Movement Unseen

When using a light microscope, adjust the coarse focus before utilising the fine focus.
A blur of peacock blue and glory red suddenly coalesces and becomes a map of tiny rooms and coloured walls. The cross-section of a leaf, unbelievably thin, on a plate of glass. I can't stop the gasp and don't wish to. The student beside me looks my way. I don't look away. I can't look away. It's magic.

Confirmation of permission to study part-time comes on Friday. Classes start on Monday. The breath I have been holding for months comes out, and has not yet stopped, because months is only the first gust of a change years in the brewing. High pressure systems, low pressure troughs, and a wind that has nothing standing before it.

The lecture is dense and rich, and I am not overwhelmed because this is what I want. Golgi. The shape of the word does not tell me how to speak it, and I wait for the lecturer to give this noun to the air. Gohl-gee. That which manufactures substances the cell needs, within the cell. My handwriting chases the lecture across the page, a mess of missing letters and cryptic shorthand, throwing arrows to printed slides and underlining key phrases. I'm already saturated. I can feel the information being given rolling off me like water will fall away from a lotus leaf. I am a hunter and must catch everything I don't absorb, to consume later. I am tired. I can't read what I've written.

Two subjects a semester, two contact days a week. When I say it like that, it sounds pathetically easy. What possible challenge could this pose? The Tessa who was an employed person in the past worked four days a week, which is the equivalent of the full time contact hours this course requires. Time is not an abstract concept, however. Time is the marking of change, and I have changed, and I am not that person any more.

The microscope shows me tiny bacteria dancing in the cell of an Edolea ssp. leaf, and I can only think of that dance and those little lives as 'jitter bugs'. Within that cell the chloroplasts are sizeable and their green is the green of the entire plant. A colour that eats the sun. A colour that need consume no other living thing to survive. The nucleus a pale grey sphere, sitting apart from the chloroplasts. On the projector, cytoplasmic streaming; the chloroplasts whirling round and around the cell as the world spins round and round. There is so much movement in this unmoving plant.

I didn't come here to make friends. A reminder. The class I am not enrolled in, which fell between ecology on Tuesday and biology on Thursday, has been a bonding for which I was absent. The formation of groups has begun. I did not come here to make friends, and I do not need the social acceptance of my colleagues as I once did, but I can see the absence of camaraderie come exam time, the absence of a shared journey. To seek out these things is to spend energy I do not have to spend. I know what my priorities are, and do not regret them and mourn what will not be. There is no conflict in this.

A scraping of the inside of my cheek wiped onto pristine glass. On the projector, the lecturer's own cells. There is something confronting in this, something utterly vulgar and vulnerable in the casual way she shares the tiny pieces with which she is made. There is no green, for we are not autotrophs. The cytoplasm is pink and the membrane near invisible. The nucleus a darkened oval. They are disorderly, folded over and scrunched together like sodden paper. I am looking at myself through the microscope. The instructions for building my physical self lie before me, and make no sense to me. There's something repulsive in what I am seeing. I must know more.

The heavy traffic is a blessing. Should I have an accident, I won't be travelling fast enough for it to cause much damage. I'm saturated. I'm strained. Fatigue sits curled in my lap, patient. I just need to hold myself together long enough to get home. Drive carefully. Turn the music up loud. Louder. Blast cold air. Fatigue knows it will have its way, that I will let it have its way. It is well before tea time when I go to bed. I sleep until after lunch time the next day, and still fatigue is draped across my shoulders. This is why you need part-time, I remind myself.

Too exhausted to concentrate, I crack open a text book borrowed from the library.

I do this because I want to.

Love by the Pus-Choked Sea

For most of my adult life I've used analogies to navigate the process of living. For example, I've always been a strange fish. The complete lack of representation of anyone I could relate to in the media I consumed whilst growing up means that I am now unable to see myself in any narrative. Not even those which now feature people who look like me and live like me. 

But I see myself reflected elsewhere. In 2007 footage of a frilled shark surfaced, captured by divers off the coast of Japan. She was in distress, swimming lopsided, and died within a few hours. It was surmised she was sick, to have been so far from her natural habitat. 

I saw myself in that slow, heavy shark. Meant to swim in cool, quiet darkness, in stillness and solitude in which the cycle of seasons are not measured by light. To be a silent creature passing by other silent creatures with nary a pause. To venture in to the world is to enter warm, shallow waters, bright with sunlight and full of extroverted fish in dizzying crowds. Society asks that I live in these bright, balmy waters, but I'm not made for it.

