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.