TATTERED

They dragged from her. Strange half words in breathless icy syllables.  Sharp sounds that fell on soft mushy ears.

Fumbled and tumbled and crashing from her junk brain, her trash mouth, her fat tongue. Her lips, too thick for her mouth to tell her story.

The police woman hands her a hot thing. Hard, and hot, too hot. “Cup”, she says, “Of tea”, she says. Words are fractured. Thoughts tattered. Body torn.

She tries to tell the tale of her fall from grace. Her push from grace. Her shove from grace. The theft of her grace. She tries to force the words out through slick teeth past metal fillings and into the air.

She sits on a chair that hurts her creaky rigid bones. Snapping bones. Brittle icy battered bones.

This room is full of strangers, foreign to her, she doesn’t speak their language, or she does she just forgets how.

She remembers to try and push the words out again but her fettered breath hangs limp in the air as strange eyes and strange hands draw their own conclusions.

There is no comfort here, in this bare room of hard walls and soft people. No comfort. Except for inside the hard and hot. Hard and hot and really there. A cup, she said, of tea she said.

It seems there is always comfort to be found, at the bottom of a hot drink.