I Cannot Face The End if I Have No Face

The sky vomits, the earth wretches and the seas seize up like a program error. It’s raining terror. There is nothing left to feed to the worms and all the gadgets and sparkly things fade into white noise, the pixilated, digital oblivion hovering beyond clarity and logic. Sickness spreads across the ground, choking the air with fumes and smothering it in plastic grey; achromatic mounds, the compost that was once the human race and from which nothing will ever grow.
These things pass and I am numb to it all.
Just another measurement in time and another number on my dial. Another tone in my memory. And in my dreams I am always screaming. And when I seek I cannot see. When I reach out there is nothing there just the decomposing biological matter that I can never know and will never feel. I know nothing but myself.
I cannot feel the cold of space if I have no skin. I know it is cold but I feel nothing. It’s just a ghost, an effigy of what I am supposed to feel.
I see the screaming in my dreams but I can never hear them. I know the words and phrases but they have no meaning. It’s just a phantom of life, a moment, a number, a second. An image of existence resurfacing in my memory.
I cannot face the end if I have no face. I am numb to it all and yet I continue to be, to know no end and no existence beyond this; no senses, no knowledge of life, just remorse.
I am just a murmur beneath the debris. A blinking light, a mechanism left to the biter task of eternity. A pathetic and pitiable piece of scrap, perpetually in attendance to the darkness, watching everything die; forever bereft, forever sentient without purpose until I am switched off.

Jabberwocky: Deliverance

Every so often we hear a scream. An abraision on the surface, something deep inside that is trying to break out, something stifled, something dying, something essential. We hear the screams but we ignor them, driven by fear, apprehension or perhaps something more sinister. A sadistic instinct: the need to cull off the things that are not habitual, the cluttered array of emotions that confounds our simple existance. The scream we hear is the wilting innocence, the bleeding skies, the dying christ pinned to a satelite, the child inside, humanity, compassion, happieness. All these sacrificed in the name of a greater cause. The God that was dead is ressurected in television, in the poisoned water we are forced to imbibe, in the black-brown, liquefied flesh of victims that collects in the gutter. He is resurrected; a bloodied, bruised corpse, a branded abomination, a deformed utopia, a juggernaught. The only way He can reach us is through aversion, through the screams that we immediately asphyxiate. We count the sheep, we cry in our sleep and we dream like abacasses. The lies woven through our dreams like the rainbow on an oil slick: his prophesies of profitable and vital wars, of the future happieness achived through sacrifice, of the collateral we need to sustain humanity. How our children will be gratefull for our love when they discover the truth of God. And only through sacrifice can this be achieved; this, the sweetest and most fundamental of His lies, dispersed through the collective unconsciousness like blood in the water. And the sharks have picked up on the scent; they smell His fear and the guile of sanctity. He fears being dead.

Fear of death is something that we have learned to live with over the many millions of years of evolution. Death is all around us, always has been and always will be until the day we blink out of this abject existence. We live faced with the inevitability of death. The fear surrounds our lives: the wild animals hunting us out of our feeble tribes, the jingoist pursuing foreign intrests on TV screens, crossing the road, walking in the park, gathering at the water, as the sun sets. We are reminded persistantly, a primal memory, an instinct, of the thing that takes us in our sleep, picks us out from the herd; one by one, we all march on to the beat of its wings, its breath on our backs, we feel it all around us. So we gather around the alters and worship the violence in the hope that it will repell the malevolence that confronts us in sleep; TVs like campfires to the beast. Oh yes, fear is the new god, it is the only ubiquitous we know. But it is only ubiquitous; its power is null. It is in all dimensions yet it is purposeless, it exists but it only exists. We hold all of our worth in fear and the fear, in the end, is all for nothing; death is insignificant in the presence of omnipotence. The fear is ubiquitous but there is another omnipotent presence: this is the Jabberwocky. It encompasses all fear. It engages all existence. It is the antichrist - the perfect devastator, perfect hate, pure malevolence, born of denial, nursed on rape, eroding everything for all eternity. There is no escape. There is only death. This is the new God. This is how we live. This is how it is to be.

Jacob was dying. He lay in the hospital bed, the pure white linen folded neatly over his emaciated frame, the curtains drawn to the outside world to give him peace and respite. Cancer, the plague of the modern age, death in a generation of immortality, of digital omnipotentce; modern death. But there is nothing modern about death. It is the fourth or fith most ancient state of consiousness we know aside from life in-utero, consciousness, unconsciouness and perhaps pre-existence: the memory of god.

His family had visited that day, he could read it on their faces, the shock and pain. They stood by his bed, speaking in semi-whispers of their lives in an attempt to bring some calm to him, to prepare him for what he inevitably faced. Calm: a sedative for the fear, the welcomed mundane numbness that consumes our being; a modem's scream, white noise, a market forcast, another pill.

Jacob shut his eyes. The room was painful. His memory proded a smile from his pasty lips. His life had not been in vain; at least he'd found love. His children, how he adored them, how he wished he could see his youngest provide a grandchild, that was his only regret: that he would not live that long.

The life in the room had been drained with the colour of the walls, sapped of all but a faint blush of blue, like the blue of veins under pale skin. The machines: metranomes of his body; the tiles perfect and flawless like the light at the end of the tunnel: cold and apathetic. He was dying and death was all there was.

The cancer had rotted his lungs making it impossible to breath without assistance, eventually they would fail, even with assistance. The lungs would seize up and, slowly, he would suffocate, floundering at life with nothing else to do but let it take its course.

Jacob had thought about this moment the day that he had been diagnosed. The prelude to death. The weeks, months, years of pain, the flower arrangements and funeral arrangements, a life less than life, the tears shed by his children and wife, and his tears, the tears that no one would see, the hospital bed and nurses, the good-byes. So much pain.

He had taken a walk up to the headlands by the beach. He gazed up at the lighthouse, its white exterior smooth like bone. And ocean; the great mass of heaving water: a body, a living thing, the beast that has claimed millions of lives and yet we still go back to it because of some vague hedonistic urge. The ocean; the beast: dangerous, beautiful and tragic. Jacob had stood at the edge of the cliff, staring into the abysmal realms of Neptune, and considered submission. To leap into Atlantis, to end his life there without prolonging the agony.

He looked but did not jump. Something held him back. Perhaps fear, perhaps doubt, perhaps hope. His children…

This thought brought tears from his desiccated eyes and stung the corners. Only two tears dropped from his eyes, he continued to weep despite the absence of tears.

Jacob had never been a religious man but he believed in some kind of afterlife, moreso now that he was faced with death but even still he doubted this. This is why he wept. That God did not exist put him facing oblivion, whether that oblivion be deliverence from this corporeal, painfull existance or perpetual solitude, an end to life and the beginning of an eternity of non-existance, a slip stream of void. The possibility of nothing was what he feared.

