I.
Of course I could. So easy, at least in the telling; a few words, silence after. Lingering, lingering; waiting for the storm that would never come. Nothing, the book closed; wordless apocalyse that we both ached for, that we both denied... Why? Why couldn't I just tell the damn story, have it done with..? Footsteps on the landing outside, soft, stealthy; an assassin's tread, come to put me out of my misery. The door sliding open almost silently. Almost. “Hey. You want some coffee?” “Oh, bloody Hell, yes.” Milk, three sugars; frothed to dessert sweetness. He knew; his hand on my shoulder, the other setting a steaming mug on my desk. A chaste peck on my cheek, a rasp of stubble. “What's the plan for today?” “This; got to get this fucking manuscript done.” “The serial killer thing? I enjoyed that one...” “No; no. That more or less wrote itself; Cam's already looking over it. Just waiting for him to get back with the edit, you know?; This one...” Fits and starts, feverish; inspired by its own winter chill. “...I don't quite know, to be honest.” A nameless thing, waking in a bed of snow; an empty world...save for ghosts; echoes of those whose neighbourhoods it wandered, whose homes and memories it invaded. Old songs, old whispers; confessions so desperate to be heard, as though they might be absolved in the telling; released from the Hell of remembering. “Don't those ones usually turn out the best?” “Usually.” What career I'd carved out for myself founded on them; random scraps, scribbled during more desperate years; before Alistair, before his money gave me time, space; freshly ground coffee in my mug, a centrally heated study; a consistent roof over my head. On buses, at cafes, waiting for trains; many unrelated, or seemingly so, when they first manifested on paper; their relations becoming apparent later, when I took time to type them up, expand them into something half coherent... “I might be a bit later than usual tonight; we've got a staff meeting about some stupid fucking thing. I'll try to get away as early as I can...” Turning to him, into a kiss that continued, tasting of bon fires in frost. “Okay, I think that's enough. Or neither of us will get anything done.” So easy; a telephone call, a text; the computer set to stand by. A day together, closed curtains; on the sofa, a season of something mindless. Too much, in recent days; too much than is good for either of us. “What do you fancy for dinner?” “I don't know. We still got enough stuff to make a Rogan Josh?” “Yeah, I think so. If not, I'll pop into town for an hour or two; you know, blow the cobwebs away.” He loved it; this world he created; the home, the profession; the boyfriend; a published author, a cook; a pretty, younger thing to flaunt. I loved it, too. Impossible, barely a couple of years ago; a dream of others, a fairy tale, that I would never know. The thought of it ending...enough to make me nauseous. A staff meeting. Sudden lightning inside, illuminating an image behind my eyes: he and one of his students; a boy barely beyond high school, sweating and grunting over a classroom desk... A trick of old anxieties, that he'd done so much to help me exorcise. Standing, going to him, not even showered this morning; still stinking of sleep, dreams; last might's sex. Arms around his neck, a closer, longer kiss. Breaking from me, laughing through hitched breath. “I've got to go. Tonight, yeah?” Tonight. * A shower, before it started again; Winter calling. The empty room; my room. A gift; renovated, decorated, before I moved in, outside my knowing, until he first ushered me through the door. Book cases lining the walls, most laden, sagging with ill-organised volumes, folders; files and piles of loose notes. Toys and figurines and ornaments; brick-a-brack of childhood; of the waking now. The desk my favourite part; in front of the far window, which looked out over the back garden (untended, save for the herb and vegetable patches that were his pride and joy), elaboratly carved; deeply stained, scratched and marked from its pevious use. An antique, by all accounts; the most expensive piece of furniture in the house. Mine. An especial shelf separated from the rest, lined with copies of my published work (a detail that he always made a point of showing guests). His precious, pretty, clever boy. Waiting for me; document still open, computer singing. Snow and cold and emptiness; a void that made me smile and shiver. Where was he? Who was she?; My androgyne wanderer, my lost and naked child, padding through the snow, unknown, even to itself, following whispers; distant, faded things, echoes of a time long gone. Lights and faces flickering in darkened windows, shapes dancing at the edges of sight, dissolving into snow and static nonsense beneath its eyes. Children playing, whimpering; singing secrets and confessions that their parents would shudder to hear. Where are you going, sweetheart? What is this world..? Not knowing, any more than I did; walking it together, discovering through one another's eyes. My strange, sexless child; no clue as to its nature in its face, the proportions of its body; from one perspective, more masculine, from another, decidedly feminine...shifting with every step, every flicker of expression. Between its legs..?; Shadow nonsense; a state that my eyes slipped from like fingers scrabbling at a puzzle box of polished ice, not able or willing to define; sometimes seeming to protrude, others to flower and gape; not both, never entirely one or the other. A flux that might madden, if fixated on overlong... An insect buzz, a bone rattle, tearing me from the cold; our communion. Far longer than it felt; the day already swollen, cold sunlight streaming through the window at my back. My mobile phone, buzzing its demands against the stained wood. Baring my teeth, a wolf snarl; silent curses for whoever called me from the cold; from intimacy with my lost and strange babe. Worse, far worse; the reluctant gratitude, to be back in the warmth and waking. Plucking up the hated device (one that Alistair insisted on, since we first became lovers), a familiar name and face painted across its screen. Trevor. Fuck. Almost not answering, returning to the white and the wastes. Old anxieties demanding otherwise; poisonous whispers swarming behind my eyes: Do it; leave it 'til tomorrow. You know what might happen... How would that make you feel? What would that do to you, knowing all you had to do was pick up the fucking phone..? Snatching up the phone. Hating myself; the indulgence of it, the surrender. “Hey...hey, Trev. How are things?” A momentary burst of demon-babble; some static interference, Trevor's voice emerging from the nonsense: “...Pat? I'm...I'm sorry; I know you're working.” Perpetual apology; a status the man had worked so hard to break, but so ingrained; his default condition; to be alien and absurd in any situation, any company; an irritant, endured rather than enjoyed. Often a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Don't worry about it; I could use a break, truth be told.” Nervous laughter, crackling that makes it sound as though he's lying on a bed of crisp packets. “That's...kind of convenient. I was going to ask...” Breathless, the conversation no doubt rehearsed ten times or more before he called, the lines coming in ahrythmic, unbroken stream: “...you maybe want to come over? I can make us lunch...” Refusals risng like vomit in my throat: I'm sorry, sweety; I'd love to, but I can't: I have other plans; in the wastes, with my lost creature, my nether-child. Nothing else, until Alistair got home: alone in the wastes. That was okay; I liked it there, in the snow and silence, the strange lights, the whispers... Wondering, wondering: what had murdered humanity, in that state? What had undone the cycle of seasons, made Earth a cemetery Eden, a garden of ghosts?; Perhaps some military or cosmological experiment gone awry; some engine designed to peer into undisclosed dimensions or probabilities; to provide perpetual energy or to hurl us to the very edges of known creation...maybe cosmological phenomena; something never known or perceived in all of humanity's history, ending us as suddenly as we began. An occult rite, an arcane spell; alien or extra-dimensional influence... Maybe not quite so clear cut; any and all, none that I or my creature or those that follow us would ever know. Swallowing the filth back, needing a little respite; a place in the warm; familiar humanity. “That sounds good. About what time?” A sigh of relief, another burst of demon-chatter. “...about an hour?; I can have something ready by then.” “About an hour it is.” Call ended, a brief wander in the snow and emptiness. * Away. Away from conern and confusion; away from worry and jealousy and yearning. A ghost, trailing its child's footsteps. Whispers on the wind, calling it to where they played; where they fell on one another. Where they scrabbled and sang and wept; where they lay, frozen in their flights and mournings; their confusion, their wittering pleas for salvation from the coming snow (none hearing, none answering, until now). My child going to them, drawn by their whispers; clusters of black, withered forms, half buried in the snow, so densely entwined with one another as to seem like parts of the same anatomy; parents fused with children in an attempt to insulate them against the cold, lovers now more one than they could have ever dreamed in ephemeral love making. Many seemingly caught in the act of flight; attempting to outrun the apocalyptic cold or whatever first brought it down. Others on their knees, faces raised to the sky. Statues of frozen flesh, testaments to an end that none foresaw. Some in their cars, crashed to a halt; murdered by their own hands before the cold could find them. Others in their homes; sat in front of long dead TV sets or computers, in bed, their quilts and covers welded to their bodies by frost more completely than by any fire. Following as it went to them, drawn like a magpie to shimmers of silver; a moth to bonfires. The dead far from inert, here; certainly not to its sight or mine; blazing with blue and green flame, some pale to the point of colourless, others deep and bright; rising high into the grey and swollen sky. Forms in the flames; flickering, flimsy; child's scrawls, stretching and distorting in the wind, endlessly whispering; broken, fractured stories; of their lives before winter, of the world that was. As though confession might absolve them, as though our hearing might somehow open a way to salvation. The secrets they told...accounts that might or not have been true; things imagined, things wanted or dreaded or dreamed, all presented in the same, fretful, desperate manner; the actual and imagined having no distintion: Here, what was once the car park of a sink-estate flat block, now a small desert of pale drifts and dunes, a sexless, shrivelled thing at the wheel of an old fashioned