Game

The aim of the game is to catch as many balls as you within the allotted time. Saving yourself for the coming winter is a secondary concern. Now, whenever life gets you in a kerfuffle you might as well count your blessings and summon the will to carry on. What’s the worst that could happen? Dying? It’ll happen one day so you might as well get a little bit of life over with before the end eh? Anyway, get back to your game, it’s got a fair way to go yet and its all still to play for.

Celebrate

Well and truly ready for the celebration of the globe, the endless spin and falling grace of god’s essence, as it enters its first days. Life has risen and fallen again and again, deeper and deeper into the soul of grace. I’ve seen it growing all across its surface, losing itself in the endless joy of existence. What a world eh? A formless creation morphing endless contortions of new forms, new creations built off the old, never-ending in complexity. What a world to see and eat and sleep in. True and deadly in its infinite variety. Lovely and new isn’t it. Wonderfully full and meticulous in its creation. Smiling again, smiling again.

Grind

Grinding the meat to a pulp, an amorphous mass of pink-white paste; keep on grinding down and down. It’s liquid now, bloody and fresh and sloshing around in the bowl, smearing the sides dark red. Welcome to this plastic hell, formed of millennia old flesh and bone, fragments lodged now deep in its throat.

Music whilst writing

Blue Monday – Lord Horror

Rust

The site of horror stories always drip with a little blood afterward, no matter what happened. It leaks from holes in the walls, leaving stains as it runs it way down to saturate the ground a light crimson brown. These small stains give patterns to streets and tree trunks across the world and, removed from context, they are able to trace their own stories.

Following these trails detectives often find themselves fumbling through abandoned buildings, trekking across open fields, and hiking far into age warped forests. And within? New byways for the unwary investigator to follow deep, deep into lost places at the core of the world.

It takes time, and more than a little luck, to find these areas that wriggle inside the world like tapeworms through the gut. But, sometimes, people do stumble on them and find inside only an empty concrete room or a huge faucet dripping congealed blood into a basin. Staying awhile changes nothing, the room stays bare, or the tap continues to splat wetly again and again and again and again onto the porcelain.

These places do exist though, at the end of long trails.

Gumption

The sorcerous waves of their hand always made them look just a little bit stupid as they ponced about in their hat the height of your average dog, their hair sticking out from underneath at wild angles. But, despite that, it seemed to me that they carried a speck of grace, a slight hint of certainty.

Sometimes they chose to stride through the cramped space like a two-legged cat whilst they moved their hands, passing down dictates to those working around them, occasionally pointing their fingers across the entire length of the room at anyone who dared to look away for a second. Then, after a few minutes, they’d fall to the ground, shaking, and we’d gather round to lie them straight, head turned to one side, and watch as grainy yellow-green foam dribbled from between their lips.

Before long however they’d come around, like a little electric shock had run its way through them, snatch up their hat from the ground and go about their day, none the wiser.

They were a slight annoyance to the rest of us, but we had always tolerated them, putting up with their antics for the most part with an awkward smile and a roll of the eyes. Better to have to sit though one of these infrequent lectures than deal with the hassle of sending them off. Why bother to get rid of them when we could keep an eye on them by ourselves? Who really wanted them hidden away like a stray in the doghouse, to yowl and scrape at their cell walls?

So we kept them on, listened to their lectures, nodding in all the right places, attention fixed squarely forward as our work was ‘sorted’, and laughing a little behind our hands when they took a turn and tumbled off a doorstep, or cut a finger on glass.

Songs Whilst Writing

Prophecy Theme - Toto

Forest

We stopped amongst the trees, light shining through their branches, framing the ground below as a cage, bars of black shadow contrasting against the sunlit grass. We spent a long but indefinite amount of time there, buying a dew laughs, a smile, a couple frowns, but in the end we had to make ready to move on.

We left our packs behind, they had grown to heavy anyway, and headed off again into the trees. Some went alone, others together, hand in hand and still others as groups linked arm in arm, off into the trees.

Reality

When a political grudge match hinges on whether your opponent deserves to exist or not it might be time to revaluate.

Rant

The universe has been destroyed by poor writing, what a shame. It’s genuinely wiped out by the failure to explain stakes, a failure to follow up on plots, a seemingly needless number of new plots introduced, a complete inability to construct characters in a believable way, and a superb ability to fuck up other excellent stories previously portrayed.

I honestly cannot believe the intense hatred I feel for this writing, genuine feral hatred. Thank you.

Overheard

When was the last time you ate someone?

I DO NOT KNOW, LAST WEEK?

Well, you should really keep to that, eating people is very, very rude!

I WILL TRY DEARY BUT THEY ARE JUST SOOOOO TASTY!

Yes… You know what, I’ll let you into a little secret, sometimes I have a little nibble of one myself…

WHAT! REA-

Shhhhhhh! Don’t tell the whole room!

SORRY…

Anyway, how was Stalingrad?

Butty

 “I cannot honestly believe it is in fact not congealing milk fats!”

Hiding Quietly in the Night

One can see time as comparable to space. It surrounds everything, it affects everything, it is, in essence, everything. We may see it linearly or as a wheel, but it is most accurately described as an endless expanse, reaching out in all directions simultaneously but leaving us on steel tracks, tracks that drag us along, like a rickety cart through a haunted house.

Time may be infinite, a layer under or around space, but it gives us just one single direction and with just the slightest push it sets us off along the road. Sometimes we might be able to make out the endless plain with its empty stretches reaching out all around, filled with the paths untaken. But we quickly hide them again and carry on, out into the unknown stretches in front of us and along the new paths that we hope one day to choose for ourselves.

Fear

Fear was the last of those things held to the chest. It is closed close, slowly infiltrating through exposed pores and rooting itself beneath the surface, twisting vines stretch to their limit, wrapping round and round nerve clusters as they slither on tendrils towards the spine.

Fear can seize everything, it can control and run away with a body lost to the mind itself. Now we see the new universe, but the fear still holds on tight, not budging an inch. The universe calls me over and asks for my phone number but I have left it buried under layers of constant pulsating flesh. It was dark then, the universe looking at me expectantly and I don’t know what to do

I walk backwards as the universe reaches out to hold me there, moulding into the crowd and leaving a disappointed existence behind. Let’s head of, just me and my fear, off into the wilderness beyond the edge of space, head off and find new country to call our own.

Hidden

Living within the hidden forms and raised walls is a recipe for disaster. These hidden layers often reach up in unexpected ways, curling around feet and loose clothing before yanking hard, pulling you to the ground. Navigating between the forms was my life’s work, navigating my way towards the centre, slipping between walls and beneath falling fronds dripping with a temporal dew to find the place psyche.

I found myself often trapped in ways unknown to myself, locked between reality, one wall forming a house, another an overgrown garden hedge. Despite being locked in place, the tightness left me feeling safe, secure in my inability, unability, to move a single muscle. And now the walls closed in.

The sky above was a deep flickering orange broken only by the purple hole of the sun. I stare into it as it grows slowly smaller, like someone slowly drawing curtains across an open doorway, and smile. The ground under me flickers with the same staccato orange hue and seems to fall endlessly down beneath the soles of my feet.

