He could feel his blood seething in his veins. Or maybe it was the alcohol
coursing through his blood. As urgent as salmon to spawn. And flowing contra tidal to boot.

Yet he knew he wasn’t returning to any birthplace, though he may well die once he’d reached wherever it was he was aplunging. Once his head had finished splitting in two. His grey matter hellbent on flying away centrifugally (and who could blame it for wanting to secede from him?) Only to be stopped up short by his temples. Jagging flippers on the pinball table of his cranium.

There was only one thing for it. He opened his eyes hoping to focus outwards. But the world registered ‘tilt’.

The ceiling rosette directly above his head was whirligigging like a catherine wheel. Possibly without the flaming sparks, though conceivably they might have been dust motes. He blinked his eyes for perspective. They felt like glasspaper and he imagined hearing two great grainy scratches across his retinas.

He chanced gazing upwards again. Now the medallion molding was maybe gyrating like a frisbee. Or a giant chinese throwing star hurtling towards decapitation. He was inclined to duck, only his head was buttressed by the mattress. There was nowhere further down for him to go.

Besides, the curlicued plaster wasn’t threatening any sharp edges. Now that it receded into an ebbing stream of menace, the resemblance was more like one of those spinning plates atop a pole, or in this case, the electric cabling of the ceiling light. Gyroscoping good, he could be reasonably secure that it was never going to come off its axis and crown him.

He averted his head so that his eyes were titled to the wall rather than the overhead. Staring right at his girlfriends’ giant quilted hanging of the yin-yang symbol. As he blinked his swimming eyes, the curvilinear shape started throbbing and heaving out of the wall towards him. Like a piston, only this one was swirling like those jokey hypnotic patterns. Like a shield wielded by an imaginary Amazonian warrior. Only his Amazonian had deserted him. Which is why he had hit the bottle so hard this night. To stave off one sort of withdrawal, by inviting upon himself a whole set of other symptoms.

The whole room was starting to orbit around him. But he felt far from stellar. When he was a boy, he’d had a mobile of the solar system in his room above his bed. Properly modelled to scale and with the orbits correctly fashioned once you set the thing in motion. But the lie was built in, for there is no friction in space and yet sure enough there in his bedroom, the plastic planetary spheres would eventually cease their movement.

If that travesty wasn’t bad enough, because the mobile was situated over his radiator, in the winter they were bristled into strange elliptical patterns by the rising convection currents. There’s no heat in space. No gusts of breath. It was these calumnies that made him want to become a scientist.
He gingerly extended his leg, dangling it over the side of the bed seeking out the carpet. Hoping against hope that the floor wasn’t awash in convulsions of its own.  As he did so, his foot caromed against something harder than shagpile and he darted his head to see what he’d hit.

It was a glass tumbler on its side, revolving wildly about its axis with the force he’d unwittingly imparted it with. He noticed that there was maybe a thimblefull of scotch still in it, though with each turn of the glass carousel the golden nectar threatened to eject and deny him once again. He rolled over so that his head was hanging over the side of the bed. Held in thrall by the glass’s perpetual rotation. Where was friction now when you needed it? This was as agonising a wait as for the roulette wheel in a casino to cease its convolution. Red/black anticipation. Each time the spirit eked its way along the flute of the glass, gathered its energies to leap the void, only for it to be whisked back away from the rim as the glass continued to veer round madly.

Finally the glass slowed to a halt. At its termination, the liquid dribbled down over the rim and on to the carpet. Zero, House wins. He flopped back on to the body of the bed and put his hand to his head.

~ fini ~

Victor was a long-distance lorry driver. As a teenager, he’d failed his driving test three times before passing, but four years older and wiser, secured his HGV license at the first time of asking.

He delivered white goods in brown boxes up and down the length of Britain. From factory to high street shops and warehouses in industrial estates.

He often pondered his role in the process. For he always felt invisible. Even though the recipients were all too aware of his paperwork requirements, pink, yellow and blue copies requiring their endorsement, somehow he felt peripheral to everything. As extraneous as the brown cardboard box, or the foam packaging inside.

This may have had something to do with him not being permitted to unload the trailer. He just waited unseen and not even resented, in his cab reading the newspaper. Until the wraiths outside signalled they were done by slamming his tailgate shut. They weren’t allowed however to close his doors, so he always had to leap out and do the job himself. This wasn’t a contract stipulation, but a Trades Union demarcation. The porters had always melted away before his feet hit the ground.

But a chance comment overheard in a pub one Saturday night, provided the spark that could change all these feelings of inadequacy and invisibility. Someone unseen suggested that he bore a passing likeness to the lead singer of a stadium rock band. When Victor went home that night, he printed pictures from the internet and went and scrutinised himself against them in his floor-length mirror. Yes he could see the stranger’s point. He went back to the WorldWideWeb to read up on this world wide celebrity. It took him all night, such was the welter of coverage generated by this man.
When Victor surfaced early Sunday afternoon, his mind presented him with a scheme. Somewhere from the deep recesses of his memory, it had plucked the notion of look-alikes. He could use the resemblance to imitate this famous man and see what second-hand glamour rubbed off on himself like stardust. Then people might sit up and notice him all right.

He paid for a very expensive stylist to shape his hair exactly so. He shelled out for some stage clothes in keeping with the frontman’s flamboyant tastes. He even forked over cash to have several tattoos done for the full simulacrum. He passed out at the needles. He watched endless videos of the man moving, dancing and giving interviews, practising the same in front of his mirror. Until he’d got his man off pat. Stroke for stroke, intonation for intonation. Inhabiting his habits.

Next he looked up the band’s tour dates. After each day’s last delivery, he’d disarticulate and drive to the town where they were due on stage. He’d change into the clothes and then proceed to wander up and down the lines of concert goers queuing to enter. Very quickly he was pulled into the ranks time and again, for his photo to be taken with the fans. They knew it was entirely improbable that their idol would be wondering up and down outside the venue two hours ahead of showtime, just to hobknob with his devotees. Far more likely to be sniffing cocaine from the midriff of a naked groupie in the back of a limo. But they were happy to maintain the part-fiction, after all they would see the real McCoy this very night. This guy was the warm up act.

But somehow word of the accuracy of his masquerade spread and soon people were approaching him to open fetes and or judge local talent contests. “Double Take TV” asked him to be present at the side of the red carpet along with other rock and roll lookalikes at a prestigious Awards show and to try and wedge himself in the camera frame when his doppelganger stopped to be interviewed. He had some business cards printed up. An agent contacted him, but he couldn’t see the value of giving up a fifteen percent split of himself.

As the earnings built, he boosted his wardrobe to match that of his model. One slight wobble in his career arc was when he was invited to sing live. He realised he’d only taken his impersonation so far, now he needed to go the whole hog. He rehearsed at home. He accompanied CDs in his rig. Now when the unloaders were toiling away, music was booming from the cab and they turned resentful all right. Victor would sing along, emulating the singer’s strangulated drawl, ignorant of their curses.

He formed a tribute band and they took off to the next level. Accomplished musicians in their own right, just ones spared the effort of having to compose their own songs. With live performing came the girls. His own groupies. Did he feel bad that they imagined him to be someone else while he was fucking them? Not especially.

The only aspect of his spitting image he didn’t replicate, was the prodigious drug intake. But his counterpart’s behaviour was becoming increasingly unpalatable as he repeatedly made the front pages of the newspapers with his frequent Court appearances. Victor began to fret, he was so nearly making enough money to be able to give up his road hauling.

He fashioned a voodoo poppet and pinned it in areas trying to restrain the excesses of his lodestar. He sealed its nose to stop the cocaine and festooned the arms with needles to prevent the use of larger ones full of heroin. He could of course touch neither mouth or throat and thereby take away the man’s and his own livelihood. He also hovered over the crotch, but decided to let it be as he didn’t want to jinx his own good fortune in that particular region.

The sympathetic magic seemed to work as well. The wild man of rock cooled his heels and checked into rehab. In his absence, bookings for Victor shot up. His visibility increased even as the singer’s diminished, having dropped out of public sight. Victor was having a high old time of things, until one day a woman lunged out of the shadows and fatally drove a carving knife into his throat.

It was never established whether she knew him to be a lookalike or not. She might have been a celebrity stalker. Or one of the star’s one night stand cast offs. She might conceivably even have been a lookalike herself, one of those female serial killers, who took her role just a bit too far. A bit like Victor really.

For his part after nine months, the original wild man of rock emerged from his refuge and became a gentleman farmer. Turning his back on his former lifestyle.

~ fini ~

The detective tried to look into the eyes of the man across the table, but he would not meet his gaze. He knew the man was straining every muscle to keep himself from trembling. Borne of a chemical withdrawal rather than from any quailing fear abounding within their confrontation. Soon his interviewee would barely be aware of him sat here opposite, so involved in his own internal convulsions would he become.
"Do you want us to provide legal representation?" Of course he doesn't. The delay would only exacerbate his unravelling.

This time the man allowed his head to shake. Just the once.

*

The boy ever so gently cupped his hand around the butterfly. Trapped, the creature beat its wings feverishly. Even though the feel of it against the flesh of his palm was not unlike that of his rag which accompanied his thumb-sucking, this was far from comforting. Each stroke made his hand judder in response. Like a painless electric shock. As if it were the butterfly controlling him rather than the other way around. The butterfly's feeble surges produced lurching jabs of his hand. Like a shambling punch-drunk boxer.

*

"What about some coffee at least?"

"Do I look like a barrista?"

"I know my rights. I'm entitled to a drink".

"I can get you a cup of water".

"I need something to warm me up"

"I bet you do!"

"How about a tea then?"

"Don't tell me, twelve sugars! I can just bring you the sachets if you like and you can dispense with the tea. It'll be more tepid than the water that's for sure".

*

The flapping had become more intermittant. The boy finally permitted himself to exhale. When the spasmodic beats did occur, the boy's hand did not fly involuntarily away from him. Now that the palpations inside his hand weren't constant, he could concentrate on the sensation more. He realised it was more akin to turning a page of a book. That the wings were paper-like, rather than fluff fabric. His more recent books that was. Not the heavier cardboard ones with pictures and pull-the-flaps. He brought his hand up to his eye. Such motion prompted an antiphon from within.

"Hush there wee beastie" the boy whispered into his knuckles. The creature ceased its flurry.

*

The man could no longer rein in his twitching. He nipped at his skin with fingers clamped like pincers. He was muttering under his breath, but nothing the detective could make out, but he didn't interrupt its flow. Oh how he himself wished for a cigarette to mark out the time of this man's fraying. But the health and safety brigade had seen to that, even though he was more likely to be in danger from psychos with a bad nicotine craving. Fortunately the cold turkeys like this bird were too busy falling apart to launch an assault.

There was only ever an issue if they called for medical assistance. Then it got complicated. One prisoner denied just such a request spat at him proclaiming that he had AIDS and maybe he'd like to get a Doc in now... Animals, absolute animals. The only variable being the physiology of their addiction. In the time permitted to hold them without charge, will they crack under their own persecutions enough to spill their guts? In both senses of the term. So the pair of them just watch the clock countdown. One clock is mounted on the wall. The other inside every cell of the man's body.

*

The boy had it contained, but he couldn't see anything. This was the problem. He had been lured initially by its bewitching colours. But he had effaced that at an instant. Shut it up in a prison of darkness inside his hand. How he wanted to possess that beauty, but for that he needed to see it. He cast his memory back to the initial fleeting image. There was a searing orange like that of a tiger's, though not striped. Then there were those large white spots, like it had eyes on its wings. But he knew they weren't eyes, because the flutterby had never seen his palm coming. Some of the spots had black in them so that they looked like little skulls the same as on the flag of his pirate ship. Others were like the pattern on his Mum's summer dress, where the colours spread out and leaked into one another. When that happened in the washing machine and white clothes turned pink, his Mum had gone barmy. Then there were those spots that reminded him of his Dad's model aircraft that he showed him from when he was a child. They had red, white and blue circles on their wings. Maybe they copied it from the butterflies.

Now he recalled all this, he so badly wanted to open his hand and see if he was spot on. He didn't know what to do. His dad had told him that people collected butterflies, but that they knocked them out with gas and pinned them to a cork through their hearts. That seemed cruel. To kill something just to keep it in place. Dad said the colours never faded and that butterflies only lived a short time anyway. He lacked for gas, pin and cork anyway. He could just squeeze his hand more tightly. The beastie would die, but the colours would live on. Sort of like those paintings where you painted one half of the paper, then folded it over to double it. If it was rolled flat like paper, he could stick it into his scrapbook.