That shark was caught and couldn't swim home. I've learned to flee into the depths sooner, rather than later.

I'm one of a sentient and intelligent species, however, and can adapt. There are ways to exist in shallow and busy waters. I was not one creature, but many. A whole school of fish, the many pieces and parts of me moving not necessarily in unison, but with coherence. Sometimes, when there were sharks in the water, the school was in chaos. Other times, the school was a mesmerising ribbon of silver, curling around a thriving seamount. I had to fracture myself to move through a social world. It wasn't an injury, just another way of existing. 

These seem like such trifling little toys, now. 

Can I speak of anger for a moment? Anger is magma, and the volcano only erupts when there is naught else it can do. Magma comes from the depths as well. Sometimes it can be controlled, sometimes it can be channeled, but it will always want out. 

Trauma does not come from within. Trauma is the meteorite that slew the dinosaurs and lays waste to all the strange and wonderful things a life can grow. A depth not of me nurtured that meteorite, out there in the world, and then slammed it upon me. Perhaps I invited my meteorite, but then, who honestly anticipates the extinction of the soul?

I used to contain multitudes. My mind had no boundaries, no beginning nor end, the multiverses playing out in layers of consciousness I only barely acknowledged. There was never only one Tessa. How could there ever be only one Tessa? I could survive everything, because there was always more of me, so much more of me. 

Until the meteor struck, and the ocean died.

I'm not a fish. I'm not a school of fish. I'm one, only one, standing on the shore of a disease-mangled ocean. The surface is broken by the bloated carcasses of so many fish, the waves do not form those smooth glass tunnels of my memory but are chunky with skeletons and decay. Pus floats like polar ice on these waters, riding low, yet still so much sitting high. The water that laps at these bergs of sickness is stained with the blood of ruptured corpses, stirred by a wind corpulent with decay, the reek so heavy its a wonder the air has the strength to carry it. All this wasted meat. There are no scavengers to enjoy this feast. 

The extinction of the world leaves only one, wondering when the horizon drew so near, why there is nothing else but this beach. 

How small I have become. How very small.

No one can see this, but I spend my days standing in that disgusting soup with a bucket in my hands and the taste of putrefaction in the back of my throat. One heaped bucket at a time, I pull the empty bodies of fish from the surf, I scoop pus from those rancid bergs, I work and work and work to clean that ocean. Behind me, on stained sand, are mounds of detritus. All the poison I pull from the ocean in slow-growing mountains. 

There are birds hidden in the pus. Birds that survived the first impact and surging tides, birds who tired of flight and tried to rest only to discover that pus is not an island. Caught in that quagmire, feathers slick with it, they floundered and sank and drowned in the symptoms of my wounds. They appear from the stuff suddenly, frightened and frightening and staring in panic.

Sometimes the waves bring up secrets from depths that no longer exist. I have a hook and a rope and being the only one I pull these behemoths to the shore. Their jaws are a mile from crook to crook. None of them smile. A sunken eye larger than the sun, cloudy in death, reveals nothing. I drag these monsters up the beach, their skin sloughing off in great curtains, and go back to my bucket.

It is unglamourous work. There is nothing to romanticise in this filth. 

Occasionally I find another me. One of the multitudes lost in the cataclysm will wash ashore. Maybe she will be in a foetal position with her face hidden in her palms, or perhaps she will be standing with her fingers curved, her spine curved, all her bones curved into the question. There is nothing to be done for these pieces of me. I try to comb the pus from their hair, take the scabs from their skin and leave them on the beach where they are found.

Squalls are unkind. Sometimes I can see them coming and find myself a shelter amid my own ruins. Other times they take me by surprise and I find myself hunkered behind a soggy pile of scabs, the bucket over my head drumming furiously with the unforgiving rain. These storms bring new wreckage to the shore. There is always more.

I don't often venture close to the impact site. The turbulence in the air over that space is upsetting, the tides vicious and mean, and the miasma so thick I cannot see nor hear nor breathe. I don't know if occasional exposure to it will help me or not. I only know that it is there, now, and I must live with it.

One bucket at a time, when days and nights have no meaning, and the tides are always bringing more, more, more. 

It's hard to accept love, here, now. I don't know what there is to offer. But then, I know what it is I love in those precious people around me who also struggle with a history of invisible injury. Their wounds are a part of them, and so I must love those wounds. Their wounds do not define them, so I can see a person who exists with or without that struggle, who inspires love. Their struggle is a heart breaking over, and over, and over, and for taking up that fight I love them too. Fiercely. So, perhaps this is what can be seen in me.

