This Darkness Mine Read Online Free Page B

gushing cunnilingus waters, the bony king of nowhere comes to call, his jointed knees are sparkling with thick craters of rust and neglect. His face is a crater-burn itself. Street spirit is in his veins as he stumbles and bumbles about. He wants to know how to disappear completely. The meat machines will not communicate; all mouths here are stapled shut and eyes done too with needle and thread. The sewing is expert and worthy of grandma. The faces are masks of wasted fruits and vegetables, lumpy, ungiving. Sprouting from collars that have not been washed in weeks, white has gone to grey.
    Soon, all will fade to black.
    The king wheezes, the failing iron cladding of his lungs loosens some more. Underfoot, the cracking and bursting of a fragrant shell. Dead hatchling plastered onto the paste-colour sole of his foot. He scrapes it off on the pavement, peering down, a cooling spatter of yolks and haemorrhaged membrane, insignificant trail of death, leading to the gutter. In the gutter, many hatchlings have been crushed down into scrapings.
    Bony king keeps on walking. His eyes are beads, flash-frozen cryogenes. Each one a galaxy in abeyance, possibility in checkmate, arctic temperatures keeping the future at bay. Black circles form under his eyes. When he closes those long frosty fingers on his heart, he will be gone.
    We will be gone too.
     
    The young pretties squirm on glistening ends. Tongues stick out of every place, licking at the air for salt and nourishment. The mouths are beautiful, lush with Botox, eyes clear as wind-screens. A California midsummer glaze. Fall asleep in the grass and wait for the night’s blankets to settle, breathe it in like the Prozac powders they crumble into your milkshakes. Soft warm feeling of the thick dairy buttermilk, chilled to sperm flavour.
    “Can I have some more please, sir?”
     
    Dreams die at night. Too long begging on the streets wears them out, begging for someone to take them on, give them a home. A dream is nothing without someone to dream it into being, a dream is in danger of becoming a nightmare if it is abandoned, left unnourished. So there they are, clinging to your shoes, fluttering around your feet, mistaken for scraps of paper and discarded plastic bags, we kick them away.
    The nightmares don’t beg on the streets. They have so many homes to go to. We readily accept them as old friends, invite them into our loving warm homes in the hope that they’ll make them turn cold. Fimbulwinter settles in where the nightmares roam, in the crumbling hollow eyes of destitute housing, in the bloodstained mattresses of immigrant hostels, in hearts that have all the warmth of a calcified black turd. They leave a faecal odour to hang in the air, invisible and heavily breathed in, nightmares get spread around. The vain hope that misery shared relieves itself withers and dies.
    There are too many nightmares.
    I dreamed a dream once. Young and innocent, spun from golden threads. Thinking on it now, I had not realised how long ago I left it behind. How many nightmares and other attendant kinds of unpleasantness had taken its place? How unlike me, I think. But then how am I like me? Who or what is like me if I am not? I realise the notion is ridiculous. I am like me, no-one else in the world is.
    What is gone is gone.
    From such a state, I have moved on.
    For better, for worse.
    Not richer, much poorer.
    ******
    Story I heard at the water cooler #1
    The terrorists storm the cockpit of the plane. McDonald’s grease-bags over their heads with eyeholes cut in the paper. The eyes in there are as processed as burger meat. The sub-machine guns jab-jab at the ribs of the pilot and co-pilot. The heads fall off, the peg-stumps of store window dummies are revealed, cracked and pock-marked with alabaster paint crumbs, the wooden hands are sellotaped to the joysticks.
    The plane shrieks, starting its dive.
    The terrorists shriek in tune with the engines and the passengers.
    They run back into the