Aix/salon

There is an opportunity to answer correctly and then that door closes forever. Lifetimes are spent waiting for it to open again. There are miles and miles of scrubland riddled with fire trails; it seems the only purpose of this place is to burn down every few years. The hum of power lines proves that civilisation still exists, but that it exists elsewhere. It's a place to return to every now and then, like the surface of the moon. The paths fork, criss-cross and double back on themselves but it is never possible to cut a different trail. The question - more of a plea, really - was perhaps answered correctly after all. Perhaps there was only one form the answer could take, whatever the words. These days it's different. They keep to rocky ground and sometimes they wrap their pistols into plastic bags which they hold above them as they wade into a river and float downstream for dozens of miles. There's almost no trace. The stakes are a little lower, the footsteps softer. Still, sometimes in the night a hand reaches out and tries to weave the darkness through past lives in flooded cities, the sigils of the road, the rows of empty chairs, the secret passages and through all the threads a voice is shouting "listen! I know the words now!"

Repeating Myself

Every word I have ever written has been an ineffectual and, since 1941, frankly redundant, attempt to describe and simultaneously solve a complicated labyrinth that stares out at me from bus shelters, tourism offices, smartphone screens and anywhere else where can be found the words "you are here."

Nothing is more terrifying. Because all of these maps are blank and this is a boundless maze with no walls by which to mark progress. I am here. Every day I wake up and I am at the beginning again; the puzzle has recapitulated itself around me. I have been asked where I am and I respond that I am in the only place I have ever been.

Still they insist on breaking matter down to ever smaller, more discreet components. To fix themselves, quantifiability. But the decimal points never end and we drift further and further out to sea, having done away with the compass and sextant, star-charts and astrolabes, the global positioning satellites, the signposts, the standing stones and mountains, with the very sun, an endless journey to find a stick to place in the ground so that we might say "This is the point from which all space is reckoned and by it you shall know your way."

Kingdoms

- I spent longer than intended trying to find the spot where I had buried the lump of coal in preparation for the race. The dunes I had marked against the stars a year ago had shifted radically and by the time I had excavated the shimmering black horse from the sand and rode back to the city there was no one left to race against.

- hundreds of escape pods carve contrails across the sky as in the distance Mothership crumples into a mountain range. They tear through skyscrapers and crash land into an alien city abandoned not ten minutes earlier. Meals rot uneaten on strangely carved tables.

- it was my task to present to the public the amicable face of our organisation and to lead interested parties down the dusty cellar that was the terminus of all those little passages criss-crossing beneath the bazaar. And here they would sit and stare at the crumbling skeleton in the center of the room, which is to say, at god. And none would ever move again.

- I slipped away from him in the night and kept to the rocky ground until I reached the river. The current carried me for more miles than I could count. I picked up the pilgrims trail, towards a cathedral in the west wherein interred are the remains of a saint. Her bones are all we have left, and somehow it is we who are to be envied.

- that night there was a terrible thunderstorm and when he awoke he was fixed to a rusting iron mast that was the peak of a mountain of similarly deteriorated metal. Years passed and the sun grew larger and brighter until it covered the sky day and night, turning to molten slag everything but the mast he was bound to. Eventually all was fire, borderless, and he knew not which way to turn.

- and these are streets and roads and houses unending and repeating in configurations known to all by heart and here is a labyrinth of the usual corridors of tall hedges right angled to one another and a now a variant with the false paths and dead-ends removed, but this maze is a single mark on a blank page, without clear beginning nor any indication of an exit.