#17

The basement is cool and smells like wet cement and dead insects. I am barefoot and walk into the laundry room where the cellar used to be.
 
In the sand, I dig with my toes. Above are spider webs. Egg sacks haphazardly strung on them like pearls.
 
There is no mirror here but I know what I look like. Broken.
 
I braid my hair and wish for the egg to split open, for life to crawl out.
 
 
 

Elizabeth Schmuhl is a writer, dancer, and artist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, PANK, Glass Press of The Future, and elsewhere. Her genre-bending, multidisciplinary book, Presto Agitato: A Dictionary of Modern Movement, will be out from Zoo Cake Press in fall of 2015, with an additional artist edition published by dancing girl press in 2016. She also illustrates essays for The Rumpus.