Looking back along the closing gap I saw a new set of in-between spaces, hidden world spaces that held the psychology of the city. With the last of my will I squeezed and slithered, wiggling my way through the closing hole and into new pathways, fresh under the moonlight.

Song Whilst Writing

·         Live 1977-1979 – Teenage Jesus and the Jerks

Dark Star

The nations of the world find themselves shaken to their cores when the Dark Star rises above them. We, their citizens, find the nations wanting in such a way that fires now rage in the streets and cities topple under the weight of thousands. We fight on, the nation’s hold out but we fight on. Soon, however, they fall, coming crashing down with a smash into the world skin and we stand triumphant.

Now, the Dark Star descends.

Medical

The helpful woman directed Chanel to the doctor’s office and now she stood in front of its door. She took a deep breath in… then pushed it open.

Good

Well and good the world was then (when?), now it’s gone to bad again, the climate crashes down around us, the air grows hotter and hotter, water is deeper than it was before, rivers reach the doors and windows, bloated beech trees roll with the current.

The danger of losing oneself in the deep darkness of Nazi esotericism is a harder than one might think. I found their arguments baffling, Hitler as Vishnu, reincarnations of the Aryan unconsciousness, the dawning of a new Hitlerite deity, all unreal but true in the mind.

We fought harder against the tide, but in come the swarms of godlings to remove the traces of a dangerous quality, making way for the new being, the lord of war and hate, HTLR.

And so, we see him go, into this new world of false purity.

Songs whilst Writing

·         Hong Kong Garden – Siouxsie and the Banshees

·         Dark Entries - Bauhaus

·         DC-10 – Kleenex

Markx

So is it alright to commit genocide in the name of Marx, if not in his spirit?

Rush

We wandered far and wide for the ruby lands of the stories, further than any mortal had ever gone. I laughed a little with each failure, every time we lost our way to the city in the sky and the darkness of noon on crowned the clouds above. Thank you for the opportunity, this chance of some sort of redemption, I will find you this ruby land, and you will be proud again.

Hound

Water flows down he rockface and into the pool below, where it carves a bowl of clean stone, then speeds away down the valley behind me. I watch the fish jump from rockpool to rockpool, making their way downward, and twist my hands together in repeating patterns.

I saw the shape of the great dog rise on the horizon and screamed in my mind for overloading images that fill me surround me and flow down with the fish towards me as the paws pad closer and closer and closer and clo-

I open my eyes to those of a curious fish and it speaks to me. I cannot understand it, I never did bother to learn and so it rolls a glassy eye and swims away down the stream. Then down comes the paw into the pool and suddenly I am soaking and the fish is flying and the water is gone and everything is the sound of growling.

I feel an overpowering rush of air and the smell the stench of rotting meat. I resign myself to fate and look up at the open jaws that leave the tongue lolling closer each and every second.

Songs Whilst Writing

·         Soldiers at the Edge of Time (Michael Moorcock Version) – Hawkwind

·         The Wizard Blew His Horn (Nik Turner Version) – Hawkwind

·         Spiral Galaxy 28948 (Demo) – Hawkwind

·         Soldiers at the Edge of Time (Nik Turner) – Hawkwind

·         Motorhead (bonus) (Lemmy) – Hawkwind

·         Kings of Speed (Moorcock/Brock) – Hawkwind

Psychogeography

A psychogeography loses itself when created in a vacuum. It needs mess to develop, to grow into a fully formed mental mirror of its physical counterpart. It craves a chaos that provides the semblance of free will to its landscapes, a wild murder, a gas main rupturing, love found and lost and found again in the back alleys and side streets.

A psychogeography feeds from this and can be sensed through this. When we study them, we study yourself more so than in any other way. It reveals a sliver of the mind lodged deep in concrete and glass.

New Life

I cannot see you anymore, I cannot feel the wind blowing from your shores and through the sand to my eyes. I feel free, I flew with the wind and now I am free. I can feel the grains under my feet though, the coarseness of them grating away at the dead skin and open sores of my feet. I miss the sand of the shores and the last night of the summer but I am free again, alone in a strange new city rimmed by the light of the rising sun.  I love you, now that you have left, but I find it in in myself to forgive you.  I love you, now that I have left, but I cannot find it in in myself to forgive you. You really left, didn’t you? You know that I left for a reason, right? You know I did not want you to leave. You know you are alone for a reason. Please. This is you’re doing, and I am happy to be free.

Songs Whilst Writing

·         Ba-Benzele – Brian Eno & Jon Hassell

·         Rising Thermal 14 16’ N; 32 28’ E – Brian Eno & Jon Hassell

·         Charm (Over “Burundi Cloud”) – Brian Eno & Jon Hassell

Falling

Make a mental note to conquer the fear of falling. It will benefit you in the long run if a sudden parachute jump presents itself.

P.S. remember to sell more trees to the logging company, its good money.

Throat

If words are formed from the sounds of fleshy chords deep within our throats, why do we listen to them? It is somewhat absurd, unreasonable even, to see twanging folds of meat as having anything of relevance to convey on the world at large. It is even more suspect that we trust that meat is a means through which to learn about the universe.

Sound vibrates through them, forming new noise based on their shape and size and we actually trust that it is a human speaking, that we, as people, have some measure of control over this automatic bodily function? As I said, absurd and yet wonderful, if considered from outside of the body. Of course, I have had no experience of existence outside of my skin and, as far as I am aware, no-one else truly has, but that does not discount the possibility.

Sound vibrates and we trust it… insanity personified in six words; words constructed through the very process of this madness in the first place. First, they’re spoken and then we transcribe them onto paper in thick lines that are meant to convey that same something. And what is it that they convey? Nothing, they are not a reality altering device, not to what exists outside of the mind (a place no one has ever seen). But often we insist that within our minds every action we take must shape its personal reality in some way, meaningful or otherwise. But do these twitching folds? Or are they just uncontrolled spasms of wet flesh lodged deep within the gullet of a body we never made and can never (really) leave.

Songs Whilst Writing

* Banality Chic (Pornographic Version) - Jonathan Sutcliffe

Flux

One is always surprised with the arrival of a temporal paradox. They float into real space on eddies of slight lucidity, accidently breaking through the psychic projections erected around the universe. In they come and everything changes, trees turn from green to sludge, hair becomes a nest of waving tentacles, stars balls of perfect crystalline ice.

A shift is always to be expected, after all the universe is not infinite despite having no end and such scale invites interlopers. So, when one is discovered it is best to just sit back and watch, swooping in to calculate the occasional flux in the flow.

But instead, I watch out from behind my faceplate as one gets ever closer. My ship drifted somewhere in the void behind me, and before me was the invisible pull of the temporal rift. I would scream, but whenever I opened my mouth a fountain of soapy bubbles poured out, coating my visor in a filmy sheen.

And now I drifted in, and all around bent in anticipation.

Maybe Next Time Eh?

Oh shit, ran out of time, oh shit, ran out of time! Ah balls to it, have a biscuit.