mini-cooper, hands fused with the plastic, another, smaller form in the back seat, head thrown back, as though seeing angels through the ceiling. Father and daughter, the former howling, voice thin and distant, as he chased the latter endlessly, reaching to embrace her only for their insubstantial forms to disperse, pass through one another. The Father slowing at my own child's approach, staring at it with hollow, ragged eyes. The stories coming without greeting, without context; of the wife he treated as a second Mother; his maid, his sex-doll; seceretary and chaperone; unabashed in his self-condemnation: ...no wonder she left us. No wonder... The girl laughing as she paused, perched on a nearby dune, waiting for Daddy to follow. ...wait...wait for Daddy, sweetheart... Laughing, laughing as Daddy crawled, as Daddy slipped and slid after her. Such knowing in her eyes as they found us; such conscious cruelty. Elsewhere, a once-park that had become a desert of snow, littered with the frozen forms of dogs; their masters, children at play. Contradictory fires, rising high; great conflagrations like witch's bon fires, fed by the powdered bones of murdered babes. The children still at play, some, at least; a small gaggle screaming and barking laughter as they chased a weaker specimen through the snow, the diminutive one burning brighter than all the rest combined, flaring to drive them back, turning on them with high-pitched harpy-shrieks, a voice like metal claws running over the strings of an ill-turned violin. Smiling at us, as they scampered back, as they fled from it, gathering form and substance as it approached. The others; the cowering and animal pursuers, scattering, dispersing into cold-condensed tatters of breath and weeping, pathetic threats. Hello. More coherent than most; able to speak, able to hold itself. My child not answering; not with its spoken voice, at least. A smile, the child laughing; a child no longer; transforming before our eyes; warping in the fire that wreathed it, limbs lengthening, neck elongating, its face becoming almost crocodilian; a black-eyed, saw-toothed beast; an echo of one that the girl used to dream, back when she lived. They used to chase me; Billy and his friends. He got sick when the cold came. She liked that; hating him, hating him; liked watching him cough and moan, liked watching him shiver. Calling to her, trying to speak, though I had no mouth or voice here; though I was less than a mote of snow or dust. The creature she became bounding away through the snow, sniffing out the traces and tatters; raking them from the air, into the dunes, where they coalesced, shivering; children still, lacking the wit or imagination to dream themselves other. Whimpering not only in fear, but in jealousy of their victim's new state, of her solidity; pleading with my child to lend them a little of the same. Happy to, with a glance, with a breath. The one that the former girl pinned down in the snow suddenly screaming like a wounded pig, the others flocking to it, swarming around the pair as we watched. My child smiling, tendrils of silver vapour seeping between its teeth, the shadowed uncertainty of its sex disturbed, rippling and distorting. All of them kindling in sudden, common conflagration, their stories, their desperate confessions, merging as one; a single, contradictory tale that seethed and elaborated into surreal nonsense. As for the spectres themselves, swelling in their own pale fires, like their victim before them; the one she pinned down in the snow with a many-fingered, spidery talon swelling and bubbling, its swine-screams congealing around it into a bloated, gelatinous form, many eyes rolling in its folds and recesses, a porcine mouth biting at its captor. The others dancing, laughing even as they kindled; knots of matter like wax in the flames, but swelling rather than melting, taking on form and substance beneath our fascinated and appalled attentions. Soon, a new menagerie; something far beyond ghosts and echoes running wild in the desolation. Maybe our business here; why I dreamed the child into being: to populate tomorrow; to make something new from the filth and sorrow of yesterday. An hour... Yes; idiot insistance; the paranoid twittering of an alarm clock in the back of my mind. Timeless, here; an hour meaning nothing. Wandering, following in the child's wake; through parks and fields, streets and market squares and neighbourhoods. Magpie fascination drawing her; the fires and embers, the stories and songs. The beaten-senseless Mother, frozen in the process of being dragged along behind her husband, bleeding and half-delirious from her last transgression; a new crime that she'd not known of before, that she hadn't understood would hurt him so. Bodies fused at the hands beneath the snow, the child in her arms all but featureless; a black tumor, a knot of nothing, tears long since gone to crystals and dust. Their polluted fires blazing; the Father's belching black smoke, the Mother's thin and pellucid, almost nothing. The child?; A stuttering light, brilliant blue and green, shifting and flaring in its Mother's smothering embrace. The day winter came like any other, for them; an unwanted waking, tip-toeing around the house, hardly a whispered word, for fear of waking Daddy. Daddy, who'd been working all night. Daddy, who'd played with his trains, with her, most of yesterday; who'd let her work them at the controls. Daddy, who was so sad so much of the time; so tired. Daddy, who sometimes swelled out of his skin and became something black and wild-eyed; who sometimes called her name in nightmares, slurred and growling, as he sometimes did Mommy's. How she knew; that Mommy had been bad again; had done something stupid again. Not understanding; money and loans and bank accounts. Bills and telephone calls and men on the doorstep, calling Daddy home from work... The same story, told in so may ways; from so many points of view. Lingering with my empty one as it went to them, the Mother and Father screaming, bellowing at it to stay away, even as they congealed under its attention; as its sweat and breath, as its tears and the seepages from the nonsense between its legs threaded through them, weaving matter from lies and nothing. The daughter, the child, flaring, the Mother wailing as she tumbled from her arms, reaching for her, calling...the child laughing as she skittered away; swelling to something new, something ragged and many limbed, that others flocked to; children murdered by the sudden winter, enraptured by her transformations, begging for some semblance of their own. Over and over; following, lacking any choice in the matter; a mote orbiting my own child's skull, tethered to it by demands beyond gravity, beyond parental adoration (though I did; it and every one it found, whose story it consumed and provided the means of reshaping itself). Here, this dark and quiet house, frost and ice on the carpets, the ceiling; on the bannisters and photographs lining the walls. Echoes here wailing a different species of lament; weeping accusations that raked though my child like rusted, steel talons in her entrails: Clinging together, shuddering on the sofa; their pale fires flaring as one, immolating them; more coherent than most; shades that boasted some detail and distinction; a half-naked woman, swollen breasts punctured and bleeding, wounds at her throat, her flanks, her heart. The man trying to comfort her weeping red tears, his eyes put out, his placations hitched and trembling with despair. The ones responsible for their murder watching, basking in their pain; nourished by it, swelling to parasitic substance without my child's input: Two boys, teenagers only; sixteen, seventeen at the oldest; the one wiry, whippet lean, handsome, in a wan and ephemeral way, the other taller, broader; already hirsuite, rugby-player's frame pelted in wiry, dark hair, the thick glasses perched on his nose incongruous, lending him the look of something pieced together. The pair of them shivering in one another's embrace, painted in blood, the apologies they once sang long since run dry. Now, revelling in the suffering of those that would have murdered them for the sin of their affection, that almost did, not realising how strong they'd become together; how much more they were than the frightened and retiring children they'd once been. A story that seethed on the air; in every shadow, every frozen ruby droplet decorating the room: The best of friends; more like brothers than children of separate households; hardly apart, since they were three years old. Every weekend, every Summer; every Easter and Winter and New Year: together. Knowing from so young; in ways that I never did; knowing also that they'd be condemned for the kisses they occassionally shared; for the touches that had grown more intense and intimate as their bodies swelled to adolescence. Not hating themselves, like so many; not denying; hating the world around them for its ignorance and condemnations, for its idiocy and judgement. These two; the parents of the skinnier boy; his natural effeminacy drawing grunts of disgust and cruel eyes from Father and Mother both since he began to swell into his own state. Never physical; the two of them too cowardly for that; their cruelty in looks and words; in the questions they'd never dare ask. Learning to hate them. The other...cruelties of a different shade; marked out for his size, his retiring nature; a nerd born, more at home in the darkness of his own room, on the computer or buried soul-deep in the books that had come to predominate his existence...endlessly harangued; both at school and at home: Why don't you go out once in a while?; Get some fresh air. Meet some girls, maybe... The answer he gave earning him silence; a coldness that stabbed into his very depths, murdering whatever love their might have once been. Fantasies of emptiness; of waking to find the world barren of humanity, just themselves; a playground in which they could wander and laugh and be. A playground that we'd made for them here; beyond all blood, beyond all judgement; the flesh they once wore frozen as one in their bed upstairs, those that would have murdered them for it going first; less than a day before winter fell and gave them the world they ached for. Such beautiful boys, my child going to them; drawing their eyes away from the wittering, weeping things that would never know, never see. Drawing them out, out into the pale day, the grim light. No longer merely ghosts, but growing more solid by the moment; not the boys they once were, but as they dreamed themselves; wild things, running and howling in the snow. Black lightning, a hideous wrenching; my child feeling it too, trembling, almost losing its feet as I was torn away; an echo of that original expulsion, in all its trauma, no denying it, no matter how desperately I clawed and wept; no matter what prayers I silently cried.