Later, I will have a bounty of silver scales and event-stained skeletons. Later, the bones of these deep giants will be revealed as towers of glass, casting shadows which are not shadows. Give me enough time and the mountains of pus I move from sea to shore will dry and harden. The pressure of aeons will turn that once rancid mucus into beautiful, milky stones, which when polished and then held up to the ear will hum quietly of grief. Entire ranges of humming peaks. I can give you the ambergris of lost whales and the surrendered pearls of unknown clams. Strange and unimaginable mosses will creep across this long grave. Algae will bloom in this sickened water. There is an ecosystem in the future and its ghosts reach back in time to here, now, urging me on. One day, multitudes of me may wake again.

Sometimes I do nothing. Sometimes I look at all I have done and all I have yet to do, and the futility of it all becomes overwhelming. I sit in garbage and the vomit of the ocean and there is nothing in this universe to hear my wail.

The tide creeps up the shore to suck at my toes, and I pick myself up, pick up my bucket, and carry on.

I have contained multitudes, and so I can grow a new world. This is not unknown to me. 

I do not know what it will be, but this new world creeps closer, one bucket at a time.

$30 for 20 minutes

The memory washed in with the warmth; first through my nose, down my throat to rest cozy in my lungs. My cheeks are next, as the only thing that can be done with arms full of clean washing fresh from the dryer is to bury my face into that soft, comfortable warm pile, and hug it to my chest. Let it warm my bones.

It was getting last night's tea towels out of the dryer that was my first waypoint for a standard housekeeper's day in Ullapool. First came the cleaning of toilets, wiping of windows, incessant mopping and buffing; interspersed by dashes to the laundry in the little country garden out back to switch the loads over. Most of the time it was bloody cold, because a Highland summer is a wonderful thing, but not a particularly searing one. After having my hands immersed in cold waters, grabbing all the towels out and flomping myself over a bench and them was the purest of delights. I was overly fond of them, in a weird way. After all the weird stretching and bending and scrubbing, being able to stand still and methodically fold the same square of fabric in the same fashion until the pile before you is a pile no more was peaceful. It did not involve other people's bodily fluids or uncomfortable strenuous activity. Just nice warm hands. The folding of the tea towels also indicated breakfast time. We'd fold them, have them sorted into their colours, and drop them into the kitchen on our way to the staff hut. Lovely cup of tea with the sound of the village waking up and the first ferry coming in from Stornoway.

I don't miss housekeeping. But I do miss Scotland. 

Captured on the 373 on longline

It's not necessarily summer, but the season is at home on this remote shore. We've made the trek from the distant road side, through the lazy sand dunes with half-buried grasses and rushes bowing before and eternal breeze. There is no path, and our feet sink into the fine dry sand with every set, our balance already compromised by blue eskies and beach chairs and umbrellas. There are no trees for miles so we must bring our own shelter.

It is not a vigorous beach, nor an overly safe one. The waves, a deep jade in the shallows falling into a brittle blue darkness limning the horizon, wash the beach with amiable indifference. Marring the wet sand is a chaotic mess of gull prints, the gulls themselves long gone.

The light is timeless. The concept of night has no place in the noon world. We dig in, alone for hours in all directions, the clinkhiss of open beers sounding before the chairs have been set up. Someone has brought along good speakers, and we dance as we toss picnic blankets and towels down, fumbling for oil-drenched olives in jars with too narrow a mouth and tearing apart fresh crusty loaves to slather with rich chunky dips and chutneys. We are so free here, there aren't even planes in the sky to remind us of the rest of the world.

Our picnic is a feast and we graze heartily. Some of us play beach cricket, badly. Some of us swim out past the break of the waves and paddle quietly, rolling with the fluid surface and seeing no shadows in the water. We wander distant among the dunes, unconcerned about losing each other, finding tiny treasures hidden in the tussocks. Beneath our umbrellas - a bouquet of enormous flowers discarded on the shore for us to hide in - we doze, cradled and nuzzled by the warm, loving air, our dreams lined with salt.

Later, when the long afternoon has tilted gently and drunkenly into an equally prolonged evening, with a sunset shy about the colours it paints with, we fall silent, eyes to that featureless horizon, and wait.