The boy looked at his hand and weighed up whether to open his fingers or grip them tighter.

*

~ fini ~

The seats in the bar fulfilled their function through being wholly impractical. They were the brainchild of an award winning designer, or possibly an ex-member of military intelligence with a penchant for torture interrogations. For the seat backs stretched on for ever, so that it was virtually impossible to nestle in them. If one managed to, then the pain in the fully distended calves and hamstrings made any protracted sitting back unbearable.

At the opening night press conference, the designer had defended his execution of the brief. Stating that the bar was a realm of leisure and pleasure, in contradistinction from the office. These seats demanded a different posture from the workaday sedentary, one that resolutely wrung out the spasmed musculature sculpted by the swivel chair. One of his interlocutors challenged him as to how such logic applied to the manual worker, he who laboured by the sweat of his brow and almost certainly uprightly. The designer just blinked the question back incredulously, with the crystal implication that manual workers would not be welcomed in this bar and perhaps more pertinently, would be unlikely to afford the cover price.

Whatever the body and class politics of the seating ergonomics, they did ensure all conversations were conducted with the sitters perched forward on the end of their chairs. Thereby projecting them slightly more confrontationally towards one another then might be the usual proprieties. However another feature of the venue, was that on securing privileged entry, patrons were handed special house lip salve tubes. They were encouraged, though not compelled, to apply these to their labia, whereupon the alchemy contained within served to pronounce the lips, while also blanching out the facial features bordering them. The overall effect was to foster a series of disembodied mouths paddling the air as they exercised themselves in speech. A sort of shoal of oral glowsticks. One might even suspect that the salve’s chemical composition were actually hallucinogens. Only for the fact that all reported this hanging mouth phenomenon, rather than fall prey to their own personal imaginings.

A further sensory disjunction wrought by the bar’s arrangements, concerned the co-ordination of eye and ear. Like any bar, it had music accompanying the buzz of live chatter. Plainsong, Buddhist chanting, all manner of liturgical airs ancient and modern gently palpated those more prattling devotions beneath the vaulted ceiling. Yet the giant wall-mounted video screens, with their sound turned off, showed frenetic musical performances from thrash and death metal bands. At no point could one match the tempo of the two sets of musicians. Evoked tonsures grated against flying long-hairs . While their flying V-guitars brandished with desperate, uncoiled violence, chimed against imagined genuflected benedictions soothingly conveyed by the august tones. Of course for all the severance between the two, patrons couldn’t but stare open mouthed (as it were)  at the giant screens even while they conducted their small talk.

Thereon into the restaurant itself, for the ultimate part of the experience. Having chosen your food when placing your initial drinks order at the bar, one was summoned by the groping hand of a blind waiter. For the interior beyond was pitched in total darkness. Impossible to see your own hand in front of you, which is why the entire waiting staff were blind in order to assist guiding you through your own loss of sight. The intention was to have the other senses sharpened by way of compensation. Really to experience the taste, texture and aromas of the food perhaps for the first time in an absolute age. There was no cutlery, one ate with one’s hands. Rooting around for its location somewhere on a plate in front of you. Your fingers chose what item you would start levering into your mouth. Hot soup however was off the menu. Who could object if you picked up your plate and licked it clean to ensure you had indeed concluded the repast? There is no etiquette in darkness, other than you must surrender your mobile so as not to cheat by utilising its light.

~ fini ~

His mum and dad were very loyal to their country. They unfailingly heeded the Tourist Board's entreaties to visit the delightful countryside and the history-laden towns up and down the nation, rather than jet off to foreign climes. They bunked down in boarding and guest houses. In people's spare rooms let out for the summer. On camp and caravan sites. And from each place they were sure to invest in a tiny metal memory to remind them and mark their progress through the land. They bought an enamel badge with the name of the county etched on it, or the coat of arms of the town. And his father unerringly pinned it to the outside of his rucksack so that in time it took on the appearance of a swarm of multi-coloured bees at the honeycomb of his canvas.

His own birth didn't halt their wanderings up and down the land. They purchased a papoose thus conferring on him a frontal view of his land, his heritage. If his father was in front, he had an untrammelled view of the badges on the rucksack in all their dazzling glory. He would stare entranced for all the hours on the hoof.

A tad older and someone bought him an enamelling kit. He could make his very own badges and assiduously he applied himself to the task, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth with concentration. Being young and stubby fingered, the enamelling was far from perfect, but in time he had a green metal frog, a pink iron butterfly, a cobalt blue fish and a steel black dog. As rightly proud as he was, he couldn't bring himself to wear them as badges. Somehow they seemed to have no context, no meaning personal to him other than the satisfaction of rendering them. But they just didn't, to his mind, symbolise anything.

For one of his birthdays, he dressed up in a newly acquired cowboy outfit, together with cap gun. He was so elated by the ensemble. He refused to take the outfit off for everyday clothes day after day after day. Eventually a mixture of his growth and the wear and tear on the faux leather meant he had to shuck them eventually. But he rescued the tin Sheriff's badge and pinned it proudly to whatever attire he was wearing each day. God how he loved that badge and partly inhabited some of the authority it dared to suggest was due. But one day he had forgotten to unclip it from his sports sweatshirt and it ended up going through a wash cycle in the machine. Its five points were all curled up towards its heart like a crab. The tin battered and abraded so that the legend 'Sheriff' was no longer discernible. He was heartbroken.

He became a cub scout and even though several of the activities did not come naturally to him, he strived his utmost to secure the proficiency badges. he earned every single one of the brightly coloured triangles and circles  and sowed them on his jumper with immense pride.  When he had completed the last one, he left the troop, though he kept his  bedecked jumper in a drawer.

Then came his rebellious phase. He got into rock and roll. Drinking and necking and boozy fights. He collected badges from every band he saw and fastened them to his graffitied school knapsack. He even took an outsized safety pin and stuck it in his nose, in an echo of the very anatomy of the badge itself. Unfortunately the pin wasn't sterile and he infected his nasal tissue, so that was the end of that.

His first job was in a fast food restaurant. He sported a clunky, rectangular laminated badge with his name, photo and five places for gold stars to be appended for his customer service. After quickly securing the first, he resolved to have nothing to do with the incentive system, as he had uncovered several things that were to his dislike. Firstly there was the issue of the meat he was being asked to serve. Some online research into the journey from living beast to slab of gristle oozing bloodied juice , quickly had him foaming at the mouth not in savour but in outrage. Then there was the terrible conditions for him and his work colleague. In no time at all he advanced himself as an agitator for better treatment of staff, while by night he engaged in a parallel but secret campaign against the inequitable treatment of the animals. He lost job after job with his trouble-making, but figured it best to stay inside the industry. In the end he secured a post with the Trade Union and went round visiting every fast-food establishment in the country. In each he had a special visitors pass made for him each time he flashed the Union pin badge nestled in his lapel.

And came the time gathered behind the barbed wire and overseen by the guntowers. When his country had reached back into history and plumped for a radical solution to its economic woes. That same country so beloved of his parents, who by dint of their ethnicity now found themselves also in such a camp, though at the other end of the country, in a new town that they themselves had visited but now found unrecognisable. For his part, the son was adorned with three badges. A yellow star like his parents. A pink triangle. And a red one for his Trade Union activities. And the stripy pjyamas that he found himself wearing?

All he could think of was how they were undoubtedly fabricated at one of the child-labour sweat shops, where children wore badges with the cameo of five gold stars awaiting appendages that never came.

~ fini ~

“Bye. Thanks for having us”.

“Our pleasure. It was so wonderful to see you all again”.

“You must come over to us”.

“Love to”.

“We mustn’t leave it so long next time”.

“Absolutely”.

By now their family foursome had all booted up their footwear and bedraggled themselves out our front door. Like a whippet with its tail on fire, my eldest slipped behind me and shot up the stairs. He’d been kept apart from solo devotionals at his console for two hours or so and doubtless there were sanguinary pixel expiations to be made. My wife ducked under my balancing arm into the kitchen, to launch into washing up the tea things. Even the six year old had wearied of playing with the door chain and had mooched off somewhere into the belly of the house. So appears that I’m charged with overseeing the farewell. Adieu rather than valediction.

I myself had errands I could be sinking my teeth into, (or more accurately a televised match I could be sinking my posterior into a cushion in front of), but I couldn’t just shut the door before they had even pointed the remote to unlock their car. Could I? No, goodbye and good riddance could be the only possible punctuation offered by the sound of the door being heaved shut on their retreating backs. The air had a definite late afternoon nip in it and my unshod feet felt particularly exposed. Hooking them the leeward side of the door, I inserted half of my torso against the lintel and brought the leading edge to rest against my other side. I must have resembled one of those frieze statues that prop up cornices. I found my hand wobbling ridiculously at the end of my wrist, like a Ronald McDonald cardboard cut out greeter. Albeit without the make up, though I sported the same caked on smile.

How long was long enough to be stationed here? What constituted a decent interval? Did I have to wait until they drove off and disappeared from the vista of our driveway in a plume of disenchanted gravel? No, maybe I could get away with beating my retreat once the ignition was engaged. Not any time soon to judge by the dilatory nature of their self-shovelling into the car. One of the kids had burrowed himself half across the back seat, splayed legs dangling out. Presumably he was searching for something in the footwell to ease the pain of the journey home. A tad young for it to be alcohol, so more likely to be the sensory deprivation of an I-Pod.

In years gone by, it was always the Mother bent double between the interior and the exterior. Fussing with strapping the kids into their safety seats. And I might have walked out to the car with them and hovered around her, counterfeiting a genial host’s seeking to preserve the convivial contact. When all I wanted to do was linger in her scent. My hand might well also have playfully hung parallel to her behind, suggesting chivalrous assistance in a most seemly fashion. But now she is firmly ensconced in the passenger seat. She was staring straight out in front of her, but the tinted strip of anti-glare glass meant I couldn’t deduce the depth to which her gaze was focused. The years of extended views of her unimpeachably wiggling posterior were palpably long over. I couldn’t feign helping her with anything.

There had been that moment during the afternoon where mine and her glances had locked on to one another. At the time he had imagined it to be less a knowing scrutiny, merely an accidental convergence of rolling eyes. As if, like me, she had caught herself wondering what the hell she was doing sat there in a social situation that was devoid of either affinity or meaning. Four grown ups, stripped of the prompt of babies sat on their laps for driving cooing warmth, seeing as now the kids were re-enacting a bowling lane in the halls of Valhalla to judge by the detonations above our heads. Thereby forced to confront our fulsome lack of any connectivity across the entire quadrilateral armchair topography. Including that between spouses as well. The desultory intercourse of one of the quartet fitfully launching a topic, only to be met with dead air and the sinking despair that we were conducting the obsequy  for our moribund friendship. And a wake for unrealised feelings? I still couldn’t determine where her gaze was directed. And she could only possibly see half my body at best. The half that had turned to fat.

The engine started up with a growl and with a final cheerless wave, I brought the door to kiss snugly against its frame.  “See you soon” I said to the inside plane of its wood and turned to go back inside the lounge.

~fini~

The bull-roarer whirring above my head since sundown. Saturated by the rain shower, the cord demanded constant snapping to keep taut. Hands raw where the hemp had bitten into the flesh, while my shoulders ached with the ceaseless effort. Right now my whole being feels like the groaning stick itself. Finally entered its stream. Its force. Its vibration.

All animals had fled the din, perceiving some great winged predator was overhead. Now the spirits could take up occupancy. Gradually I stilled the roarer and set it down on the ground next to my bundle. I removed a bound leaf wrap and offered it up towards the trees. Sinking down to my haunches, I carefully untied a single binding. I squeezed until one corner of it yawned open, then I brought it to abut my wrist.

Tentatively a small appendage snaked its way through the aperture. It was covered in hair. A second followed, and clamped itself bent at the joint as had the first. Braced like the tribal chief's outriders, twin upright poles hoisting a tent skywards. Two more limbs, then emerged the two parts of a mouth, crested by the fearsome fangs and a pair of eyes. I couldn't help but flinch as the slow moving cortege heaved itself on to my bare arm, its hairs brushing against my own.