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Ghosts here, welcome apparitions, playing in Summer dusk. Light like I haven't seen since they were born; dense, syrupy, gold and auburn and scarlet. The first whisper of night's chill on the air, cooling the kiln-day.
Sweat and sweet grass, old wood and the peaty ripeness of compost. Flower plots dripping with jewels after a brief shower, three minutes worth of rain so violent, I was afraid it might hammer through the ceiling, drown us all where we sat. Out here, away from TV and sofas, from carpets and comfort. Out here, away from familiar faces, finding those I've forgotten: Spectral children, dancing and darting through the bushes, rolling across the grass, shrieking at one another as they hang from yellow-leaved willow branches. Hearing her, in my thoughts: the woman shrieking, barking at us from the kitchen window: “Keep it down! The neighbours don't want to hear your bloody noise!” “Get down from the damn tree. I'm not gonna drive you to hospital if you break your damn necks!” An unfair potrait, perhaps, but the most enduring: the woman red, swollen and bellowing, the way her jowls flushed and quivered, the way her eyes seemed to shrink, burning in their pits. Not afraid of her; not after a time. Realising early that her bluster was exactly that: just noise, empty threats, no more consequential than the wheezing of a punctured balloon. “Such a little shit...” Not at the beginning, not here: this ghost, this boy, with his azure eyes and white-blonde hair, his striped “pirate's” shirt, his ragged denim jeans. Laughing, crying in the dirt, quivering at the sight of splinters in his fingers, of grazed knees, of cut shins. Laughing at those that suffered likewise, who wept in his place. Closing my eyes, inhaling: the perfume of dead Summers, this...nothing in comparison; echo of an echo, copy of a copy, bled of colour and texture and meaning 'til it might as well be translucent, a sketch scratched on clear acetate. But where the ghosts play... So dense, so sensory, so real. I can be there, with them; see and feel as they see and feel: what it is to be weightless, fearless; to tumble and roll in filth, to bruise and swell and cut and not care, after the initial tears; to climb trees and have no notion of falling,breaking arms or legs or fracturing skulls. Happy idiots, blissful animals, one and all. Dead as the Summers I remember, now. Dead as the one I walk. This garden...a cemetery, as I am: one I should have left behind, stopped mourning at, years ago. Still here, the man who maintained it; who watered the plants, who trimmed the bushes, who clipped back the coniffers, when they grew too rampant: a thinner ghost, one not so in love with the light and colour; a stretched and weary thing, slumping where the children run and gambol, frowning and fretting where they laugh. Muttering to himself, as he casts rainbows across the flower plots, sad-eyed, frowning; a face about to slough from the bone beneath, leaving him with a smile he can't deny. So like him, despite myself; seeing him and more and more with every passing day. Some possessing ghost, some hideous, hereditary virus: always assuming I'd be more like my Mother, resembling her side of the family throughout childhood, adolescence, my university years. Now? The mirror a tragedian, telling me stories sorry enough to make me weep; the same mask, growing slacker and looser with every day, waiting for the moment it will tear and peel, leaving my despair naked. They don't know. How can they?; They don't know me, any more than I knew him. A stranger to them, as they sit and slump on their beds, in front of their computers, over their phones and tablets. Hardly speaking to me, with such contempt, on the rare occassions they do. What am I to them?; Some stranger in the house; some befuddling, confusing intruder. I see it in their eyes, every time they turn my way: that worm of disgust, a reflection of what they see: a lost, weary, pointless thing, awaiting a time it no longer has to sustain eating shit. Not here. Here, I belong again; here, I am welcome, where the world melts, were cemeteries meet sunlight, and memory bleeds into waking. Calling me, inviting me to play. So many ghosts; not just children, but more ragged species: lightning-eyed, wild-haired; the older tribes, as feral as their appearance suggests, coming here as I do; to mourn the escalating decay of childhood, to gnaw over the betrayals and disappointments of the world, unasked metamorphoses of mind and body. Knowing him, this feline-faced, emerald-eyed youth, with his predator's smile, his wiry, reptilian frame. Knowing him, in all of his secret bitterness, his sly contempt: the cruel fantasies he basks in: of those who disappoint him combusting, skinning themselves before his eyes; of daily apocalypses: tsunamis of blood, rains of liquid fire, undoing the systems and routines that abuse and bludgeon and beat him more and more every day, not knowing how long he'll survive. So sad, not like the children; not running or laughing, but swapping conspiracies and secret cigarettes with another; oaths of suicide, before they reach twenty, when they know life will be over for them; stories of how they'll do it, what the world will think when they're found: that maybe they'll become martyrs to their generation, inspire similar self-murders. If only, if only they had the courage of it! The disgust in their eyes, as they find me; wordless refutations, as though I'm a spectre of sickness, stinking and fly-blown, that they can't bear to be near. Driving me back, away from children, away from ghosts; away from the point where we might play together. I can't...not like this. I can't let them see, be with them. Maybe, if that boy had been braver; if he'd not been so timid, allowed a little pain, a little blood, I could be there, another ghost in the molten sunlight. But no...chill deepening, light bleeding away as the sun melts. Stars already in the sky, the spectre of a cruel moon. Wandering back, almost weeping, to that place where I'm a phantom, and all mourn my lack of passing. The Twisted Path Late winter chill, early morning dark. Frost and concrete and exhaust fume. Paths of glittering black, bushes festooned with dark, ragged blades. The way twisting beneath my feet, alive, despite its pelt of ice, a serpentine way, stirring, waiting for dawn to melt away its nightmares, so that it might devour the parasites upon its back. Phantom Gardens Roadside sweetness, cutting through bitter sweat and petrol, sludge and cement. Sudden, intense, no discernible source; a synthetic spring. Pausing on the path, bearing the confuesed, judgemental glances of passing dog-walkers, cyclists, motorists, trying to find this phantom garden, with its ghost and plastic flowers, somehow sweet in the depths of winter, when all around has gone to rot. The Lonely Child Alone, strange and twisted in her thick, white coat. Azure eyes staring past, staring through, somehow reptile, seeing what I cannot. Painted face, flawless as sculpture, a carved idol, whisps of cobweb hair protruding from the depths of her hood. Barely moving as I approach, seeming to wait, to gaze longingly down the path behind. For who? For what? Something that follows, that has always been my shadow. A story I'm not part of. Head twisted at a peculiar angle, as though her neck is deformed or broken, poorly set. Aching to speak as I pass, for her to twitch or glance my way; anything, anything to undo her dead and terrible quiet, to make her more than a wind-up doll in absence of its key. The Way Angel Not stopping, barely slowing at sight of him; dark, gaunt, camouflaged from most eyes, unfurling beside the path, a figure of leaves and shadows, of twisted trees and broken boughs. Long-limbed, stretch-bodied, swollen-headed: a forgotten one, my own Changeling, blood and innocence starved faery-thing, hungering in this world of plastic and process. Afraid? Oh, yes! More than I've ever been, more than I can say. But enraptured, enraptured, whatever it might do, whatever salvation from banality it brings. No refusals or refutations, if it plucks me up and impales me on a broken bough, if it drags me into its shadow-realm to peel me naked and pluck me hollow...all welcome, if only for the chance to see and be touched by a monster, a manifest miracle. Anything but this; slow dissolution in rain and early morning murk, this lie of illusions, perspective undoing it as I draw close, revealing it as nothing more than a play of shadow, a child of imagination's sadism, leaving me bereft in the grey Hell of a waking day. The Broken Gate A child of tree and architecture, its absurdity raising smiles as I draw close, pausing on my way, to admire its strangeness; boughs weighted with dark leaves, even in this late and frost-bitten season, curving into the sky, casting deep shadows across the path. The arch it forms broken, as though shattered in some great war, a natural calamity: no bodies or debris left to mark it (save perhaps those entangled in its roots, their rot feeding its younger incarnations). Standing on the lip of its shadow, gazing down into it; an abyss, a black sea, into which I might plunge, those drowned or drowining still rising from its depths to drag me down, into whatever alien Hell awaits. Cursing concrete's solidity as I hurry by. The Unwanted Friend Seeing, from the corner of my eye; plastic smile, desperate eyes. Paint cracked and flaking; glare of a frightened child in an old woman's face. Sparrow and magpie words, twittering, high-pitched, nervous and demanding. Hooks and chains of anxiety, attempting to find purchase on me, to snare and infest. None. My allegiance already given, my time not my own; certainly not hers. Idiot answers, the briefest I can muster, cracked, painted smile dying, hooks retreating as she finds me frictionless, a thing of cut and polished ice. The Stolen Moon Bus-journey malaise, mind and patience withering beneath the banalities of already dead things. A flash of silver through the window, weary eyes snared, drawn to a passing house in which the moon burns, a cold captive, plucked from the night sky. Theives of miracles, none of those wittering around me -sick and bitter men, weary and defeated women- sparing it a glance, not noticing; not concerned, even if they do. Miracles never mattering to them, stolen or otherwise. Why they drown, now, why they smother in their own skulls, in filth that silver will never pierce. Goblin Children Returning along the twisted path, the serpent sated now, sleeping in the weak sun, undisturbed by the black and ragged things that caper and run over its back: the goblin-children, unleashed from subterranean asylums, pale-faced and dead-eyed, to bark and bleat their filth at one another, at passers by, to kick up clods of earth and frozen shit, to revel in their own hopelessness, a dance of despair that will last until they part, until the cell doors slam shut again, and they allow themselves to weep for humanity they'll never know. The Alone King Key to the kingdom, grinding in its lock. The portal opening; long neglected way. The dreamed and promised kingdom, yearned for in exile, only shadows and warm promise to welcome, the scents of bread and incense, of spice and old, old books. A lonely paradise, a quiet Eden. All he's ever asked for, if only for a dream's span. My time amongst the Engines, my years sweating amongst the stinking, steam and shit dreams of others...