It begins with a flash of light which does not diminish, but grows with a sense of intent, small yet determined, just on the curve of the Earth. It's bright, brighter than any of us, and ponderously slow, it begins to lift from the ground. Watching it struggle, we are aware of gravity as we have never been before, and strain with the rocket to break free, to rise, rise, rise leaving a wake of smoke and lighting up the ocean for miles. Now the sound has finally reached us, a grumble and moan that feel completely unrelated to the miracle before us. This rising star paints the cloud underbelly with a light golden glow before punching through, filling the belly itself with an internal fire, quickly extinguished as the rocket leaves our sky and our world and never once looks back.

It is the first of many. It will be a long night. 

Wedding Cake Island

The wiki article tells it all. It's a pile of rocks in Coogee Bay

What the article fails to mention is that it moves. It must move. Every time I look at the sea and it is in view it isn't where I expect it to be. Even just walking down the hill to the shops, which is my most common view of it, it isn't where it should be!

I'm not the only one who has noticed this.

The floating island in Discworld was a temporary build up of gas, which, when it dissipated, caused the island to sink again.

Doctor Doolittle's floating island was in fact a giant snail. Or wait, tortoise? I think he went along the sea floor in a giant sea snail.

This island is a pile of rocks.

And yet.

"This is it, isn't it?"
They are two men, not old, in the water behind me.
"This is how we die."

The water is jade. Sometimes cloudy and occluded, other times like glass, but always jade. We float in this wealth and majesty and it does not deign to note us.

"Wait, maybe it's this wave we die on."

From behind clouds came the sun, reclining in the long angles of afternoon, and below me the sand danced. White, jade, and lost seaweed, and the fingers of a star tracing their paths.

Fight.

I saw three owls today. One was white thread on a black singlet, grey tie dye at the bottom. It didn't get on my bus. The second was on t-shirt, this a sort of rose and hibiscus hue, the owl in black paint. The third owl was on a canvas tote bag, and also in black paint.

While they were not identical images, they were siblings in design and size, the owl with eagle ears and enormous round eyes.

It was the same owl, just looking out different windows. 

A Little Story

For once, my unconscious was kind. She was crawling up my leg when I woke, and I knew it was her. No flailing and slapping in a frenzy of "WTF IS THAT?!"

I don't know how long she'd been trapped in my room. I only discovered her when I returned from Sydney. When I broke the darkness with the bedside light she fluttered against the wall in a panic, a moth large enough to mark her impact with a shy "thud, thud." I couldn't catch her then, nor the following nights. She'd tumble down beneath my bed and there she'd remain, until the next night, the next time I turned on the light.

She was weak now. It was all she could do to climb onto the hand I offered her. Her feet were large enough that I could feel the small hooks she used to cling to my skin, the timidest of prickles. A thick wedge of a rich deep brown with only the faintest ghost of a texture, two vivid grey eyes her patches like the eyes of a storm. A fur collar like a luxurious lady in a luxurious coat.

She was so tired.

I carried her to the bath room, opened the window and let her out into the dawn.

We all have days, weeks, months, in which we're a confused and exhausted moth. I hope kindness finds you.

Later that day, as I stepped onto an escalator I looked down. Another moth, similar in size and colouring, lay against the grill like a crumpled leaf. Hands clasped, wings to the floor. Kindness did not find this one.

Wake

Tokyo. That was an incessant city. London was indefatigable. Sydney is bursting. Sleep is a similar city. To sleep is to try and traverse the main street of all of these cities on a weekend, a holiday weekend before an event that requires all to do extra curricula shopping, also it is a beautiful day, the first after winter, and there is a parade.

Sleep is never a straight and empty road in a featureless land. Sleep is not windless water. Sleep is not rest.

I am not haunted. My dreams are not nightmares, shames, guilts, fears or secrets. They are only dreams of living libraries, water suits, rollerblading on uneven paving and leaping from high platforms because gravity is for other people. They are only dreams.

There are always dreams.

Always running. Always negotiating. Always solving. Always seeking. 

And then I wake.

Such a simple word; wake. A single syllable. Staccato. Wake. To open your eyes is as long as that syllable. As if the crossing from one state to another were such a small, easy thing. 

Is it? Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am doing it wrong. It's likely that for most of you it is.

In the city of Sleep I am so many other people. I live so many lives, with so many other faces and furies. My agendas are diverse and legion. To wake is not to wake. To wake is to stop being these other people, stop pursuing their goals and fighting their circumstances. To wake is to suddenly and abruptly become me.

Bewildered. Confused. Untethered. 

I do not go to sleep; I go away.

