The ghost stag

Thunderous hooves striking basalt and arduous turf, the beast roared its approval of the land with rhythmic beating footfalls.
Shooting out from the treeline came the white stag - a creature so tremendous that the onlooker was said to shade his eyes from its radiance.
Here stood Henry, the great photographer, the consummate filmmaker, with his sights trained upon the stag.
This animal, breathtaking in its realism, Henry could only afford to glimpse through the thick lens of his camera. Its reflection, squeezed and twisted through the barrel of an 800mm lens, came to the eye as a perfect replica of its image, as if you were standing mere feet from the delicious creature.
How rare a find, was this stag. Everything related was now Henry’s. He would name said stag, he would describe the rituals and trials, friends and lovers of the animal. He would report on it all and pass the information to the world - a world that didn’t even realise it was waiting.
All day long he watched the creature, he snapped and reviewed, he filmed and played back. Amazing footage: eating, running, calling, standing and looking. The mundane became majestic, almost supernatural, in the presence of the white stag.
Ancient Celtic cultures were wary of the beast. They recognised it had great power, its presence in a local glen would bring forth soothsayers, melancholy for the lives of the landowner and his family. Some even say the white stag is behind the myth of the unicorn.
But Henry forgot these flotsam mythologies, for his childhood was fuelled by but one story - that of the ghost stag.
This animal appeared around once a century - often before a time of war or other great suffering. Its advent was traditionally seen by farmers as the crying out of the land. The animalisation of nature to bring forth a message of unnatural events to come. It was as if the ghost stag were spat forth by an acrid earth to run, whisper and warn of a brewing apocalypse.
These were the thoughts and fine wonders that filled Henry’s mind as he shot away at the beast - his images growing more graceful, more godlike with each passing hour, with each memory card filled with photographs.
It was at roughly 3pm that the white stag turned its nose to the east and sensed Henry’s distant presence. Camouflaged in a green hide, tied up between a large bushel and a solitary pine tree, sat Henry. And as the ghost stag turned its head, so that it was the direct peer of his eyes that was squeezed and shunted down the telescopic barrel of Henry’s lens, the cameraman’s finger stopped firing shots off at the deer and froze for the first time in three hours.
It crept forward at first, stealthy, into and out of heather strewn ditches and hollows. It haunted the moorland like a legendary wight, seeking the unfortunate traveller in order to feast on his vitality. Then it darted north-easterly, splashing through a full winter stream and causing other deer to worry away into higher ground.
As the ghost stag crossed the byrne, effectively entering a rival’s territory, it occurred to Henry that the beast may be nearing on purpose - may be coming for him.
The focal length of his lens had reached it’s lowest capacity now and a new fitment would be necessary to apply to the camera. Of course, it is rare that stags should come so near, especially with the rutting season approaching, but Henry was prepared and rolled out of his camper chair to pick up the video camera - which was capable of a much more diverse range - and slowly zoomed out.
Steadily, the blur of the middle distance gave out and the eloquent stride of the white stag filled the frame. Then it began bounding up the hill, a full-charge for the tent, and it had roared a sneering cry before its launch.
With one hand, Henry held the video camera very steady and kept the brown eyes of the deer in shot and in focus with an insane determination. With the other hand he picked up his old analogue SLR camera and held it up to the flap in the sopping hide. Flicking the switch to ‘rapid/continuous’ shooting mode, the camera was able to fire off tens of shots into the face of the animal, lit by the light of a myriad camera flashes.
The ghost stag reared and bellowed, bellowed and reared, before dropping to its feet and munching the untouched wild grasses that grow in such heath regions. It milled and rested for fifteen minutes or so before disappearing over a steep rise.
Henry’s heartbeat then returned to normal, as did most things within the world. Henry blew the air out from his lungs and slowly wiped his brow.
He would look at the pictures, but not yet. He would wait. He would wait to stare at the creature, the great white beast, the ghost stag. He would wait, because he realised that this life is transitory , as are the actions of everything in it.
What if the shots were blurred, what if the lens was smeared, what if the stag seemed less than brilliant white?
The ghost stag could not be viewed for the moment, because, in Henry’s mind at least, the images would be burned indelibly, perfectly.
It’s a photographer’s prerogative to notice the flaws in an image and, sometimes, to remember the flaws alone.