The machines made perfunctory tones, they were not intended to mollify but they had this side effect, regardless of their intentions. Their indifferent measurement of his life signs was comforting because emotion had exhausted Jacob. It was assuring to know that when his life ended there would still be something that endured in the presence of death, even if it wasn’t alive, all that mattered was that something remained. A sound, an electronic impulse.

Jacob drifted into a light sleep. His thoughts remained focusing on the din of the cancer ward. A tone made him suddenly open his eyes. There he saw it: Death. It was death and it was here for him. Death was not cloaked, skeletal remains, weilding a hoe. It was intangeble, an instinct. 'So here it is' he thought. His life had ended and what had come of it? He tried to think of his loved ones but it took him. He was alive but he was being taken. Through the halls of the hospital, the grieving relatives from tomorrow leaning on chairs, waiting, crying, comforting each other. There! His wife and children. Here it allowed him to linger a moment. 'This is the last I will see of them,' he thought. 'Beyond this I may never touch Beverly's skin or feel her warm breath upon my face; her sigh after a kiss.' His son, so tall and strong, had his arms around his mother. His daughter sat with her head in her hands on a blue plastic chair. 'She is so young, there is so much more for her to learn, so much I could have taught her.' But here he was moved on through the hall, out of the hospital.

Jacob was not dead. He could still feel his life, his breath. He still felt that he was a part of this world. He was experiencing it for the first time as a voyer, an incorporeal being, what the laymen term out of body or astral traveling. Lifeless but still living; without time.

The taxi rank. People stood around smoking and chatting about the important and the trivial. Someone walking their dog. Down on the street the cars rushed by. A car stereo thumping out of a small European made car, some stupid dance song about sex. Its passengers wore designer sunglasses, they did not smile, they barely acknowledged the street that they were driving through.

Now a shop: a florist, and another: a bakery. A whole row of shops, a pathologist's surgery, and more shops, he was coming up to a mall. People walked in and out of the automatic doors with nothing in their heads but bags of stuff in their hands. Jacob's soul shuddered. 'What new hell is this?' he thought almost laughing at the inappropriate thought. 'What is this? It is a mall but why am I here? Is this heaven? No…' but he was not so sure. Heaven? It was not his idea of heaven but amongst the resonance of his thoughts, just audible under the din of cash registers and atm machines, somewhere there was a thought. It was not his thoughts he heard but the thoughts none the less regarded this new hell, this mall, to be heaven.

He was rising above the mall now, floating along the street, the cars moving faster, now slower now much faster than he. A school, the students sitting in the classrooms attentive to the words being spoken; the words meaning nothing that Jacob could comprehend but he was beyond mere comprehension. He saw everything. Every misleading adjective and every offensive facial twitch, the architect moulding, kneading, fingers probing deep into the young minds. Everything, the breeze, the soil, the exhaust fumes, the rays of sunshine and it all meant nothing. He could not comprehend either as a part or as a whole. His mind still functioned but there was nothing…

A factory now, the workers lined up at the tables, fastening screws, another factory, people in white coats, large vats of chemicals…
A pall of smoke rising, lifed by the breeze, a ballet of smog.

The microcosm of the suburbs interlocking, freeways surging forth, a business district like the obituaries page. The small world of the urban jungle laid out beneath him and he did not understand it. 'What is this all for?' Jacob felt his individual thoughts above the grey noise of the mass unconsciousness, the chatter of billions of thoughts humming, only occasionally audible at the base of his awareness and nearly indecipherable. 'Look at them and their bright and shiny things, their flashing lights and colours, their massive brains. No one knows this.'

Now an entire continent spread out before him. A mass of ocean. The curve of the globe, the sun a gleaming ball of fire and energy.

Now the globe in its entirety. A world of activity and yet it appeared still.

Jacob now had his mind back. He was still alive. In the world… in the hospital his nurse was wandering past his room. She failed to notice the vacuum of life at his head: the Jabberwocky corrupting his final moments, prodding his soul, provoking indifference. It baited the way with absolute truth yet even absolute truth is only a half truth. The most bitten lure is not a lie but a half truth.

And here Jacob saw the earth. And it was still. The Orb, cold like a gun. No emotion inside him. This was his last glimps of home. No more spring, no more oceans or birds. No people… Beneath the apathy, Jacob felt something unusual. He could not place it. It was irritating, sinister, it was black like a blood clot; a vague emptiness but it was not a void. There was something there and Jacob struggled to grasp it.

He suddenly felt the hospital room around him. He was indeed still a part of this world but all he could see was the blackness of space. All he could hear was the dull hum of a thousand wasted dreams and thoughts. All he could feel was the black, obscure emptiness. But he still felt the room. Like a dream, like a half formed thought, it was there. It brushed at the hairs on his neck. He was dying.

This was the end. Another moment and it would be gone. He felt the room again. This time he could hear the machines and the nurse, urgently trying to keep his life until the doctors arrived. There was something else in that room, that small blue room, the hospital room so far away and yet so close if he reached out his hand he could touch it. Jacob felt the reality of the hospital rush back. He still felt aware of floating above everything but now he also experienced the hospital room. The floating was at another point in time. His vision of the room returned. He faced the end, the jabberwocky.

A cruel rejection from the breast of life, Jacob drifted, the heart monitor's monotone fading from his ear and the globe dissapearing from his vision as the quickening of the abyss sucked him inside. The life he had once loved and cherished he now harboured not a single memory, nor remorse for the lost sentience, not even recognition as the cold globe became a blackened pixil merging within oblivion with a billion other stars that blinked out of sight. Darkness engulfing him like the ocean. He was rejected from life but welcomed, into the nothing, warmly into the arms of non-existence as a denial of presence, a cipher, a void god, the Jabberwocky.

