This Darkness Mine Read Free Page A

fingers and toes recede and deform, according to the mood of the purchase. Stinking geriatric fuck-holes open and beg, embarrassingly, in public, to be fingered as we pass by. A slit opens, forming a lizardly eye from yellow putrescent jelly. The eye is soon overcome though, strangled to death by the bloodshot web of its capillaries. It makes such a mess when it pops like an old egg, the dripping remains of it giving birth to a rustling brood of white-haired whining spiders, which scatter to every dark corner.
    Some of the purchases are swathed in used hospital linens whilst others are stuffed into stapled-shut supermarket boxes, bandaged with reams of brown packing tape to keep the amniotic fluids in, as much as is possible. We hurry out. We are ashamed.
    The Shop is an odd place.
    Every city has one.
     
    Intersections and vivisections. You can cut and peel it how you like. Staple down the open flesh. Admire the naked meat from your favourite position. See it glisten, run with blood and shine under the surgical lamp-light. A scalpel, a rough guide and an idea where to start working on it.
    Hack work.
     
    Shit scared and nervous. Insects writhe on hot plates behind my eyes. Popping black popcorns leaking cartilage. I wear the same clothes and skin as ever. Thin and sickly hiding in pretentious heavy black. Passing into the office as an afterthought in the lower ganglion reaches of an unwanted HR assistant. Self-righteous malaria stalks the corridors on high heels with a face that implies deep-seated internal pain. The tap of the heels is the same tap as fingers on keyboard keys, as the rattle of a dismissal interview door handle. A mad monkey, red-eye wild, whoops and bangs on its glass cage.
    I collapse into a thousand shivering neuro-statics. Slip into the deep, dark shit of human existence. In high colour, I’m out. Found out. Seen for what I am. Better out than in. Sad grey eyes follow me and my fear, staring from cemetery cells, redundancy graveyards, butcher’s yards of abattoir-fed fools. Take us with you. Out of this place. This corporate cut-out Hell fermenting in the sulphur of Financial Times hues. Theft and murder are the pandemics uncured by the patient, high-born sodomisers who stride the steel, oil and plastic-made spaces of restructured disaster.
    Sit back, I say, sit back and relax, my friends.
    An ice-cold Coke’s the cure.
    Taste sick dizziness, lose some sleep.
    Give yourself something to worry about.
    The world can wait.
     
    His throat is hanging open. His belly is trailing its tacky ropes, kindly smiling without teeth. He jiggles and jingles the battered tin cup that he begs with, stroking the dead dog lying across his lap. The dog’s gums are fleeing from its teeth. Eyes hardening into crispy nuggets of black and white. Soon, the vermin will have eaten away the skin and shown a bit more bone. Whatever else remains, the tramp can have a nibble on.
    Them’s the rules, you see.
    The tramp has been dead for about a week. His jaw is loose, his beard is coming off in faminous clumps and the dog died maybe a day or two longer ago than that. I remember seeing him cock his leg and piss thick blood about a month ago. Today, stiff zombie fingers rake and stir through the thinning hound’s fur, a rib tip punctures wasting flesh, a fish-hook end. The tramp runs a coarse finger along it, making music, licking off a clear, corrupt fluid. I nod his way and he smiles at me.
    We look after one another.
    Know what I mean?
    ****** 
    This is my workplace and I am finally accepting that it is my asylum. The air echoing with cries and despair. I sit lower in my cubicle, hoping not to be seen. My fingers work against the keyboard, turning red numbers to black. My workplace is staffed by the living and the dead. The sick and bizarre truth being that the dead are the better workers; they don’t sleep, their brains are dead so you can leave them to work through the night. Grey, speckly masks staring into the flicker of