The spoils of war

Yes, I try to forget, but you wrench these memories from me like the gold teeth I extracted from that gallant Frenchman on the fields of the Somme.
The rounds whistled like throstles that day as I crouched by his broken body and took my windfall. What was death to me in that hellish maw? Had I been there at Flanders or seen the very Angels of Mons I would still have stopped to fill my pockets with these ingots. These molars are life. And just as the dragon tooth, when sowed can bring power, so my find should bring me a great life once I returned from the blasted front.
Next thing I was flung into a scarified tree by a falling shell which disrupted a nearby corpse into flakes of its former shape. I passed out and woke in a field hospital. I felt the doctors whispered as they left my bedside. They later shipped me off to Scotland for recuperation. I had to sleep with one eye open for the men of my ward surely knew what secret lay in my pyjama pocket. But it was to no avail. The teeth were lost one night and I could do naught to request their return.
One morning Wilfred recited a poem of his about a beggar who went to war and stole from the dead. He called it 'The Ghoul' and likened the sorry beast to the grave worrying scientist, M. Frankenstein himself. I scowled and shrank into my bed. Siegfried laughed loudly at his friends' joke, and as he guffawed I swear I caught the glint of gold in his mouth.

St Vitus' Dance

I can’t hear because of the screaming of the crowd. I can feel them all around me.
They don’t know I’m there yet, but they’ve come to see me. I allow myself a grin - I try not to cough, or make any sound.
Someone is banging, a rhythmic pounding, almost upon me. It’s too regular to mean this is my time. I will remain here just a little longer.
Sweat is starting too engulf me. I wonder, for a mere second, if I might drown in here. I have an orange stress ball in my hand which I squeeze after every blow rains down. THUMP, THUMP, THUMP. Fear and excitement well up in equal measure. The adrenaline feels like it’s going to burst from my skull in a vibrant fountain, gushing and mixing with the sweat to create strange chemical concoctions to feed the frenzy of the waiting mob.
I’m in a box, a crate about six feet long and a couple of feet deep. I think it’s used to carry lighting or wires or something. A massive stagehand dragged me over here a few minutes ago and I’m supposed to wait in silence for five minutes.
I’ll be able to tell when the rest of the band take to the stage - the cacophony will increase as screams mix with chords. An A-minor to start with, I believe. Then, just as the audience think there can be no more excitement - that excitement does not have a level beyond this point - I will rise, with grace and power. My made-up face inches from theirs. And in one moment they will know fear, awe and then rapture.
I picture this moment, I imagine the crowd’s reaction. That’s invariably when the shakes happen. Slow trembles in my calf muscles - they twitch like I’m cold - I do feel cold, and clammy now. I’m shivering, but I feel ridiculous. It’s more than a shiver, I’m twitching all over - I’m vibrating.
The crowd roars, as if to salute my St Vitus’ Dance, they won’t hear my head threshing against the sides of the box. My body becomes very heavy and my eye lids droop with the sleep of a child. I’m shutting down and I like it, I will it to happen.
And then comes the chord, the A minor that startles me from my reverie, and I rise so quickly from my casket, so much more wildly than in my mind’s eye.
I whirl around before the baying punters. The room spinning ever so slightly, but the adrenaline tempering it.I fight back the vomit, but they’d love it in their faces.
A strange choreography is at work. There is a crazed man in their midst, floundering, dying; but they feed off it. They go wild.
Every show starts like this.

The Green Man

One day a man felt something in his shoe. Not painful, or particularly uncomfortable, just different. He smiled as he walked, now he was special, different from the others. They had ordinary shoes with nothing inside but their feet. They had ordinary feet that couldn't stand to have something pressed up against them all day.
And all night, so it came to pass, because this young man decided never again to remove the shoes that made him so different.
One day his leg began to turn green but his doctor could not persuade him to remove his shoes to find the cause of the infection. So he hobbled out of the surgery and back into the world where he was now a man with special feet and a green leg to boot.
On the 4th of December, 1989, he passed away. His body, now all green, had made him a figure of freakish fun for the tabloid newspapers of the day.
The next day, his jaded body lain on the slab, the man's GP was in attendance at his autopsy. "May I?" he asked and the coroner nodded.
With one gloved hand he gripped a mushy leg and with the other slid away a black brogue. "Aha!" he exclaimed as the coroner and his assistant craned their necks to peer over the GPs shoulder and stare deep into the shoe.
Tipping it, ever so slightly, an object rolled into view. The globular form of a single garden pea.