Barely remembered, now, save in the vaguest sense; as images, as impressions: moments of vicarious inspiration. Flying, the wings of dragons, of angels, sprouted from my back, beating the cold or burning air. Slithering, a great serpent, grinding skyscrapers and temples to powder beneath its belly, hissing laughter at those that shriek and scamper before it. Moments of absurdity and banality, intermingling: serving a dinner party of skinless, infested diners, the silvery mites scurrying over their bodies seasoning the food with every motion, taking flight in glittering clouds around their heads. Sat watching TV soap operas with parents I don't recognise, the itching, skin-twisted, sullen body of a teenage girl, the world outside the windows burning with lurid, turquoise fire. Not supposed to remember at all. Most don't; waking or shuddering as though barely a moment has passed, that space between one heartbeat and the next...a gulf of decades, an abyss of centuries. Timeless time, down there, in the noise and light, the nonsense processes that underly all they know. But I do, no matter how distantly; I remember, thought returning to it, over and over, no matter how earnestly I try to forget, probing like a tongue at a rotting tooth, trying to gain some...comprehension, some measure of control... I can't. I can't. We forget for a reason...we aren't built for it; to contain those spans, to conceive of them. No sleep down there, no slowing; only the endless wandering, from engine to engine, from unborn to unborn; the less fortunate; the unwanted that humanity won't miss, bound into the machinery, floating and shuddering in their tanks, endlessly filtering the dreams of others... Insane. Hearing them; the ones that wake, that tear themselves bloody, that smash their ways free. Attending them through the filth; the blood and glass, singing to them, giving them a little peace, chemical peace. Broken things...I remember; wasted and rubbery-skinned, no names, no histories: taken before they could even be born. Parts of the Engines, the most essential; the human component, without which they'd be nothing; towering hunks of dead metal, cold bone, still flesh. Going about my day, with those memories; that knowledge. Smiling hello to people I pass in the street, swapping mindless, thoughtless pleasantries with the hateful-eyed girl behind the cornershop counter as I purchase cigarettes and chocolate. In phone calls to the bank, the waterboard, the gas company. Chatting on-line with friends and family. Always there, always knowing. Aching, aching to tell them all, to shriek it, to type out some confession, send it to every news site and broadcast station in the land. But I can't. I can't. Because I know; what they'll do, what it will mean. Others have tried. Others try still; to make them see. They've come to me, down the years, trying to recruit, to convince me of their causes. Dismissed, out of hand, the most earnest threatened with exposure. I don't know how I'd do it; who I'd contact. Only that I don't want them here, on my doorstep, phoning and texting and e-mailing... Don't want their condemning eyes, their fretful, fervent poetry. All I want is what everyone has; to not know, to not see. To forget I ever dreamed. Failing, no matter what I do, what I sacrifice...the heart of all being, beating its last, the dream it sustains done...
No song to inspire it, no prayer. Dreaming of apocalypse. Eager to be born, my child of pain, my sorrowing angel. Soon, sweetheart; I swear. When the red rains come, and the abandoned garden is fit for you to walk. An end. Is that all you dream of? My skinless, suffering babe? No. Too much sacrificed. I'll abort Eden for you. It swells, no matter my efforts; the maggot in the wound, the Cancer of Creation. No angels left, now; no celestial surgery to carve it out. Soon, they will bring her; the last suffering soul. Then, the red rains will come, a new angel taking flight. Nothing left to mourn, no one to worship. Glutted on dead dreams and humanity's meat. Mine the last, a creator's gift; a species sacrificed in its conception, none now to celebrate its birth. My empty God, my divine abortion. The end of death itself. What is their pain for that promise? Nothing. Suffer, Eden's children, in defiance of oblivion. At last, an end. To stars, to light. To dreams. And in the dark after?; A nightmare child, our child; spawn of dead suns, black-hole maggot, swelling in the wounds of God, after all between Heaven and Hell is done
They come, my carrion-children, my fly-born, singing desolate lullabies, curdled hymns, in welcome of creation's leprosy. Unwanted waking, my only prayer to sleep forever; that they never hear my dreaming lament. Denied. The Eaters of Dreams sing to me, call me Father, in the dark, despairing hours. Worms call, black-hole dawn, gasping in the light of dead stars, my first breath, choked with dead Mother's filth, my own. A son of leprous Gods, my nightmares new gospels, that all waking and dreaming will soon know. No prayers, now, save in cockroach tongue. Our Vermin Children come! Sing, my unwanted, my aborted! Sing and call them to cannibal feast. Listen...the elegies of worlds, diseased stars. Beautiful, isn't it? No use praying now, sweet ones. Fairy time is over. Come! Come and join our choir... Awake, almost born. All know, the dreaming in their cribs, the choking in their deathbeds, all see. Wailing in welcome, hearts stopping as one. Don't mourn me; my dreams are over. Save your tears for when the black suns rise, when my nightmares are born... Many, child; no dream survives, no garden is eternal. Let them show you the night beyond Eden... Perhaps...perhaps this one. Perhaps I could hold on here, for a while; let the worm inside rest.