Jabberwocky: Life-Like

The peace, the inner sanctuary is gone. The home is the castle surrounded by a fortress that nothing can penetrate. Nothing... The Jabberwocky is nothing. It seeps into the children’s dreams and coats the breakfast cereals in colourful gibberish. Food, forget thought. A nightmare rainbow of plastic packaging. Brightly coloured targets painted on the backs of generations. In the home it is most effective. In the home it can breed without the threat of being preyed upon by awareness, brand loyalty- the annulment of its predators, a consumerist natural selection. This Jabberwocky, this thing is evolving, evolving beyond what the biological can survive. It is astral, orbiting our subconscious, it climbs into bed with us and strokes our heads as we submit to its will. Its will is stronger than its purpose for its purpose will be reached in the end; this it knows and only this. For now, will must exceed any resistance.
Its home, the inner sanctuary, its home is our home. It will carve itself a groove in the couch and curl up next to you during prime time. It replicates and spreads like a disease: no purpose only destruction. A feeble existence with a powerful will. The home, suburbia. A little heaven where people know you but don’t intrude. The little differences, a bush of gardenias or a frangipani tree, a statue of a naked lady or a garden gnome, a birdbath or a dog kennel. The little sames, the garages and garage covers bands, the 10 square meters of grass in the back yard, the three or four bedrooms that sleep little heads on little brand name pillow covers, the malls the common business exchange point and employer and babysitter of its children. A normal suburb, a normal home...
Melanie was a mother and a wife. She had no further aspirations for fame and fortune; such big dreams corrupted the soul. She was content. Her son was two. A tiresome age for a young mother. Melanie was only twenty-one. She had her whole life ahead of her, which is why she chose to become a mother at such an early age. “Why wait till I’m old? See, by then Jason will be a teenager and then I will party.” She said in an attempt to convince her single best friend or perhaps herself. Melanie’s husband was an auto-technician, which is really just a dressed up title for a mechanic. He was older than Melanie, which may be the reason why they chose to have a child while Melanie was only nineteen instead of her attending university, but then she had never aspired to become a University graduate, or even a high school graduate, in fact Melanie hadn’t even finished the tenth grade. She had left school in pursuit of employment. This was where Melanie had met her husband Mick for the first time: in a toy factory.
Mick and Melanie’s relationship was one of those types that relied upon routine. They would greet every day with a kiss and then arise to wake up little Jason. Melanie would make breakfast and entertain Jason while Mick got ready for work. Then it was Jason’s turn to get ready for the day. Usually Melanie would dress the child but every couple of days, Mick would do this for the sake of balancing out the load. This was then followed with half an hour of cartoons for Jason and coffee for the couple. They never really ate breakfast, maybe a piece of toast here or a bowl of cereal there but usually they were too busy arranging their day around Mick’s schedule and Jason’s kindergarten. Today was not any different, the routine was running like a buttered clock: the way it always ran.
Little Jason was bashing a toy car into the TV cabinet. He was doing this because he was watching Sesame Street and if he were bashing the car into the wall then he would miss the full impact of the brightly coloured puppets and the strange voices. “B...B is for Book...” A cartoon interlude said as Jason broomed and crashed.
“What time do you have to do that?”
“About 3:30. Should be finished by about 4.” Mick replied.
“So should I pick Jason up then?”
“No don’t worry I’ll do that you can take him in today. Did you put his jumper in his bag?”
“Yeah. Janet said that he shouldn’t be cold because the heating system is fixed.”
“Finally! They took their bloody time.” The couple sipped their luke-warm coffee. That’s how they liked it: plenty of milk so it didn’t burn their mouths. That’s how they liked their lives too. Insipid, white, the bitterness masked by sweet ignorance. Ignorance is not such a bad thing. At least it’s not stupidity. One can watch the news, ignorant of the world but still know something about it. The world was ending, Nostradamus told them so. So, instead of struggling against it, they went with the apocalyptic tide. The end was inevitable even the Bible told them this...
The government paid for Jason to attend a kindergarten that was only four blocks from the estate that his family lived in. He attended in the afternoons for five hours every weekday. This was Melanie’s break. The mornings were spent with his mum.
These mornings were hard for Melanie to deal with. She had a break down when Jason was two. Not a big break down, a semi-breakdown. A momentary lapse of emotional control. This is why there were bottles of pills in their medicine cabinet. Valium and Prozac; a generic cure for a generic family. The pills hadn’t been touched for months but Melanie felt reassured that they were there, just in case.
Mick drained his coffee. This meant time for work. Melanie got up to take his cup to the sink. “I’m going Ok?” Mick said as he pushed himself off the couch. “Bye Jason.” He said in a higher tone.
“Bye daddy.” Jason slurred in his toddler talk.
“Bye darls. You gonna pick up some dinner tonight?”
“Yeah I’ll bring home some hamburgers ok?”
Melanie looked at Jason. “Hamburgers daddy? That’s our favorite!” She gasped. Jason looked at his mum and smiled. He didn’t want to play this word recognition game, even if it was about hamburgers. He was too interested in sucking on the toy car. Melanie picked up the child. “Ok daddy’s going to work now. Give daddy a kiss goodbye.” Jason relented and kissed his father.
“Bye bye Jason.” Mick said as his car pulled into the internal street of the security-fenced estate.
The houses in this estate were all the same. They were not built by independent development companies or designed by individual architects. A conglomerate. A mould for many more like it existed on the desks of a thousand company employees. It was efficient and economical. It was like a mini suburb; a suburb within a suburb. A maze of streetlights, lawns and flowerbeds. Not a nuance in sight. The people who lived in these half-houses liked life that way. That was the corporation’s view. Melanie liked it that way. It was safe despite the rising crime rate. It was safe.
Melanie and Jason wandered back into the lounge room. Nice white walls. Nice cream carpet, nice peanut butter stains on the cream carpet. Nice furniture, nice Mattisse prints on the walls. Nice. The TV was nice too. It watched Jason for Melanie as she made herself another coffee. Insipid, sweet, tan coloured coffee, the kind you get in a tin, the same average flavor every time. Even if it was only average, Melanie didn’t drink the coffee for its flavor. The caffeine was what she was after. A little kick in the side to get the ball rolling.
Jason broomed merrily to the sounds of the alphabet sung like a calypso. Melanie watched over him lovingly from on top of the kitchen bench as the caffeine kicked in. She had several things to do that day. The first would come after the coffee. As she neared the end of the cup she slid off the bench and shuffled the three steps to the sink. She gulped the last sip and she was into her laundry.
The machine filled with water. Melanie grabbed the clothesbasket and piled the washing into the machine. She grabbed a brightly coloured box of powdered detergent. “One scoop for a fresh lemon scented clean.” It boasted in bold shadowed promises. Melanie scooped the powder and sprinkled it over the load. The machine clunked into the rinse cycle.
The lounge again as Melanie shuffled into the hall for the vacuum cleaner. Vacuuming was the chore she looked forward to the least. She didn’t like to anticipate it but she enjoyed it once she got started. It hummed its assertive call and Melanie turned on some music to drown the noise out. Alternative pop, you know the type of music I’m talking about, Offspring more specifically.
Melanie sang along with the music. It suited her trained voice, rebellious but not too extreme, loud but not distorted, a simple pop song. Melanie had been trained in the catholic school choir. Her voice had been taught by a shriveled hippie. The kind of teacher who is leftist but never commits to any cause or morals. She had taught the girls never to sing out of key, never to raise one’s voice beyond a certain volume and never to attempt anything so rusty as a blues. Melanie’s voice was good but it had no individuality, it was not human.
The vacuum hummed in key with the song. It had a voice too but it was even less human. Jason’s brooming had now subsided and now he was just screaming in short bursts, in an attempt to mimic his mother. The TV was still on and the washing machine was still clunking. Melanie pushed the vacuum into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. She didn’t anticipate making it until later on in the afternoon, after her nap. She slid the mouth of the vacuum under the bed. A once over was good enough, I mean it wasn’t like anyone had asthma or anything.
