Vision

First I went to bed, and then I started to feel, overwhelmingly, that something was about to happen. Seconds later I found myself standing in the Savannah at sunset. Something was wrong. I knew that I was dreaming, but couldn't move. Or rather, I could move my real limbs - slowly, as if through some viscous liquid - but the ones I could see, the ones that were with me in the desert, were unresponsive. Something was wrong. The ground was perfectly flat, save for the odd rock or shrub, but I began to fall. Gravity reversed direction and I tumbled into the sky. Writhing, and staying still, I brought my hands - my real hands - up to my face. Blackout. I opened my eyes; the room was dark.

***

My head hits the pillow and the desert overtakes me like a tidal wave. My limbs are far away, and though I can feel them move through some sticky liquid, they stay perfectly still by my side. Something is wrong. A boulder tumbles past, but the landscape is featureless. The sun dips below the horizon; the ground has become a vast pool of water, perfectly reflective, and I fall, or sink, into the sky.

***

Something is wrong. Sand dunes roll over my bed and I am buried up to my neck in the desert at midnight. Gravity vanishes and I evaporate slowly, into ten hundred million rising grains of sand.

Rat Trapper

There was a man below the city, and the noise he made, it sounded like wet, papery wings or maybe some kind of steam-driven pump.

Thhhhh-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th...

Then the singing:

'Mmm, na-na, na-na-na-na...'

The man looked uncomfortable on some very deep level, as if he might have been better off as a spider or an octopus, a cockroach even - something small and manoeuvrable. Anything but a human. Th-th-th. It was either laughter or breathing. Facing the table, which is placed against the brick wall underneath a naked bulb, his long arms reach into the darkness and bring back an electric drill. A white cotton shirt with rolled up sleeves, tucked into brown cotton pants. Braces. A misshapen head dotted with tufts of white hair.

'Na-na, na-na-na-na...'

The light flickers for a moment. The man doesn't notice. His eyes are clouded over, as white as marble. He is a creature of precise routine; when he sets the drill back down, in the darkness, it is no more than a centimetre away from where he picked it up.

When he sleeps - which is never for more than five hours at a time, the longest he can stand being away from his tools - the bucket of nails and screws is refilled, fresh planks of wood bought in, the battery of the drill swapped out, spent tubes of glue replaced, saws sharpened and a plate of assorted foods placed on the table. No one has ever spoken with the man. No one even knows if he can talk. Everyone knows he can sing, though.

They whispered to each other, once they'd bolted the door and retreated back up the stairs, into the depths of an ancient and crumbling house.

'But god, his eyes...'

'The way he breathes, I can hear it when I sleep.'

'The singing, though...'

The three of them shudder. Below, the man drops another of his creations down the hole next to the table. Fifteen seconds later there is a splash. For once, there are no other sounds. A rare thing happens: the man permits himself to smile, his withered lips unfolding to reveal a row of triangular teeth, sharpened to a point. No one has ever seen the man smile, but this doesn't bother him. He has never seen anything, and besides, the drains and pipes that run under the city can carry an echo for miles.


'Mmm, na-na, na-na-na-na...'

Drafts 1-8

They told me 'put your heart and soul into your writing,' so I did. But it bored me to tears; my grand statements about how I saw the beauty of the universe in the reflection of the spoon that I was using to eat cornflakes, or just how much inner torment I was experiencing, were so, so pointless. Everyone has pondered the mysteries of life at three AM over cereal. Everyone has experienced crushing despair for some banal reason or another. Your heart and your soul are the same as everyone else's. Fuck your heart and soul. Language is more interesting than that.

Dango Margraves at the End of the World.

The often misinterpreted, misunderstand and generally maligned Dango Margraves is a fictional character. I made him up. His endeavours and exploits are entirely unrelated to real life events. Having said that, he stands at the end of the world, lighting another cigarette.

'Hey,' says a nervous man who looks like some kind of janitor or caretaker, 'you can't smoke here.'

Dango raises an eyebrow. He makes as if to extinguish the smoke, but pushes the man off the edge of the end of the world instead. He falls for so long that his flesh decays and his bones rot away into a fine dust. The end of the world is infinite in terms of both time and space; it is always happening and it is happening everywhere, and if they have banned smoking at an event which is omnipresent then they have banned smoking in totality and this is something that Dango will not stand for. Cigarettes are his central conceit. Without them he is literally nothing.

Apologue Two

In the dark, crouching on top of the washing machine with our hands around our knees we wonder - not for the first time - where it all went wrong. Not for the first time - not for the last, either - we fail to find a satisfying answer. It was, is and will continue to be a long process of gradual decay. All we can pin down is the time Marcus Margraves, the fighting dwarf, dislocated his shoulder in a drunken brawl. After that he stopped fighting, though he remained a dwarf. No other change in our little world was as definable. All we could say was that things were better 'before' and different 'now'. We briefly debated whether Marcus's injury was a turning point, or even the cause but eventually decide - not for the first time - that it was symptomatic of the larger downward spiral.

About me:

Worst is that sometimes when I wake up I am still dreaming. This is called sleep paralysis. I will lie there as unimaginable terror takes far too long to evaporate from where it was standing next to the bed, watching me sleep. Three months later I dream that I am in my room, watching myself sleep.Creeping, nauseating fear. I wake up, and watch myself vanish from across the room. I am unable to scream. I am unable to move. I am totally at the mercy of these imaginary horrors.

Second worst is audio recordings. I cannot let my voice be recorded, in case it says something else. So far so good.

These Children

'These children, who come at you with knives'
Manson said, in what amounted to a threat but
He had a point, you know -
The little fuckers are all tooled up
A six inch switchblade of staggering inconsequence
It stared me dead in the eyes and said:
'well, goh-ah dafend mysewf, in-it?'
and it was, we s'posed, but doubt persisted;
Though we knew the blade was imaginary
We were never sure about the kid.