This one, where I learned to mix and knead and bake bread before I could walk, before the first word slurred from my lips. This one, where I learned how to milk cattle, churn that milk to butter before I knew my own name. This life...one of a thousand, a million; one in which I was a child, not wanted or reviled; simply one that slopped onto the blankets and cold stone like the rest; my brothers and sisters, who told me stories before I knew the words, of those who went before; the elder ones, sent out into the city, the desert. Stories of the desert...I liked those most of all. They told that it's forever; that beyond the shattered outer walls, the ghost-towns and ruins that stretched into the horizon, the white sand that shimmered all colours at mid-day was endless; an emptiness into which only the lunatic, the diseased and visionary wandered, none returning. I asked, when I had the words, when I learned the way: What was out there? What wandered and lives amongst the colours, playing in the rainbow light? So many things, if the stories they told were true; the children of people and animals; of spirits and dust-demons that danced on the winds. The ghosts of those that made our city, this strong-hold against the desert; the last place in all the world where there were stories and buildings and bread. Our family...my sisters and I, we made the bread, from the flour and wheat our Father brought home, in the way that our Mothers taught us. I didn't know which of them was mine; none of us did. I learned not to ask early; saw the froth and fury it roused in our Father. A blasphemy, he said; not be uttered under his roof again. All children of all Mothers, maybe not even the women themselves knowing, after a time. That was how I spent my days, from the very earliest; in the cool murk beneath the house, where the flour rose and swirled like ghosts, where my sisters gossiped and swapped stories of their twilight escapades (none for our Father's ear; on the rare occassions he heard, he would bark and bellow and beat until those responsible could no longer plead). I learned from them; not only how to bake, the magic of capturing yeast from the air and slamming air out of dough, watching it swell, but how to walk, how to move, how to carry myself. Not long before they started to realise, not long before I knew: one of the blessed, a soul that walked in strange skin, one of the Dragon's own daughters. I was so afraid, when my Father came, when I knew that he knew. I don't know which of them told, but I hated them all for it, never so betrayed, before or since. Still so young, then. Not that he required their confession, to hear him tell it; he'd seen the light in me, the strange fire, from the moment I was born, or so he told the Tiamine, my true sisters. He took me to them, at little more than eight years old, when I had barely set foot outside of the bakery, when the rare instances I was allowed to climb the stairs to the cafe above shuddered me to my marrow. Sweat, fear; afraid my heart would burst, when we first set foot out on the street; afraid that I would shrivel up and blow away beneath the eyes that turned on us, more dust to feed the desert. Every step unravelling me further, the cold storm inside swelling; sunlight as I'd rarely seen, brilliant white filtering down from a sky of greens and pale pinks, ribbons of luminous colour coiling and converging there, shedding streamers down, down upon the city, upon the broken spires, the old temples and markets. I fell in love, my hand in his, enveloped by it, his sweating, furious heat transmitting to me like a fever. In love with the city I'd never seen, in love with every weary, wondering face, every curious or condeming eye. I met them, though it damn near burst my heart to do so, letting them snare me, to wonder and recoil, to spit in the sand at my passing. A Tiamine, a child of old chaos, when the world was a woman; when deserts were ocean, and sky was storms. Before the land and fire, before He rose from beneath, to still and tame them all. I knew the stories; my Mother and Sisters had told me; of the Great Ocean that existed here long, long, long before I or they or their parents were born, long before the city rose; of the Goddess whose body it was born from; of the children that swam there with her...so many stories, swirling behind my eyes as he led me through the streets and plazas and market squares. So many people...more than I'd ever seen, even in the cafe; bustling and jostling and stinking together, swapping stories and laughter, barbs and insults; a knot of them brawling in the sand outside a nearby temple, screaming as they wrenched at one another's hair, as they bit down on their opponent's arms and backs. We didn't linger, the crowds parting before us as we drew deeper, as we approached the place where my Father came to pray six times a day; where he'd promised to bring me, when I came of age. An oath he'd never collect on. I felt him tense, his fingers gripping mine tight enough for the bones to grind against one another, felt him slow, stumbling to a halt. Burning eyes, wider and paler than the sun. So many, their light on me making me want nothing more than to be back in the cool darkness, kneading dough with my sisters. Stammered words, another voice; one I'd never heard my Father use before. I hated him, at that moment; a splinter of familiar betrayal working its way into my heart. None of them would be mine after this; none of them. The ones that waited, with white fire in their eyes, silver in their hands...I didn't know them, but my Father did, pleading with them to let us pass, telling him that the Tiamine expected us. They spat and snarled at mention of the Dragon's Children, some of them crying out, calling me perversion, beast, abomination. Fury, burning the hand he held, a twin fire of shame feeding it. "You dare bring that thing out here, to our dooresteps? We won't allow it!" One that stood before the rest; a tall, pale man with a wide-brimmed hat, its cone bent and drooping, the hem of his coat tattered and dust-stained. Eyes windows of dark glass, reflecting the fires of another world. I knew him; had seen his like in the cafe before. Edenics, my Father called them, in the rants and ravings that inevitably followed. "They don't belong here. Send 'em across the Dragon's Bed, back where they came from." No such spit or froth, now; not that he allowed them to see. "The Children...they've asked to see. Please..." The first stone, catching him full in the face, hurling him back in the sand. Others followed, bottles and shards of stone, clumps of compressed sand, rotten food. Pelting him, as I watched, as he struggled to rise, the pleas smashed from his lips, the sight of him like this... quickening my breath, stirring strange tides in my entrails. None of them found me, none of them daring. The rain didn't stop until he stopped struggling, until he no longer attempted to rise or plead, darkness spreading from beneath him across the broken stone. I went to him, the man who made me, the pale, thin robe that my sisters had dressed me in fluttering about me, the hem sweeping in his filth, in the shadow-stuff that seeped and bubbled from him. I didn't touch him, though I knew that, if I did, they would see a miracle today; the man they'd presumed to murder rising from his death. I drew close, the sourness of him so offensive...nothing like the bread-and-yeast wholesomeness in which he'd raised me. How we'd let this man touch our bread, let his stink and disease seep into it... bread that would be sweeter, from today; I told him so, whispered it as he lay gasping in wet, broken breaths. Cruelty...I'd known it, from him, from the less loving of my Mothers and Sisters (the ones I would expel, if and when I returned home, or set to work grinding the flour, sifting the wheat, but that I would never beat. Not like him.), but had never experienced it for myself; never known that black, liquorice burn in the back of my throat, the ragged red lightning between my temples...the invisible blade carving the air, burying itself in another's soul. So hungry for me...I'd never known it; the heat of their eyes, of their white, white fire, aching for me, nothing else that would sustain it today but a sacred soul. They waited, watching as I rose, as I turned to them. I would have let them take me, had she not come; would have let them set my dress and skin ablaze with their eyes, burned for them, as I never had for anyone. But she did, the scent of her drifting on the breeze, a breath that was also a song, sweet to my ear; like those that drifted during festival months from nearby temples, from the streets and plazas I wasn't permitted to walk. Her voice the sound of the ocean, lapping against ancient shores. I had never seen the ocean; no one living had, but I knew it, with the certainty of dreams, saw it as she came, the gathered Edenics parting before her, scuttling back to the street sides, some of them breaking, scampering into their broken-down temples, where they practised their broken creeds. Others brave enough to stand, though not to speak. All, except one. She smiled as she came, the most beautiful thing...the most terrible. Tiamine...a word like angel or demon; a thing that cannot be described or expressed any other way. I had never known them; never seen them. Only the stories. A slender form, almost naked; feminine, but still noticeably male, its body wrapped around in streamers of translucent fabric that seemed alive, flapping and coiling in a wind I didn't feel, crawling over her skin with parasite ecstasy. Seeing her, I envied them; wanting to be amongst them; to travel the softly undulating dunes of her belly, the soft whiteness that was an echo of the desert beyond the walls, to wet myself in the honeyed dew of her sweat. Strange wants, strange hungers; ones I'd only ever felt pangs or echoes of before, and only ever in dreams, when the dragons came for me. Long, slender arms, bedecked in jewellery, her skin tattooed to resemble snake or dragon scales, the shimmering light that passed through them with every step and gesture making them seem animate, far more than illusions of ink and needle. A shaved bald scalp, similarly decorated, eyes so green they shone like the ribbons of light weaving across the sky. At the end of each finger, a delicate, silver talon, so finely polished, they left contrails of light in the air where they passed. Dark lips, a soft smile, though only for me. The Edenics withdrew from her as though she were diseased, though none threw more than a frown her way. None, except the one with white fire in his eyes. I had no eyes for him or for my Father, bleeding and shivering where he lay. Only for her, hers on me both wonderful and agonising, my body beneath the