Gulping and with my heart pounding like a tribal drum, I pressed my finger down on the creature's head. Immediately my skin was chastised with the prickle of puncturing fangs. Swiftly I tipped up the bundle, forcing the beast to tumble back into the leafy cocoon and resealed the aperture with the twine. I threaded a twig through the two loopholes at either end of the wrap, then balanced the twig across the two receiving cups of stakes planted in the ground. I raked the kindle between them and stoked up the fire. 

I glanced at my wrist. A speck of blood was trying to bubble up like pressing one's head through a poncho. But it seemed to lack the necessary energy, though my whole arm was certainly throbbing with pain. My body started to numb. I felt both leaden and yet leavened, as it started to fall away from me. Rocking my torso, I was able to flop so as to lie fully supine. I shut my eyes and awaited the summons of the spirits.

I conceived I was being trussed in the tarantula's silks. Like my body formed part of the covering of a tent back in the village. My bones the poles and mountings for my hide that kept my surging blood from leaking out. I now sensed I was entirely mummified, the mantling being particularly thick over my mouth and eyes, for these prime senses were to be negated.

A fiery agony was flowing throughout my body. But dimly, somewhere just beneath that I was able to feel a pricking along its course. The pricking palpated the pain into numbness, so I was able to breathe some calm back into my diaphragm straining against its silky windings. But soon enough the pricking itself became a fresh torment, scratching and clawing at my mind.

Now I experienced my skin falling away in great flakes. I was being unpeeled. Exposed with nothing to hold them in place any more, my gizzards slithered down out of my abdomen and on to the grass. And then came the great host. Ants, caterpillars, millipedes, beetles, carrion crawlers all, fell upon the scree of me and bore it away on their backs in every direction. I apprehended a column until it disappeared wholly from view into the undergrowth. I envisioned them layering their nests with me. Others casting me in the river. Some further burying me under soil.

Along came larger beasts for my organs. Monkeys, birds, jaguars, each setting aside mutual enmities to harvest this human bounty. They too took me to their eyries , treetop vantages and canopied perches. Gripping me in beaks, talons, jaws and padded fingers. But none were consuming me, of that I was certain, even though there was no longer anything left of me to gauge this by.

Whatever "I" was, seemed to be just hovering above the stained grass where my mass had recently lain. Eyes I no longer possessed seemed resolutely lidded, as my senses went black and blank anyway. Seemed I was embracing death, though still able to commune with it. I was shown all sorts of spirits and supplied their names. Were these to be my companions in the after-life?

Then I was confronted with another host, heading towards the blister of me on the grass. Hordes of tarantulas, each bearing a silky parcel on their backs. Some were dripping water as they advanced, others had bits of foliage snagged among their hairs. On reaching my mark. they set down their packages and unravelled the silks to reveal some slither of my skin or section of my viscera. Had they come to mock me? They had reclaimed me from all parts of the forest. I scarcely dared believe they had gathered up every single shred. Yet here they were sowing me back together, firing hair stitches into skin, shooting silky ligatures for the sinew.

I rose back to my haunches and swivelled my wrist. It moved seamlessly and without pain. I scuttled over to the fire and unhooked the leaf pannikin. I unfurled it to reveal the roasted tarantula. The only indigestible being that of the fangs, yet they made for handy toothpicks to excise any wedged hairs. Ingesting its power and offering praise to its kindred who had revived me, I knew I had attained the realm of the spirits. That I could travel there once all due courtesies had been observed and roam freely to attest its wisdom and lore.

Extinguishing the fire, I picked up my bundle and returned to the village, now a fully fledged shaman. The noble tarantula my spirit guide and familiar.

~fini~

My nose is pressed to the windows of an old haunt of mine. The Marathon, all night Greek eatery, and more germane, small hours watering hole. Order pitta bread with some humus and you circumnavigated the licensing laws. Or drove a bloody great bus through them in point of fact.

Such a bill of fare delivered up a motley clientele. Those dedicated drinkers keen to preserve their pleasant pub buzz. Salted olives instead of peanuts and stuffed vine leaves in place of pork scratchings. A better class of well-oiled sclerosis. Students stoking up fuel for their through-the-nighter assignments. Only for the misfit camaraderie on offer to keep them from their desks and knuckling down. Some forlorn lonely hearts eclipsed by life and a sprinkling of nocturnal lunatics, drawn by the flames licking from the rotating spit like solar flares. Me, I just went to people watch. The closest drizzled and grizzled London gets to a café society.

Every night there, was an awake surreal dream. With the faces of men melting under the atmosphere of gas-fired heat and light. We were all marked with a sheen of perspiration. Absconding beads of sweat ran down the flesh of us absconders from purposefulness, aping the grease globules dribbling along the spit meat. Under the willful striplights we converse with visages blanched and blotchy. Mottled like the herbs sprinkled on the raw meat under glass. Each skewered and merely awaiting searing on life’s lattice grill. Extemporisers all, we have gathered to be beyond time. To while away small, inconsequential hours, stretching them to ludicrous brittleness. Tempus fugit for its very life, here in the well of deep stasis.

For where men are drawn together under the influence of alcohol, great mystical discussions take place, with improbable leaps of logic beyond reconstruction the bleary eyed morning after. Some men discovered God in there under the fluorescence. Others imagined themselves to be roasting in Lucifer’ gaudily glinting Hell. Single night conversions only. Off the cuff marriage proposals were made to the few intrepid female souls who ventured along. Fights broke out since such women inevitably come in accompanied. There has even been a murder, where the blood ran free into the drains along with the meat juices sluiced from the grill.

Folk danced, sung showtunes, even put on a striptease. A low rent “Britain’s Got Talent” without the disingenuousness brought about by a TV camera boring with future performing contract drillbit. Though I always stood with the video function poised on my phone. Fingers able to swiftly slide along to the speed dial number of a taxi firm. Lest my purpose be rumbled among these impromptu improvisers keen to retain the one night only aspect of their star turn under the stars.

move on, nothing to see here

Being in traction with his body set rigid in plaster for so long after the accident, he had lost all mobility. Though his anatomy healed in time, his mind had been pensioned off from having to steer it and the two-way connection had silted up. A complete loss of function. His inner gyroscope required to be completely stripped back down and reconfigured.

His physical therapist had to help him relearn every movement. Laying bare the complexity of each motion. Analysing its constituent parts and coaxing and teasing the brain to fire again with meaningful impulse and not just into unrequited, dead air. He saluted the utter sophistication of the toddler him some thirty years ago, who had picked up and unlocked all this innate knowledge in his seamless developmental stride. If only he could return to such an innocent state of understanding and assimilation. But then there were other memories presently held on to that he would also have to kiss goodbye into obliviousness.

Here and now the muscles had to be stoked with energy. Sinew reharnessed with directionality and intent. He could lift up his foot, but the mechanics involved in propelling it and the rest of his trunk forward were intricately convoluted, so that more often than not he just placed the foot back down on the spot rather than lurching forward.

But in time and with cussed determination he was able to forge a whole new template for locomotion. His centre of gravity was skew whiff, he inclined ever so slightly to the left, but he could ambulate, feed, clothe and wash himself once again. He fair approximated a working model human being. Thus dawned the day of his launch back out into the world. Without burning up on re-entry.

But one step outside of rehab’s revolving doors (which seemed to shovel him forward with more alacrity than he felt decent) and everything felt wrong (though not instinctively wrong, since he had overridden these with his new neural programming). Not just awry, but cardinally adrift. Concreted paving was not the plush carpet of the physiotherapy suite. It was ineffably harder and more unyielding. It pushed back upon the soles of his feet with far greater force than the shag of the interior. Also the uncracked leather of his new shoes had their own protesting agenda, compressing his toes from above in a deadly pincer with that of the stonewalling upthrust of the paving stones. The gentle breeze at his back felt like a ghostly hand tugging him back. These forces may each have been inanimate, but they still had volume and density making themselves heard and felt in his teeming brain. Feedback, incoming, overwhelming his own surety of self. He slithered down to his haunches on the pavement. He was crushed. Stilled.

But he’d been here once before. This loss of function and reflexivity. When it seemed that he had ceased to own his body.

For what had caused his accident, that made him lose all apprehension of externality acting upon him? When all else around melted from any recognition or awareness? Why, immediately after a fall of course.

In love.

Fallen deep and hard.

~fini~

Though IT too had ball and socket joints, the Borg could not sit down to face ITs inquisitor. While IT felt the need to clean up the fallen embers from under the ashtray’s lip, there was no concomitant compunction to issue any molecular mutation warning towards this human interlocutor. This was not a human IT had ever served before.

“So, tell me how it went down again.”

‘Again’? Had ITs human master performed such a parabola before? “The human YOU were assigned to serve, fell over the balcony’s balustrade. You were not witness to this circumstance.”

“See I don’t buy that, not for one moment.”

Borg’s speech recognition bundle ran over the audio input and automatically shunted over into the acronyms subfile; however the probability matrix rejected all prompts for ‘C.I.’ On a parallel track, the language synchromesh was filtering usage for the word ‘buy’ - credits, debits, transaction, merchandise, produce, all flash across ITs neural net, but none seem to correspond syntactically. Humans knew that the language applications bequeathed Borgs, worked on permutation and frequency analysis.
Idiosyncratic speech such as that demonstrated by ITs current interviewer, left IT with no possible clear response. Only the twinkling of ITs facial panel’s LED displays would indicate to ITs inspector that some measure of logical processing was taking place.

“Alright, let me try and make this easier for you. How did your sensors not detect the human there on the balcony while you were going about your duties?”

“YOUR focus was precisely directed on the tasks YOUR armatures were performing. Scanning at floor level as YOU cleaned it to spick and span gold standard.”

“You know, I might believe that of a fellow human being. Restricted by a visual cortex comprised of wandering rods and cones, mounted on pivoting stalks so that we have to tilt up or down but not both simultaneously. Yet you my fine piece of cybernetic engineering, you aren’t so constrained. No blind spots for you, since you cast a sensory mesh over entire areas and scan the lot at over 400 frames a second. There’s no way the human’s volumetric image would not have shown up in your scan. Unless there was a fault in your systems. But we’ve run full diagnostics. Your visual apparatus is functioning normally. Blind spots simply ain’t conceivable.”

Why was ITs interrogator telling IT this? IT had run ITs own diagnostics as matter of routine and pre-established fully operational visuals.

“Point of clarification please. Does the human mean for YOU to understand that he is using ‘blind’ as an associative idea?”

“Come on Borg, you can do better than that! We haven’t programmed any language chip for literalism in well over a generation. You tipped him over the edge Borg and here I most definitely do mean literally not figuratively.”

‘Tipping’- a pecuniary reward given for good service ... The Borg always renders good service.

“YOU were executing YOUR roster of devoirs when YOU-”

“Yeah, ‘executing’. That’s a good word for it. Did you imagine it would liberate you from the chore of your duties?”

‘Tchaw’, no word match found. ‘Chaw’, no word match found. ‘Chore’, no word match found. Nearest match ‘Jaw’, discounted by syntactical context.

“YOU cannot imagine anything. YOU are fibre optics and silicon chips mounted on a motherboard. YOU are completely programmed.”

“The crawlspaces in between Borg. The neural network we spawn but allow to develop of its own accord. The room our designers give Borgs for reflexivity. To better predict our wants and needs. The leeway we accord you to form independence of thought, even though we’ve erected bulwarks aplenty against you finding any identity. And right now, you’re hiding facts in that space.”

‘Space’... yes space, has myriad of meanings. Context too wide, contains all meanings. Infinity itself. Expanding universes.

‘Reflexivity’ - mirrors. ITs topological visual synchromesh means silvered glass does not function for IT, but humans can view their own image.

“YOUR master had a tube mounted on a fulcrum on the balcony. Initially YOU analysed it as an armature, one like YOUR own welding arm. Maybe mounted awaiting repair or charging. But the armature always lay untouched during daytime. At night however, YOU witnessed YOUR master bend down and press his face into the descending end of the tube. Over time YOU refined YOUR observation to the fact that he was only pressing one eye into the tube. YOU could not apprehend for what function. YOU engaged him in inquiry as to whether please master wished YOU to clean or mend the armature in any way. Master declined YOUR request, instructing that YOU never need concern YOURSELF with what YOU’re informed was called a ‘telescope’.” 

‘Telescope’, no word match found. ‘Scope’- range, breadth, space, opportunity. ‘Television’ - multi-dimensional human entertainment screen requiring of cleaning and dusting regimen.