Strolling before the city became shiny (2)

Or perhaps he almost lost control and almost ploughed into me.
Hitting an undulation in the tarmac, it seemed his attempt at turning the car followed the road perfectly – just as if his wheels were on tracks. Maybe there never was any danger? I mused on this as I walked on.
Rounding the pavement, the road snaked back about the rear of the tower. I crossed over to get a better view and the wind howled in my brain. The block, more impressive it now seemed, was desolate. Work on the higher levels had apparently ceased, perhaps due to the gale.
Old Hall Street itself was scarcely populated and as I watched the ramparts of the half finished tower, plastic bags floated mockingly in the breeze – like some Scooby-Doo ghost that would later be inevitably unmasked.
Two skate-punks scraped around a side street. An infamous city apparition, they quickly vanished. Their gothy apparitions fading, like their short-sleeve shirts.
There are side streets. So many side streets in the city. Places people barely seem to go. They’re not out of bounds. It’s not like you’d get stabbed for going into the wrong street.
People just ignore them, they either don’t notice they are there or they don’t care.
I noticed them only six months ago. This was about the time of my awakening. A time when I noticed a world I had ignored before, just like everyone else still seemed to be doing. It was about this time that I first needed to see my own blood.
So the side streets, yes. Essential, visit every quiet city centre street in Liverpool. So much more interesting than the beaten track. Side streets off Old Hall Street can lead to views of abandoned old Liverpool. Broken glass gives way to warehouses; dark, dusty, haunted by bustling dreams of life.
That life, that real life, now gone - all but for the tattered cobwebs and splintered floorboards that we can’t even touch anymore.
Someone touched them though, so imagine them. Stand in the street, quiet, no traffic, no access to anywhere, except the past. Anywhere you can get away from the people and see the true heart of the city then do so.
The people are now merely blood cells, pumping further and further from the heart that once sent them forth. But we’ve got to get back to the heart.

“This dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the greyish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain. Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque - just as I felt then.
But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the ‘pool of life’. The ‘liver’, according to an old view, is the seat of life - that which ‘makes to live’.” - Carl Gustav Jung

Strolling before the city became shiny (1)

I passed several women with umbrellas as I left the building. They had thought ahead this morning and heeded the weatherman’s threat of rain, although the rain had not come, thus far.
No rain, but wind. A strong gust that rattled the teeth and singed the ears but, if wrapped in a half-decent coat, wouldn’t cut through the bones. I braced myself and gazed toward the water, visible at the bottom of the street, over the carriageway and beyond. Not too busy, the ferry was in view and a ship was moored on the far bank of the river.
I continued on down the hill, the pavement not too cracked as I advanced towards the on-coming traffic. A one way street with a church on the left, a hotel at the bottom shaped like a steam iron and two red post boxes. There was so much more to the street, but on this journey little more was noticed.
The post boxes were salient as I had twice trekked to more far flung pillars to deposit mail in the last few weeks. Had these two beauties sprung up over night? I realised I was far less observant at street level than I was with the skyline above. I was angry with myself, angry for noticing and, then again, for not noticing. I imagined kicking the post boxes and then moved on.
I was walking for the sake of it. I had never before rounded the front of the Atlantic Tower Hotel and travelled against the flow of Albert Dock bound traffic. I did it today. Maybe I’d been missing out on something amazing? I doubted it almost completely, but intuitively realised it was worth doing. Experience is everything to a man, to this man at least.
Surprised as I was to learn that one of the road tunnels under the River Mersey exited beneath the body of the hotel, I almost walked out into tunnel traffic. At first the tunnel appeared to me a mouth, a wondrous cavern into the depths of the city and later the planet. Yet it became immediately unwelcoming as it spat uncomfortable vehicles towards me.
The stream was not continuous. Indeed, for small periods, the mouth lay empty and invited my consideration to walk inside, arms ready to embrace whatever I should find within. Of course, I expected to be embracing a warm bonnet if I should venture into this particular Aladdin’s Cave. The experience gained would likely be my last.
This degree of empirical data was, I felt, at this time unnecessary and I had seen the likely results in an UNKLE video on MTV2 recently.
I instead waited for a safe opportunity to cross the forked-tongue-road that allowed traffic out onto the main carriageway. My legs skipped across the tarmac with some urgency.
Ahead lay the near side of a new development. To be the tallest building on the Liverpool skyline, I needed to see the façade from beneath. A tune, recognisable as coming from the obtuse stable of DJ Paul Oakenfold, was annoying my mind – some fool had it blaring from their car-stereo. These sensual beats, along with a Holsten Pills billboard, distracted me sufficiently from the fact I was already standing beneath the new tower. I looked up and it seemed small.
Unimpressed as I, perhaps, some joker in an Audi lost control and ploughed into me.