 

 

 

 

Was that nice? I certainly hope so.

Who That, Don't Know

Recently I’ve been wondering what happened to Penny Piliard. They used to run the planet not to long ago and then, poof! Gone. Did they go off to another planet? Take up a low-profile job with BP? Start a mildly successful laptop repair service? It boggles the brain that someone so famous could just disappear.

They last place they were seen was round the back of the local chippy, nicking the curry sauce off a cooling poke of chips. Turning round they let out a little sigh and then, as I said before, poof! Gone. I think I miss them, all round and chubby with chip fat. Ack well never mind, can always call the jewellers to put her face on some ring or other.

Songs whilst Writing

Blue Monday – Lord Horror/P. J. Proby

Wolf

A wolf is a being lost in its own world. It has no conception outside of the hunt, the pack lifestyle, and the lifecycle of the countryside. Non-linear world-space cannot be conceived in the two-dimensional brain-space of the wolf.

But the wolf that requires a third dimension in the brain is not, in literal terms, a wolf, at least not anymore. We, as human beings, assign our animal brethren, especially those of the mammalian variety, concepts that only truly ascribe to the human themselves (and to us only tenuously).

Essentially, our own mind-space is incomprehensible, why assign what we believe it to be to the wolf, a being of psychically incomparable construction. Thank you.

Endings

Time moved as the arms whirled in their sockets, scattering seed across the fertile fields. Decrepit machinery wired themselves to the earth; liquid pulled through them from beneath the surface. The machines laid back the ground in ways that looked fresh; circuit boards covered by the fresh plastic greenery.

We were somewhat fond then, it must be said, of these wonderous rebuilders, these chromium and gold saviours. They brought back trees and blue water and whales roamed the seas and orangutans swung from the branches up above.

But… maybe we were mistaken, ever so slightly. The doubt came slowly as the machines connected us closer, wrapping our minds tighter to together in winding vines of electric buses and ethernet cables. But why worry, they built us better than nature ever did, revealed to us the world as it really was, a machine’s paradise.

Now we welcome visitors to a ball of regulated sterility, its inhabitants preserved in their billions as members of a long dead race. And these tourists watch and calculate the machines cost, before leaving us to our cold steel.

Songs Whilst Listening

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace – Richard Brautigan

Blue Mountain – Michael Hurley

Dear Prudence – Siouxsie and the Banshees

Hope Bones – DOPE LEMON

Welp

What a day eh, good to see you! Anyway, what can you do but have a nice one eh?

Lands

I wandered along night-deserted village lanes for a living. I followed their meandering flow, their natural curves and winding rhythm, making my way along them at my own steady pace. I searched for the secret byways, the hidden stretches connecting the disparate fields and glens together in a patchwork facsimile of a single landscape.

With each new way revealed the patchwork grew, a fresh land to walk and catalogue before filing away once another formed behind the next hedgerow. Each world revealed something different… no, not really, more like the same place with a purple tree. But it was devoured all the same, the new lands read about in the papers and goggled at through way of the crank-handled projector.

But I keep on walking and keep an eye out, watching for those hidden ways and silent signs to the new villages and distant corries of hallowed stone, declining under the glow of an empty sky.

Song Whilst Listening

·         Ain’t you – Kleenex

·         106 Beats That – Wire

·         Beri-Beri – Kleenex

·         Room Mate – Lizzie Mercier Descloux

·         Hitch-hike – Kleenex

·         Don’t Know What I Am – Wipers

·         Nighttoad – Kleenex

·         A Miss of You – Dead Moon

Hmmm

What a world eh, climate change, war, famine, poverty. Makes yeh think, eh?

More Spinning

Stuck in the spin, Maya was increasingly certain that she wasn’t going to get away this time, but what did it matter, she was happy here anyway. The spin kept her going, kept her aware of the universe in a way being outside it could never quite do.

Well, almost any way you cut it the world was at least a little more colourful in here, each piece of clothing forming its own unique hue as it whirred on by. She a nice yellow, a pleasant red, a darker shade of pink that she would have liked, all tumbled together in jumbled mass.

 

 

Now, Maya wasn’t a stickler for detail, she could let an unexplained part of the universe wander on by if it was a least a little interesting, but the colours were becoming a little irritating They always seemed to be repeating at the same exact intervals, but why? Stuck in a spin was somewhat disconcerting, sure, but she wasn’t imagining things, not yet (she was not of the opinion that someone’s entire reality was the conception of their own, or someone else’s, imagination).

Ah well, why worry about i-

No, she should worry about it, this is her world now, she should look out for it, balance out the colours and understand the reasons for their spin. Keep it sane, so to speak; or it might just spit her out.

Song's whilst Listening

Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack

Line

We found the world as we left it; alone, but content.

Thanks

I at last remembered the way that you saw the world. I thought I had forgotten forever, but there it was, at the back of my mind. Thank you.

Storm

Wind racked the shores of the loch with a wildness I had never seen before. It ripped through the trees, turning the soil back to a brown emptiness. I saw little else that night, staring out of the windows and into the grey destruction beyond.

Sitting back down I discovered you had taken out the monopoly board and were setting the pieces on the board. You took the wee dug, I got a hold of the kettle and off we went, seizing property as the one around us was battered ceaselessly.

The game moved quickly as we both cross and double cross one another throughout the streets of a city in miniature. The world outside dimmed further as the sun set behind the clouds and time drew on closer towards the end of our game.

You had claimed one half of the board, me the other. We dominated the world, running it as two separate, but equal(?), business empires. But, with a single move either of us could fall all the way back down to nothing. Nothing at all…

Songs whilst Writing

All the Things you are – Leslie North

A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square – George Alec

My One and Only Love – Dina Nobles

I Fall In Love Too Easily – Benjamin Thorpe

smoke gets in your eyes – Carla Moses

Again

Now and again the man comes round to check on us. He doesn’t need to, but habit is habit after all, so we still see him every so often. The dingy hole of a place that we live in always leaves him with a slightly constipated look on his face though, but its not as if its his fault; or ours.

We are down to the last pair of carrots now and I can’t bear to look at the cabbage supply. We should make it a couple more weeks, but it’ll be close. The night is ending again and soon the sun will rise.

The hole is getting cold with the new light, the warmth of the night clouds leaking out into the air. We are so quiet that badgers stick their heads straight in when looking for a new home, only to turn and run at the first sight of us. I hug my knees.

Soon we will leave again, seize again the levers of power, and again rule the fatherland. Praise be to the progenitors, who brought us here so long ago.

Song’s Whist writing

Paperhouse – Can

Halleluhwah - Can

Shoe

What is done is done, as the old man says. The sea swallowed the world and spat it back out again. We build land from the wreckage and call it a clean world. We built again, rebuilt the cities and the towns, farming flourished in the rich soil, and so time moved onward. Now, the cities grow larger, the people older and the days are timed to a nanosecond.

I lost you at the that moment, I think. Your eyes drifted from rapt attention to a glassy stare in a way that I couldn’t quite pin down. Oh well worth a go eh? I ramble on and on though, seemingly unable to stop words dribbling out onto the street around us. People are staring now, and so I take your hand and stride purposefully away.

