This Darkness Mine Read Free

bananas and day-old jism is his calling card. He’s moving slow as you like towards me, without hurry. The air between us is a glycerine syrup he has conjured from some dream-time, stretching out the seconds, making more suffering space for me. It clings to him, leaving him wet and excited. In my pockets, I fumble for my salvation, a scuffed Bic lighter, red faded to pink, cracks and snaps in my fingers as I try to light it. Metal scoots over metal, refusing to catch, to ignite. He is grinning, giggling, licking his chops, tasting airborne spoor of fear, emptiness, despair.
    Flame leaps from my hands. Youching, I chuck it. Bomb it at him and duck, volatile air shrieks and blisters, he bats and slaps at himself, a sudden inferno, billowing, sizzling, flapping feebly as if to fly away from pain. If only. Then, gone, leaving slight soot-stains where he stood, charred ozone stinging my nostrils.
    Inhaling deep, I taste the opiate of his dead dreams.
     
    Creosote and old spice soak in through the glass. Run down rain that won’t last, hurricanes not due ‘til January. Dried semen opals rattle around my toes, hiding in crushed cans and empty bags of stolen sweets. Suicides hang from railway bridges and high school gates, their homemade gibbets rattle and tear in the screaming breeze. Overcast night, devil bright eyes, crystal tears settle on the silvered lips of mothers widowed from their children. They shuffle in segmented prayer, dripping sorrows down the drains. The sewers are a wailing iron-web calling out to them, its sad, aimless spiders, high on valium, growing cemetery warts. No predatory zeal, no killer instinct, no love required, not when there’s a microwave dinner waiting warmly and there’s Goldfinger on the telly.
     
    The way home is full darkness with bowing street lamps trailing mottled streams of light, spilling their luminous guts, burning through the night. I navigate by them, stepping through icky three-in-the-morning slush. I feel the chitin opening itself, letting loose those unthinkable feelings that do not smooth out over time. I dance from light hole to light hole. Heading on home. The air ripples with a febrile tension because this is their city, not ours. It is merely haunted by us. We are the aberration, parasites scuttling over the body we have poisoned, unhappily hungry, begging to it for wealth and power. We are so petty and small in our whining, they are sick of us, incessant us. They advance on us with shining, sticky hands, dripping with the deposits left by the masturbatory ferocities that grip them in the draughty bus-shelters of the afterlife.
    This city belongs to the dead.
     
    There’s an atheist in the church and all eyes are on him. He approaches the altar with outstretched, subordinate hands. His eyes downturned. His steps shuffle, mutter then curse.
    Then he comes to an end.
     
    There’s a place called The Shop and you can get everything there. Good price. Low price. Cut price. That is, everything you don’t want. Why would you want something you don’t want? That’s what you’re thinking but is that not what we want all our lives long? Things to fall over at home, ever-increasing hoards of rubbish, snapping, splintering, breaking-down clinkered heaps of microchip, beads, plastic, perished rubber and wood.
    So in we go, into The Shop.
    Marching in, we tick the box on the disposable card-strip and stand patiently in line. Our faces serene, unlined and our guts gurgle, our throats are in turmoil, so eager, expectant. We know what’s coming, what the assistants will bring to us, place in our hands, hurriedly. Look at us askance, plead with their eyes for us to take it away. They wipe their hands on their tunics to erase the wet electric sensation of having touched our purchase.
    They try to look away but are drawn back to stare at it. The softly shifting dimensions of it, the out-of-focus outlines, patches of damp. Then, there is the way the vestigial limbs twitch and grow,