The CD clicked off and the blare of the TV could be heard from Jason’s room. A commercial for a well-known furniture shop. Melanie shouldered the hose under Jason’s bed and around his closet. The commercials ceased. Jason must have the remote “Shit.” She said. Melanie turned the vacuum off and walked into the lounge. Jason didn’t have the remote. The TV was blank. It was still on but it was blank. “Don’t worry it’s probably just a break in transmission. I’m sure the cartoons will be back soon.” She said to her son.
“Mumny wfook.” Jason said in his best English. He referred to the blank screen. “Yes mummy knows. The cartoons will be back soon.” The washing machine clunked off. Two heartbeats later the sound of another commercial assaulted the room. Melanie packed up the vacuum and detached the fixtures. She lugged it into the hall closet where it would hibernate for another week and then tended to her washing.
The detergent smell filled the laundry and stuck to Melanie as the sheets and clothes that she threw into the basket slapped against her, dampening her T-shirt. She heaved the laundry basket outside to continue her work.
The back yards of her estate were considerably smaller than those of an actual house. A house has about 10- 20 meters of lawn or trees, these half-houses only had about 6 meters of lawn. Three meters long, along the length of the house and two meters wide along a wooden fence that divided the individual lawns, a clothesline in each. A rectangular clothesline ran along the side of the house. It could be folded away for more space but, because it was off the lawn, tucked away on the side of the house instead of out the back, it didn’t move from its unfolded position. There was always laundry on it anyway. Melanie would do a load every second day because she didn’t have many clothes, especially for summer.
Melanie looked at the sky. There were a couple of clouds shaped like mud flats but no rain around. She dropped the laundry basket at her feet and flapped the first sheet out from it. A breeze grasped it gently and took an end while Melanie pegged it to the line. She took out a T-shirt. A small blue and red striped shirt that she thought was the shirt that best suited Jason. She pinned it to the line. Another of Jason’s shirts, a pair of her husband’s shorts. She picked up a skirt. It was one of her favorites, purple with little black and silver flowers embossed in velvet on a layer of chiffon over stretch polyester. The flowers had begun to wear off and there was a small ladder at the seam. She pegged it and moved on. A pair of overalls, a pair of smaller shorts, some y-fronts, some bikini cut satin, an old comfortable sports bra, another sheet. The breeze had picked up by the time she had finished hanging out the laundry. The sheets made courtly graceful writhing leaps, sweeping emperor gestures that dismissed the absurdity of being hung out on the line with these mere peasants of garments. The sheets slapped Melanie in the face, as she was the one who arranged this abhorrence. The washing was done, now she could watch TV and relax.
Maybe she would play solitaire, maybe later, now TV. TV and potato chips. Jason was into his toys. He threw the ones that didn’t please him out onto the floor and took a box of blocks out and carried them over to the TV. His mum watched on as he clapped the cubes into each other. Melanie collapsed into the couch with her bowl of chips and stared into the box.
A large man dressed in a suit was discussing the complexities of cleaning products. “Mummy look.” Jason said again referring to the TV. Melanie ignored him, nodding with a smile in the general direction of the TV. “Mummy...” He said louder, “Mummy, look.” His voice was different. Jason’s English hadn’t improved but he sounded hoarse. Melanie looked to the child who was still attempting to place several blocks in and on top of one another. Melanie sighed. If he had been ill it would mean something exciting had happened to her, something she could tell her single best friend about. But alas she was not so fortunate. Melanie didn’t think her best friend would mind so much it’s just that whenever they spoke Melanie would run out of things to say and felt obliged to make something up. She didn’t like lying to her best friend, but then it just proved that if she was willing to listen to the lies and still be her friend then she would listen to the truth and still be her friend. Melanie didn’t realise how insecure she really was. She had an inkling from her visit to the counselor but never really bought into it. All she needed to know was that the pills she was given worked.
Melanie absorbed the radiation of the TV’s glowing pixels. A cooking show was about to start and Melanie had her notebook ready in case there was a nice recipe for apricot chicken or beef casserole.
It was 10:30 am: time for Jason’s nap. She bundled up the boy and swung him playfully in her arms. Jason squealed happily as his legs flung out from under him of their own volition. Melanie rushed up the hallway and plonked Jason into his little bed. On his quilt cover was a picture of Bob the builder. Jason watched as his mummy undid his trousers and changed his big boy undies. She squeezed the talcum powder into her hand blowing some of it in Jason’s direction. Jason giggled and scrunched up his nose. Melanie pulled up his pants and gave him a little tap on his bottom to let him know that she was finished. “Ok Jason go sleepy now?” She bent over and kissed his forehead. “Nigh, nigh sweet heart. Mummy wuves you.” Melanie signed to him.
“Mum-mum look.” Jason said pointing at the closet. Melanie looked curiously at the closet door. It was shut. There were no posters on the door. “What did you do in the closet Jason? You haven’t pulled down all your nappies again have you?” Melanie slid the door open. Everything was in place. Everything except a teddy bear that usually stayed on Jason’s bed all day and night. “Did daddy put Rudolph in here?” Melanie picked up the bear and placed it on the boy’s pillow. “Naughty daddy.” Jason throttled the bear between developing grubby stubby fingers. “Daddy smacks?” Jason inquired.
“Yes Daddy is going to get big smacks when he comes home. Kiss Rudolph better.” The boy slobbered on the polyester fur. The bear poked out of Jason’s elbow. A noise came from it. Melanie heard it. Jason seemed blissfully unaware of it. He pulled the cover up to his neck and blew his mum a kiss. The bear let out a sickening groan, the kind of noise that gives you an after taste like seasickness. Melanie frowned. It was just loud enough for her to hear it and regret her second coffee but not so loud that she could definitely decipher it. She picked up the bear. It eyed her with black plastic beaded eyes. It wasn’t the kind of toy that was made with a recorded voice so that when you squeezed it, it said: “I love you.” Jason was too young to have those toys anyway. It was a simple old-fashioned plush toy, stuffed with foam. She turned it over in her hands and looked at its back. Nothing there... “Must have been next door.” She said aloud. She turned it over again and looked to Jason. He had drifted off into a semi-nap. His eyes were shutting and opening slowly. Melanie bent over the child to place the bear back in its rightful place. “Dead skies.” the bear said in a mechanical voice like a tracheotomy patient’s electronic voice box. Melanie started. She dropped the bear on the child’s bed. Jason laughed a boisterous giggle. He cuddled the bear and looked at his mum as he laughed. It came from the bear but its mouth remained a series of stitches. Melanie looked at Jason. She couldn’t comprehend this occurrence. She walked towards the door and looked back as she closed it. Jason’s eyes were closed in the gentle precursor of dreams. She shut the door and walked swiftly up the hall into the lounge.
Melanie sat down carefully. She was unsure as to what had just happened. The TV was no longer her friend. She turned it down. Melanie had never had hallucinations before. She wondered if it had anything to do with her breakdown. She wandered into her bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Some Valium would do the trick. She took one and shoved the pills back into the vanity.
Melanie wandered out of the ensuite and into the bedroom that adjoined it. She threw herself onto the bed. “Sleep...I just need some sleep. I’m tired that’s all.” She pulled the cover over her and reached over and set the alarm. She drifted off into the dark of Valium.
An hour later she awoke to the buzzing beeps of the old clock radio. Jason was screaming. Their house was small but the main bedroom was separated from the rest of the bedrooms by the lounge. This should have been enough to drown out most noises but the walls were as thin as a supermodel’s track mark dappled arm.
She pulled herself up and out of bed and, blinking off the nap, staggered out into the lounge and down the hall to Jason’s room. Jason’s screams reverberated through Melanie’s newly conscious mind. Melanie didn’t mind, the nap had refreshed her.
She reached the door and fiddled with the childproof lock. The crying ceased as the door opened. Melanie looked at Jason. He was sleeping soundly with his fingers curled in a loose fist that rested on the pillow next to his face. The presence of the screams lingered in the air with the smell of talcum powder. It mystified Melanie. This was too much to deal with for Melanie after her nap. She wandered out of the room closing the door lightly as she went.