I do not wake; I come back.

And between those two points of transformation, I do not exist at all.

Postcode G40

You open the door and an empty syringe wrapper lies by the frame, half a footstep flattening the end.

You open the door and discarded beer bottle sits neatly on the jamb.

You open the door and a spray of blood still young enough to not yet be brown draws a line across your path, significant enough that you cannot not see it, when ever you open the door.

You open the door and upon the second storey landing stands a young man already an old man smoking a cigarette. The ash is short. The door before him shows no sign of opening, and he is wholly indifferent to it. A gaunt face made harder by dirty light and suspicion. Your own. He stares.  You look away. You fasten both locks. You put distance and doors between you and him..

You open the door and the hallway light globe flickers with a fear that keeps time with your heart.

On a double-decker bus between Glasgow and Manchester

A crisp autumnal morning with frost still bright in the early  morning sun, she blinks once, twice, before turning away from the window. It will be their first night apart. She is thinking of warm knot of his limbs and the wool blankets before the sun had risen, and wondering if now that she is used to sleeping in sanctuary she will be afraid of the dark. This seems a legitimate worry, and so she closes her eyes.

When she wakes she is in another country. The paddocks are smaller and the fences meticulously maintained. Turning to look at a sign for the way back as it whizzes past - SCOTLAND - and the signs ahead warning her that the bus is taking her to the SOUTH, the SOUTH shouted as though the traveller did not understand the foolishness of choosing such a destination. Farmland has given way to something that can only be described as 'countryside': a land without urban sprawl but so utterly domesticated there is not even the ghost of rural to be sniffed. The spaniard in the seat in front takes photo after photo of the motorway. Impressions of Preston are endless scenes from The Bill, now years forgotten and the hairdressers and bathroom shops boarded up with greyed wood the sprayed tags of delinquents now long married and mortgaged unseen almost lost in the grain.

She wants to say this is not Scotland, does not feel like Scotland, but she doesn't know Scotland. She wants to say Manchester is the windy-street version of Glasgow but she knows neither city.

Dinner is three boys, the parents, and her. Her second appearance in this household and the boys are no longer locked boxes in her presence. The dialogue that frolics between them is not loud nor boisterous, but full of energy and attention. There is no competition between them, which she marvels at. She thinks of her own brother as distant from her as is physically possible, and the lack of antagonism between them that had been and always would be. She thinks of these three boys who will grow up to be their own people, and thinks of distance, and how irrelevant it can be.

Standing on the floor of the Manchester Arena she puts her hand to her chest where the bass trembles in her lungs and ribs, and beneath her palm she can feel her body shudder as the music moves through it. Here there is no identity. She is no longer an autonomous body but part of the organism that is the audience, the crowd, the consumer of sound. A single cell at the beck and call of invisible energy; she sings, howls, stomps and pumps. Sweat that is not hers. Eyes aching in the strobing lights. Neck craned over shoulders. All these miles and years and this cleanses her still, again, ultimately. It is to cede her boundaries, those intangible ways in which she holds herself apart from how she absorbs the world, and in doing so ceases to be. This happens in Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Reykjavík, here. The ideal of her falls back into place with every step from the floor.

Just in time she looks up to see 'Welcome to Scotland' flash by the window. It is a nondescript standard highway sign, more than a little anti-climactic. None around her appear to notice nor care. She strives to identify any difference in the world out the window, but there is none.

It has been 33 hours and when she arrives in Glasgow she is starving, dehydrated and in dire need of a toilet. Priority of wellbeing, her feet take her straight into the pub, to the back, to his arms.

She is thinking of adventures and the exhilaration of solitary jaunts into the world. She is thinking of the home she finds in him. She is thinking of all the things she never expects, including herself.

And then there were 3.

You wake and there is one dead bird.

You wake. Every day. Without fail. The mattress a thin briar of coils and your pillow never quit right for your neck. No alarm wakes you. There is no pressing need for your wakefulness. You wake, and sometimes you stay awake. Sometimes you even get right out of bed, shower, dress, prepare yourself for the day as though the day might contain anything to prepare yourself for. That is not the norm, for more often than not you wake and, finding nothing has miraculously changed in your environment, you force yourself back to sleep.

So much sleep and yet never enough. You could blame the weather - Glasgow is hardly known for its bright and sunny disposition - or you could blame the stress of finding yourself once again unemployed and, despite your excellent track record and qualifications, seemingly unemployable. You could blame the belligerence of a city soundscape on your too sensitive introvert ears. You could blame a change in medication, even though there has been no change except for branding, but maybe, possibly, who knows.