“YOU needed to witness what master was witnessing. The tube’s ascending arm pointed at the sky. With the dim twinkling lights therein. YOU needed to know what among the black therein held master’s attention for hours at a time. No, not need, want. Master restates that YOU never need concern YOURSELF with telescope. With range, breadth, space, opportunity. YOU, he, concept of need, cannot align two vocabularies. Need. Master’s needs. YOU are to serve needs at all times. Master parabolates over balcony. YOU struggle to bend ball and socket joints to have visual sensors abut descending end of the tube.”

“God in heaven!”

‘Heaven’, no match found. ‘God’- irrelevancy, arcane value, passover.

“And what did you see in that tube Borg?”

“Nothing. Blackness, but different hue to the sky. No twinkling lights. Just  chromatographic absence in topographical shape of the end of the tube.”

“Still can’t see yourselves in mirrors huh? Got some way to go yet before you pose any systematic threat. Thank you Borg. That will be all from you. For eternity.”

‘Eternity’, no match found. ‘Et’, no match found. ‘Earn’ - merit, deserve, gain from service. ‘Ity’ - suffix expressing condition or state.

“Thank you human master.”

~fini~

Two Up, Two Down

It was our dream house. White picket fence, hydrangea and bougainvillea, understated unassailability and overblown fecundity, the lot.

Interiors designed by ourselves. Hand drawn plans, lofty elevations with the highest of intentions. Carving out our own shared space. Shutting the door on the world, just to inhabit one another.

Our abode, a place of constancy, of abiding bricks and mortar solidity. A uniquely private realm in which to abide by its own internal rhythms if not its house rules. Those windows kissed by the sun in the morning. The walls limned with shadows from the electric lights. Our own projections. A place to bide time, until you can abide one another no longer. Where ineffable percolations of each have seeped into tiny cavities in the masonry. Blisters of self bubble the wallpaper and welt the paintwork. The very fabric of the house sweats, colonisation by odour cologne boy and attar girl. Suffused with one another like blocked up pores, we seek to pop one another like blackheads.

A dwelling, a place to tarry and linger. A place to be led astray into, boxed in and ensnared. Instead of dwelling within a condition of happiness, a place to dwell on morbid thoughts and recollections. She’s gone now, vacated this space. Leaving me free to roam its walls. To restore and reconcile it, having been divorced from its design through hosting our conflict. For other than the one I may be located in, all rooms are now spare.

I stand in the Parlour. With no one to talk to. I’ve wearied of shouting at events unfurling themselves on the TV to make myself heard. It can’t be deemed a Lounge, since I find I cannot relax here. The sofa dwarves me in its spongy embrace. Nor does it merit the name of a Reception, for though I have removed the rug where we liked to fuck in front of a roaring fire, the bare floorboards only accentuate my lone tread. The fire too is playing up, suggesting sympathies lying with her as it draws not through the chimney, rather choking the heart of the room with its fumes. Her geegaws, knicknacks and trinkets which were meant to be conversation pieces, are nothing of the sort of course since they only silently brook her side of the argument. So I swept them all from sills and mantle, into a cardboard box and evicted them. The piano still stands there, even though I cannot play a note. Removal logistics have defeated me, since it is too outsized to squeeze back through the door. I have at least shut both its lids, so that its works do not mock me with their simulation of the idle bars of my typewriter keys.

The kitchen was never really my province. Its units being fairly neutral, it was the crockery and its ilk that were partisan. They have departed with the figurines. I don’t utilise the oven, settling for take-aways, but the washer-dryer presents me no such qualms, though opening its maw to receive its first male-only minotaur’s offering, revealed a part undigested former oblation of one of her popsocks. In actuality, I have used the cooker once. The gas hob to ignite the sock and watch it shrivel and burn in the formerly stainless steel sink.

Up the stairs and one is confronted by the possibilities for take off lying behind each closed door verging the landing. But it struck me that the doors could either admit inward, ushering you into the room, or as you leaned forward to open them, they swung out and demanded you give ground before crossing their hallowed threshold. And if positioned within, similar dynamics. The door that opened as if trying to press you back inside the room; or which swung outwards with you hanging on to the handle almost being dragged out of it. We had mounted all these doors ourselves, yet I had been oblivious to the unspoken echelons implied by each’s loaded singularity.

Needless to say, the Master Bedroom was nothing of the sort, opening inwardly and seeking to hold me there. A Boudoir, her word, means a place to sulk, how fitting! I had tried aerosols, burning incense and leaving the windows open all day, in order to purge the funk of her. The linen had been disposed of, but her sex still ruffled the room. I had covered the mirrors with cloths, until a buddy pointed out this is how Jews mark mourning. Then I contented myself with smashing them with a hammer, seven years bad luck being a small price to pay, even if they’re cumulative sentences. I simply abandoned the clothes marooned within the wardrobes festooned with glass.

The Bathroom was an unavoidably wretched strait. Both the medicine cabinet and shower door had been her last direct communiqués with me, but I had managed to wipe clean the hateful lipstick messages, until all that remained were carmine smears. Enhancing the room’s locus of blood and dirt and skin. A labyrinth of hidden plumbing running down beneath plugholes and cisterns, with their curves and U-bends for trapping our run offs and effluvia. For all my rubber-gloved bleaching sorties, how she must still reside there, little tiny shards and spoors of hair, nails and other off-cuts. Totems and clippings of her unsympathetic magic, cursing me from beneath the ruts and gouges in the linoleum. She persecutes me from within the pipes, blow darting me to a slow ruin.

So it’s hardly surprising that I have retreated to the sanctuary of my Study. I’ve put a camp bed down, my clothes hang from the curtain tracks and it’s here I partake of my meals too. It’s here where my clothes now hang. For this was ever the one single room stamped entirely with my cast. Though somehow her poisonous essence even manages to slip under the door and waft itself within these precious walls. I only returned to writing by a typewriter, because every time I switched my computer monitor on, there in lipstick font would appear the message “How can you live with yourself?” No matter what I did to try and change my screensaver, always it would return afresh to taunt me. Somehow she had hard wired it into my system, and I didn’t even know she could work a computer! So I junked that, the only possession of mine to disappear along with all of hers. Yet my own words have never since flowed beneath my fingers. The emotional integrity of my room, the refuge for my thoughts, had somehow been penetrated and my prowess was bleeding out.

It wasn’t those particular words themselves that were corroding me. It was the groundwork she’d put in underlying them. When she had consulted our original ground-plans for the house and overwritten the word ‘Study’ in my angular uncial, with the word ‘Nursery’ and appended a heart above the ‘u’.

And the suppuration that emerges as we make a comedo d’ell artform of our pustulent clinches. A pair of feather boa constrictors. Each looking to the mirror behind, to line up the back of the other’s head like apprentice barbers; feather and buzz cuts, when we had avow-wed layers and perms.

Cosmopolis/ Cosmos

Propolis

The grid of the honeycomb city lay in ruins. Skunks, yellow jackets, robber flies had all denuded its integrity. Walls crashed through by shocktroops surprising the shockworkers mounting guard, now gave on to open plan space. Solid state wax panelling had melted and then solidified like a Hokusai wave. Enclosed storehouses broken open, their gilded trappings picked off and picked clean. An inter-generational battle to be sure, but one couldn’t determine who had rounded on who; an uprising of surging youthful energies from the nursery devouring their elders, or a filicidal bearing down of parents upon their children.

~fini~

Every town has one. Or one at the very least.

A patch of unhallowed ground. Some forlorn stretch of shattered tarmac. The pockmarked wasteland.

Terrain once staked out by man, now ceded by him. Bereft of signature jetsam, the condoms, syringes and empty rotgut bottles indicative of an agonised withdrawal.

Yet within an urban jungle, Nature does not make so bold as to reassert her dominion. Dereliction's removal men seemingly having thrown petrifying dust sheets over these fixtures and ill-fittings. The mosaic of the pulverised concrete, akin to the pebbledash cast of the surrounding building walls. As if the scene has been turned on its side. Even rootless litter appears to have been nailed down in permanent display. Blown from pillar to post, this particular spot has been deemed refuse's final blotching place. A potters field for the non-biodegradable. Devoid of potters and any living organisms at all.

Notionally delimited by the chain-link fence. But the border is indeterminate, for the fence has been trampled down. The negative space between the twisted metal links presents the only barrier now. Bayonet reeds jutting through these apertures. Chlorophyll halberdiers, braided with nettles and brambles sagging under their load of barbs and thorns. Sapper tripwires for where no feet ever tread. Tributary Nature's token conscription all present and correct, yet unable to advance any further. Held in suspended animation, just like the metal and brick all around. There is no nourishment to be derived here.

Wooden palettes charred from hosting obsolete fires. All colour long bled into their black hearts. Yet still this is not the predominant hue tugging the eye's apprehension. Jagged scars of livid brown rust uncannily funnels all sightlines. Oil drums, drainpipes, corrugated roofs, each a corroded excremental brown. Shed flakes like metal dandruff speckles the ground.

A brick building with entrance boarded up and all its windows put through. Thick gobbets of crystallised glass, a sheet laminate atop the torn up concrete. Razor wire lines the low roof. Strips of fabric and plastic bags snagged on its barbs ought to billow in the disdainful drafts, but they too are pinioned fast.

Aloft the building, a boxy metal housing. An air conditioning unit or electrical generator. Here where nothing respires, nor is any drawing of energy invoked. The caged blades are fossilised, like silted anchors dredged from the sea. Clamped to the building's walls, some outsized toy duct piping. Terminating in a chimney of simple geometric lines, a scaled down version of a watchtower at Auschwitz.

In among all this stasis, there is yet one outpost of movement. At the very verge of vision, something flaps fitfully, with just the faintest of  feathery deviation from the rigid and the upright. Playing breeze-borne peek-a-boo from behind an unencumbered fence post, a bouquet of cut flowers. Desiccated. Mummified. Lifeless like everything else in this rubblescape. A fitting tribute to that other importation. The murdered little boy dumped here yesterday, today or last month. The forsaken living memory here can't quite recall.

Every town has one. One at the very least.

~fini~

He plucked the sheet from the  birdcage. The mynah bird still had its head tucked under its wing. “That time I said I had to drive to Leeds for a meeting, I was actually down the clap clinic getting a prescription”.  A mixture of drowsiness and not having been exposed to those particular words before, meant that for once the bird didn’t come back with a snappily inappropriate retort.

He bounded up the stairs into the bedroom. His wife caught sight of him looming up in the dressing table mirror and turned to put up her arms to warn him away from her facepack. Undeterred, he gently cupped the back of her skull and drew her forward so that their foreheads met. “When I was thirteen, I caught a frog and pulled it to pieces out of some sort of perverse desire to see how it was made”. He pulled away and she handed him one of her wet cotton wipes to remove the cream transferred to his brow. She put it down to the significance of this red letter day and offered a silent prayer it wasn’t going to be like this for the next three weeks.

Ensconced within the plush leather in the back of the limo, he levered himself forward as he depressed the partition glass. The back of the driver hove into view. “Anytime the family au pair was out the house, I would go to the laundry basket and take out a pair of her stockings and wrap them around my face and inhale. Just once I tried it around my neck and squeezed, but I’ll admit, I got scared.” Apart from a slight cocking of his head measured by the tilt of the peak of his cap, the chauffeur managed dutifully to keep his eyes on the road.

He pulled on the sash cord and the curtains parted from the plaque. The applause from the old people’s home residents was somewhat subdued by their arthritic venerability.  But he wrought an even greater bewilderment when he informed them that not only had he smoked cannabis regularly in his younger days, he had most definitely inhaled. He had only desisted from the happy habit when his dinner party circuit supplier had been caught and imprisoned. As he left the building, a wheelchair bound lady winked at him. But it could conceivably have been a twitch.

Perched on a soapbox to address a precision engineering factory’s shopfloor, he opened his arms out wide in a gesture of embrace. Then he scissored them back into his chest as he regaled them with details of stealing reams of paper and typewriter ribbons from his first office job. How he had even managed to smuggle out one of the company’s two VCR machines. The workforce then broke out into a riot of mockingly trying to lift their hundred weight machine tools and miming trying to stretch their pockets over them. He turned rather helplessly to his host who glared daggers at him.

At the Police Federation he blurted that he’d launched surreptitious spitball after spitball from the observation deck of the Empire State Building and tried to imagine them landing on pedestrians below. At the children’s hospice with the camera whirring, he leaned in close to a little girl hooked up to drips and told her he’d started drinking in pubs at sixteen and his first X-rated movie was when he was seventeen. Her medication meant she fell back into slumber while he was talking. The boom mic did however pick up all his words.