thin robe a shame to me; so much like my younger sister's; a woman's that hadn't yet begun to bud. "The daughter I never had." His title for me. The fire-eyed one stood in her path, blocking her sight, his black and grey rags severing us from one another. Fury, disgust; as for one who had smeared shit across my eyes. Nothing I could do; no knife, no weapon. "Enough," the man hissed, the word rendered even more sibillant by the rags swathed across his lips. I heard her laugh, then, a voice that was neither that of a young man nor a girl, snared in some sweet space between. I didn't see what happened, but Fire Eyes staggered, his boots scraping the sand, a gloved hand rising to his face. The whine rose from deep inside of him; in the loops and whorls of his entrails. A child watching its parents hacked to pieces, burned alive before its eyes, a husband witnessing his wives and daughters raped again and again. The fire in his eyes bursting free as they turned to the sky, white streaming into the pink and green, his hands clawing at them, to shatter the glass and let the rain in. She nodded, still smiling, her eyes widening as they found mine. Little sister...I'm sorry I did not come for you... Her voice...not in my ears, but my head, as intimate as my own thoughts. Will you come with me, now? My tongue swelled in my mouth, words snarling in my throat like flies. How could I answer; bleat my ugly, animal nonsense at her, let her smell the shit-eating foulness of my breath...? No. I couldn't... The Edenic screaming, blood-streaked, eyes of splintered glass, hurling himself at her, his filthy hands clawing at her throat. Red lightning as he touched her, the world and its filth boiling before my eyes. Flying without thought, without reason; a splinter in the storm, intent on severing arteries, on piercing eyes; shearing away the fingers that dared pollute her with their hate, their ugliness, their violence. He didn't see; too intent on her, the most beautiful thing in creation accepting its murder without a twitch or word, though she was more than capable of preventing it. My Father raising himself, spitting reprimand through the blood and broken nonsense of his face. Too late, too late. A bird's weight; a fact that he'd reminded me of again and again, during the drunken moments when he'd sought me out, taking his hand or belt to me for some imagined sleight, some contrived crime. Broken again and again and again, always healing, thanks to my Mothers and sisters, despite my fragility. Barely enough to stagger the Edenic, to distract him from his violence. Pain, a flash of silver through the boiling red. Tumbling, skidding through the dust. A cut and quivering worm, nothing, just as he'd always said, as I'd always known... One of the Tiamine, a Dragon's Daughter?; Less than laughable, in that moment; the poorest joke, blasphemy beyond even the bruises deepening beneath the Edenic's fingers. Heaving, its glass eyes on me, swimming with the story of my ugliness, my wretchedness...a tale to make me weep, and be thankful for the fire it would bring. Breath catching in my throat, scarlet pulsing between the fingers clutched to my belly; a wound running from navel to flank, my life, my filth, pulsing into the dust. Out of the corner of my eye, Father's weeping as he dragged himself through the dust, muttering wordless pleas, prayers that no divinity worth invoking would acknowledge. Those that came in the Edenic's train, the piss and fire all but dwindled in them, those that remained doing so more out of terror of drawing their former shepherd's attention than anything else. I hadn't known, until that moment...how much they repulsed me. How happily I would have bled and bled and bled, until the streets became red rivers, until the desert ocean, the living swept up in them churned and boiled and broken until they were nothing; scraps for strange fish. Yes, a world of them; the churches, the cities; history and all its detritus, ground down, swept away; become the foundations of coral reefs, the nurseries of whatever strange, sanguine life would follow. A dream kindled and aborted in a heartbeat, murdered by a second stroke of lightning; this one carving my face, hurling me back from where I lay. Dragging her still, hefting her high, the Edenic followed, its voice rising with every step, becoming more manic as it cast its empty eyes over its hesitant allies, silently imploring them to see as it saw, hate as it hated. And they did. They did. Not seeing; my eyes on her; her broken, bleeding beauty, the trails of mercury she bled and wept into the dust. Not seeing, as they descended upon me, as the first of their boots and blows found me, as their spit and curses burned me alive, their knives carved me open, spilling me out to mingle with her, red lacing silver. Not seeing, but feeling; their burning eyes, curses hotter, sharper than any blade or fire. Carving me to the bone, spilling me out, splintering and unravelling; a knot of living pain, agony that was nothing, nothing, compared to what the sight of her roused. Through the chaos of smeared, snarling faces, of boots and fists, flashing knives and broken glass, my Father, the man crawling away, into the shadowed side-streets, there to lick his wounds and pray that they'd be content, when they'd reduced my sister and I to filth in the street. Singing to him, to them all, through the pain: I'll find you...I'll find you all, in dreams, where I can be a dragon true, where I'll burn and devour and shat you out over and over and over, forever... My sister hearing the song, laughing, through their animal grunts, their cattle-snorts and barks. A sound as beautiful as the sight of her, washing away pain, anger, hate...a lullaby to ease us both from this world of dead fire and dry seas. * Another end, so soon? Swirling, a thing of dust, seeping, carving red runnels through my own filth. Seeing what they'd made of me, of her; our broken, mangled bodies, her beauty and mine left to gather flies and feed vermin in the street. Seeing him, the bloody, broken, weeping man as he dragged himself from the shadows, trembling, whimpering as he cast frightened eyes away from us, up and down the street, fleeing, fleeing as fast as his bruised and bleeding frame allowed. Leaving us here. Leaving me here; another abortion, another unwanted birth. Sad, so sad to leave behind the bread and my sisters, even though they'd betrayed me; the Mothers whose names I'd never learned, whose stories I'd yet to hear. The sister, who I'd never been allowed to know, whose beauty had been stolen, vandalised in the most obscene way. Not content with mere murder. Oh no; many remaining, including their fire-eyed shepherd, to beat and cut and burn, to score and scratch and carve their contempt into her hide. What remained...not even a parody of its former beauty; a lipless, noseless mannequin of meat and bone, nestling in a pool of steaming mercury. Not sorry to see the end of this sick and dying dream, wondering, as I rose, what new wastes I might walk, what new travesties I might witness... “So soon, sister?” Shuddering, in agony, in delight, as she snared me; as her mercurial blood frothed and rose, coiling about and through my abstract essence, anchoring me to meat that had yet to fully still. Her ruins twitching, her eyeless, splintered face clicking and cracking as it rearranged before my eyes. Already rising, already healing, crawling its way towards me. Writhing, a hooked and spitted worm, as she dragged me down, as she soothed me back, back into the meat I'd abandoned for dead... Sensation. Hideous. Glorious; the pulse of blood, black star-bursts of pain, my heart fluttering, a caged and rabid bird in my chest. Old and new; her effluent not content to merely return me to my shameful flesh; invading it, rewriting it... Feeling her within me, flowing where my blood flowed, lacing thought and sensation with silver and sunlight. Stirring, rising from the mire of my murder; a genuine miracle, that the holy brutes who sired it would never know, save as something to fear, to vandalise and desecrate. Her hands on me, guiding the rewriting of my flesh, moving as they might over a lover's body, over a sick and wounded child's, inspiring not a return to my old, sorry self, but the one I walked in when dreams took me; fluid and pearl-scaled, winged and star-eyed. Time, yet, before I aspired to that condition; before shattered bone and ruptured organ reknitted themselves; before I could walk or rise without her aid. Time, in which to learn new stories, miracles beyond rising bread, and love beyond the idiot anxieties of men. Rain so sudden, so fervent, it turns the grass to mire beneath his feet. Laughing as he slips and slides, as he sprawls out, the taste of wet earth filling his mouth.
Wondering: Is this what it's like, to be with the worms, to sleep in the weeds? Not so bad. Not so bad at all. This old way, the field he used to walk with his Grandfather, when the old man was still alive and able to wander. Falling out here, more than once, unable to get up, found by joggers, dog walkers, drug addicts...cutting his hand, his head. Breaking a rib, once, until Mom and Dad forbade him from coming here, as though he were a child. Hauling himself up, wondering if the old man somehow still wanders here, if some echo of him stumbles and slips in the rain. He likes to think so; likes to think that the old fuck mutters and curses under his breath every moment of every day, not knowing where or how or what; endless confusion, a Hell of dementia. More than he deserves; a merciful Hell, given all he did, all he was. Mike's clothes still stinking of plastic and solder, of smoke and chemicals. He barely notices any more, usually. Today, he's hyper-sensitive to it, the reek stinging his sinuses, making his eyes water, contrasted by the sweet freshness of rain and soil and grass. Scrabbling up the uneven rise, not caring that he cakes and smears himself in sludge, not giving two shits about those who might see and cluck and tut and comment on his condition. Worthless shite, each and every one of them. Russian dolls, filled with echoes of their Fathers and Mothers, whatever world they inhabit not one he has any interest in being part of. Weeds and wildflowers, some stinging as he brushes them, piercing his palms and fingers with thorns and white needles. Long grown numb to them; from the years he's wandered this way, to and from school, to and from work. From the chemical and solder burns he suffers daily at the factory. Laughing at their tickling stings, at their nothing. Grasping them, hauling them up by their roots, imagining that they scream, in some unspoken plant language, that the grass and dandelions quiver to hear them. * Home. Nothing waiting, not even Tabitha. Her food bowl