This Darkness Mine Read Online Free

time, making this dark thing stronger.
    I suddenly want to go to the bathroom. My pancreas coruscates and there is hot urine running down my legs. The air that I breathe onto the dark glass oscillates. Then, I can’t inhale at all. Everything stops, so still. It vanishes and so do I.
    Only then is the glass clear once more.
    ****** 
    There is an advertisement on the wall of the train as I travel in and this is what it says.
    You don’t need innocence, you know. None of us do. It’s quite a very useless sickness, a humdrum disease. We can’t cut it or flush it out so we have to burn it out. That little soft spot of trembling white blood-jelly, we cauterise, close it with a hermetic seal. You’ll never feel a thing after that, no more bothersome loves, hurts, sorrows or serenities. Those all for nothing yesterdays will be a thing of the past.
    I cry out.
    Don’t be such a baby. I know it stings a little.
    ****** 
    I forget what happened at work today. Can’t remember. I toss and turn and then I toss myself off, emptying my fantasies into my hands as a wet, spoilt wight. Feeling a young sore open on my cock head, birth can be an infectious thing. Oh, sweet child o’ mine, I shall treasure thee. There are tongues and bared things wiping themselves clean on my skin, leaving a residue on the underside that dries as I gnaw on the royal jelly of rotting dreams.
     ******
    There are rooms at work we call the Quiet Rooms. Hermetic bunkers from the chatter of the world. If in dire need, you go in and lie down in the darkness, say what you like, say what you feel, shout and scream aloud, dance until raw, fight with yourself until one of these broken, synthetic aspects that you call you begs mercy. You emerge cleansed, able to face the world, to do anything, be anything. Until the bug-brained chatter gets under your skin again, grows incessant, turning the sulci fissures of your brain into a black hive of blind, wild, buzzing banalities. You go back to the room where it’s quiet and think about how a loaded gun might set you free.
    My e-mail pings. Someone needs something from the Archives. 
    The office basement’s geography is much as it was. The textures are all that’s different; the taste of the air, tapioca shit and a mild nerve agent. Enough to get you twitching, to keep the ganglions fetid and the cortices septic. Sex and violence float on the near-fluid waves of the atmosphere, emerging as fish-scale broken teeth, glimmerings of spit, sticking to you, after-images of cigarette smoke, making you prickle and take things slowly. Losing your balance, you want to topple on down, into yourself, never wanting to get up again. Only get it up again and again and again, rolling and curling, grabbing at me, at themselves.
    The tangy musk of wet penetrated spaces hangs over them, a dry early morning fog, lapping at my ankles, simpers, whimpers, cries and soft plops pepper and salt the strange scene. Fellow workers on all fours, colleagues in anal coitus, teary eyes, milk stains and misted rims. See how they are tender with each other; giving, needing, touching in lighter ways, sometimes. They crawl on all fours through their sick and piss and shit, eating the blood that is coming from the holes in their faces. Buggered bone seeping brain slush. Little boys and little girls mount the mewling donkey wreckage and drag tiny fingernails down their backs. A flaying, a scourging, that will take years and patience to complete. Tears and semen run together as we fuck to forget.
    I’ve not got time for this, there’s work to do. 
    I remember sunlight scattering as gold coins on dirt tracks, leaves fluttering in a summery breeze. Odd light filters in from some point in space I cannot see, and settles over the dust and debris of the Archives before me. Boxes of folders, folders on top of boxes, rickety stacks, doddery shelving, a clutter and a mess.
    There’s no order to it.
    It’s all discarded, unwanted.
    A place for the