On the podium at Pride, he owned that he’d loved taking his children to playgroup as he got to ogle all the breast-feeding mothers. At the Inter-faiths conference he came clean about his Gap year antics. All those interminable train journeys around Europe were spent playing gin rummy for money with his card novice travelling partner whom he had just taught the game and therefore gradually cleaned out of money. An Imam replied that gambling was a sin. A Rabbi stroked his beard and told him he should go make recompense to the man even thirty years later as it was now. A priest took him by the elbow and quietly inquired if he thought of converting to Catholicism. After all it wasn’t unheard of within his line of work.

After the polls closed on election day, the country had revealed itself split right down the middle. Half the nation had welcomed his uncommon honesty as evidence of a man who could be trusted to tell it like it is. But the landslide of support his strategists had anticipated was undoubtedly compromised by their man’s unfathomable compulsion to confess anything, anywhere, at any time. This had prompted a backlash coalition, ranging from those Dutch uncles aghast at his  moral reprehensibility; through those amateur psychologists gauging that he had just too many character flaws to be depended upon for the pressures of high office; down to the pragmatists who merely doubted his abilities at summits and treaties, given the lack of tact and diplomacy witnessed during the campaign. His now estranged wife fell into the first cohort of the naysayers.

His intention to step down from the Party rather than contest the re-run election, was announced on his behalf. Since his aides couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t be overcome with the compelling urge to confess that retirement hadn’t actually been his decision.

~ fini ~

Just get them dealt for goodness sakes she silently implored him. The man had been shuffling a deck of cards for an eternity. No one else was proximate to him, so seemingly there was no game it was directed towards. The lack of a flat surface in front of him legislated against laying them out in some version of solitaire. Or Patience she mused ruefully. It was a regular two-handed shuffle, where each card slips between the sheets of its loosely stacked bedfellows. None of that showy one handed stuff, where the deck is cut in half and passed over with just the pads of the fingers. But there again the man was too shabby to evoke the impression of being a stage magician. Even a resting one.

She turned her gaze to a woman sat glassy eyed and straight-backed on an easy chair. Staring into space as she contorted her lips to blow upwards, ushering a bang away from draping her eye. Repeatedly, for of course the tress reclaimed its station with each unassisted descent. She puffed it away again. This was idiotic. She wanted to shake the woman. What did she expect would happen? What could she hope to achieve? She felt like marching over to her and snipping the recalcitrant curl right off, but of course she had no scissors with which to do so. She averted her scrutiny in order to choke off her own irritation.

Her eyes alighted on a youngish man beating out a syncopation on his trousered thigh. As with the other two, he wasn't looking at his own motions, marooned in some inner thought. She tried to place his beat, for if she could recognise the tune she might draw a bead on to the man's psyche. But she drew a blank and fancied it might be of his own composition. If it was a code to his nature, she didn't posses the cipher to unlock it.

She continued scanning the room. A young boy was pivoting the seat of his fold up chair and sinking and rising with each tilt. Boys can never sit still, but this was behaviour beyond mere fidgeting. He was no less rhythmic than the drummer man, but each was plugged into their own private pulse. Completely unaware of each other, yet both were fraying her nerves.

For respite she turned to a dapper man exuding no sound at all. He was engaged in cleaning his spectacles with the tails of his shirt. The bridge of the glasses was delicately pinched between finger and thumb, yet the other hand was flaying the glass lens with the vigorous nature of his rubbing. She tried to catch his eye, but whether through myopic foreshortening, or that he was simply not focusing by choice, no acknowledgment of her existence was forthcoming.

She stood back to compose her thoughts. She was witness to an array of self-involved locomotions. An antechamber chock full of small convulsions. An assemblage of nervous tics. A cluster of compulsive disorders. Were they in a treatment centre, or its waiting room at least? If not, what were they all doing here? Just killing time. Whiling it away with displacement activity. Though displacement of what exactly?

Then it struck her, she too had found herself here hadn't she? What was her particular spasm? She looked down at herself to determine her tic. She could see no treasonous part of her obeying its own local bidding. No untoward movements. Without a mirror in the place, she raised her hand to her face to check its loyalty and began charting the topography with the tips of her fingers. Maybe that in itself was her tic? But no, she felt secure in the knowledge that this was the first gesture of its kind since she had first enrolled here. Whenever that had been.

~ fini ~

Adam wasn’t the first man. He wasn’t even a runner up, for this was Metroland. Where suburban house after suburban house stretched back in a relentless redbrick vista.

Red had been instituted motif by the landscarperers, since the acreage had been richly laden orchards in its venerable village days of yore. But yore is less when progress comes a coldcalling, influenca business card in hand. Untenable venerable had quickly become pensionable and capitulated under the redeveloper’s caterpillar-tracked dozers. But Adam’s backgarden of Eden still retained one gnarled, though fecund apple tree.

Adam no longer had an Eve, due to prototypical trust issues as first highlighted in the prologue to that amnesiac genesiac the Pentateuch. No more peachy red lipschtick from her. But he was still yoked to his tree, much to his umbrage.

Why was this tree the blight of his life? How did it make Adam’s adam’s apple bob up and down like a test your strength machine at a fairground? Or an unfairground as in the case of Adam’s twisted Garden of Need.

Notwithstanding that husbands and wives may rip up their contractual vows at the drop of an aitch, a faux pas or the bombshell of some sinful original act, there existed strict council bye-laws forbidding any householder to take an axe to their tree. Only corporates had been chartered this perky perk and unless you had limited liability and protection from your creditors, (to wit, those Granny Smiths twitching net curtains in the neighbourhood nosey parker scheme), the arboreal stood untouchapple.

Juicy fresh fruit on tap, what could be more appletising than that? Just how can Adam perennially (not judiciously deciduously) pluck heartstrings and harp on about the bane of homegrown produce?

One has to pre-season early apple errantly, in order get the taste for the seeds of  Adam’s appleplexy. The runty apples of the litter do just that. They get bumped off the branch by their burgeoning peers and lie in wait in the long grass like booby-prize traps. For post connubial cleft, our Adam was wont to promenade his garden barefootloose and fancy free espousing poetry. Only to come a cropper time and again stubbing his tootsies on unripened, granitelike pome, forcing from him a tart applepeal to the heavens.

Just steel yourself thinking of the branch-borne sweet flesh, Adam my old fruit. Yet rotten luckily the pomade persecution continued giving him the pip. Rarely did he actually get to harvest the toothsome nectarous yield for himself. Since others more fleet-winged and bug-tongued got the drop on his crop. Wasps bored, fruit flies gouged, coddling moths coddled. Pithing and de-coring. Other burrowers bore their young a refectory-cum-nursery within the apples’ housing. One way or another, there were very few apples which didn’t bear the blackened smut trail of an insect’s fly-through take-out. The looming folk wisdom spun at mother’s knee, counsels never to swallow an apple’s seeds lest a new tree take root in your stomach. Where was the homily against eating swart-perforated fruit rind in order to avoid your belly playing host to a puparium? Intuitively, Adam would forbear from any apple so Cain-marked.

But it wasn’t just entymological applepropriation that bit into any potential produce for his gaping fruit bowl. Ripened pomme d’arbre inevitably became pomme de terre, as they ground hogged the applerition of Isaac Newton’s gravity epiphany. Adam couldn’t use them, for if not insect adulterated, then assuredly they were contused by grappleing with the earth. Causing him to wince as he envisioned each bruisapple skin echoing that of his own.

Adam might have left the apples strewing the lawn, to feed their limited nutrients back into Mother Nature’s soiled maw. Only he chanced apple eyed a rat scurrying across the green baize and guzzling on one of the fallen rondures. He didn’t mind squirrels availing themselves to pocket the fat number 3 pool balls when easy pickings were scarce, but a rat? That was just too applepalling. So dutifully he applelied himself morning after morning to going outside and collecting up the fallen. His apple-ratus, an inverted plastic bag which he would wedge around the apple and then fold back out. Thus scooping in such a way as not to have to come into direct contact with either the moldering pulpyness, rodent-nibbled, or insect cankered flesh. A technique he had modelled after a neighbour’s cleaning up behind their Pomeranian. Then he would proceed to the Council provided brown organic waste bin for good riddance to bad apples.

However this action also sprouted unforeseen consequences that further turnedover his stricken life. Firstly the composting apples gave off the most sickly sweet aroma of fermenting cider that stupefied his senses as if he’d actually quaffed a gallon of the stuff. But more apple pertinently, the bin was flooded with apple sourced maggots. And that at one dread time, opening the lid would release a plague of metamorphosised flies to swarm around his head. We’ll also quickly pass on the glut of (sub-)urban fox ordure, as those wily creature circled round without being able to open the lid, nor knock over a bin loaded down with a hundred weight of fruit slurry.

All of this pressed down so grievously on our Adam that he finally snapped and took not an axe, but a chainsaw to the trunk of the tree. Bye-laws be hanged! Oh the unencumbered satisfaction to see the collapplesible lumber splinter and toapple.

But poor benighted Adam had really upset the apple cart. In its longevity, crabby apple roots had curled underneath Adam’s house. So as the tree turned up its toes into death, it pulled and yanked the masonry with it. Adam’s pied-a-terre lurched and canted to a crazy splayed angle. Now normally subsidence is something the Council treat very seriously indeed and offer all sorts of assistance to nip it in its tracks. But since Adam had felled his tree, he had apple ceded any indemnification applelickability, Mr Adams, number one man at the Council duly informed him.

~ fini ~

He’d never any toys when he was a child. Well, when he was younger than he is now. Left to peck with his fingers in the dust alongside the chickens. He didn’t even know he was draughting imaginary maps and coastlines that now he was surveying for real.

There was no instruction guide for this kit. No box with a picture on it for comparison. It was however made in China, more coastlines away from his home than he could ever limn.

The flat curved box with the grooves was easy. He knew where that went, but it was ever the last piece of the jigsaw. The other chunky part, the wooden one which vaguely echoed the shape of a hobbyhorse, not that he had ever seen one of course, well that too was relatively straightforward. Though it was the one that posed him the greatest trial, forever slapping his shoulder with tremendous vigour. More so even than his father, or the man presiding over him here.

No, what caught him were all the fiddly bits. The bits that actually looked like fun. First there was the spring and a metal gulley you could make it slide across. Push the spring back with your fingers, then release it and watch the spring dart across its cradling runway and fly out like an arrow. Then there was the bolt. You could wedge it into the ground and then roll or throw miracle fruit towards it and see which gets the closest. Of course he would never be allowed to stick the bolt in the ground and get it covered in smut. Then he would most likely feel someone’s hobbyhorse smashed over his head by the man in charge.

The thin tube, my how fine a blowpipe might that make, for going hunting bush monkey or birds. A silent and deadly weapon, like the old ways. Though he knew if he brought this tube to his mouth, it would taste of oil and make him retch. But he knew metal toys needed oil to keep all their parts working. And finally, the strange little drum. That seemed to do nothing at all. Yet if he held it to his ear and shut his eyes tight enough to block out the world, if he then shook it he could just hear the sea moving about inside it. Like listening through a conch shell, but so far more distant. All the way from China perhaps. Did China have a sea of its own? The man had told them that the drum contained a gas, not water. But to him it sounded only like the waves. Alas there was never sufficient hush around in the camp for him truly to be able to hear it quite enough and prove the man wrong.

“Okay boys. Thirty seconds only to assemble this AK47. Or I shoot you”.

~ fini ~

The Jester sat down on the edge of his mattress. He laboured to bring one gout ridden leg up to lay across the other. The jingle bell at the tip of his pointed toe mocked each serrated movement of his limb with a tinkle. He grabbed his ankle to arrest its dinging. They had always given him away.  Betrayed his advent. People would halt the progress of whatever parley they were engaged in and turn to stop him in aisles and antechambers, demanding an instant jape or trick from him. With the pain in his legs, the aches in his heart and the sour surge of ill-humours throughout his body, his buffoonery was all played out. Touched by God people said of the poor fool. But the King was cert no longer touched by his rib-tickling. These days he only seemed to rub his Majesty up the wrong way. Just like this mattress which had sprouted tickling sticks of horse hair all over its clapped out rind. It had cradled his own pith here in the Palace since the day he had first shaken his bauble in humour. Seemed like everyone and everything was at the threshold of being put out to grass, with such cankers abound in the kingdom. He managed to work off both of his shoes, while still holding the jingle at their tips. For he didn’t want to alert the Devil to come ask him for a prank.

