Shadow dance.

[Lessien Melwasul]

~North side Chicago, Downtown in a non-descript boxing gym. The old kind where it smelled bad and the walls dripped with history. A place where some of the greats would stop on their cross country tours to pump up before the big night. But that was two generations ago, and the new generations had no memory, no hunger and no need for them anymore. America was dead, its youth fuckin' doomed. Breast fed until they were fat and rotting with extinction. Jacked into to the internet to pretend they actually lived a life worth living. Fortunately for Lessien, she wasn't American and wasn't raised there either. She was one of te last children of British Hong Kong where children still starved and the streets were filled with real danger. Not tribes of lost boys and girls whose fathers and mothers forgot to teach them how to be real men and women. No, Hong Kong was alive, and if you blinked it would eat you fucking whole, bones and all.~

~Their shadow danced on the wall in an elongated distortion of her true self because only the skeleton lights were left on at this late hour. Betty's voice cute the quiet with grunts of force and hisses of speed in an alternating current. Alice danced slow just like she always did and their body was covered in a lather of sweat and spent force. Shadow boxing was the ultimate expression of futility because the shadow always fucking won. It matched every punch, every

last

sweet step and never broke a breath louder than a whisper.~

All

night

long.

~She swung a wide hook for the shadow's ribs, three times before settling back on her heels to jab it back to the fucked up lights it came from.~