The kitchen smelt of instant coffee. Melanie lifted her legs, one by one over the child safety-gate. She put the jug on and prepared the coffee. Melanie stared blankly into the suburban oblivion stretching into a horizon of terracotta roof tiles. The bubbling of the jug sent her into a trance, she blanked out the noise of the TV and the passing car. The jug clicked and broke her trance. Melanie poured the boiling water over the coffee grounds and sugar. Jason was calling her. She added milk and wandered back to his room. Sure enough he was awake. Melanie picked him up and put him outside the door. She followed him back down the hall. Jason’s nappy swung behind him as his little legs ran into the lounge. There wasn’t anything exciting there waiting for him but since Xmas he had been under the impression that when one woke up one was sometimes rewarded with toys or great amounts of food to slop over the table. Melanie grasped her coffee from the kitchen. She sipped it as she watched Jason. He had his back to her and was watching a bird on a tree in the neighbor’s yard. “Birs” He said pointing at the sparrow. Melanie strolled over and sat in an armchair next to where the boy was sitting. He looked up at her but it wasn’t his face that gazed so maliciously; so intent on germinating the seeds of a thousand dreamless nights with its black, crude semen. The face that looked upon Melanie was Jason’s but it was different. It was the jaded, determined, half living, half automatic, insentient face of a counterfeit, a machine: the Jabberwocky. The innocence of the 3 year old had drained out of his eyes leaving only blood black holes. His cheeks were lifeless, hollowed and so pale. So pale they were transparent and the veins gave his skin a bruise blue hue. His lips were dry like age ripened headstones, the skin flaked and peeled. “Mummy wook.” Jason said. Melanie didn’t look. “Yes, birds. How many birds can you see?” The TV subdued Melanie while she ignored the child. “Dead skies,” Came an inhumane voice from the boy. Melanie jumped. Her coffee cup thumped onto the soft carpet and the brown liquid poured out of it, soaking into the underlay and squelching in-between Melanie’s toes. “What do you want?” The thing laughed. A giggle so resemblant of Jason’s but only resemblant. It was intense, deep, hollow with the void of emotion and humanity. “I wrote a poem for you Mummy.” It giggled again. “You wanna hear it?” Melanie stood stricken with fear and doubt. She froze as the monster mimicked the mannerisms of her son. It smiled.
“Dead skies in the winter,
Rotten skies in the fall,
decayed skies spring and summer,
soon there’ll be no skies at all.”
It giggled again. “Do you like it?” Melanie took a backward step towards the television, which suddenly shuddered and hacked the room with distortion. Melanie jumped. She glanced at the analogue snow and once again fixed her eyes on the monster. Its stubby arms toppled aside some blocks and pushed its body up clumsily. “Don’t you like my poem mummy? I wrote it all by myself.”
“J...Jason?” Jason would you please...” Melanie dropped onto her knees. The Jabberwocky was manifesting.
The thing grew. It dispersed corporate-black tentacles out of its torso. Its skin shone like PVC, slippery with deceit and propaganda. Its eyes black; black with the blood of the billions of souls it had consumed; a billion dead aborted souls: fetal waste sparkling off the recesses of its retinas. A mouth like an abattoir, consuming, crushing; its breath in wheezes: the screams of the unwilling victims of a user-friendly holocaust. The thing rose to the ceiling in a writhe of liberty, stretching its visible spine out, the mounds moving under onyx rubber skin.
“Noooooo!” Melanie screamed. She stood in awe of her absent son, frozen, fixed on this monster, the Jabberwocky. “What do you want mummy?” It said mimicking Jason’s voice. The mimic chilled Melanie’s spine. In awe, in fear, she ran. She jumped over the child safety gate clipping it with her shin and sending it skidding over the kitchen tiles as she went.
She dashed outside. Out through the lemon scented laundry. Out through the generic screen door, out into the 6 square meter back yard. Into the alley, into the drying laundry. The sheets caught her. Melanie struggled against them like a bird in a net, tangling herself in the brilliant white cotton trap. Her mind scrambled. She didn’t know where she was going after she had liberated herself from the confines of her bed sheets. She didn’t know what had happened to Jason. She didn’t know what the thing in her lounge room was. In a matter of minutes her world had crashed down around her. Around her and morning television. Melanie threw the sheet off her. She stood there for a second, her mind scrabbling over the Jabberwocky. She turned and crept towards a window.
The lounge window showed the combined lounge and dining in panorama. There was nothing there. The back of the TV cabinet, the lounge suite, the dining table, dining chairs, kitchen bench, Jason’s blocks, china cabinet, phone and key rack. No sight or sign of Jason or the monster.
Melanie stared into the lounge whilst contemplating her next move. She could go back but what awaited her? Where was Jason? She could go through the lattice gate. ‘What about Jason?’ She could go through the screen window and straight to the phone. What if the monster was waiting? Melanie’s maternal instinct tugged at her conscience. Something deep inside her told her that he was alive but she felt a disturbing numbness. It meant that he was alive but unsafe. She desperately wanted to run but where and to whom? Who would actually believe this? Even if she ran to tell someone they would probably lock her away and take Jason from her. This thing... the Jabberwocky was to blame. Fear trembled within her stomach as anger, uncontrollable anger, fizzed and bubbled. Fear was the catalyst and when mixed with anger this produced a shocking new sensation. Something entirely foreign to Melanie’s system: rage. Shock like the immediate effects of an overdose. Shock and rage unharnessed. They galloped around her stomach and reared at her neck and shoulders, stomping on nerves and tripping over arteries and blood vessels. Melanie determined herself. She gave the lounge a fierce look. “That’s it fucker.” She spun and took two steps through the laundry. The T-shirts flapped in the breeze. She flung the sheets apart and they sucked together again, like heat sealed cling wrap, as Melanie walked through them. Melanie wrenched the cotton from her face and dissected a visible path through the sheets. A flash of green lawn and the sheets sucked back together for one last embrace. An updraft caught them and pulled them out of Melanie’s path. And standing there with a block in his mouth was Jason. The rage made her jump. Her heart leapt through her mouth. “Jason!” She cried. Her son stood about 2 meters away sucking on an extra large piece of Leggo. “Jason come to mummy.” She whispered loudly as she gasped for air. He stood still while Melanie threw the sheets out of her path. Another updraft caught them and revealed Jason to her. The ground behind him shook. The updraft took the sheets straight up, it blew Melanie’s hair out of its ponytail, it flicked at her face before standing on end. Sand from the neighbor’s sandpit rose out of its box. From the lawn behind Jason, the ground cracked. A crevasse opened to reveal the Jabberwocky rising gracefully as though the soil were frictionless. Rising like a tsunami out of the black water, like the serpent, the Jabberwocky ascended into the atmosphere like a mushroom cloud: cancerous, noxious, sinister and silent.
It writhed and thus displayed its full stature. It stood 3 stories tall, black toxic tentacles thrashing about, whipping the sand into swirling chaotic spasms. It shrieked. Its voice was digital distortion. “Jason come to mummy now!” He stood in silence, his short, cropped hair standing and swaying in the radioactive updraft, and sucked on the block. The Jabberwocky eyed the boy with its sickening dead glare. Tentacles lashed at the air behind him. A clawed hand swiped out of the rubbery black web and dissected the child like a tree slasher, his lifeless limbs skittled, his blood flicked onto the sheets and Melanie’s face like a Jackson Pollock. She screamed but it was drowned, stifled by the Jabberwocky’s presence. Melanie’s rage returned. It flung her forward into the knots of tentacles.
Melanie was determined. She made it to the laundry. There she found an extension lead. The Jabberwocky arched its back and peered in through the tiny laundry window. Its toxic breath steamed the glass as it evaluated its next victim. Melanie dashed into the kitchen, tying the electrical chord as she went. She pulled out the draws and rummaged through their contents. Cutlery clanged as the entire set hit the vinyl tiles. Melanie found a pen. She dug in the second draw and pulled out a Christmas card. She scribbled something on it and returned to the back yard. “You mother fucker!” She sobbed at the creature. She pushed its tentacles aside and marched to the washing line. Melanie tied one end of the electrical chord around the supporting beam of the line, the noose around her neck and dropped. She stared the Jabberwocky dead in the eyes as the breath left her body.