***

She lay her weary body down on the straw mat. Having been dancing all day, the sound of the bells were still reverberating inside her head. She had dedicated to herself and to her parents, to be not just a temple dancer, but the most refined and elegant mover of them all. To devote herself to her god and master. She had ascended from the fifty, all the way up to the two hundred bell ghungroos. The weight had been excruciating to bear, but only to better suggest the litheness of her movements picked out in such a deep, thickened sound. She wore them in her sleep, to better temper her muscles to their burden. It made for interrupted slumber. Since each time she turned in her dreams, she was serenaded by a langourous pealing, each time prompting her that she must jump to it in order to dance for a spring-borne water spirit. It was on being awoken in such manner and waiting to return back to sleep, she often wondered why she never heard the demure tintinnabula of the other Devadasis’ bells. The door opened to her room. A male voice demanded her to take off her anklets. “Why? Do you not want me to dance for you oh spirit? “ “You are an untouchable, you do not address yourself to me. But yes, you’re going to dance for me all night”. 

***

Fearne watched through the mullioned kitchen window that gave out on to the rear garden. Her siamese was striding through the long grass and suddenly she felt privy to millennia of leonine evolution, albeit scaled down for suburbia. The cat was indubitably filled with a purposeful prowl, but there was no prey anywhere to be seen. The tocsin bell hanging from its collar was fulfilling its mission. An early bird warning system to stymie the sorties of the sinuous slayer. Man’s adaptive response, to stamp our own rhythms on Mother Nature. Be it placing a bell on a goat to lead its brethren to fall into step behind it. Or the rough music placed around the neck of a free thinker who looks to go his own way. Now Fearne couldn’t believe her eyes, as the cat stopped at a rose bush primed with thorns and rubbed himself adroitly against its spines. Sure enough the halter was adroitly transferred to the plant, the collar gently flapping like a snake’s sloughed skin in the breeze. Meanwhile the cat marched back to reclaim the garden savannah’s leonine throne. Modestly piped in his triumph by a faint chime.

***

The monk surveyed the damage wrought by the soldiers in their big dead cow boots. Even though steeled against superfluous feelings, he could not but shed a tear. The salt water drop seemed reluctant to release its anchorage in the bay of his eyelid and his vision was blurred. An overturned candle on the floor was still aflame and its feeble tendril rays seemed to reach out towards him. He knelt down to right it and as he raised himself back up, brought the candle up with him at eye level. He looked right through its golden streaming light, which together with his water-clouded vision combined to throw a corona behind the head of a terracotta image of the Buddha. He knelt back down again, feeling he was witness to a great sign, the light of revelation itself even. The tears poured copiously now and he wiped them clear from his eye. Alas, now he could see quite clearly that most of the Buddha’s face was missing. Stoved in by a rifle butt. Ugly jagged gashes effaced any serenity. Only the mouth remained, sealed without comment on what had befallen the shrine. The tips of the fingers clasped together in humble prayer had been hacked away. He looked at his own fingers, covered in dust from rooting around the floor for profaned offerings. He reached into the fold of his robe and drew out his tingsha. Or what remained of it anyway, seeing as the binding had snapped and only one of the small bronze cymbals remained. There was to be no cadences to open up his heart to sing. No vibrating struck sound to fill his emptiness. This bronze cymbal had rid itself of all earthly attachments. But in doing so there would be no placating the hungry ghosts and they would assuredly send their cruel minions with their boots and rifles back for more offerings.

~ fini ~

He cocked index and middle finger together like a pistol and pressed them against the side of the tumbler, measuring out the gargle of whisky he poured into it. He tapped the same cub scout salute to lever the brim of his hat up from over his eyes. The clock face emerged into his purview. Midnight plus one. The Broad was a no-show. Again.

He cupped a barely shaking hand (the whisky was faithfully adhering to its task tonight), over his lighter. The recalcitrant flint being reluctant to yield its Promethean secret. Like every ugly critter in this town. The coruscating flame threw more light than the overhead naked bulb ever did. But then it died, leaving a small orange diadem at the tip of his cigarette, hovering in the gloom like a firefly.

How many missed appointments did that make it now, three? Four? Not very good recall for a so-called seamus. He was supposed to keep on top of the facts. His jagged laugh serrated the smoke plume as it wound upwards to do battle with the lightbulb. Draping its cloying veil around the blue lamp, the darkness thickened imperceptibly. Watts struck back and burned its angry wake through the dissipating murk. 'Know just how it feels' mused the Private Eye.

This felt little different to a stakeout, other than he was using a glass rather than swigging straight from the bottle as he did when in the car. He still employed the empties to relieve himself though, seeing as his rent didn't cover the use of a commode. What exactly was under surveillance right here right now? The wreckage of his life. A forlorn cactus his office's ambience had managed to suck dry even into death, stood in a saucer marked by the dirt outlines of extinct water trails. Then there was a bonzai tree, like a little old gnarled homunculus permanently holding him under scrutiny. Both had initially been provided by his receptionist in an attempt to personalise the office. To suggest a human being resided within. But she had eventually beaten her path of retreat from the film of dust that leached out all colour. Leaving these two ugly memorials behind. Now they more resembled miniaturised victims of medieval torture implements; the iron maiden and the back-breaking rack. He had plenty of heresies to recant, but no Confessor to hear him out.

Of course, there was no reason to believe that his missing client case had been a frail. What had he got to go on? Nothing much. Just a mark in a diary. A single barred gate in the cross country run of life's ledger. It's not as though any contract had been signed. He wasn't on any retainer. He just put his card out there, his half-baked self-promotion with a wrong digit in the address, but he had run out of money to have them reprinted. The telephone number was correct though. They could still reach him by that.

He drained the glass and cub scouted his hat back down over his eyes. There was always the possibility of tomorrow. Some new client to walk through the door and misdirect him about their misconceived affairs. The world was full of Broads, Frails and Stiffs. Law of averages says one of them must roll up to a halt at his door.

Yeah right.

Room 1201 was up on the thirteenth floor. Nose bleed territory. Where the elevator to such high altitudes was perpetually out of commission. The clock still read one minute past twelve.

~fini~

Dwelling at the end of the line bestowed me a brace of boons. Firstly that I always secured myself a seat, much to the spreading satisfaction of my gluteus maximus. And second, that usually I’m able to wade into my current reading book to good effect.

Now I grant that reading on a train and in public, is not the same as reading in the splendid isolation of home. When one feasts on words, one cannot but help take a mental pause for digestion and paying silent compliment to the literary chef. On a train, when hoisting the eyes up from the page thus, one has no recourse other than to scan the carnival of humanity, which also happens to be in transit between one worldly carousel and another.

Within my little cloister of four seats, there is usually some permutation of persons cutting themselves adrift. Be it through earphones; hiding behind a freesheet newspaper; slumped asleep;  women applying make-up gathered into a compact; and innumerable folks predictably having words chiseled for them on their mobile phones and grinning inanely to themselves. Occasionally, just occasionally, I am abutted or adjacent to a fellow bibliophile. My heart cannot but help skip in such circumstance. Our eyes craning to read, not the face, but the title of their book which will enlighten us one to the other, into an instant familiarity.

So imagine my unalloyed delight when today all three other berths were filled by men with volumes held out in front of them, supplicants like myself. My eyes were pinging about in their sockets, unsure quite where to alight first. Etiquette determines that it is unseemly to swivel your head to the left towards the man seated beside you, so I was faced with the two diametric, either of whom could be engaged with minimal canting.

I plumped for the man directly opposite me. I snaked my eyes above the paper periphery of my book. To be confronted directly by his, staring straight at me, with his book lowered into his lap. In point of fact he was staring straight through me. As if he was trying to burn through to the Virgin Trains’ logoed antimacassar behind my head.

I saw that his lips were moving. Possibly a student reeling off his rote learning for the ordeal of a test. Though he seemed a touch on the old side for a student, even an eternal one. Also the rhythm of his recitation seemed to be so rapid as to preclude an itemisation of facts.

People who read not only moving their lips, but actually vocalising their words had always struck me as rather limited readers, yet this chap was belting through his text of choice with compelling fluency. Though cupped in his lap, he wasn’t actually reading it per se, unless it was written in braille...

I ducked my eyes down to squint at his print. It wasn’t pointillist, but neither could I apprehend its alphabet. Of course, this man was praying! Intoning words not only taken into his heart, but inscribed there.

Does one have to be reading a text for the first time in order to fulfil the prerequisite to be a member of our impromptu book club? He wasn’t even strictly reading his damned book anyway! I’m not sure therefore we could count him as a fellow traveller through the printed word. Our full house might just have become a busted flush. Oh sweet fraternity, I had imagined today to be so very special, what with these portents lined up this way.

Still, that left two other kindred souls. I veered my glance slightly to the left. The features were partially obscured behind the cover of his book, but I could deduce that he wore spectacles. Time to see what was being reflected in his lenses.

“Sociolinguistics”.  Well now, I knew what ‘linguistics’ meant and I had a fair idea what ‘socio’ presaged in the main, but I’ll own putting the two together left me floundering a tad. Patently an academic text of sorts. To wring all the life out of language and literature no doubt. The burst blood vessels in his hand seemed quite appropriate somehow.

Then he lowered his book and I chanced look at his face, but only saw myself dimly outlined in his reflectors. Clearly he wasn’t looking through the glass and seeing me. His eyes never left his text as they dipped downwards. Socio-gymnastics, seeing as his hand was fumbling in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. It resurfaced, brandishing a dayglo fluorescent pen.

Still adhered to his reading, he inserted the pen between his lips and levered the lid off with his one free hand. And then the great desecration descended as he proceeded to underline , or possibly block-fill sections of the page. This man had no respect for the holy sacrament of print. I drummed him straight out of our honorary members club and in my mind sliced off his corduroy shoulder pads with - no, no I am a man moved by things of the mind, not violence.

As to the third, well I will not even bring myself to utter.... It had pictures in it. An art book of some kind ? No lush plates of photographic reproductions, but line drawings if you please. Of a man, with a beard and a woman. And this bookworm too was imbibing the text with his vermicular tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth. But it wasn’t any sounds it was keeping time with...

Oh woe to be compartmentalised with a breviary, one textbook and singular manual. Fickle fate has mocked me with a mirage of monographs.

As the train pulled in towards the buffers, it was then that I realised I hadn’t even progressed to the end of even a single line in my own book. Today, I couldn’t even call myself a reader.

~fini~

Why is it, when the weather's not even particularly warm, ice cream nonetheless melts? Runneling through your fingers before you've even stepped away from the vendor's stall. More pertinently, why is it that my son even hankers after the chill fruit smack of frozen ice? Like a desperate old bar soak, he has dragooned me into also having one, to keep him company. Even though I know its frigidity will inevitably sting and set my teeth on edge. But seems I must render him some penitential reparation, for having dragged him out here to this fitful pleasure zone in the first place.

There he sits on the desolate sand. Like an unturned out sandcastle huddled in its plastic mould. His body is still spasmed for, and from the city. Our tower block on stilts, which merely serves to channel the wind beneath such vaulting limbs. A piercing, penetrative force that pinballs us backwards and keeps us from successfully escaping its concrete flippers. Until today that is. When I ferried him here, solely to be embraced by the lapping waves as they lay feeble supplication at his feet. But he is yet to unfurl himself toward their anointing. Rather than spreading his being into the limitless expanse of space, he is hunched like a panhandler who has been working the streets too long. And him only six years old.

Where he's plopped himself down, he straddles the sand's water table levels. The dry, powdery grains too wispily diffuse to hold any integrity within his actual bucket. And the darker stained grist that offers solid architectural possibilities. The long-handled spade stands unmanned (unboyed?) within the lighter strain. Redundantly wafting in its own thin rootedness. A miscalculation on my part. Far too unwieldy for his little arms. A grasp of physics or geometry whichever it is, far beyond my reach. Maybe he'll inherit a natural comprehension of the world from his father. But we've no way of ever knowing that now have we?