The Kraken Sleeps

“Only time shakes the Kraken.” That’s what Franks always told me. But I never really understood it until a few days after Pierrot died.
The museum was a lonely place after that, let me tell you. Pierrot was larger than everybody in there. A frothing personality, a trembling soul, his shrieking laughter filled your bones with vitality and your chest with warmth. He was like fruit for the soul. Everyone tried to get their five-a-day of Pierrot.
Pierrot once lifted me up onto his shoulders. It was a sad day for me. I’d broken up with my girlfriend - a week before - and then my grandma died. Pierrot caught me crying in the storeroom. He didn’t check a step when he saw the tears rolling. Instead, barging right into me and then picking me up as if I were a piece of bread that he was going to slam in the toaster and make warm, he carried me high, high about the room so that I could see those dusty shelves that usually I wasn‘t able to reach.
And he knew I wasn’t allowed to use the stepladder ‘cos my balance is poor, but he put me up there - left me right on the shelf and said: “Stay up there, stay high until you feel like coming down. Give me a call when you know you’re done.”
Just then he walked away, whistling. I heard his footsteps walk down the hall some way and then he got out the whizzer and started polishing the corridor, so that even if I wanted to get down I couldn’t, not for the moment.
I sat up there for two hours while Pierrot finished the work, and I sat and thought about grandma and my life up to that point and my life to come.
Later Pierrot came back and helped me down. We both handed in our time cards and went home and Pierrot never said anything to me about the time I’d sat up on the highest shelf while he did all the work.
Pierrot scared you, but he made you feel like you could fulfil something in your life.
So why did Franks call Pierrot the Kraken? Hell, I didn’t even know what a kraken was until two days after Pierrot's funeral.
I was in the library and I was enjoying a book about strange creatures that this kid had left on the reading bench. Mermaids, Selkies and Samiads - all interesting parts of the chapter on sea-creatures (did you know that selkies were able to take human form and, if caught, had to live as the betrothed of their human captor, unless they found their selkie skin?) - but the kraken…
The kraken was a massive creature, a many tentacled beast related to tales of colossal squid attacking the boats of merchants crossing the various trade oceans of this world. The open ocean is a barren place - “more devoid of life, perhaps, than the great land deserts of this world” - but was it devoid enough for a creature to want to attempt to chew on a large galleon? Well, maybe, and that’s the kraken. Nothing is too big for the kraken to tackle.
I guess that’s it. I think that must be why. That Franks is a succinct fellow. I’m glad he never gave a eulogy at Pierrot's funeral, though.