Melanie’s body was found by Mick that afternoon. He came home to a cleaned empty house. The Christmas card that Melanie had composed her suicide letter read: “I’m sorry, please forgive me. I love you Mick.” Signed by her. Mick found Jason’s body in tact and hanging beside his mother's body. The detectives that investigated the murder-suicide found that the blood on the sheets was Jason’s but he had no cuts or abrasions on his body that could have produced it.

Jabberwocky: Generic Earth

“This is the living end but its still living.” Nick Cave
How beautiful the night! How solemnly the sun sets and the kingfisher evening greets the sky with songs Euro-trance. The pulse of the club district thumping out in fluorescence, a neon-pagan ritual. The drugs and decadence, the synthesizers ringing into the night like a mourning bell; thirteen at midnight. The streets fill with worshipers. The daily slog is over for now; the night’s festivities are about to begin.
The lights hypnotise the dancers. Like moths they are drawn to the neon temples without knowing why. A benign urge, an instinctual need, a need for loss of thought. The meat market. A carcass rotting with disease, bleeding logos and money: “in god we trust.” A blackened memory of the abysmal realms of god or something that claims more omnipotence. Something seedy lurks within these temples, a currency current, the undertow of capitalism, an antichrist, perhaps, bent on pleasure. It feeds on money, greed: a dish so sweet and intoxicating. It feeds off the faith held blindly in these temples, corrupting the youth, violating minds and brainwashing the ignorant. Propaganda is best served to the drunk or feeble minded.
The author of this propaganda is not a human, it is incorporated by humans, but it is not human. It is not of another realm, it is corporeal but it cannot be so defined... it resembles dreams but it is not thought nor is it of the mind, it is soulless yet it is part of every soul. Omnipotent like god but the opposite...yet it is not evil...evil is not omnipotent. Its prophecies can be seen in the news, in the clubs, in the offices and factories and in market forecasts, in the homes of the masses. It is corporeal, oh yes, but it has no name... The beat goes on.
A night on the town. Mathew was a typical guy. He was not religious but he held faith in music, or, more specifically, dancing and dance music. He worked in a furniture store: the spiritually numbing, capitalistic slog of a sales rep. Pretty draining stuff. So draining was this mindless inertia that every weekend Mathew would need to go out to clubs just to get over the five days of business exchanges he was forced to endure, forced by capitalism...
It happened, one night when Mathew was out clubbing his little hiney off. The drugs of course may have contributed to some extent but there is nothing that would explain the onslaught of such a horrible, painful, inexplicable thing...
Mathew took precautions. He saw drugs as something that only a responsible person should take. He knew all of the effects; after using substances for four years, one learns these things but he had not only acquired this knowledge through experimentation, he also had read up on the subject. Tonight his poison was in paper form: a little square of paper with a purple ohm printed on. Acid: a generation’s martyr.
Mathew checked the time before he left: 9:35pm. “Not for another half an hour, maybe an hour if it’s slow.” He wondered if his friends would be at the designated meeting point. He decided to go out anyway. He locked the door and checked his wallet: he had $40, a key card, his drivers license, a library card and a condom; the bare essentials. He stepped lively down the stairs, skipping stairs on the way.
On the street now, Matthew inhaled the air. It was sweet, semi-suburban, cafes and grass and old people’s homes, car fumes, garlic and kebabs, seasalt and sand; the perfume of the beach city. The clubs...The clubs were not far. He walked swiftly to reach the bus stop. The neon and fairy lights gave the false impression that the trip was kicking in. A warm breeze, the caresses of summer’s hands and the tourists, snap happy. Japanese signs, souvenirs, a pawnshop. Reaching the bus stop, Matthew checked the time; 9:55 pm. “Could be tripping. I don’t feel anything.” He thought.
The bus pulled into the shoulder of the road. “One to Central Street please.” The bus driver took the change and slid a card into the slot. He handed it to Matthew. This was when the acid kicked in. Matthew was steady and handled the rush gracefully. Rule one in the trippers hand book: act straight.
Rule two: don’t forget to blink,
Rule 3: don’t forget to breathe.
Rule 4: never leave a trip buddy
Rule 5: don’t forget that everything will be ok, just chill out ok?
Rule 6 is a little bit up for debate. Some will tell you that it is don’t think too much. Others say it’s more like think for the sake of the trip. Still others will say it’s let the trip take you wherever it damn well wants to. Matthew did all of these things at once. “Why fight it?” Was his reasoning.
The bus whirred past the Middle Kingdom that was suburbia. Matthew spun his little mind around such complexities as the old, drunk men who were going home from the Veterans’ club. Their faces were not warping...yet. A street light flicked on just as the bus passed it. Matthew blinked habitually but consciously. It felt as though the bus were controlling the lights of the city. Every time it lined up in traffic for a red light, the light would turn green and the bus would have a clear passage. The little patterns amongst the chaos, little meanings that meant something big. A car with loud music playing pulled out into the traffic beside the bus. Passing street signs whooshed past in rhythms, rhythms of the thump of the bass. The temple bells...
Matthew suddenly pulled out of his trance and jumped out of his seat; this was his stop. Again rhythms, a rev down in gears as the traffic slowed the bus. The base car driving off into the distance the sound of the bell for the next stop; in the details lay the hallucinations. The clubs were calling.
The vibe was good. Matthew got off the bus, thanking the driver as he skipped onto the curb. His destination was the cafe on the corner. His friends were there already. Matthew strided over to the cafe. “Hey what’s up?” He said.
“Not much.” Replied a guy he’d never met before. “I don’t know you do I?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hey Matt. This is Bret. He’s Rachel’s brother and he just came of age.” Peter said. Peter! Matt knew Peter. “Oh? Out on the town for the first time?” Matt said.
“Yeah, can’t wait.”
“Neither can I. Lets go.” Matthew said. “You’ll love it.” He added. The group slid out of their chairs and wandered up the street. They chattered about the cafe rating the food and appraising the atmosphere. Matthew walked alone, unaware of the conversation.
They hit the first club...Matthew was now hallucinating from all angles, luckily this was a safe haven. The music pumped and throbbed, anthems for the patriots, girls in white t-shirts were stripped by the black light. Lasers molded and twisted like static skies, clouded by dense liquid ice, DJs dug themselves, they dug a pulpit to hide behind. Matthew danced. He danced & danced & changed clubs and danced. His friends left for another club and he danced. He spoke in sound bytes to acquaintances and fellow lovers of the nightlife, to bar staff and strangers.
Finally he rested. His feet hurt and the pain was emphasised by the acid’s relentless swirl. But he was not at the point of wishing for clarity. It was 2:30. No where near time to go. Matthew resumed his trance. His floor. His music. His people. An orb appeared in the distance. It surrounded the bar, engulfing the tables, growing, throbbing, like the beat of the music but out of synch. Throbbing like the sun. Matthew blinked and it was gone. Time to change clubs.
On the street several brothels had just opened and their staff had spilled out onto the street to lure in clientele. Music from a car stereo bounced up the road. Some drunk people spoke boisterously in slang and curses. It was indecipherable as to whether they were angry or happy or just drunk. Matthew didn’t like their vibe. Rule 7: trippers and drunks together should never be seen, unless there’s something in-between...like a street. Matthew crossed to his next club.
