived, and I was an old woman now, full of the cynicism that comes from living through two world wars.   I expected nothing from anything, least of all from men – the other sex of our species. 

Just then a bionic man ran by.  My god, it was him!   He was chasing on bionic legs to catch another man, perhaps to feast on him and kill him.  He brushed past and virtually bumped into me.  What terror on earth, when the only way to escape it is to escape it is to die.

But I am older now, and have passed through the shadows, passed through the boundaries that I was trying to cross before, and even though my youthfulness state would never advocate for me, something has changed now between the shadow and the light.   It is a subtle shift – almost nothing at all – like the thin threads of a spider’s web, but my brain is advocating for me to stay amongst the living.