The hands of Mitch Gregory

For two weeks Mitch Gregory’s hands had been slowly swelling.
He felt it at first like a numbness in his extremities, such as when the circulation of blood seems poor. Later in the first week came the cold, his hands and fingers were in the grip of some glacial freeze.
Careful observation produced no sign of colour change: the skin wasn’t particularly white or even blue, there was no bruising or rash appearing upon the epidermis. Mitch asked his friend, an oncologist, to take a look, describing the strange symptoms. The friend’s reaction was one of simple time-wasting or hypochondria. He suggested applying some sort of gel used in nerve pain.
The gel was useless and by the middle of the second week the phenomenon had caused a visible change in the size of Mitch’s hands. It was most remarkable in the fingers which gave the appearance of uncooked sausages. Mitch became rather concerned by this development and, on the Thursday, visited his GP who decided the cause of the swelling to be caused either by an inflammation of the tendons in the hand (perhaps stress-related) or due to some prior blow to the arm resulting in a delayed swelling.
In either case, rest and an ice-pack, along with anti-inflammatory medication, was the best course of action. So Mitch took the remainder of the week off and prepared to relax.
Things seemed well and his hands had reduced in size, returning almost to a recognisable constant. By the weekend, however, friends were dismayed to witness a downturn in his general health.
A vicious fever gripped him and he was unable to sleep without delirium upsetting him and the close friends who watched over his dreams. His hands, let it be noted, had returned to their usual size and state, yet Mitch would cry out in his sleep that the big hands were with him; that the big hands were crushing his world.
The fever broke by Wednesday and his friends were relieved. One close friend, Maria, in her fear for Mitch’s life during this period, had realised that her feelings for him were stronger than mere friendship and she asked to stay with him, alone, that night.
The events of that night from the moment Maria shut the door on the last of the well-wishers are clouded. Apparently they went straight to bed where they made love. Maria mentions being aware of an immense grip upon her body that pinned her to the bed during the intercourse. Later inspection of her body by doctors suggest she was held down, about the shoulders, by a man twice the size of Mitch Gregory.
The couple fell asleep, holding hands as far as Maria can remember. At 3am she awoke in great pain and distress. Stumbling into the bathroom she struggled to switch on the light. Her right hand hung limply and ragged at her side. All the bones had been crushed and the muscles torn. The appendage was later amputated.
When police entered Mr Gregory’s apartment at around 7.30 that morning they found that all the door handles had been destroyed and several items of furniture showed signs of tearing and clawing. The television set, microwave and home computer had all been crushed “like scrap metal”.
According to the report, Miss Maria Derwent was found unconscious in the bath tub and was taken by ambulance to Ford’s Hill Hospital.
The body of Mr Mitch Gregory, was meanwhile discovered laid out on the floor of his lounge, his hands covering his face. Cause of death was recorded as strangulation, possibly self-inflicted.

Becoming night

It took him many years to realise how to command the night.
The day was no good; the day was chaotic. But once the sun died, and the only light came from tiny tears in the sky’s canvas, then he could have dominion.
He had slept at first for he didn’t even know that he wished this, wished to fly at night. Then one day, one summer’s evening some sixteen years after his birth, he stayed up through the night and saw the dawn giving birth to light.
An awesome sight for any to see, but it was the feeling of the night that surprised him most. It seemed so still, but frightening. In the rampant chaos of the day it seems everything happens, but there is a concurrent pattern to every action. Little happens that is not planned. It occurred to him, to this growing man, that the company of so many other human beings, so many throbbing lives, was a restriction, was the restriction against the infinity that life promised.
Perhaps that is why religion is held sacred in the day; it is the only glimpse into infinity we are allowed to see with the sun’s light in our eyes. Once these other redundant, copying minds are allowed to rest, there is space for individual consciousness to breathe.
So he would sit up for hours, his apartment lit only by the light of candles, and converse with his soul. Great journeys would be taken across strange voids of thought, now that he was unfettered by other minds.
By his 41st birthday, Alaric has started to leave the house only after the hour of midnight. He would walk about the skulking streets watching the lives of the neighbourhood cats. He observed their societies with the interest of a god. Sometimes he would throw stones into their midst like thunderbolts, other times he might throw fish.
In the darkness, bright long roads become strange tangential avenues to untold groping pits of despair. Oftentimes his mind would ascend while journeying a once familiar street, and he would lose himself to the infinite and awake with the sun, weeping naked in a garden pond or a forgotten brook.
It was on a thick autumn night upon the dunes I met him. He was howling and incandescent as the hailstones pelted his bare body. I understood that he hadn’t registered my presence. It was as if angels were the only sight he expected to see on the beach that night; only a divine mind did he wish to converse with.
The time was roughly 3am and thunder tumbled atop waves that swept up the beach. I climbed to the top of the highest dune peak and tore at my shirt until the buttons burst and my skin was exposed, like his, to the ice bristles that crashed down upon us.
The sky fizzed grey above and I was transfigured before him - my shirt floating wings about my arms.
In that instance the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the world to be translucent. He had witnessed the presence of the divine mind and it had burned his retina sorely.
Once the storm passed I went to Alaric, blinded but penitent, and helped him to his feet. He told me he now knew everything, that he had tasted the fire of heaven and survived its draught.
I took him home and asked him to teach me all he had learnt on his journeys. I feigned awe often but siphoned much from his babblings. Truly this man was insane, but his methods were sound for I had come to the same conclusions as he, as to the power of the night.
After many months, when I had learnt all that he had encountered throughout those 25 years since he shunned the light, I took him back to the beach where we had first met and bade him walk across the boiling seas until he find the maker of his near perfect mind.
I’m sure he journeyed with a bright smile even as the wintry waters tugged at his flesh. Whether the divine mind lay above or below the waves, he wouldn’t have known or cared.
Now I am alone, able to continue this experiment in solitude and silence. I am the true hermit, the true holy man. I have survived in the dark wilderness for more years than any but Alaric, and with his insights I will grope even further. I will have mastery over the black alleyways and dank canals, I will walk where shadows even fade away. I will transcend the body and will inhabit only mind.
I will become the night, for the night offers nothing more than the light it takes.