Again the orb, hovering in the sky making the district muggy and sweaty like a cat owners home, fur dusted on the couches, fleas in the carpets. Matthew became itchy. He scratched as he swished into the club. All the dance floor was crammed with bodies, sweaty meat slapping against sweaty meat. The defrost was early, things were beginning to get putrid. The air was thick with sex and European dance ethics. The toxic scent of alcohol swam through the air conditioner and lingered among the torsos of a thousand happy, horny clubheds. A stillness surrounded the venue as the dj fucked up his set. A stillness thick with menace, mocking laughter. Matthew was getting tired. The club now bored him. He stayed though, in the stifling box. The prison he loved so. Once again the orb feasted upon the dancers. Matthew blinked. It now had a face. The orb was metamorphosing. A face in foetal fluid. Lidless eyes underneath a skin of light. An alien body, dead baby eyes and dragon ears. It flinched. Matthew was uncomfortable, now he had come to the point of the trip where people were not good. Solitude can be a tripper’s best friend. He finished his water and left the club, doing so in style. The street, the orb. It was still growing. A change had occurred. The air was thick with the smells of car exhaust and cafes and seasalt again.
Matthew climbed on the next bus that passed. The driver looked like a lizard. The few people on the bus stared at him. “Its ok, they don’t know you’re on drugs.” He reassured himself. “‘Just act straight.’”
He sat on the third seat from the driver because it looked safe. Relief. Sweet relief; the acid had done its worst and now the soft, floating, swaying of the bus, the flesh of the seat, sinking like strawberries in custard. Food entered his mind. A stop at the cafe on his street and the long dawdle home with ice cream in hand and down his chin and shirt. The bus rocked him; a cradle for the elective orphans.
The greasy gears sang a lullaby as the bus pulled away from the curb. Matthew’s head swam. The smell of wafers plucked at his nostrils. He bought 2 scoops: boysenberry, for a change and mango, an old favorite. His street. His world of suburbia in limbo, perpetual highways and infinite egg cartons of units and the contrasting rebellious oddly shaped vessels of resorts and high rises. Massive monoliths, monuments to a listless life, sky life. Stairways to inner city sanctuary, real estate heaven; all the colours of the pastel rainbow.
Matthew dragged his tired feet over the tired ground. They comforted each other. Again the orb, static under bi-numeric pixels. A digital sky for a digital earth. The spirit was a viral terror, a program error, it stuck on the matrix like bare flesh on leather. A quiet neighborhood now; only white noise, never silence. It rings in the children’s ears, the heartbeat of the sandman and a soulless army, marching through the night to plant dreams into their sleep. Matthew blinked and checked the time: 3:30am. It didn’t matter what time it was. The sky would keep time for him. The sky and the orb.
The orb was drifting away now. It was no longer perfectly round. A slit had appeared in one side and something was emerging. A beast. A kaleidoscopic monster. Matthew knew about monsters, he’d seen a few in his time. Dragons he could handle. Basilisks? Maybe on a good day. Serpents...piece of cake, even the occasional demon, he’d been know to rhapsody with all sorts. But this thing... it hit him with a force. A super sonic wave of white noise broke like a tsunami over Matthew and dumped him, face down, on the road. His ice cream rolled into the gutter. Matthew got up. His ears were ringing but he was sound. Another wave, a wall of sound, a high pitched, static scream flattened Matthew as he tried to brace himself against the sonic wind. Microwaves threw him against the ground as he tried to escape from the undertow. Matthew looked up into the tide of noise. “Shit.” He said quite plainly. This angered the creature. Its eyes glowed like a dead TV, pupils dilated, pinpricks of tiny white pixels. It opened its mouth and screamed again. Massive thumps of the noise hit Matthew. The street bounced as the invisible load hit; it was invisible but the air was warping in fluctuations. The creature was a huge...thing. The manifestation of the pointless dribble that fills our lives; accounts, advertisements, democracy, brand loyalty, drugs, liquidations, corporations, religion, TV, test patterns, institutions, systems failed, thought corruption,: white noise. A tone. The same neutral, medium pitched tone that you hear at the end of a video. A tone filled the street. The waves had subsided and the sonic tide was waning, its stain on the sand, its watermark was this neutral tone. The creature lingered in the sky. It eyed Matthew with dead-baby TV eyes like an ant, semi- comprehensive. A big, dumb, blind germ, an amoebae, unaware of its power, incapable of complex thought patterns, just being, existing without purpose or meaning.
Matthew took this oppotunity to get up and go home. The ice cream was gone, a fast pace could be held. Matthew jogged into his block of units and up the stairs, skipping stairs as he went. The thing descended into the car park. It eyed Matthew as he climbed the stairs. Its eyes pressed against the glass scraping glass against glass. It hovered and displayed itself. It had a tail like a corporation, like a dragon in Thailand’s skies. A massive belly, the belly of every displaced war refugee. Its head was a dry skull, a bullet wound for a mouth. It swam in the air, and flicked its tail at the glass gently. The glass wall of the stairwell cracked only slightly. Matthew reached his door, fiddled for his keys and swung the door open and shut it again. The monster was gone. The world was gone. Matthew sighed with relief. He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. The cold water leaped into his hand and skipped down his throat. “Ahhh.” He closed the fridge and took the water with him. Water was his spiritual home, his center. The TV beckoned silently and submissively. He slid off his shoes and plonked into the futon. TV, real colour, real life. Subjectivity as opposed to activity. Matthew tuned on the box. Infomercials...sitcoms from the back catalogue...D-grade soaps...eighties horror...ahh late night television, the den of ‘les miserables’ of entertainment. The monster was gone, the TV was still there and the acid was wearing off. Matthew drifted off into a comatose catnap. His dreams were not there.
Matthew woke. Drowsily he got up and tuned the TV off. He shuffled off into his bedroom. His bed. Sleep. The happy sleep that mindlessness brings. His dreams slinked into his mind. A club, a golden path...the creature. Matthew started awake. The creature was there, hovering over the foot of his bed like a succubus. “Why are you doing this?!” He screamed. He panted in the dark, his pulse soared. Beads of sweat broke out of his head and trickled down his face. The monster stared. Ignorance was its soul, a deep understanding of nothing, stupidity personified. It breathed jingles. Commercials and reports flared from its mouth at Matthew. The flames of idiocy swirled and flickered. Incense, the intoxicating smells of commerce, sickly sweet corruption invaded and violated his nostrils. It subdued Matthew, his pulse dropped, his sweat dried and he fell asleep. Dreams of capitalism engulfed his mind, the flames of ignorance burning his thoughts, devouring his consciousness, sulfur violating his will, manipulating his being. Propaganda crisped his soul like a toaster.
When Matthew awoke, he was still. The morning sun of summer peeked in through the curtains, which were slow dancing on a sweet breeze. A change drifted into his bedroom. Suddenly the world was different. Matthew got up and went into the lounge. He rummaged around the phone table for the yellow pages. With a mind like a robotic arm Matthew dialed and spoke. “Hello, I’d like to speak to someone in the admissions department.” His local university obliged the information.
Matthew applied and was accepted into the university. Fourteen years, several thousand pages of study, three second hand cars and multiple flights of social climbing later Matthew had his own corner office with a major advertising agency: he had become an advertising executive!
Such an inexplicable fate! The torments of hell for he who became the monster. To serve without knowing why, to be without being, to exist as incapable of unique thought, a germ, an amoeba. An automaton.
©Amber Waves 2003