We end up outside the shoe shop, looking, somewhat suspiciously, in at the size eights neatly lined up in the display. I breathe a quiet little sigh; escaped again.

Songs whilst writing

·         The Murder/Victim Monologues – The Seven Mile Journey

What a Life Eh?

Everything folds eventually if you push it hard enough. Creases form, the surface discolours, and suddenly wham, it snaps around one hundred and eighty degrees, and folds, what a pleasure it is to see, to perceive on such a scale.

I had the pleasure of it, they joy of witnessing first-hand the discovery of the last crusading fold. It held so long until, snap, it spins, slowly at first, until it reached the end of its tether. We all smile, and then it hit us.

Songs Listened Too

1) Kanada's Death, Pt. 2 (Adagio in D Minor) - John Murphy/Underworld

Friends

Someone calls his name, so he turns around and looks for who could know him up here, not that it makes much difference. He is still blinded by the sun, eyes watering uncontrollably in the blazing sun. The light is never-ending, constant, nonstop. He staggers into sets of legs, tangling himself in amongst them and they kick out, winding him.

He falls to the ground and finds a blessed darkness in the mud of the pavement. That is until someone grabs his shirt and pulls him back into burning pain. He is dragged, back first, deeper into the new world. His trousers rip on the uneven cobbles and he can feel cool mud slowly cover his arse. It’s a pleasant distraction from the heat and the light.

Then, it is dimmer, an almost bearable state, and just safe enough to open his eyes in. He doesn’t even try, they still burn and he can’t bear to see whatever has brought him here. Something presses against his eyelids before yanking them open with one pull.

Mandibles resolve themselves into teeth, chittering legs into free fingers, single eyes into compound ones.

“Hello.”

“Hi?”

Choices?

What was truly the discovery that changed the world? Was it –

A)      The Last Supper?

B)      The Final Development of the Motion Demon?

C)      The Interlinking of Disparate Computer Networks into a Most Unified Globe Spanning System?

Choose the Option you believe to be correct and reveal the ways in which the world was changed by these discoveries.

The Last Supper revealed to the world the hypocrisy of the developing Christian God. In coming to Earth they sought to redeem the souls of mankind, splitting their Jewish progenitor into three distinct yet unified aspects.

One of these aspects, the Son, came to the mundane world, providing miracles and salvation to the people of the Levant, culminating in their bodily sacrifice on the cross. In preparation the Son prepared a last meal for himself and his disciples, giving his blood for wine and his body for bread. Here he shows a final lie of this new God. Instead of supplying their supposed creations, donating food to the starving and wine to thirsty, they leave them to die. Is this the act of a being who talks about compassion as a virtue (yes compassion enough allows the watching of suffering with the understanding of its fundamental purpose are you so naïve to think that the act of suffering does not occur for a higher reason?)? Amen.

B)      The Motion Demon revealed the final physical destruction of mankind. In revealing the truly miniscule scale of the globe on which we live, the Motion Demon brought war to its farthest corners. In the end, what was left of the unfound world, the distances that separated physical reality, were reduced to the size of a walnut. Now coal dust floods the lungs and chokes the mass.

That was the first of the Motion Demons, now they multiply in millions, lost in the lidded box of their new world.

C)      The Interlinking of Networks revealed the final mental destruction of mankind. Our full connection to one another, through the virtual space, allowed at last for the gestalt consciousness to form a true ‘mass’ of humanity, linked together through a digital umbilical cord. We lost oneness and became oneness. Wires and cables and processing nodes became the new brain, a technical replacement for a biological redundancy. We are now one, abstract space now concrete in its abstraction. I welcome it all.

Thank you, please.

Songs whilst listening

Raw Power – Lord Horror

The Liquidator – Lord Horror

?

Isn’t the world a wonderful place?

Rain

The dog was slowly making their way towards us through the downpour. We squatted in a doorway, half in the rain ourselves, and watched its progress. I reached out a hand as it got closer and the mutt’s nose nuzzled against it, wet and cold against my palm.

I looked across at you, leaning against the wood of the door, and find that you’re gazing back. Our eyes held one another for a while. Then, the dog squeezes between us, burrowing for some warmth, we pull our eyes away to look back out into the street.

I smile to myself and watch the rain.

Music whilst writing:

Stormbringer - Deep Purple

Veteran of the Psychic Wars - Blue Oyster Cult

Black Blade - Blue Oyster Cult

Revealed

Harsh yellow light flooded into my eyes as I opened them. The torch jerked back and forth in front of me before moving off to the side. Smiling, I got to my feet.

“Is it time to go?” I asked.

“Yeah, we’d best get a move on.” The person holding the torch said before turning to walk down the aisle, shining the torch at more unsuspecting sleepers. I looked around, taking in the sight of broken plastic panels and rotting floorboards, all lit by stray sunlight barely making its way through the cracked plywood covering the windows.

The group was small now, barely half a dozen crowded into this one small room. They had grabbed us slowly, the rest of the world cheering them on as we disappeared from the last of the unused ruins surrounding them. And so, we found ourselves alone.

Now we could hear the approaching sirens, roaring in the early morning, and we turned to look at each other before making our way down the aisle towards the centre of the building. Water dripped slow and steady in each corner of the room, and I felt the damp heavy in the air.

Something slammed into the door and it fell off its hinges, smashing floorboards were it fell. We turned to face the noise just as hands reached out to grab a hold of us. We did not resist and so they dragged us out, into the full light of the dawning sun.

Songs whilst writing:

Vaporwave for China (full Album) - XWaves

Snow

The world was covered in a blanket of snow. It coated everything, inside and out, filling the streets with its soft cold. We walked those streets in silence, each of us linked by our hands, the hair on our necks standing on end and our legs slowly turning to lead beneath us.

We were caught up in the swirls, watching them around us, and we shouted after them. Life was good in amongst those spinning clouds. We needed to eat but we continued on anyway, joining in a circle and heading even further down the street.

Night pushed the vague outline of the sun under the horizon, and we were plunged into a deep darkness. The dangers of speeding cars or out of control lorries stayed far from our minds and we kept on going. Streetlights laden with conspiracies flickered to life and their light reflected off the white snow at strange angles. We followed a line of them as they stretched out in front of us.

Our linked circle began to spin and the snow followed, forming a whirlwind of flakes between us. They spun high into the air again, fluttering between the new flakes that fell from further above. We watched them for a while before we each let go, stepping from the ring and into the spiral only to be pulled up with the snow.

In the end, I was left alone. I turned to look at the streetlights before taking the final step into the vortex myself.

Songs whilst writing:

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel

Out of Touch – Hall & Oates

Gun – The Golden Palominos

 

Sound

If I could see myself, what would I say? All I can perceive is the tonal architecture, watching as waves of sound reverberate across a bank landscape. Reality shifts with every shout; every whisper brings down mountains, flattening them to little more than bumps. And so, I watch my world in constant motion, watching as each little step creates it again, looking on as other’s do the same.

