mud flaps, huh?

Halle couldn't take it any more. Even she was surprised by what she couldn't take any more. It was always someone else, something else that made her so emotionally angry that her skin would start to break out in hives and she'd start to pass out from hyperventilation before forcefully calming herself down. It was hard work, harder every time, but she hadn't lost consciousness. Yet.

This time it was the darkness. So complete was the darkness that she wasn't even sure if she was still on the road, still on this planet or maybe she was but those others out there, those ones with the gleaming smiles and perfect hair, they had drifted away leaving all the darkness just for her. For the loser, for the - she stopped, took a deep breath and counted backwards - the Mama Groovy's patented hives curing method for not getting pissed. Halle bent down to feel the ground. It was still hard and cold. That was no indication, because at this time of year everything was cold and hard, even people. So she slipped a mitten off and felt the ground again. What she felt through the cold was an indication of cement, a strange, gritty feeling, that not quite real texture of being held together by something other than nature. Just like her.

The laugh that escaped her lips as she slipped her mitten back on was spiteful and mocking, but at least it killed the last of the futile anger that had been building up.

"Just like me, huh? Now whose thought was that? Certainly not one of mine. Mom's maybe? Or even Dusty's?" She laughed again, this time there was actually mirth in the sound. "Halle, my girl, you do realize that you are talking out loud to yourself just to make sure that there still is life in this darkness, that there still is you in this darkness."

She twirled once, twice, and about-faced, just like she had learned as a little girl in ballet, when she had pretended that there was magic in the movements and a future to her life. She bowed back at the place she had last spoken aloud as if responding to her past self. "Of course I know. I know I know. I know things even you, yourself have forgotten like this-" she curtseyed, bending low and sprung into a leap.

Through the air she flew and before her foot touched back down to the earth, before she reconnected with what was real, she felt that she had left this cold land for good - that she had leapt beyond the grasp of gravity and family, the crap pealing away as she left earth's atmosphere. In that moment, she felt again that movement brought magic back to the world or - no, that movement brought people back to magic. It was a wild, exclamatory leap, which probably felt much better than it looked, but who was here to judge? Halle felt that it would never end, that she would never come back down out of the sky where she found herself among clouds - the world however had different plans for her.

Her foot lightly touched back down, found no purchase, no connection to the ground and slid out from under her. This unfortunate movement made her other leg swing forward wildly, reacting to the fact the momentum of the movement had not been abated but agitated by the slip and back she fell. Her head bouncing painfully on the ground, making small white stars explode before her eyes. She sat up quickly but the effort made her head swim and she rolled over and puked.

When some of her composure had returned, she reached down beneath her left leg where she felt an unnatural shape that had to hold the answer as to why she slipped, to what had stolen the perfect moment from her. What she pulled from the ground - with effort, as if the earth was reluctant to reveal its devices - changed her life forever. There in her small hands, before her slightly unfocused eyes was a squarish piece of rubber and on it - arched in what many think of as a submissive pose but Halle recognized as a show of strength, of dominance - was exactly the woman that Halle determined to become.