Our Unknown Girl

Our Unknown Girl

There was a story of a girl they found
dead
in her apartment.
They said that she had been there for months
laying on a clean mattress
now dirty from the decay
and mold
and shit
rotting from her bones.
They found her because a woman had sad she smelt something
she had reported the smell almost two months before they checked.

The girl knew no one they said,
her neighbours didn't even know they had neighbour
and no family nor phone to call her with.
In a room
On a floor
In her own private hovel,
in a nice part of london.
The girl should have friends.

They cleaned her up-
tossed her out.
Buried,
or cremated-
who knows;
no one knew her.
All she had left was the mattress
and her laptop
plugged in
the screen fryed from months of pixels burning.

And the police took it
for a motive.
There might be something
the unknown girl left behind.
The girl with no one to know.

And they took out the hard drive
and connected it to another screen
and when they turned it on
everything from when she had stopped
was still working-
stopped in it's own tracks.
And what the police saw made them cry
and made them sick.

Hundreds of open little windows
with a million little chatters still chatting with her
some still talking,
others miffed had gone away.
Love interests,
companions,
friends,
no family.
She had them all by the ton
each one of them half way around the world.

The room had been 8 meters by 6,
but it held the earth once.
And on each little window
of the ones still typing
were more windows
and more people
and more windows
and more people looking through more windows
to find people on the other side-
halfway around the House.

And they reached in and caressed the heads
of wantons
of faggots
of housewives
of butchers,
of children
of fathers,
of players,
and of murderers.

And they found a full house all through one window,
turned it off
and walked away.

-Matthew Koutzun