This Darkness Mine Read Free Page B

their computer monitor screens, walking away from the building, sometimes, you look back over your shoulder. You see it lit from within by epileptic, high-definition ghosts. They scamper and writhe about as dead bodies go to and then fro, disturbing the flow of artificial light. From desk to photocopier to fax to confidential recycling bin, best workers in the world, you see, because their brains are shot. Gone. Stone dead. They’re not as interesting as the zombies you see in films because if you’re dead, you don’t want to do anything, never mind eat the brains of the living.
    What would be the point?
    No reason to do it. No more than there would be for them to wander about, arms outstretched or to snarl, make a sound at all. No, the dead are quiet. They smell bad, eggs and old cheese, sometimes they leak and no-one wants to clean the stains up. The dead don’t care what state they’re in.
    Again, why would they?
    No reason to, no more than there would be for them to remember where they lived. Dead means brain dead. Nobody home. It means don’t care, don’t know, don’t want, don’t need. I envy them that despite the emerging fact that they’ll do us all out of work. Sometimes, you look back over your shoulder and see those tell-tale eyes; receding, dried-out apricot pits and the beehive-husk brains behind them looking back, out from the black, at you. Holding your gaze with a mere suggestion of intelligence, recognition, perception. Something’s in there, inside those dead heads, it knows what it’s doing. Someone I work with for a long time, never knew their name, they dropped dead yesterday. I know, terrible thing to happen, right? You know what the first question was? The one that everyone asked?
    “When’ll he be back at work then?”
    ****** 
    Tonight I have tried to become one of the dead. I’ve cleaned all the matter from my fingers and hands. There’s blood everywhere, I can feel the mattress squelching, wet with love. I hold shivering white bones up to the moonlight and try to move them but there’s too much pain. It fills every inch of me and everything in my surroundings is in me. It takes the form of hump-backed goblins, their stilted faces splashed with the bleached glee of badly-animated shadows. The angles lean and bite at me with whittled edges, a song escapes me, thin and reedy with melancholy. I whistle its tune, hoping to dissipate the pain, but the melody breaks and so do I.
    This bed, this room, get to the outside, I can’t do a thing with my hands though. I look at the door handle. The key, loose-tongued in the lock. The glistening spaghetti and scraped sticks sting and whimper. I make up a number with the clogging blood, I dab at the emptiness before me. I watch the number I have made hang there, dripping down. A click, a creak and the door opens. The number, mine, dissolves into copper mist.
    Outside is waiting, for me, and I go to it.
    I am the fractured man, so it seems. A scarified suit that bleeds creation and control with dust and moisture. I’ve rewoven my hands from the bloodied ruins I carved them into. The wounds must be small and hidden, if made at all. My legs, arms and torso will be suitable for this; little, little cuts. A few drops of gore fall to linoleum floor, shining bright. That’s all I need. It will keep me going.
    My alarm goes off.
    With the usual array of grunts and sighs, I get up and am soon ready and go on my way to work.
    These dreams are getting worse. 
    I stop by a window that is on my way, seeing the tone of its glass, its deeper shade. Last night, I came by and saw a couple inside. Canoodling on the couch, pale legs and roaming hands, rucked-up peachskin blouse, a breast-fed jiggle of coffee areola. I could not have seen a scene like that through this. The glass is too dark; heavy, opaque. It obscures all else as I come up to its smooth, natural surface. The carbon particles settling on it remind me of Time. People are at work, wasting precious