You could blame higher powers, even though you believe in no such thing. That incident and that incident and that incident and that incident; this long run of significantly bad and usually pointless bad luck. You whisper in quiet moments, barely heard over a washing machine that devours the power so fast you can watch the credit on the meter tick down, that you're not supposed to be here, that Glasgow doesn't want you.

You could even blame yourself.

You don't want to be that cliché story of a deluded young couple running off to the big city and that big city being cruel, hard and chewing them up to spit them out broken and grey, but perhaps you no longer require any chewing to be broken.

You go to sleep, eventually.

You wake, inevitably.

Every day. Without fail. Opportunities and chances to change the tuning of your heart strings. Get out of bed even if there is nothing requiring you to. You know you won't get them but apply for those jobs because you would love to be wrong, please, be wrong. Go exploring because you will find the charm in the city even if the city will not charm you. You wake and even though it cost you dear you fight your little war inside and out. Because this too will change.

You wake up and there is still one bird, chirping and relentless.

The Ceiling Unfelt

the sun sets

The sun struggled, it didn't want to go and so left scratches in the sky.



the sun rises

My freaky darlings, today is so fat with delight it has stretch marks, and it is all for you.

the sun sets

Act swift if you wish to pan the clouds for gold, for the gold is gone even swifter.

there are ghosts in the wires
ghosts wired on electricity
we are all someone's ghost
we are all waiting to become ghosts
so i am haunted

The Psychosomatic Phrynosoma

The Psychosomatic Phrynosoma is most often found in the abdomen, particularly in the stomach but has been known to roam about the digestive tract and guts according to the stability or lack thereof of its immediate environment.

Eggs are introduced to the host via aural injection, usually riding in upon words that the host does not wish to hear, or that perhaps herald further words that the host does not wish to hear. As these words traverse the earways they trigger various timers and countdowns that will either terminate in their own time or at the behest of external interference.

Once the eggs are deposited in the head they will remain dormant until mindscape surrounding them is at an appropriately fruitful and tense state, at which point they will hatch and begin their journey south in to the literal bowels of their host.

There, depending on the stress under which the host is placed, they will grow into mature adult size which is typically just a little bigger than is comfortable for the host. The host will react by clenching their stomach against this protrusion, which in turn will prompt the Psychosomatic Phrynosoma to extend the many spikes adorning its armour. This conflict will proceed as a struggle of wills, with the Phrynosoma twisting, clawing and scrabbling about with its many spines and claws while the host is most typically sitting calmly in a public place, such as a tram stop or an office desk, gazing distractedly into the distance and working the inside of their lips tensely.

The Psychosomatic Phrynosoma causes no physical damage. The infestation ends once the host's stress drops below viable levels, at which point the Phrynosoma dies, passes through the host's digestive tract, and leaves the body with a moist sigh.

The common name for the Psychosomatic Phrynsoma is "Anxiety".

ETA 28 June 2011: Cockle-warming surprise reading of this post done by the bouncy flouncy Alex Garber.

Metaphor much?

"What are you doing?"

"I'm looking for a black t-shirt in a drawer full of black t-shirts."

"Oh."






"Want to talk about it?"

"Shut up."

"Just trying to be friendly."

"Well, my advice to you is: stick to what you're good at."

The Dead Birds of North Melbourne

BEGIN


Some say he gave his life - kamikaze - to defend them.
Some say he flew too close to the sun.
(We know he saw his reflection on a windscreen.)

BETWEEN


"It's not agoraphobia!" she wailed. "The sky has no point of reference!" And so saying she buried her head in the footpath and never moved again.

END


We are not dead.

We were never birds.

Undoing One of Many Mistakes; Triptych

"Well, this is the end. There isn't anymore. Now what do we do?"

"The only thing we can do: evolve."

"I think you mean 'devolve'."

"That is a matter of perspective. Anyway. Onward?"

"Onward."



"................Okay so the siphonophore thing didn't really work out."

"I won't say I told you so."

"Well if you're so clever why haven't I seen you in the sea? What did you devolve into?"



"A Golden Ray of course."

Travellers and Escapists

"We have to go, we have to get out," he said. "Everything is fucked."

She shook her head. "There is nowhere to go," she said. "'Everything is fucked'."

Then she smiled, opened the window and let the end in.

The ghost lingers by the tracks with the reminder of flight, stilled.