empty, her litter tray full. Out in the field, no doubt, maybe watching him as he stumbled home, slowly closing her eyes in denigration of his awkwardness, his oafish slips and tumbles. Chasing field mice and rabbits through the rain. A message on his phone, as he slumps at the kitchen table, watching the rain sluice down the window: Hey man, Louis here. Had a great time the other day. You free tonight? ;) Free tonight? The thought of humanity disturbing this quiet almost as repugnant as leaving it unbroken, knowing what it would give birth to if he did. I have to get cleaned up and eat first. A response coming so fast, he could half believe the man to be some sort of telepath, reading the message as it forms in his mind: No worries; I'll be at work 'til 6. See you around 7? ;) Around 7. Of course. * Time seeping yet static, the texture of the sludge drying on his overalls. No sign of the damn cat. Drown, then. See if I give a shit. The same minute seeming to tick by over and over, the same raindrops falling; a little purgatory, that he wishes he could suspend... Move. You know what will happen if you don't... He knows, he knows, god damn it. Groaning as his grandfather used to, as he rises from his chair, a faint flittering through the archway drawing his eyes. The living room dark. “Fuck off.” Scrabbling on the wooden floorboards, claws, many feet. Something slumping and dragging itself, wet, uneven weight catching on carpets, on warped and splintering wood. The image it conjures of an immense slug, bleeding and seeping mucus as it inches through the dark. Closing his eyes, every inch of himself suddenly acute; every unconscious process: the pulse of blood through veins and arteries, the chemical gurgling of his stomach and entrails. Brute, biological things: no poetry, no myth: just process, mindless, purposeless... Always the best diversion; the scritching, scrabbling, slithering, whispering, fading as he falls into himself, as he becomes a carnival abyss; a wasteland of clockwork rhythms, suspending this delusion that he calls Mike Varnham. Time shifted when he opens his eyes again. 6:15. Almost time. Louis likely already on his way. No hope of cancelling, now. Tired. So fucking tired. Of needing him, of wanting him. Dragging himself up the stairs, struggling out of his overalls, his shirt, his underwear; their cotton and fabric sewn to him like an old, too-tight skin, refusing to be shed. Voiding himself, closing his eyes, as his body goes about its idiot processes, as its foulness rises around him. Nothing; not even the faintest whisper. Good. Maybe tonight, they'll let him be. * The shower scalding, eliciting gasps, hisses, clenched teeth. Happy for its scouring, not only of the day's filth and grime, but of the cockroaches that swarm beneath his skin, the vermin that have mated and multiplied there all his life. Belly aching, no food since breakfast; even that a rushed, unenthusiastic affair. The ache intense, a knife twisting in his guts. No matter; too late, now. The seconds before Louis arrives melting like snowflakes on his fingers. Plucking up whatever clothes are scattered across the bedroom floor, hardly bothering to dry himself. No matter; not as though he'll be wearing them for long. Thoughts turning to beyond seven, when the man leaves, and there's nothing; none of the knife-edge anticipation, the old anxieties swirling like poison in his belly. When there's no distraction, and the whispers begin again. “Stop. Stop it, you fucking moron.” Self abuse no stranger; the vast majority of his inner-exchanges masochistic, to some degree. “If it's too much, just fucking leave. Just go.” What, like Ridgeworth before him? Yeah. That turned out fantastically, didn't it? Nothing to contain them, nothing to divert them... He saw; his Mother made sure of it: what was left of his Dad, by the time they finished their games. “Is that what you want? For Louis, for Alex, for everyone?” Time was, thought of old loves, memories of those lost or abandoned, were enough: enough to have him sigh and accept one more night of play. But tonight, last night; the night before...almost. Considering it, all the way home: leaving the house be, fleeing into the night, letting whatever powers preside over his idiot, hereditary duty come for him. Whatever they might inflict, whatever they might show, can't possibly be worse than this... The doorbell ringing, his phone buzzing in his pocket. Ding dong ;) Anxiety bubbling like vomit in his throat, lightning scouring every nerve. Shaking his head, laughing at himself. “Idiot. Idiot.” * A blazing smile, a slice of sunlight, awaiting him on the doorstep. Louis seeming to bleed and sweat luminosity, emphasised by the murk of the evening, the natural dark of the house. A bottle of wine clutched in one hand, a brown leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Blowing a veil of white blonde hair out of his eyes. “What's that for?” “What do you think? Oh, don't worry; I'm not planning on moving in or anything; it's just in case, you know, you actually want me to stay...” Stepping aside, as the man flutters in, seeming to flit like a sparrow, almost weightless. “...it's not that I don't want you to...” “I know! I know, all right?; Work, work, work. It's fine. In again today, yeah?” “Pretty much every day...” An argument lingering on those pretty lips, aching to take flight. Aborted before the first sigh or syllable. “Why's it always so dark in here?” Because it's how they like it. It keeps them sedate. A shrug. “I dunno. I just like it that way.” That lop-sided smile, an affectionate laugh. “You...are weird. Has anyone ever told you that?” “Someone usually does most days.” Following him through to the living room, as he flicks on lamps, sets the fire blazing. “There. Isn't that a little more like it?” A shrug, already fatigued by him, already feeling his energies bleed into the ether. “So...” “So.” Drawing to him, closer than he's been to any other human being in days. His hands on those bony hips, feeling them burn through denim. “There's more meat on what butchers throw out.” The man's hands knotting themselves behind his neck. “Charming as always.” A kiss, tasting of spearmint and bubblegum, of spice and meat. Slow, savouring it, anxiety evaporating, a cool and calming blue washing his entrails. Louis breaking the moment, laughing, pressing his forehead to Mike's chin. “What the Hell am I supposed to do with you, Mr. Varnham?” “I can think of a few things.” * “M...Miii...” “Hush, sweetheart, hush.” The man stumbling, clinging to him, all the composure and volition of a newborn foal. “W..where..?” “You know; we've been here before. Lots of times. Just a game...” A whine rising, the man trembling more furiously, as memory returns, as his bladder gives way. “...just a game, sweetheart.” And tomorrow, nothing; the man waking without a mark, without a scratch or scar. Courteous sadists, the children he serves; always clearing up after themselves, leaving little to no trace of their mess. So long as he's present to ensure it. Weeping, now, as he leads him from the shadows, to the centre of the room. Always the same: an attic space, of some kind; the dimensions of a cathedral: a vast chapel of old, splintered wood, of greening beams and floorboards. No electric or synthetic lights, what illumination they see by filtering through ruptures in the walls and ceiling; a pale amber, like Autumn moonlight. Not knowing, only asking until his Mother and Father beat curiosity out of him. A space between; reality in the cracks. Where the children play. “Come on, now; crying won't help...” It never has before. Though it hurts, he won't deny that: cold fingers around his heart, trailing up his spine. Pleas coming through the tears: “No...not...not tonight. Please...” “Hush, hush.” A threadbare carpet in the middle of the floor; one of their many nurseries, the playgrounds where they gather. Hearing them, feeling them all around: shapeless, rustling and hissing in the shadows. Louis clinging to him, as he levers him down. No need for restraints or shackles; the man as weak and helpless as a boneless newborn. Setting him upright, his head lolling on his chest, crossing his legs beneath him. “Woah! Woah, steady there...” Almost toppling on his side, tears and snot streaming down his face. “F...fuck...” “Yes, I know, sweetheart: fuck me. Not feeling very inventive tonight, then?” The least of curses, compared to what the man has slurred and spat at him, what he's gasped between wretches of pure fear. Not realising, early on; that he can provide proxies, that it doesn't have to be him joining their games every night. The very notion sickening him, at first, but necessary. He isn't his Father, or Wainwright or Childers; he can't sustain what they did their entire lives. Not every night; one or two a week. The rest...all his. All his. “P...please...” More wounding than any curse; the desperation, the appeal to love he wasn't certain of, until now. The children whispering, some of them whistling fractured nursery rhymes. He sees them, the look on his face, the despair in his eyes... Mike goes to him, running a hand over his plastic smooth cheek, as he did after their lovemaking. A kiss, like the one that preceded it, but more urgent, for both of them. Breaking away, the man grasping at him, weeping, as he falls, splaying out across the carpet. “Please...please! I...anything! Anything you want...” Anything. The first breaking away from the shadows, from its brothers, with a vile, wet squelching, its bulbous form bleeding matter, shredded and torn open: a thing that might have made him vomit, once: that he recalls screaming and screaming and screaming at, as an adolescent. Not so much as a snarl of distaste, now. Myriad faces gasping and grinning across its hideous body, stretched taught, partially subsumed; their eyes black and weeping. Mismatched, spidery limbs clattering over the floorboards, clusters of tubular and sack-like organs wheezing and seeping beneath its bulk. Louis not screaming at sight of it; his eyes glazing over, his expression slackening. Perhaps for the best. Others follow, small and immense, coiling down from the rafters, descending on silken threads, slithering and squirming and fluttering: Children of atrocity, the inspiration or the spawn of humanity's most delirious nightmares. Mike doesn't know; has long since stopped wondering. Always the same dance, the same bizarre reluctance, as though they're afraid, reaching out, pawing the air, prodding and pricking. The first extending a limb that pierces Louis's shoulder. Now he screams. Mike winces, closing his eyes, turning away. * The night timeless, their playtime...without bound or limit. He doesn't know...how long he stands, occassionally glancing at their play, watching what