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.

Lovely Sight

It's hard to do in this kind of job. Even from a distance she hits you straight in the lungs in much the same way as one of those cigarettes you keep rolling from other cigarettes you find on the ground. I haven't actually messaged her yet but I am convinced that we are meant to be together. Still I am covered in someone else's blood. It's possible at this stage to hear the first radar reports. 

Our relationship is complicated: She kills people like me for money and sometimes for free. She can't see me till January two thousand and eighteen, possibly. 

There's no pressure. After all, three million dead is a lovely sight. She's OK as illuminated by gunshots, artillery fire, a knife pulled from a boot reflects the light of the moon on her face and in the moments like those- yeah, she seems OK I suppose. 

Gamma ray burst eventually melts the entire western hemisphere of the planet into a wasteland of liquid magma and I ask her if she wants to go to see the double screening of both the Bad Boys films they're showing as a run up to the recently announced third. Unfortunately she is dead along with most of the other people I know so I have to see it by myself. It's no big deal, really.

Raygun Gothic

They have been checked into a hotel for some years now. The building is badly weathered and at some point during the nineties an abortive attempt was made to do it up in the Raygun Gothic style, which was by that point already a naive vision of a future which had not come to pass. All the furniture has fins of no discernible purpose. The television, which only displays in black and white, is rounded and built into the shiny plastic wall.

The hotel, at three floors, is the tallest building in the small town, itself little more that a petrol station and a few houses on the road through hundreds of miles of scrubland.

They sleep in six hour shifts like submariners, endeavouring to never be awake at the same time. You cannot design a complete reality, you have to start small. A beating heart in an otherwise empty room still implies the existence of walls and floorboards, construction materials, the networks and supply chains required to deliver and assemble them. A few fingernails and teeth in an empty void betray knowledge of voids and teeth and the presence of something to know them. Start small. They miss each other terribly.

Their suite has two rooms connected by a door and a bathroom. Sometimes one of them will hear the other stir in the other room and overcome with some emotion will step through the door into an invariably empty room. The other always knows they are coming. They switch rooms through the separate doors and apart from a few crumbs of room service sandwiches leave no trace of themselves.

At first there was a dream of a single cell and nothing in which to contain it. Decades ago there was some kind of car accident. Their future hit a tree at seventy miles per hour. Three seconds faster than death. The hotel suite is registered to one name only but neither of them can remember whose. 

Daguerreotype

8

He finds a small leather bracelet on his shelf while throwing out old books and holds it to his face. A faint scent; he is floating on a swell of memory that fades almost instantly. He holds it closer but it's used up. Everything has gone. The bracelet gets thrown out with the books and all the rest of it. How long had it sat there on the shelf, biding time? They are sitting alone in dark rooms many miles apart. He feels he has knocked over an urn.

7

Have you ever felt momentarily the rotation of the earth around its axis or even its rotation around the sun or the Sun's movement around the center of the galaxy or the galaxy's movement around clusters, superclusters, nothing?

Doesn't it just make you sick?

Nausea creeps up the spine at one thousand miles an hour. If you vomit now the world will end and everyone will know it was your fault. Nails rake a digital smart board. Have you ever been unable to move or breathe during daylight hours? What does being the only one without a life jacket say about you? Have you ever felt you were going mad but were unable to reap the full benefits at the time? Could you be eligible for compensation? How many thousands of times can you really be expected to do this sort of thing? Do trillions of stars really burn out just for me? Has a boy ever wept or dashed a thousand kim? A hundred? Ten? Everyone is witness against themselves. Will you take it further?