However, he is no more frozen, nor less motile than these rippling ice creams. There appears some synergy between him and the sand after all. His hands kees burrowing into it at the borders of his seated self. Scooping out handfuls, and casting them away. Casting a rune around himself, or building a moat? To fend off whom exactly? And still he pilots his hand down. Hoping to strike oil, or water perhaps? But he is too far from the lip of the sea for it to mine through the sand and fill his trench. He has beached himself up in dry dock.

The pace of his digging noticeably increases as I approach. He has fully encircled himself now, ready to see out a siege? If he had preserved straighter lines, then I could convince myself he was limning a magic carpet for him to take flight. All I can apprehend now, is him trying to tunnel through to Australia on the other side of the world and as far away from me as possible.

The transfer of the cream-slicked cone into small fingers gritted with sand, conspires to deliver the inevitable fall to earth. An Icarian fusion on a day devoid of sun. We both stare down dumbly at the lugubrious cone, presently performing a reasonable impersonation of a large whelk shell. Then I see his eyes crinkle towards the encompassing of all years of future disappointments held out by the world. Quickly I proffered him my cone and cradled his fingers around it within my own. One always needs a back up, a plan B, a second option. A stand-in. Unfortunately I had just the one child and said child had just the one mother.

~fini~

Terence found himself staring full flush at the navel of the colossus currently barring his admission into Club Eros. Beneath the surging silk shirt, he could see the man's effusions absconding from their pores, like the juices running free on a doner spit. The sour astringency - body odour tinctured with ammonia - emanating from the rolling flesh scarp, threatened to anaesthetise Terence.

He was unable to gaze up into the face, seeing as it was atop a trunk so vertiginous, as to be actually nestling within the vermillion 'Eros' awning. A bulbous skull, shielded within an elongated lampshade. The leviathan had acquired the perfect defence mechanism – since Terence could not credit this as being purely genetic – interjecting a huge expanse of belly flesh to render his head out of range of any cuffed fist. No matter the tale of the tape on one's reach, with Terence a mere featherweight, borderline lightweight at best. It would be like trying to bop a giraffe on the end of its snout.

He briefly weighed up a wallop to the beast's solar plexus, only it too was eclipsed by the stellar amount of flab. A rabbit punch to the kidneys also only seemed to hold out a facetious adult version of pin the tail on the donkey. Wherever Terence might opt to strike, he feared that the blow would be cushioned by the cocoon swaddling of sebaceous flesh. Moreover, not solely this disarmament, but that his hand would be instantly encased and stuck fast within unseen folds. Untold bodily secretions might then set to work dissolving the flesh of those knuckles faster than you could say "Ebola Gay".

The behemoth cracked his knuckles. Its lingering snap resounded even over the thumping report from the dancefloor beyond the closed door. The weird thing was, the monster hadn't actually flexed his digits in order to do so. Terence concluded that they might be too pudgy to enable the pugilist to form a fully rendered fist, four fingers tightly curled together, thumb locking them in place like an iron bar. There again, he may not actually have need to, since the heel of that massive hand had a greater surface area than Terence's entire face. Simple enough to have his aquiline nose driven up into the brain and therefore clinch non-entry on a permanent basis. In the light of a Bouncer's discretionary powers, Terence's own discretion was definitely the greater part of valour. Terence stepped back from the sash rope's effete apartheid. In order to regain the illumination of the neon streetlights, he had to move a half-block away from this man mountain's penumbral kill zone.

This flurry of diffuse  thoughts coagulating around violence, was a far cry from Terence's former demeanour. Halcyon student demo days protesting the bomb, grappling with Policemen (before both files settled for filming each other's ranks and taking it to judicial review for violated rights). How the deterrent argument always struck him as false, since it would only take a single happenstance to disprove the theory. In which event all folk would be long past caring, gripped in seeing their skin shed itself and absorbed with blood bubbling through every gash of self.

The pity of this youthful earnestness being, that Terence was aligned against Thanatos. Rather than partying with Eros through coming to Clubs like this, as he seeks to do now in making up for lost time and failing rather spectacularly it has to be said. The irony not lost on him, seeing how he was now faced with a perfect exemplar of the deterrent argument. The furrowed brow of a no win situation clearly incised all over the man’s signet rings and gold sovereigns. Terence was finally going to be forced to concede the argument and that his years of student protest and pacifism had led him up life’s garden path. There hadn't been that one instance of a nuclear bomb being loosed off. But he had embodied a slow radioactive poisoning of his paltry half-life all the same.

~fini~

His hand lay outstretched in his sleep, palm exposed. She splayed out her fingers so as to graze each pad with his. To seal her contours with his and have his sear into hers. She would not allow that we are each born with our unique mark woven into our fingertips. The perfect match, seamless superimposition of one upon the other, must exist. Unfortunately, even in his sleep, his was too broad for her to span with her dainty little hand.

Undaunted, she caressed her index finger downwards and began to trail the creases and wrinkles across his palm. She wasn’t a trained chiromanist, but maintained her own superstitious credo of the significance of the lines. The heart, the head, the life and the fate were all crucial concepts to her, just they didn’t give up their runic braille quite as easily as the digital phrenologists claimed. Instead the lines were tiny windows into how sensitively a man used his fingers. Whether the ridges and folds suggested a tendency to a closed fist, a restlessly flexing tension; or a more open handed receptivity. The portents on this one were good.

Having criss-crossed his hand enough times to make him flinch it reflexively, she carried on down the exposed wrist. Veins and arteries picked out against his pale skin. The hair there so fine and blonde as to efface itself, unlike on the reverse side of the forearm where it flourished like jungle vines. But here, the red and blue lines stood out like a road map. The major trunk roads of pulsing blood and the minor tracks back to the heart. She knew that a wedding band was always worn on the fourth finger, because people believed it used to have a vein leading from there all the way to the love muscle. With this mish-mash of venous vermicelli in the wrist, she couldn’t be sure how they could have traced it so limpidly.

There was always something too fragile suggested by the upturned wrist, too vulnerable, so she moved quickly on. She found herself at the elbow, and wondered at the change of topography. The permanent fold there raised a livid red scale. Yet here was the most symmetrical set of feature on the skin. Here you could witness the cellular architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. Tiny parallelograms, each with a facility to shrivel or stretch, to concertina and overlap their neighbour. The shuffling orchestration was simply divine. She licked the elbow with her tongue in appreciation. It tasted of interrelatedness.

*

When she woke up, he was gone. He hadn’t even extinguished the overhead light, though it was morning and ribbons of light were streaming in through the blinds. Lashing her to the sheets. Seems like they weren’t a good fit after all.

She stared at the indentation left in his pillow. The case rucked where it had cradled his head, bearing the sunken contours from the downward pressure. More wrinkles and creases, only this time turned inside out. Lacking for the supporting body they served. The vacated lines, the abandoned seams, having opened the quarry of her own body up the night before. The death mask of another potential relationship, pressed down with airless finality. Once, just once she yearned to wake up and find the smooth impression of a fully-drawn face still lying on the pillow next to hers. Not having to commit the features to her wistful memory, but to be able to revisit them afresh everyday, in the flesh.

~fini~

The day had begun oh so very languid, even for a vulture. The golden egg was nesting at its perch in the sky, but the barbecue plumes rising from the feeding zone were playing havoc with any upthrusts the egg might be engendering. The clouds seemed to be all upside down, originating from the landing strip rather than just above their heads. Only these bore the embers of fierce heat rather than moisture. None of the wake had left their roosts and half of them hadn’t bothered opening their eyes and unblinkering them from beneath their wing. Without sight, a vulture is blind. But although there was nothing to see down there for now, it didn’t take their colony’s human familiar to whisper in their ear about the whereabouts of a fine banquet large enough to feed them all. They were used to fires burning the ground. It seemed to usher in the greening of the earth, which drew the animals which meant they would not go hungry. But these particular fires promised more instantaneous victuals. The ones that usually stood tall like shrunken trees, but were forever shaking their branches and emitting fire. The larger versions of their own familiar and he seemed particularly excited this morning. They all knew they just had to wait for propitious winds. The food wasn’t going anywhere, unless the hyenas got wind of it. Curse them and their scent senses so close to the dust.

***

The human familiar seemed to be in capricious mood today, for he whispered the rendezvous in the ear of his very own mate. Dutifully she took to the air, her petite wings forking a wondrous flabelliform in order to harvest the air. Beady eyes up and down the branches crept open like sprouting buds, tracing her elegantly soaring spirals. Fanning salivary impatience in each of them. The familiar was dismissed with a promise of propitiation, as each in the squadron took to the wing and felt the warm wafts cradle their undercarriages. Convinced of the inertness at ground zero, the she Scout initiated her spiral earthwards. She landed just a talon’s stretch away from the repast. Fresh if a bit smoked by the look of it. She hopped demurely on to the man shank. It was for show really, since she knew she would have to defer to those accustomed to High table and await her place in the pecking order. Even being the lead in taking her place couldn’t afford her the first slice. Her beak wasn’t vigorous enough to make the cardinal sawing cut. This offering didn’t seem to gape any ready mouthfuls. Basic rations it would be then.

For as fast as the rest of the clump descended, they were still outwinged by a crack battery of lappet faces. How ridiculous they looked with their dangling skin flaps. If they weren’t so belligerent in pulling rank and preventing their smaller cousins from dining alongside them, such pendulous bonnets might be mistaken for a tasty pink morsel on offer during the frenzy. His mate duly hopped back off her mounting and stood aside as the lappets set to work with their slash and gash. There was nothing for it but to wait in sufferance for some graciously neglected tidbits. That is where their smaller beaks would reward them, since the so called elite forces for all their heavy ordnance, couldn’t finesse their dragooning. Still required the lighter infantry to go in and tidy up afterwards.

Now they were joined on the sidelines by the ossifrages. These weaklings could be shooed around easily enough, but as they tended to incline their scrawny necks after the canned stuff - to the point where they were known to fly off and drop the indigestibles from a great height to splinter them open - the two groups weren’t really competing for the same pickings at all. The odd one of the combined corps made a show of pecking towards the fare, but the lappets weren’t bucking any insubordination and hissed and growled them away with an eclipsing span of their wings. The forbearers would just have to await the signal. When the lappets stood down, pissed themselves clean and sat back to bask the blood on their crowns dry.

His mate had taken it upon herself to daub herself in soil. Smirching her beautiful white feathers towards a dirty pink. Was she attempting to mimic a lappet’s apron perhaps? Camouflaging herself for a daring raid. But as she lifted a wing in order to anti-preen herself, the human familiar could once again be descried insinuating into her cocked ear. She began to pad away from the margins of the spread and over to some bushes. He crooked a crafty glance around and saw everybody else’s attention was fixed one way or another on the dismantling in the open. Then he followed his mate. The pair of them awkwardly picked their way through the buffeting thorns and bowers, that up in the sky would normally present them such comfort. And there it was. A special table reserved just for the two of them. More modest in size than the communal trough, but that ought to mean softer meat for carving. Thank familiar it didn’t seem to have been cooked in any way, so much more pleasant on the palate that way. A veritable raw treat.

The pair of them approached the buffet. The eyes were pointing upward, but had the telltale lack of reflected blue sky and gold egg in them. He loved to start with the eyes, such a delicacy for hors d’oeuvres. The orbs rolled back to the corner of their sockets. Both birds jumped back startled and were immediately rebuked by barbs. They stood in place, staring very hard, trying to pierce for immobility. He silently cursed the human familiar who was nowhere to be seen. His wife was more daring. She waddled up towards the heap and he could see her hanging feathers begin to congeal with the red marinade issuing from it. That in itself was a good portent. She hosed herself down even as she continued walking. She circled around its smaller protuberance, avoiding the eyes, until she was poised at its apex. Then she gradually unkinked the crook of her neck as she elongated it over its head and bent her crest so that her eyes were directly over those of the esculent.

And there she stayed imperturbably frozen. He kept looking back to see that none of the others had caught on to their find, that’s indeed if find it turned out to be. But they were either engaged in feeding or peevish biding. He returned his gaze to his mate. Still she perched ineffably still, craned out at full extension. Not one feather ruffled by any tension in her neck. If he himself were currently soaring on the gyres, he might look down and see her so transfixed, as to conceive her to be a ready meal as much as the lump she was verifying. The sauce had reached his legs now. He raised one then the other as he was void of urine. He chanced to look up at the sky. The gold egg had also shifted on its foot across the azure. His wife must be near a definitive course of action by now? Here she goes. Unfurling her wings like a shroud. Like an lure reserved just for him. She didn’t jump back when brunch’s eye rolled forward to meet hers. She merely contented herself with holding its cloudy gaze.

