Any town built on swampland is bound to sink.

It will collapse into the layers of substrate and sediment from the pressures of time and space, and people stomping through their routines. Prefabricated houses, all askew, are weighed down with chipboard furniture assembled using finicky allen keys through blurry tears. You hope a new shelf might invite new habits, but the lumber is as uneven as the floorboards.

You know the earth will split into a sinkhole, consuming everything—your neighbour’s garden where you popped ripe, juicy tomatoes in your mouth after you swiped them from her porch. Their juice spilled promises down your chin, seeds bursting with the possibility of life.

The hole will swallow the playground where Billy’s kisses first pricked your skin, where your dizzy, dazy days twirled you on a swingset and the sky melted and you felt alive for the first time in your sixteen years.

The McDonalds will be devoured next, the counter you stood behind tilting sharp and angular. You worked there on-and-off for five years without a raise, buying instant ramen with food stamps and clothing yourself in cast-offs from the Goodwill (which is also capsizing into the sticky, relentless mud).

The gape will even suck down the hospital where you waddled into the ER screaming with the pain tearing apart your body. They pumped you full of Narcan before carting away the last piece of your beating heart in a transparent plastic bassinet.

Under the fluorescent lighting, your heart’s vines glowed in rainbow prisms. They coiled around your pinky—five perfect, tiny tendrils. Your arteries melded with its veins, crying “Mama” and thumping, pumping, spraying blood all over someone’s powder blue uniform. In a violent rage, your conjoined taproots were ripped apart with mandrake shrieks, causing a scene in the ER. Hospital staff and other patients still tiptoe around that ugly split through the linoleum, cracked right through the foundation.

Nothing is safe from the muck.

When the doctors release you, you stagger back into the swampland. Every corner buzzes with mosquitoes, driving you deeper into the darkest corners where it reeks of rotting flesh and tugs at your skin and bones and marrow, drowning you in sweet death stench. You try to sweat out its toxins for days hoping that your footfalls will be light enough to float along the surface—you can’t stay locked behind the clapboards of your mocking-hope home forever—but you round the corner of Aberdeen and York, and Billy is there promising another dizzy kiss.

It stings, at first. Familiar, fitting pain. But a poultice of peat moss with tickling greenery, pings through your roots and veins, even the torn ones with dead-end trails where your heart once nestled, and the blight which polluted you for as long as you can remember stops hollering about every time you’ve fucked up, and the sinking somehow feels like soaring.

Nothing can survive if it’s built on swampland, you think as Billy topples you again and again and again until you’re fully submerged, beneath the skim of acrid water, losing your body amongst the decaying relics of a town that never had a chance.

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Ⓒ Erin Brandt Filliter