This Darkness Mine Read Online Free Page A

forgotten.
    The rest of us, those who don’t become great, those who don’t matter, who live without the beauty, skill or talent to make things better. We who will never rise again; the fallen, the trampled-upon, bottom-feeders who subsist on mediocre, give-away gruel. The testaments that we existed, were once around in the world, are all in here. Frail invoices, decrepit dispatch copies, carbon scrunches, creased-up scrawls, bitter, meaningless lives that wither away.
    Dead flowers in old dustbins.
    This is our resting place, the long cold waiting room on the precipice overhanging nothingness, yearning to feel the death-rattle of existence and everything else that made it come into being. Gently, I go picking my way through false corridors of stationery, building a bookshop claustrophobia, second-hand, it gnaws at my fingertips.
    A box shifts of its own accord, a ghost in my periphery that I barely see, sending down a rain of mummified leaves. Something falls out that is neither paper, nor a folder or files. Something flesh-heavy and wet. The box exhales. The cat is dead. The card insides of its makeshift coffin gouged with tears, fur clings to strips of yellowed decomposition.
    “You were a sacrifice here, weren’t you?”
    The carcass’s drawn lips, edged with wriggling blackness, don’t speak but I know.
    The Archive demanded an offering, a sacrifice so that one of my predecessors might come here and go out again with impunity. That’s why they put you in here, shut you up in a box, leave you to premature burial, to the air being sucked out of your lungs by the presence down here, your eyes popping like frogspawn bubbles.
    Did it laugh as it was doing death to you?
    I think it did.
    Maybe, I should look for another job, another workplace, somewhere like this but better. But it must be like this.
    ****** 
    I’m in my home from home. The gents toilets, for a break, a breather, to sit in one of the cubicles, make everything go away for a while. It’s very quiet in here and doesn’t smell of recent use.
    I open the nearest door.
    Bile spits against the back of my throat.
    It’s everywhere - raw rivulets, spatters and scarlet ribbons, wet rubies, curdling into ruddy blushes, all clogging in the bowl with pieces of masticated face-meat that bob and seep more juice-violate. The wall drives into my lungs. I am empty. My throat is full. I swallow the surge, tasting warm acid. Not sure if the splashes on my vision are in the cubicle. A fine cold makes its way through me, from head to toe. System shock. The muscles of my heart are bulging fat, wanting to split and burst open wide, become bleeding tidal mouths. I sink down, down, down, watching the gore come creeping my way, fingers of deep red forming in the coarse mortar valleys between tiles. On the surface of the flooding bowl, I saw it. The pieces of a face, half-digested, what was left over.
    I remember.
    She tasted like bacon.
    ****** 
    I sit through the days to come, reading time between the lines. The low wattage of office nights and archive days. Cell walls, so thin, fragile twilight zone of cautions and damage-case sleepovers. Huddling in on myself for warmth, learning how to hug oneself. Unwanted talent of the lonely, hour and minute as indistinguishable as warm and cold, comfort and understanding, you are missing the point here.
    Everything is mathematics. The red numbers operate of themselves underneath the structure of things, fitting us out with wires, limits and negotiable boundaries as per the requirements. The decay must continue, the dissolution must be absolute, there will be an end to us one day.
    One day soon.
    To this end, the red numbers go on, they be the purging agent, everything will move on and on until we are no more. The universe will exist without us. Very likely, it will be better off when it does. We will not see what we are, what we have done or what we eat. Too far gone is the mess known as Man.
    In a vain vale of concrete continents