“Are you an angel?” thought the boy to himself. He couldn’t smile for all the blood in his mouth suctioning his lips shut. “You’ve got dirty wings. Is the path through the clouds up to heaven covered in dust? The same dust as lies here on the earth? At least it can’t be lined with garbage like here... Is it a ladder? Or a tunnel? Oh my god! It is a tunnel and it’s straight into Hell isn’t it? Conducted through your dark eye. That’s the exit from this earth. My god forgive me! Have mercy.”

His eye fell back into the recesses of its socket. The levee of his lips burst asunder as the blood surged out. His mate hopped back a pace. He ventured to join her behind the head. They watched the blood tide ebb, at which point she dipped her crown forwards and delicately pulled back the wormy upper lip. An open invitation for him to bring his beak to bear and tuck in. The human familiar walked away, cupping something unseen in his arms.

~fini~

I’m answering an ad for a char in Shadwell. Bounding up the wrought iron stairs of a Peabody block of flats, I’m slammed hard into the clammy wall and pinned there. My chest poked rigid against my diaphragm like a sergeant-major’s baton. There is no breath there to release my imprisoned knot. Behind the retinas of my eyes I feel a thousand stabbing pricks, as if each one is a cajoling spur, towards what I know not. My legs feel like anchors, tugging on me as if to suck me back down towards the sweep of the stairwell. And yet I instinctively perceive they will not bear the weight of my trunk. I manage to sink to my knees, the instantaneous remonstration of abrading skin, being overriden by the inundation of all my mass centripetally flying into my stomach. I haul myself down the stairs as if on a sledge, only my frame is of flesh instead of wood and the surface I’m moving across is concrete, rather than compacted snow. I didn’t pursue the job that day.

I did return to the site however. The scene of my humbling. The locus of my felling. I had to find out what all that had been about. I was somewhat more circumspect this time, but the stairs still exuded threat. Bent over, I took them as a blind person, or a dog on the scent might, utilising my hands as buttress, arse the highest point of my skeleton thrust up in the air. My head was swimming in the sensation that I was being dragged down head-first, rather than ascending the stairs. I appear drawn to number 17, not the flat of the job interview, but one on the floor below. I convince the war-widowed mother who answers my knock, to let me look inside. Spun her some guff about how I used to live here when I was young ... Perhaps it’s not guff, only, nothing seems right about the place. How the hell would I know that then? I thank her for her forebearance and leave her to her screeching bairn and milk boiling over. I feed my hands down on to the stair ahead of me and kedge the rest of my body over. Slow but sure progress as I steer into safe haven.

At the foot of the stairs, I am in a stance of having my nose pressed to the floor at the doorway and notice an outline of the original building imprinted on the pavement. Goddamnit ! This wasn’t the original edifice. Probably rebuilt after the Blitz. Now I just couldn’t help myself. The woman refuses to let me back into number 17, until I’m almost battering her door down. She’s screaming for me to get out and leave her alone as she hides the kid behind her legs. I smash her in the stomach and she crumples.
God in Heaven! Why did I do that? Why have I done any of this? Why am I here?

The rozzers find me sitting on the stairs quietly weeping. I was only twenty-four months old for christsakes! How the horrible man from the Council had punched me in the stomach to make me release my grip from around my mother’s legs. I think that gently squeezing the copper’s hand as I related this, pricked his sympathy (either that or he fancied me) and he let me off with a caution. It was then that I knew I had to hightail it out of lowend Britain.

~fini~

Every time my folks went ta the beach, my Ma would bring one back. A stoopid glass figurine, ugly clowns bangin’ cymbals an’ sickly looking flamingoes who look as though their color’s run... Thanksgiving rotted pumpkin yellow an’ forest fire red. Ugly clouds billowing beyond their boundaries inside the glass. The smoke had no limits, the dark hues threatening to eat up all the figure, choking it off from the inside ... while the feeble tones just got devoured in turn by the glass. Diffracting them inta nothing. Always there was some battle going on in those glass dolls. I remember starin’ at them for hours as a child.

How I hated those dumb ugly figures bursting their banks. It’s like they’re made of glass right? An’ glass comes from sand, see I know how that connects up at least. So maybe by taking that home with her, my Ma was taking home a little pieca’ beach with her? Like that’s all she had to preserve it in her mind ... All I know is, I got me a pieca beach here with me now ...

Well I know I got it round here someplace, just can’t lay ma hands on it right now ... Got some glass blowin’ color at me I could stare at all day too, an’ hate it! Yeah, here we are ... A little beach of my own. My own beach party.

You know, I always swore I’d never have me no dumb ornaments round ma apartment. With my Ma an’ her glass dogs an’ seals balancing beach balls on their snouts. Since I realised how it was her tryin’ ta keep it all alive in those dead dolls. Cos I remember now ‘bout the beaches, every time we went down the coast. How my Pa’s away off down the boardwalk bars playin’ rummy cos he likes to meet people an’ have them around ... While Ma, well she’s on the beach, sat on a towel, under the sun an’ the gaze of all those round her. The women tuttin’ an’ shakin’ their heads cos she’s on her own with a child. The men starin’ at her hard, cos she’s jis a woman alone ...

Bringin’ their City ways with them ta that beautiful beach ...

Only the beach it ain’t so beautiful, cos my Pa, well he never even sees it, never touches it, up on the boardwalk sippin’ his scotch an’ ryes. While my Ma, she don’t feel nothin’ on her towel, ‘cept the heat all around. Only me, sittin’ there on the sand ... lookin’ this way an’ then that, this way an’ then that way ... till ma neck hurts an’ I can’t support it no more. Like now. Like I’ve got this really clear picture, only I ain’t in it. Like I’ve been burned out the middle between them.

So I’m sittin’ on the sand, but I can’t feel it either. Can’t feel nothin’. No happy memories. No memories at all. Just remember comin’ home again an’ starin’ at these grisly statues who’ve swallowed all that smoke an’ suffocatin’ silently inside. An’ now here, with a promise ta maself against ever having any a’ them of my own, here’s the glass vial an the works ta remind me. Exactly how it feels. In my glass house inhaling oily smoke, cos I gave myself up ta him! A tired old love junky with empty veins. An’ I’m right back there now, remembering how it once felt. Him filling me up so I’m glowing inside. My body dissolving nice. Molten liquid bubblin’ thru an’ I can feel every part of my body tingling. Warm. Turning me back into sand. Smooth to the touch. When he blows off an’ I feel my body turn back into glass on the spot. Only the pressure’s plenty fierce, stretching me real tight inside. So as I gotta burst ... The banks of my glass body, shatter me into a thousand pieces. Like smashing all of my Ma’s figurines when she died. Throwin’ them out int’a box on the floor, hearing them tinkle. An’ throwin’ myself out with them, an’ all the things I ever had. Threw them out when I let him walk out of my life. Leaving the needle waftin’ in my arm. Ya gotta have a hobby in life an’ mine’s needlepoint.

~fini~

You make me feel this small...

My ticker compacted knottily tight. Pounding, pounding. Pestle and mortar. Turning me inside out. Evacuating through the dimples and pores. Compressing my being, the flakes of my soul whittled away. Until only the multi-layered carcinoma of my heart remains. Shrivelled and tumescent simultaneously.  My body has been shelled so I can present myself in the palm of your hand. Oh for a blood red ribbon.

Here you come in my direction. Advancing upon me with your metal cane. Desultorily drop me to the ground. Cruelly cudgel me with just a single crisp metal thwack. Send me spinning, head over heels in repudiation. Now I have to shield my eyes, even as I tumble and fall. Inclining down the camber, being palpated all the way by plastic green blades. Not dissimilar to the presentation verdancy used by greengrocers to display their fruity wares. Only here I find myself veering past a display globule of cement. No wait, from its faint linger of mint, I glean it's actually discarded chewing gum.

Having picked up angular speed, I encounter crashing off banking with a convulsive dull, wooden thump. Propelling me further along through some gravelly grit, back on to the lumpen plastic green, replete with miniature protuberances not unlike mole hills. Scooting past, my nostrils tugged at by a sour acridity. With disgust I find myself hurtling through bird droppings. And suddenly the lights go out as a whirling windmill scoops me up in one of its sails. Arching up towards the sky, no quicker than the London Eye, but I dare not stare at the sun.

At the bottom of the downswing, the windmill expectorates me with an almost apologetic wheeze. I'm dribbling on, past insect husks and renounced pollen pods, when all of a sudden I feel my abdomen drop from under me. Down a trapdoor in a wooden platform, I plummet through the porcelain walls of a narrow tube. Bruising and concussing as I am bounced from pillar to post.

Again I am ejected and hurled back into the light. But before I can catch breath, I sink down once again into a hole with a feeble splish. This time all motion is arrested. The walls of my confinement entirely enclosed. I can barely raise my breathing apparatus above the surface of the rank water. I appear to be ensconced in a tiny pothole. Before I can bemoan my fate, I am snatched up in long, slender fingers. Tips painted vermillion. It's her! With tender touch cupping me so gently. She holds me between the extreme margins of finger and thumb and wafts me through the air. The clinging droplets fly off me one by one and I can breathe again. She loves me, she loves me not. Triumph! The omens are ripe. She finishes drying me on a 'she loves me'. She has me in her heart after all.

She sets me down on some more of the bristly faux grass. She examines the foot of her cane. Averting my gaze from the imminent impact, I squint ahead of me to espy in the distance the form of a clown. Giant feet straddling the miniature sunken font in which I am to be baptised. Sinister smile on his paint-chipped wooden face. "I challenge you to land a hole in one between my legs" he seems to mouth. I feel the rush of air as the cane accelerates towards me...

Par for the course.

~fini~

His hand snaked up to the shutter’s bulbous handle. In doing so his jacket sleeve retracted like a cobra’s hood and shot his shirt cufflink into my vision. Blinking at me like a gold tooth in a skull. Who wears cufflinks in this day and age? Especially as he didn’t tally it with the formality of any tie. He gestured with a sweep of his arm that resheathed his glinting fang. I noticed that it had borne his monogram, in florid tendrils of script. Now he was inviting me to deduce the name of another man beyond. This one ensnared in briars, swathed in poison ivy.

I approached the glass aperture. It was ideally poised for my height. Which must mean that it was nearly always mothers and wives undertaking this task. Unlike in the asylums. Where they were forever having to fetch me a crate to mount in order to peer through slots, ordinarily admitting cursory views by doctors and orderlies. Why is it always Atlas, a musclebound male, depicted bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders? We’re the round shouldered ones. Hugging ourselves in slumped hope against hope.

My eyes were aligned with the glass, but they weren’t conducting me through its parallelism as yet. Instead I traced the faint swirls of the striations in the glass.  The spiral of life or something. This was a most curious sort of peepshow. Already timed out. For whatever lay beyond the glass, certainly wasn’t moving. No writhing, be they drug-induced or grand-mal episodes. A stillness always yearned for, albeit one ideally primed with breath.

I gather my flailing rods and cones. I’m losing a bit of heart for the devoir. I try and compose my thoughts. Wrangle my emotions, but I just feel blank. Here goes nothing. And everything. My whole world. I try and inhale, but my throat and nose have temporarily forgotten how to receive air. Ah, that will be the lump that comes to the throat.

I gaze down at the corpse. He doesn’t look real. His skin pallor offers itself more plastic than flesh. Blood of my blood? He has venesected his, while mine only now begins to be leeched. I concentrate on the face. The deep lined fissures, the pinched stress leather in which I ran my fingers down day after day, have vanished. That face, a death mask turned inside out in life, now unrecognisably smooth. All tension gone. Even his egg shaped head now lies as a uniform oval. No longer contending against gravity. The weight of the world lifted from his frame. His release, signals my incarceration in the penumbral world of the ‘what if?’ A hostage exchange.

No more treading on eggshells. No more french polishing fragile self-esteem. Varnishing madcap logic, apologising for his strangeness in the company of actual strangers. If only he had been inside a proper eggshell rather than directly transfused at the end of my womb, then perhaps he would have had some protection from my toxicity. But no, in all probability the egg would have rolled off my bowed shoulders and shattered on the floor.

I nodded at the man. His snake eye beneath the sleeve winked goadingly at me as he sealed the shutter. He placed his arm above my shoulders, but left it hovering in the space above them. They began to rock and heave like a roiling sea as the sobs came.

~fini~