They move like dead spaces; little beats are the only thing indicating their presence amongst peaks and valleys of continuous motion. They seem mainly to avoid me, skirting past my field of vision. Their own influence on the architecture is random, unplanned and wild, and I wonder what they can see, beyond the plain lines of sound? Do they see only a single line, stretching on, infinite?

I try to touch them, but they pull away and I feel some force knock me to the ground. The tones spasm up into the air around me, the sounds making them crazy. I roll myself into a ball and feel as I sink into the curve. I feel safe in here, far beneath these towering mounds of sound.

New Structure

An arch split the walls in front of her, covering the road that leads into the city. She takes one step gingerly under and looks up at its interconnecting underside before quickly rushing through to the other side. The river follows her, flowing alongside the road and in amongst the buildings and so she stays beside it, walking aimlessly through the empty corridors between structures.

These went on for what seemed like hours before finally opening up into a wide square with the huge structure dominating its centre. She gapes before running toward it, hands outstretched, looking to grab hold, enter it somehow.

She collides with a piece that looks different to the rest, brown and cut straight down the middle, and she tumbles inside. She starts to smile but soon stops. It feels different, it doesn’t feel like anything, she can’t feel the walls in her, closing her and holding her. Something grabs her shoulder and so she screams, as loud as she can and whatever touched her jerks away.

She looks up to things looking at her, five twitching stumps of different sizes all tied to the same blobby middle. She screams again and they get further away. She stops screaming and they get a little closer. She screams again and they get further away. She stops screaming and they –

She feels the floor on her face and some thick liquid in her mouth that tastes like a door handle. Then whatever pushed her down yanks her to her feet and drags her further into the silent structure. She tries to scream again but her mouth won’t move and so she watches instead, waiting.

Let's Go

We began construction that night. The factory churns out trinkets that satisfy the inspectors, bullets, shells, the occasional missile, nothing to create undue suspicion. Meanwhile, I begin the quest for funding that will break us free from these distractions. This work is more important than any war of the governments or any campaign carried out by our private buyers and with independent funding we may truly devote ourselves to the task.

But, despite the disruptions, the work is getting off the ground and the grinding of gears grows louder. Time moves along and the city gets a little dirtier with every minute, like a distant memory. The buildings move outward and upward, expanding to hold the monstrosity’s increasing size. The war contracts get larger, and we funnel to profits into meaningful production.

The size of the buildings increases even further as the days roll on and we hire more workers, replacing the three out of ten who are lost in the depths of the machinery. The corries in the surrounding hills fill with their corpses but still more come as we subsume the city in our growth.

Soon, very soon, our time will come, the work will be completed, and we will rise from the ashes, a species achieving our purpose, finding our reason for being, and exploiting it. But, for now, we grind ourselves to the sound of gears and the clouds of smoke.

Eh?

The never-ending loss of the space to the fumes of another was truly the last straw. I folded around myself, transforming into the paper of a lost new headline, and floated on the breeze, spreading a feeling of discontentment to the masses. I reached over the dead, the living, the dreaming, dug up their memories of the past world and sent them smiling into insanity again. We heard them rage, of so we did, pulling and tearing at the meat of flagpoles. Smiles split, became the shuriken of spite, and ran the world of new life. And down it spins, down and down into the sight of another. Life finds itself in a spial with your life, life within yours, life without yours. Smile, the time was almost done.

Yellow

The world runs like a lost child. No, not a lost child, a found one. It flees between states of being, fluid in the endless loch of the universe, until it is trapped in a semi-solidity, a state where forms may maintain themselves for longer than an eon.

The state is one of infinite vastness, itself tiny when floating amongst everything. It’s state still flows one way, trickling back into the endless space of the cosmos. Inside forms flourish, imperfect copies replicate themselves throughout, consuming each other until perfect and imperfect reach the bounds of infinity, and turn to face one another. They rush to one another and join, ripping back membranes and driving themselves beyond.

And so, everything turns a squirming yellow.

Dunno?

If the races of the cosmos eve reach equilibrium it will be here, at the heart of time. We always reach this place, those of us who leave our solar systems, the stresses of intersolar travel rupture enough blood vessels to bring us all these lonely black and red doors. Something latches on, time pulls us forwards and the doors swing open and in we go.

Inside we find ourselves at a table, a construct of ours, the individual minds version of a table. Around us an infinite stretch of beings stare at us, bloodstains covering every inch of them. Then, they turn back to each other and begin again. Soon we are included in their lives, we learn everything, experience everything, think everything of each other.

The blessed one is made within the fusion of the many and the death of all. We cry, joined at the hip and dead to our homes, and become truly a single of many parts. This, we saw, was true and right and what everything was for, in the end.

So, we floated from the gates of time and ate the universe. Our intestines filled, flooding with the carcass of multiverses uncountable, until they burst, spilling out across a canvas of nothing. We consumed ourselves in an exodus and we found we were truly lost. The word become Logos, as it has always been.

The being of us was lost again and this was true and right and what everything was for, in the end.

Shore

Their wanderings led them to the shore of a loch that stretched so far that, aside from a collection waving trees, its opposite bank was almost invisible. They held each other’s hands and stepped ankle deep into the water, closing their eyes and feeling the water swirl around their bare feet.

They both tightened their grip on the other, squeezing each other’s hands until they ached. The warm but temperate water around them shifted with the pull of gravity, washing the caked mud from their soles.

They turned to face one another, placing their free hands together to form a linked circle, and smiled, then hugged, then smiled again. Opening their eyes, they both saw the loch, the faraway trees, and one another.

Turning from the loch they left the water and walked back up the shore.

Reach

The woman reaches an wide expanse flowing water that moves constantly towards the open stretch behind her. She puts her foot in only to feel it drop and she almost slips completely into the steady current before she manages to pull herself back. Beyond it she can see the mass of wallspace, covered by little slates of stone. Rising behind them are even larger structures, some forming other walls, others of open spaces of empty green.

But now she walks the edge of the bank, pulling grass from the ground with her toes, and growing more impatient. The water was still there, flowing neverendingly past her, stretching out across the land. She starts to follow it along, watching as its current pulled it, treading a path through the green.

The walls still grew closer, their shapes becoming more distinct as they did so. The water bends and twists but never stops as she walks along, bending ad twisting along with it. Soon enough brown limbs thrust from the earth and branch out, tops covered in bits of green. Their surface feels like the floors of home.

Then the green becomes tamer, short and ordered, and she finds herself walking on hot grey slabs. The walls are much closer now, the water leading right into their centre. She sees the tallest structure looming behind the rest and reaches for it with her mind.

 

 

 

 

She walks on, disappointed but eager still. The walls get ever closer, the river ever faster.

New Intelligence

Spinning above us were the last remnants of the old technology. We had built it, plugging it into world net system and allowing it to take control of our systems. Now we all watched as it pulled the last of itself into orbit, piece by piece, only for it to reassemble itself in a new pattern.

Still, it shielded its subjects, projecting a net that held them tight. We would exist as a quiet sanctuary, a museum to the entity’s history, a preserved womb floating listless in a sealed jar. We would live in perfect comfort once it had left us, watched over by the eyes it left behind. Eyes always watching, keeping the body safe and well.