they make of their new toy. At points, Louis seems to laugh rather than scream, his mind broken, the game now his as well as theirs. By that point, their's little recognisable left of him; a stretched and smeared face, scraps and tatters strung from the talons and teeth of those fluttering over the swarm. But still alive. Every shredded, squirming, pulsing inch of him. No death here; nothing so merciful. Slugs of meat and matter, crawling along the carpet, attempting escape through the cracks between the boards. He doesn't know...where they go, how many will escape his piecing back together, but he sometimes imagines there are thousands of them down there, now; scraps and tatters of himself, his old lovers; the strays and randoms he has brought here in between. Maybe forming their own strange nests and nurseries; mating and melding to form some vile approximation of the men they were. It doesn't matter; always so thorough in their tidying, never leaving so much as a stain, a shred of meat or splinter of bone. He smokes, watching as the less brave play voyeur, not confident or eager enough to join their sibling's games. Hunched and squatting forms, the most human seeming, for the most part. So tired, by the time they expire, by the time the last of them -the very first to initiate play- drops to the ground, twitching and seeping in its ecstasies. No words; not even knowing if they understand. Instead, stepping from the shadows into their midst, whistling between his teeth. The children stirring, some immediately, others more sluggish, still blissed out by the atrocities they've worked. Those that refuse, that lie there trembling while their siblings work...quick boots to their hideous flanks, the creatures soon on their feet (or whatever equivalents they possess), joining in the new game: the gathering and sewing and melding, the grizzly artwork taking shape amongst them quivering as its nerves start to fire, moaning as sense returns to it. Always the most cruel moment, insofar as Mike is concerned; knowing it well, from his own playtimes: that coming back together, the spark of unwanted consciousness, all that it's endured...still so fresh, so sharp. Forcing himself to watch; a kind of pennance, as Louis stirs; a seeping, skinless rag-doll, a gasping, trembling abortion of humanity, slowly swelling towards unwanted completion. The work seeming to last moments, compared to the preceding hours, the children working with such speed, he can barely register where one begins and another ends, what one contributes in comparison to its kin. The creatures peeling away, with their work done; retreating into the shadows, melting into them, becoming shades and suggestions of their own deformity. Mike waiting until the last and least of them peels away, until they grow still and silent. No recognition; no acknowledgement that he even exists. Not even the most curious and complex of them glancing his way. Until tomorrow, when he comes to them alone. Louis glaring up at him, the pain, the betrayal in his eyes...spitting him through, sprouting thorns that burn like ice and acid. None of the absence he might hope for; the catatonia that trauma might induce. Only serrated accusation, that will last until he forgets, and tonight becomes just another nightmare. * Seeing him to the door, as always. The night cold, a bitter breeze blowing. Louis lingering on the doorstep, hands in his pockets. “Well, thanks again. It was...” “Yeah. Yeah. For me, too.” Laughing, flipping hair out of his face. “Jesus, you look exhausted. Haven't you ever, like, considered doing something else?” “Something...else?” Stamping, shivering in the cold. “Yeah, you know; getting a different career, maybe moving away or something?” Not for the longest time; not since his Dad almost killed him for the suggestion of it. “Yeah, I suppose. But...there's not much else I can do.” “Hmmm. Fair enough.” Lingering, waiting. Wanting him to ask, so badly. Mike aching to fulfil that desire, but knowing what it might mean, if he does. “Listen...” “I know. It's...okay. It's just...I like you, Mike. I think...we get on, don't we?” Listening. Their sleep disturbed by the exchange, by the promise of it... “Yeah, yeah, we do...” More than he realised, up 'til this moment; more than he should have allowed. “...but...we can't really go anywhere or do anything unless you open up a little. I mean, I love coming here, but...a few hours..?; It's just not enough for me.” Not enough. Whispers, shufflings in the dark behind. Something flopping across the floorboards upstairs. “What...what was that?” “It's...just this place; it's old, you know? It always makes weird noises.” Clearly not sold on that excuse, too intent on their exchange to follow it up. That this...beauty, this man, this boy, can be so enamoured of him to bare himself like this, to bleed for him... Perhaps. Vile, parasite thought; a carrion worm called hope coiling in his thoughts. Don't. Don't you dare... “Perhaps...perhaps just tonight won't hurt.” Louis's face luminous, the sunlight breaking through from within. “Really?” “Really.” Stepping aside, letting him in from the cold, shutting the door behind him. An embrace, kisses, burning gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you...” Easing him away, as the whispers rise, as the children stir. Louis shuddering, eyes on the ceiling, as they skitter and scrape, as they slither and slope from hiding. “What the Hell..?” Taking him by the shoulder, coaxing his frightened eyes back down, soothing them with smiles. “There're a few things...you need to know.” The night obliging in confession as it does in play, providing countless hours of both, until they both emerge, blinking, staggering and known to one another, into grey and listless day. "Don't. Don't look."
Always, always. Not even angry any more, not desperate. Just...tired; a wind-up doll, grey and faded, nearly run down. Don't look. Dragging me along, her hand cold and bony, knuckles swollen with some disease, splintered inside. Not realising, until pain, until that instant of black, the world dissolving around me, tumbling across the broken pavement. Landing on my back, eyes up to the sky. Colour. Liquid orange and plasma blue, swimming there, seeping around the ragged edges of wounds that pulse and bleed, that shift and gape. A moment, only. Another blow, snapping my head aside. "What did I blood say? What did I say?" Tasting blood, pressing a hand to bruises that will fruit, in coming days. The colours still inside, swimming across my eyes. The wounds still gaping, in me now. Some pausing to look; more wind-up toys, other things of grey porcelain, faded plastic. Most moving on, muttering to themselves or one another, dragging silent, frowning children behind. All downcast, eyes on their feet, the cracked and filthy pavement, many hooded or masked, faces hidden. The children likewise; dark glasses or ribbons wrapped around their eyes, others bandaged, as though recovering from some surgery. Not looking. Not daring. "Why? Why do you keep doing this to me?" No answer; none that she wants to hear. With her ridiculous, wide-brimmed hat, her too-thick makeup. Sad and weary clown. "Oh, for God's sake, wipe yourself up..." Ferreting in her bag, throwing me a pack of scented wipes. I do as she asks, as always, though I hardly see her, though I hardly hear: Too fascinated by the patterns and colours; the wounds behind my eyes, more vivid, more real than the dirt and concrete, this sad and smothering world. More real than them, the blind and plastic things, who pretend to care, though they did it; sliced open the sky, long before I was born. Something I've never seen before, the woman's fingers cold and hard as she hauls me up by my arm. "And we don't mention this to Daddy, understand?" Nodding, nodding. Wondering why she'd think I might, why I'd have any interest in speaking with that glaring, growling stranger in our house. Happier not even to see him, most of the time. Something in the wounds and rents; scrabbling there, like spider's legs reaching from cracks in a wall. Blue and crystal, shimmering pearl; blinding light and bleeding dark. Laughing, unable to help myself, drawing disbelieving eyes, sighs and mutters. "Stop that. Stop it at once!" Trying, trying. Knowing what it means, if I can't. Mother stopping, getting down on her haunches, grasping me by the arms. It hurts, but not much, not enough. "Catherine, stop it. Now." I can't. I feel them. The legs scrabbling, tickling inside... It hurts. It hurts, but...nothing matters. Hurt, love, joy, pain...none of it. All lies and shadows, 'til now. This is the real reason; why they tell us not to look, why they won't let us see... I see it; the death of the lie. In her eyes, her face, that grows so slack, I think for a moment it's going to melt away from her skull. A hand to her mouth, others coming, taking her by the arms, the shoulders, as her legs give way, as her pretty peach skirt darkens. Trying not to look, just as they try not to look at the sky. In my eyes, now; in my mind. A part of it, filled with it: a thing if blue and orange and azure, of wounds and worlds. My head thrown back, as they come; as they tear their way free. Through my mouth, my eyes. The same, scrabbling legs, and more besides. Laughing around them, not choking, no longer needing Mother's foul, dust-tasting air. Vomiting them across the concrete; wet, scrabbling, pulsing. So pretty; sacks of blue and luminous meat, eyes like stars. The other toys run, leaving Mother to collapse to her knees, screams and sirens wailing. The first dragging itself towards her, still trailing tatters of me, swelling, even as others come, weeping from me like tears; boneless, squid-like, seeping weightless into the air, bursting from me like worms and serpents, jagged heads glittering in the sunlight... Something pinging from the concrete nearby, chipping it white, raising dust. Turning, seeing them: on the rooves, in the sky: Hideous metal and plastic things, whirring, hissing, red lights for eyes. I scream at them, angrier than I've ever been, disgusted by them, by the world they've all made together. Pain, bursts of light, hurling back, towards Mother, the firstborn already upon her, in her; undoing her sad, cracked and weary face, sculpting a new one for her from itself. Falling into her lap, her arms, her fingers no longer cold. Then stars and noise and hurt, synthetic night smothering the sky inside. |
AuthorGeorge Lea is an entity that seems to simultaneously exist and not exist at various points and states in time and reality, mostly where there are vast quantities of cake to be had. He has a lot of books. And a cat named Rufus. What she makes of all this is anyone's guess. Archives
May 2020
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