Damia, Earth

Damia’s call to the wild was nothing but her heart’s beat, pulsing debt and bad credit. The red of unpaid which she tried to soothe by slowing her breath down to the rhythm of a youtube guided meditation. She should have said she would default this month. Arranged to pay at a later date. But her silence had left her tapping out distress signals, narrating her mental health in response to threatening emails. She hoped the penny in her purse would become a pound. Though this alchemical miracle would not suffice, its promise made light of the purse sprung in her grip.

Damia, Earth

Fuck it, Damia wasn’t going to pay the bank. She was going to do a runner. She swiped clothes and toiletries at random into her pink camouflage backpack and chucked it into the car along with pillows and a duvet. Some tins of food and a torch followed, the later giving her chaotic exit a semblance of forethought.

It didn’t take long before she was out of the city and the darkness became woollier, tightly packed around the beams of her car headlights. The rain was hard, lit up into broken white lines extending out in radial formation from the top right of the windscreen. It reminded her of Star Wars graphics used to denote accelerated time travel. In this elemental relativity her escape felt sluggish and painfully earthbound.

The wheels droned on through the unrelenting rain. The digital clock display told her she had been at this for three and a half hours. It was time to turn off the main road, move deeper into the shadows of the barely silhouetted mountains. The dirt track was framed by glistening grey grass and just ahead, a grouping of deer looked back lazily at her. Six glowing yellow planets orbiting around an unseen star. Swiftly eclipsed by a turn of heads and breezy hop across the road.

Inching along in search for a place to park overnight, she found campers took up most spots. They had surged through the pandemic and the resulting holiday flight cancellations. Her headlights at last shone unimpeded into a free lay-by surrounded by beech trees. She switched off the car engine, fading into momentary silence before the shimmering chorus of the beech gathered volume in the wind. The logic of capital had flexed and shifted — money did grow on trees in a crisis — but only to keep credit card bills going. The old-normal’s burning pit of debt, glowing warmly into the future.