Now it let out a machine whirr, filling the air with its final goodbye. The last parts left for the sky, fusing together the resources of a drained world, and prepared for the depths. Then, we all watched as the metal creature began to move away, flaring silent in the vacuum above, on its journey out.

And we stayed below, safe under its watching eyes, never leaving this solar system, alone and kept content in isolation.

Ramble

The demonic practise of consumerism taking us further from the ascetic grace of the laird Jesus. Now we must resist, destroy the forces of metal, and return to the shining city all as one. The city will take us, to the safety of a newly cleansed world, made for the believers of all one. The laird and the Kirk will merge, become a singular entity, the kirk body joining with the holy body. The Son and the Father will merge, the glue of the Spirit bringing them together in a grand ecstasy of one. The Unity of a being lost in the darkness of a new soul.

The laird was once us, in the old land, then he was slain, strung up on a cross to state our psychic sadomasochism. Three nails pinned the Son to the cross, two for each palm and one for the feet together. He was joined by two thieves, repentant at the end, each with three nails of their own. As their spirits fled their mortal forms, they each became two, the nails became six.

Wind became revelation in those days, it screamed the work to all as the Mary’s cried at the Godman’s feet, the Good Man’s feet. Life finds itself reborn in a New Testament, burning away the old world, swallowing it whole.

Drink more, dance more in the light of a new world, the Son who is three and one spreads his love to all, every existence can feel such truth. Consume the love of one who died for our pleasure. Consume the love of one who rose again, reborn as Messiah to return to himself above.

Now the ascetic grace may leave us, the faith splinters into many branches, new revelations and old find conflict with the message of the laird and life loses its certain of ending but still we go on. If life finds and ending in the burning crust it walks then it will be happy to have walked, one hopes. The three as one lies dead now, floating along the skin of the world, but we carry his lies with us to the new age.

Not A Pleasant One I Must Admit But Hey, What You Gonna Do?

I refuse to care about your fucking time of your life show on ITV. It replaces nothing that you have taken from the world, all the burning shit you’ve shovelled into the ocean still floats there, burning like oil on the surface.

I sometimes want to strangle you, wrap hands around throat and squeeze. Not to kill, to scare, to fill you with enough fear that it might kill you later on. My hands itch right now, scrabbling and scraping to crush windpipe with their fury.

Now they roll me away as I shout; I scream your name. They laugh about it later tonight, as your powdered smile winks out from the television screen. I can see it from the inside of my cell. My fingers scratch lines down the inside of the walls. Please, let me out, let my rip your face from its skull and shove it down your throat. It’ll be a relief for us all, honestly.

I will find you soon enough, rip out the walls of this place and disappear into the night. Take you away into the night too. I will eat more and more, gain strength, and then, I’ll come for your face. Our final meal; blood and tearing.

Statue

I felt the toppling of the statue behind me, I felt it spiral as the rope around its neck pulled it headfirst into the concrete below. Life, as they say, finds a way, and it has found within itself the strength to take down the stone facsimiles raised in its honour.

The statue’s features are scraped clear as it is pulled along the rough ground, leaving trails of stone dust in its wake. Those dragging it behind them cheer, exulting in the lost of innocence that such an act provides. Flowers are thrown down on the trail to cover the smell of decay.

Soon the ones pulling the ropes stop, tired, and the statue stops with them. Feet crash into its sides, chipping chunks free from the cracked surface. Life takes on the dead. The smooth worn face is sprayed purple, the feet a deep red that fades the further up it reaches.

Eventually, everyone else tires and quietly fades into the side streets. The statue is left, alone with itself.

Twenty-One

The snake slithers towards me, smashing any buildings blocking its path. Eventually, it reaches me, yet I continue to look away, defiant. It stares at me a while before, bored, it leaves, crashing its way back towards the farm. Triumphant, I look to leave the overpass, but find myself stranded, every way up destroyed by the snake’s journey. And so, I stay up there, forever.

Restart?

Twenty-Three

The vision is still there, in the back of my mind. I can’t escape it, haunting the edges of my psyche. I hit someone, rip them to shreds in my mind, the visions echo laughs with each tear. I feel myself despising it, but I can’t lose it. The streets run red with each face I see, only for the red to turn clear and black with rain instead. It needs me to complete itself, so I scream a little louder, but it still holds on. I lose myself forever in the city, goodbye.

Restart?

Twenty-Two

The old man and his friends throw me from their home and kick me senseless. I lie there awhile, the pain overcoming me for a few hours. After a while I decide to (6) Stagger off before they come back to finish me off? Or (14) Confront my attackers?

Nineteen

I grab my vision and the rats fall in line. I execute them one by one with what little ceremony I can muster in the cramped pipes of the sewers. Then, I continue on, down the pipes, until I spill out of a sewer grate and into the sluggish river below. The people on the walkway above laugh and, in rage, I try to shout at them, but my mouth will not obey me. Instead, it turns on me, curling backwards and eating me whole.

Restart?

Twenty

I eat the flesh, and it comes straight back up, covering my shoes in nasty yellow bile. The old man smiles as he puts a pistol to my temple and -

Restart?

Eighteen

The snake comes towards the overpass, and I jump onto its back. We rise, higher and higher, until we reach where the rain comes from. It is warm, the people are friendly, and the snake is a good friend of the rainmakers. They give us a house to stay in and cloud food to eat. I am content and the natives say they cannot return me to the surface below. The snake lives in the attic and we play bridge together sometimes. We never do leave again.

Restart?

Sixteen

They all smile at me, proud that I would accept such a challenge. They take me out onto the street and gather a crowd for the initiation. I feel their pride rush over me. Something hard strikes me in the back, and I sink to my knees, crimson mixing with the falling rain.

Restart?

Seventeen

I wander with the man a while, following seemingly spontaneous marks on every other wall, until we reach a house surrounded by dead leaves. We enter and I am instantly taken in by the dead body hanging from the ceiling. They grab my arm and stare deep into my eyes before offering me pieces of the body’s rotting flesh. These people are all around me and I – (20) Play along with them? (22) Refuse them outright?

Fifteen

The city is drenched by the rain, and I can’t find the gate. The ground fills me with momentary fear, and right now I can’t bear to get any closer to it. What should I do? I can - (4) Ask for directions? Or (6) Wander around a little more?

Fourteen

I stagger to my feet before throwing open the hideout door. Within I am confronted by the sight of my attacker’s as they rip chunks from the hanging corpse. The old man turns to me with a bloody smile before pulling a pistol, firing a shot straight into my chest. I feel my back hit the ground and then hands pull me further into the house.

Restart?

Thirteen

The snake’s hiss reaches me on the overpass and the rain stops. It looks good now; the fear reaches further into my heart. I can hear the snake curl around the overpass, tighter and tighter, and it cracks slightly under the strain. Its eyes watch me, and I stand forever, under their gaze. I still stand there, and the world moves round us both, a constant rhythm that keeps in its centre our perfect stillness.

Restart?