Drive

Fumbling, the tight argument peters out.
See the Blackpool lights in the puddles as we crash through Damocles' daggers of drizzle in the way of my eyes.
She talks of pulling the top down: "Getting wet ‘til we’re drenched!" The insanity makes us wretch with giggles that cease, when the ice shards pierce our tiny skulls and the leather of the seats.
See, I can drive, when she lets me, but we’re still now and the roof’s back. So we dry the seats with our clothes and she won’t let me drive for a while, though not for too long – we must return the car in time.

The Lord of Pollen

"Don't it smell lovely, Aunt Mar'Lou? Juss lark fla'rs in the meadow. "
"Sleep now child, don't say such things."
And then the Lord of Pollen appeared to the Radish family and nectar rained down about the room. The Pollen King dripped honey onto the girl's chin and rubbed it gently. A bumble bee perched there and stung the girl so that she laughed. Then the great old man glowed and the room was alive with the sound of bees, yet none could be seen.
"Get up, get up from your bed child" thus spake the Lord of Bees. And the girl rose from her bed, rose a foot from the ground. Her mother gasped as she saw the wings that had grown out from her spine.
Her mother tried to grab her daughter, tried in vain to close the open window. The Pollen King opened his mouth and it crawled with hornets. His great tongue lashed them across the room and they tore at the mother's skin and eyes with their barbed bodies.
"All insects come to be this way," he cried, and the bees swarmed black in the sky above.

Silver

I used to call her my snugly wrapped little bundle of joy. She was everything to me. You could ask me to define ‘everything’, but in this case it would be sooooo difficult. Anyway she was something special, I think you understand that much.
Well, we were inseparable her and I, during those five years not a day went by when I didn’t hold her or push her to my lips, close, yes, that’s the way; gently at first, teasing me with the anticipation before the sudden rush of pleasure. Yeah, I think its true to say she got pretty hot at times.
What’s that, her name? Well I’ve tried to forget it, I mean I never called her by it anyway. There was only one person who heard me use her real name – a mate of mine – works down the paper shop. Anyway I used to otherwise refer to her as ‘Silver’. It was my pet name for her – I hoped it would make her feel special, like she was precious somehow, like she was worth so much to me, and made me feel like a rich, rich man.
Of course I wasn’t rich in the monetary sense of the word. Mind you she didn’t seem to care, and then again it’s probably fair to say that my lack of funds was largely down to her. It didn’t matter to me. I would have gladly spent twice what I earned on her; that’s how much she meant to me. But still it wasn’t meant to be.
It’s true to say ours wasn’t the healthiest of relationships. There was always the flame, the passionate heat; but it was lust, not love. I was scared of getting burned and sought solace in the arms of another, whom I grew to love. Still though I found myself going back to my Silver. She was like an obsession - an addiction some would call it.
But my guilt about my dirty secret grew. How long could I keep this from my beloved? This question would soon be answered when she caught us together in the garden shed.
She was angry at first. She thought it was disgusting. I begged for forgiveness, I grovelled. I got down on my knees and pleaded with her. I even asked her to marry me (I guess you say stupid things in these kind of situations).
Then came the ultimatum: ‘I’ll marry you on the condition that you give her up’ – or words to that effect. Anyway it came down to a choice between the two, my sensibilities took over and the wedding was on.
Since then I’ve tried to stay away from her. Sure I’ve seen her down the pub and that, but I generally try to stay out of her way. Ironic, isn’t it, that I gave her up for a silver-plated manacle, a circular symbol of ownership. Still I do look and feel better for it.
But you know every now and then, when the patches wear off, I just sit there and think about how much I miss those damn cigarettes!

