The nature of a lie

A lie is cold and slippery as ice. It peers through glassy eyes at the warm world and tracks its victims like an experienced predator: the land, the sea, the air and the trees; and the people who laugh and cry and shout for joy. A lie bulldozes these things, and mashes them into the ground so that they look all the same, helplessly pressed into the road upon which a new army of lies goosesteps.

A lie is mundane as an expressionless face, emanating from lips that move but say nothing. Its deathly smooth skin looks like a heavily made-up face in an open casket, sucking all that is real and uneven into an unnatural, rotting perfection. A lie is bleached blond with dark eyebrows, the roots meticulously covered in the very second that uncertainty threatens to expose itself.  A lie is a full-time job requiring minute-by-minute attention to the color that might make its way out, the life that might begin to twitch in the flattened road, and the eye that might blink.

A lie is a lie, because it thwarts its own existence. The body ejects it in a fever, like an infection that must be expelled. The water seeps through its membranes to equalize the salt of life all around it, and eventually dries it out, causing it to collapse from the impossibility of supporting itself. A lie retreats like a guilty thing to pursed lips that no longer know what to do with it, except to lick it with one sweep of the tongue and swallow.