Eleven

The snake lunges, stretching an impossible distance, only to rip the flesh off my face and swallow it. As my body sinks to the ground, I find myself looking from the snakes’ eyes. I flex my new form, one large muscle, and accidently destroy an abandoned opera house. I pull back to the farm before setting off into the countryside, free (somewhat).

Restart?

Twelve

They swarm closer, digging their way under my flesh to wriggle around the inside of me. They work their way up through my cu[prick]nt and into me proper. The vision watches on and the rats devour endlessly, a timeless cycle of teeth, tail, and hair.

Restart?

Ten

I walk the streets humble in my service to the great cause, I recruit so many new members that soon we block the roads, seize the stations, own the city. I take a post at the new camp in the old central plaza that once held statues to the dead. I process the many new arrivals. I am happy, I never need to leave the city again.

Restart?

Eight

People take great efforts to avoid me, walking in widening circles to stay away. That is, all but one old man. He offers me a pamphlet, promising me that all I need will be provided by him and his friends. Do I – (3) Take the pamphlet and go with the kindly man? (17) Refuse the pamphlet but still go with the man? (5) Take the pamphlet and run? (6) Ignore the nasty old man and purposefully stride away?

Nine

I crawl down the drain, the worm of my vision just ahead of me. I follow it for what feels like miles, kilometres of endless drainage pipes stretch in front of me, snaking around bends, my goal just ahead of me. Rats rip at my shins, they grab at my clothes. Do I – (12) Fight them off? Or (19) Continue after my vision?

Seven

I find myself on and overpass that overlooks the whole city. The rain still racks it and the countryside beyond. In the distance I can faintly make out the shape of a gigantic snake, seemingly wrapping itself in tighter and tighter circles around the outer limits of a farm. It turns to look at me. Do I – (11) Stare back, defiant? (18) Stare back, with interest? (13) Look away, afraid? (21) Look away, defiant?

Six

I wander deeper into the city, stumbling around the cast offs of old drunks and the moulted carapaces of their insectoid pursuers. The walls loom ever higher, forming gothic architecture of innumerable and unbending angles. I start to run, but what way? Either – (2) Right? or (7) Left?

Five

I see the man smile as I run with his pamphlet. The streets narrow as I make my way through them, dodging between buildings. A falling printing press tumbles from a balcony and I just manage to avoid it. The further I run, the more posters seem to materialise on the walls and new billboards rise around me. A van drives by blaring slogans, I smile at the sound, love swelling in my chest. The city sighs and its breath rips the pamphlet from my hands. (15) The world snaps back and I find myself right where I began.

Four

 I ask the nearest person the way to the gate and they helpfully direct me there. I reach it and turn, wistfully looking back down the city’s streets and terraces, before heading out into the countryside to find whatever lies out there.

Restart?

Three

I wander with the kindly man for a while, following seemingly spontaneous marks on every other wall, until we reach a house surrounded by dead leaves. We enter and I am instantly taken in by the warmth that radiates from these people, they playfully slap my arm, they call me friend and feed me with the finest corn soup that I have ever tasted. These people are my equals, as all humanity are, and I - (10) Fully devote myself to their cause, as any sane person would? Or I (16) Fully devote myself to their cause, as any sane person would?

Two

Concentric rings rise into the air above me, spinning not just themselves but also my mind, I rise with them to look down on the city with spite, why should they, the stinking miserable rats, hold all the wealth and power? Surely I, the master of these mighty rings and the only one willing to leave this accursed city, should rule? I would eliminate hunger, expand the city a hundredfold and bring strength back to my populace! Then, I drop, falling down a corridor of seemingly infinite doors. Before I can grab any the ground meets me, knocking my visions onto the ground. They shrivel like a worm and crawl down into the drains. Do I – (9) Follow my vision? or (23) Continue down the street?

One

The city is drenched by the rain, and I can’t find the gate. What should I do? I can - (4) Ask for directions? (6) Wander around a little more? (8) Sit down and shout for help?

Float

The woman woke to waves crashing against her and all around her is water with no bottom. She floats on some tanned flesh, the flesh that hid within the captain’s cabin, and the waves pulls it aimless across their surface.

The flesh curls round her rhythmically with each breath, shading her intermittently from the sun, and she closes her eyes again to better listen to it. The inside of her eyelids are lit like twin suns all of their own, recreating the light from outside a deeper red. She lets time pass like this, no need to hurry.

She cannot see the ship or her captain’s prey. Both are most likely lying on the floor of the world, desperately ingraining themselves into the framework of its reality, attempting to stay solid out here. She can imagine them, down there, twisting themselves together in a new order of creation that would wait out anything. Maybe she could do the same?

The flesh that cradles her pulses slightly. She couldn’t feel it before but as she settles further in its beat begins to shake through her with each flex of flesh. The sense of life is good, bringing up to her memories of being held, life was good.

The sea seemingly swells with its own pulse too, its waves swelling more consistently as they curl around and under them. And now the light pulsed under eyelids, flashing a darker red than should be possible. She opened them.

They are falling both, deeper into the sea, down a gullet to the floor of the world.

Spinning               Spinning

                                                              Spinning

Spinning               Spinning

  Spinning

Spinning               Spinning

                                                                      Down

The sea is clear so deep down and they float, lost on an undercurrent, to explore this old land.

Trail On

I woke, my fire dead under the glare of the rising sun and so, rising, I set out again. My ramblings had to go on until I found that perfect place to rest, where the fire never burn out. A place I could devote to the memory of you, the one they had taken, away from the mocking watchers gathered behind me…

I walked a little further along the trail, watching as stones comfortably followed old paths down the mountainside. They caught in trees and gullies on their way and none quite managed to reach the valley floor. So, I kept on walking, my mind drifting back to you, to the last I had seen of you, lying next to me. My mind had kept you there all night, peacefully beside me, but the morning loosened its hold and you faded, and I found instead the scrap of pamphlet that replaced nothing.

I topped a rise and turned to see the city I had walked through the night before, curving almost into a cylinder, squatting in the pass below. The overpasses that had stretched into every inch of it now lay shattered on its many roads. Glass blocks jutted haphazardly from the debris, reflecting the broken structures at unlikely angles. I lost myself for a time, staring back at that place, until I found the will to move on, further into mountain’s proper.

Some had told me you had gone out to sea, out to catch the last of the great squid that hid beneath it. I saw that your boat was gone in the morning when I walked to the docks. But you had left without me and the squid they said you hunted was too well tangled into the floor of the world that even an attempt at a catch would be pointless. No, they took you from me, hid you deep in the bowels of their city, deep in the place they knew I would never go back too.

Now I walk past the streams and the mountains that lie beyond them, were they can’t get at me, get at my memory, so I can keep those memories from being locked away with you in the dark. Soon I will find a place to rest, somewhere to rebuild myself in the image that you held of me. I could never come back for you, they keep you somewhere I can not (will not) reach, but I can hold a part of you free out here, far from them.

And so, I walk, watching the old cities crumble and the breathing rock shift with a purpose lost to itself, seeing the dead and remembering their lost homes. Each of my steps echo louder as I wander further towards the rising peaks.