Under the desk

Last week it was all getting too much for me, so I crawled under my desk during a particularly difficult phone call and hid upon the purple floor.
As I sat under the desk I looked out at many pairs of female legs, gathering around my chair. They were talking about me in hideous whispers. I put my hands over my ears so that I couldn't hear them any more, to little avail.
The whispers became chants which grew ever louder and more raucous. Feet began stamping in obtuse rhythm. There may have been hand claps and then a pair of legs vanished upwards. With a thick thud the bang sounded that announced this woman had leapt up onto my desk. She stamped and wailed and danced about making a cacophony for my poor mind to cope with, crying now, below the desk.
The leader seemed to call her followers' motions with rabid screams. Shatteringly, my earlier telephone caller then rang back and the leader picked it up and vomited gargling inanities into the mouthpiece. Next it seemed like she smashed the receiver down, down, down onto my desk. An excited laughter rumbled around the office until the phone finally was smashed into chunks. With this, all the pairs of feet suddenly held still and I could not hear a breath taken.
I waited in horror, my breath also baited, what would break the monotony of this nothing? Of this puncture in time and space? Was an attack inevitable, would they leap below the desk, clawing for me and drag me out for crucifixion? Perhaps they meant to smoke me out?
The silence moved me with incalculable tension to begin to scream, to begin to blurt out my name. As I opened my mouth every telephone in the room sounded. Every telephone rang it's dreadful call and the blood drained from my brain, causing my faint.
That was the last thing I remember and now, here I am writing this at the same desk, with the same phone next to me, with the same pairs of legs sitting neatly at right angles across nearby chairs with multi-wheels. But the floor these wheels track across - the floor is now violet!

Skimming the mire

Groping is done best without light. Down here we do not see, we feel. We do not smell, but we hear. We never taste.
Sploshing in the middle levels I find bones and guts. Any animal will do: horse, rabbit, chicken or dog. I must, many times, have handled the remains of the elderly and of small children. How would I know when all I feel for is the strength of close vitality, or the brittle of dried seaweed?
I disengage from probabilities and just stuff my sack, it doesn’t matter any more. There’s no policeman looking for such as these.
I sloop through soupy wastes in search of morsels to pick. I wade and stink. The priest does not open his confessional to me, but his bowels? Now there’s a sight to see. From me, he cannot hide even that which he puts inside of him; for I am waiting when the waters discharge from his chambers.
But I am not the first to spy. The holy spring gushes forth onto the strongest vermin, whence they collect the greedy flotsam. Coins, perhaps? Children’s trinkets, once held close to the heart; a lady’s jewels, once clasped close to her breast; a pen; a wig; a soiled handkerchief. All are siphoned and spooned into ragged pockets for later sale and barter. Thus the stronger stay strong, and afford bread and gin for their fetid mouths. They sleep somewhere above ground.
Then we come. The gropers without flame or flesh, even. Sometimes thrashing about for the slimy carcasses. My sack is full of the bishop’s chops and I will soon find my walkway up onto the Operngasse and sell my bones at the soot-belching factory.
I too will have enough for gin.
After come the skimmers. They steal the very life-blood of the city, the fat and grease that settles on the surface of the grimacing, stagnant sewer. Even this can be sold.
Once I found a skimmer, choked with rats, his one eye panicked but glazed. I waited as long as I could before I helped the bones free.