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Sometimes, when you’re going through a difficult experience in your life, you find it a very useful option to force your mind into an alternative situation.  A dream world.  Something to take your mind off whatever it is that’s happening to you.  As a kid in elementary school, you remember having to have surgery on one of your wrists.  Before the procedure, while waiting to be sedated, sweating out the anxious minutes, you discovered the technique by telling yourself that you weren’t on an operating table.  You were actually in a capsule about to be launched out into space, free to wander the cosmos unfettered.  It helped you immensely, and was part of the reason why you didn’t end up in tears as they placed the mask over your face to put you out.

A similar strategy is heavily in play for you at this moment as Carly’s early morning jog has been underway for roughly thirty minutes.

You imagine a jungle, allowing the illusion to fill your mind completely.  The air is hot.  Thick.  Muggy.  An unpleasant atmosphere, in general, you decide, but it feels good: like a sweatbox in a gym.  Your skin dampens as you simply stand still, taking it in, the heat like a cloud swallowing you up absolutely.

You inhale deeply, drinking in the scents.  A musky, animalistic odor.  Like bodies sweating all over one another and then letting it soak into their skin.  You wrinkle your nose.  It’s not a pleasant smell, but it’s the jungle.  It comes with the territory.

You feel a cool, clean droplet land on your hair.  You wipe it away, smiling to yourself, before a large splatter of it comes down, absolutely soaking the top of your head and sending miniature dribbles cascading down your cheeks, some of it even getting in your eyes and nose.  Of course, you don’t care, because it’s clean rainforest water just trickling down from the sky like a gift from the heavens.  And those kinds of things are good.

You walk up to the closest tree, and with a feeling of warmth in your psyche, hug yourself tightly to the smooth, slim tube of wood, shaved clean of its bark, running upward.  As the warmth and musk settle into your nostrils, the rain continuing to pound down onto you and into your face, you smile.  Because you’re in the jungle.

The jungle, damn it.

                No, you’re not.  You’re not in the jungle, you suddenly realize.

                The jungle air and sweltering heat don’t come from the climate, but from the oppressive body heat of your overworked sister’s skin.

                The fusty, odiferous animal scents don’t come from mating or tired beasts, but from the grody, spice-spiked BO of your sister: a cancerous, nauseating fog of sweaty balm.

                The smooth, rounded tree trunk you’re hugging isn’t made of wood.  It’s made of firm, muscular, toned flesh, clenching itself in and out in such a mesmerizing pattern there might as well be complex machinery operating Carly’s right leg itself, forcing her tight muscles and soft skin into action.

                And, of course, there’s not a clean rainstorm cleansing your body, splashing into your hair, running down your face and into your eyes and nose.  Your little sister is simply sweating.

                Rivers.

                As reality cruelly slaps you with a metaphorical, metallic rod across the skull, you sputter, cough, and shiver all at once, gasping for breath, and remember what’s going on.  Carly’s running shoes against the dark pavement far below at the end of her mile-long legs, which become visible in quick flashes as her sweat-soaked shorts flip back and forth between hugging themselves damply against your body and being flung outward ever so slightly.  With each unforgiving flap against you, the cold, soggy fabric feels like a wide whip cracking itself against your freezing, battered skin before swooping outward again, allowing you a brief, painless reprieve before snuggling around you with another wet whack.

                Your hair feels tacked together, a gooey substance pervading seemingly every single follicle on your cranium.  With each slam of Carly’s muscular leg, a fresh batch of sweat drops comes careening down her leg from underneath the strap of her underwear, which long ago had absorbed all the translucent excrement it could, forcing the thick, salty bulbs to roll down the newly slicked vertical surface of Carly’s leg.  They leak over your cheeks, stinging your skin as layer upon layer of starchy droplets soak into you. 

You cough as another generous, warm droplet of your sister’s sweat leaks down her leg and unavoidably toward your lips.  As you spit it, though, your head is jostled hard into Carly’s leg as she plants it on the ground again, and the droplet pops right against your nose, forcing you to inhale it so hard that most of the sweat bubble finds its way into your body regardless of your efforts.  And once it’s this far, with no wait to spit upward without it coming back down, your options become limited to drowning in the moisture or actually swallowing the cruel, greasy crystal of sisterly exudation.

So you do.

                The morsels of sweat that don’t find their way up your nose or splash against your lips slide down your overheated body and into the tape, slowly weakening the bonds.  Particularly for the last ten minutes (or what you perceive as ten minutes, anyway), you’ve felt there being slightly more give in the tape as far as keeping you trained against the steamy wall of leg flesh.  This of course means that you might more easily slip right out of the confines of the tape and drop straight toward your death on the pavement far below, but the detriment doesn’t stop there.  As it turns out, being forced to more closely hug your sister’s leg was a blessing, because now that you have some wiggle room, each time Carly slams a foot down on the ground, you slide back against the tape before being slapped wetly back against her limb with even more force than before, as if you were belly flopping into a taut leather barrier with each of Carly’s Brobdinagian footfalls. 

And with each step, you find the pattern repeating: being drawn back by forces impossible to combat, a fleeting moment of weightlessness against the sticky, wet piece of weakening tape, before feeling the firming of your sister’s leg and the instantaneous, numbing smashing of your body back against her tough pillar of tan skin.

“D-D-D…” you gasp, figuring that speaking is something to do with yourself, and anything to do is better than just sitting there and stewing in your lack of power to do anything about the situation.  You have to have some kind of power left somewhere, and you intend to use it.

“DAMN IT!” 

As you scream out these two words with great defiance, a potent bead of cold sweat trickles downward, snaking toward you like a cobra looking for easy prey.  It splashes against your face, dribbling messily over your lips, as if punishing you for your exuberance.  You hack in defense, but you’re far too late.  You wrench, tasting as the salty flavors molest your throat, and ponder this newly discovered fact: even karma seems on the side of your insane, heartless, slave-driving sister, regardless of right and wrong.

You hate how philosophical you find yourself getting in situations like this as you feel another healthy dribble of cold sweat settle moistly into your sticky hair.

Damn it, you resolve to only think to yourself rather than speak it aloud, as you finally swallow the nearly poisonously salty droplet of your little sister’s sweat with a painful grimace to yourself.

Damn it.

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