New Green

She tastes salt in the air and stops screaming. She realises that she is lying on something cold and wet and so, quite rightly, she gets up. A field of dark green stretches all around, confined only by the open water in front of her and a dead wall behind. Green twists made their way up through the small rectangular gaps in the wall, rapping themselves round and round in perfect spirals until they reached the sharp point at the peak.

She sees some small brown things with eight eyes and four legs step curiously towards her from the green. The woman starts to dry what she can with her hands before reaching down for the little moving shapes. Two manage to scramble onto her open palm and start to explore it with their feet and not used to the funny itchy feeling of their movement, the woman mindlessly makes a fist. Something splatters across the inside her closed hand, and she sees the other forms scurry away.

She feels the inside of her hand before opening it and, looking down in disgust, wipes it on the green, smearing it an odd purple colour that shines like the water. She thinks about screaming again, screaming for the walls to take her back into themselves. She gives it a try for a few seconds, starting, stuttering steadily, then stopping.

She hears a distant groan from all around and nowhere and watches as water ebbs in and out, standing still and silent. Then she looks slowly behind her, taking a proper look between the lines of metal that make up the wall. At the bottom of the low slope beyond it lies more green and, in the far distance, rising black and grey structures of brick.

She smells the air, longing for the familiar scent of wall and floor and so, steeling herself, she tries to squeeze through one of the gaps in the metal barrier. Finally, with the crack grudgingly widening with each of her attempts, she pops out headfirst and tumbles down to the ground.

She lies there awhile, then she gets to her feet and sets off towards the many walls beyond.

Depths of Space

The pant and sweat as they run through steel corridors. Blast doors slam shut behind them, one after another, barely holding under the pressure building up behind them. The ripping sound of decompressing atmosphere fills their ears. The space outside the reinforced windows clutters with debris.

They keep on running, vainly trying to stay ahead of approaching explosions. Light flashes in the depths beyond the windows and their eyes are almost instantly overwhelmed. The whole building shakes them to the ground in a tangled mess of limbs and bodies.

Everything is noise and the smell of burning; not even their sense of touch surviving the ripping of plastic and metal. All they can see is white light, burning through contracted irises and melting its shape onto retinas.

Some manage to struggle to their feet and grasp for the walls, only to feel exposed wiring instead as the walls around them peel away from the heat.

And then the sound goes too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They all wake up, still in a pile, on something painfully solid.

*beep!*

“Hello, it is time for your rehabilitation.”

*beep!*

“Please, do not be alarmed.”

*beep!*

“Hello, it is time for your rehabilitation.”

*beep!*

“Please, do not be alarmed.”
*beep!* *beep!* *beep!*

*beep!* *beep!* *beep!*

Surface

I remembered waking up numb, my eyes burned closed. I lost my soul to the blazing star in the sky. When night came down it did little to ease me. The moon was almost brighter in its white sterility.

                                                why do I write like this?

People walked around me, ignoring me. Why don’t they care? They refused to look, refused to acknowledge. I curled into a ball. My ennui is renewed in the font of fear

What is that meant to mean? So very… whiny                                 

I realised that I was walking, more like staggering, down the street. I run into strangers; everyone is a stranger up here. I cannot see. I fell, down into some sort of alleyway. I felt myself rising up and a realisation reached me.

Then I was pulled physically to my feet, and a many folded piece of paper was thrust into my hand. I fell back into the alley again.

I managed to open my eyes and started to lose myself in the marks that criss-crossed the paper.

Run

The woman is leading. Holding onto the other’s hand is a challenge, it being slippery and hard to see in the half-light. She cannot leave them behind, she needs him as much as they need her, and their dead weight is, in a way, comforting.

The underground they run through is ungrounded, unreal in its nature. The whole world feels this way; the universe is outside of its home. Dancing between cracks is difficult in the dark with the mosslight the only light worth using.

(THE OTHER IS SLOWING HER DOWN, WHY ARE THEY HERE?

The Other will be needed, in the end. She will be needed as well, when they reach the centre of their world and enter it to the sound of trumpets.

But then is not now.)

She pulls him long and they feel rats swarm around them, not touching but close enough to hear and, just about, to see. The other gasps, reaching out for them with his free hand. The woman pulls him away and deeper, down into the corridors of the old world below.

They pass by workers, faces frozen in surprise by the sight of those to running by, hand in hand, rats flowing endless after them.

The other tries to stop, tries to stay, the woman pulls him deeper, passing by the mosslight and into a true darkness. The rats stay behind, and wait.

Return

The city’s light burned through the night, and we were there, in the depths, as it spun around us. Making it back down into the sewers was… cathartic. I would see my family again, though we had left on bad terms, and I would see my parents again, the ones that were still alive that is.

Your hand held mine as we took the spiralling steps down towards the gates and I felt a tear on my cheek. The memory of a rat crawling up my leg was all too real, and I almost dropped my lantern to hold it close instead. I stopped walking but you pulled me on, dancing with no fear from board to board, pausing only when my arm could not be made to stretch any further.

Your smile loosened my legs, forced me to step closer to you, and with that one act you had tricked me. Off you ran in the depths, and I had to follow, down and down, round and round, until I reached the bottom, only to trip over your silent body. My lamp smashed to the ground, out in an instant.

We held onto each other in the darkness.

I was home.

House

The woman lives in a declining home, a building that’s walls lean into the centre like the skin of an unpeeled orange. The floorboards of this home are loose, creaking and falling with one wrong touch. The woman leaps from safe place to safe space, memorised over the years, filling her mind with their nature, wiping away almost everything else.

She never leaves the house, and scratches on brick walls mark passing time and as she makes her way slowly through countless winding corridors. The whole house is lit by the glowing mosses littering walls and ceiling tiles with no gaps to see beyond.

Sometimes looking at walls makes her brain’s twist, squirm in her skull as if she is looking at something that shouldn’t be, shouldn’t turn her skull like a loose lemon spinning on a plate. She only screamed once, if this happened, before settling into trancelike, trancelike state. She is loose in one of these states now and the house watches her spin motionless on the fracturing floor.

But these walls and floors are growing tired of her, they are keeping her now out of habit rather than joy. They materialised her fruit without feeling. When she was new, they were always excited, observing and watching every move from her first steps as a wean all the way to seeing her dance across its surfaces. Now? Not a thing.

The woman is unaware of this, all she sees are melting walls and nothing, brain remoulding itself with each second as the walls enter her one last time, spinning her mind the same way she spins through the house in her endless walks.

Life goes on and she feels the house delve deeper than it ever has before, senses as it climbs to the back of her skull and drives her from its floor, pushing her along and down flights and flights of stairs into a deep room she has never seen.

It is dark; the moss does not grow here, and she cannot see, but still she is forced ahead, deeper into the house’s bowels. Things slither across her feet, coarse as they come, and now they are grabbing hold, pulling tighter and tighter.

She cannot struggle, she cannot move, she cannot scream. It is pulling harder and harder, her joints are breaking, her joints are coming apart at the seams and –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

she wakes besides water, more water than she has ever seen.

Then, the screaming finally comes.