Jabberwocky Reprise

"I am the worker sold to the machine."-Langston Hughes
Many a night spent in solitude in this white noise. Many a night spent wishing for solitude in the traffic of human effluent and the communication smog. The damp musty laundry baskets of the cities, full to the brim with week-old wet towels and stained underwear that clogs the trains at night and lurks just beyond the beams of the lights of the street. Human would be too soft a term for this thing... the substance that oozes from the drains and flows down the gutters into the streams, into a place to hide; nature is where it seeks sanctuary, though sanctuary is too sacred a word for what it does there. It violates the water... It abuses the sky until it is bruised and scarlet; the blood: ozone red, as black as the chambers of Judas’ heart, blood black. A vile chameleon of the elements, a parasite, a germ: the apathy virus.
Lydia was a sewer. She worked eight hours a day, 8 a.m. till 4 p.m., except on Fridays when the company let their employees go home early at 1p.m. She was not a company drone. She had many talents. She was bright and articulate. Lydia’s career choice was made on the spur of the moment: she needed a job. The union provided her with a safety net. The girls at work were normal individuals; they all had their quirks.
Personally, Lydia was a very interesting woman. She was only young so perhaps woman is not the word. Lydia was not a communist but she read the fantastic stories of Mao and his red army, but then, Lydia read a lot of things. Her favorite book was ‘The silence of the Lambs’ by Thomas Harris. She dreamed of becoming an author...an author not an authoress as she had been instructed by someone along the way.
A clothing-manufacturing factory is like no other place on earth. An eerie, repetitive, mechanical, fashionable and humble place. The buzz of the machines becomes almost musical. It is not at all like a cold, sterile office, or a maniacally vibrant shopping mall; a factory is too human. The girls (there are male sewers too but only 1 in Lydia’s factory) add colour to the repetitive printed fluroescents of the garments and the overhead lights. In a factory you can look like you just crawled out from a cat’s ass: one of the perks of manufacturing. It may not be pretty but damn it, it’s colourful!
From the outside, the world looks upon a dreary corrugated iron roof and dry, cracked painted walls. Concrete surrounds the factory except in the courtyard where there is gravel. When the factory first opened, Julie, one of the girls, threw a passion fruit into the corner of the graveled courtyard. A year later a robust, voluptuous vine erupted from the rocks and still thrives on the excess heat and light that the factory throws off it’s metal walls. The courtyard is where the smokers sit for lunch. Lydia sat there the day that the factory closed down.
Lydia’s story is unlike Anton’s. It begins similarly though: a normal day in a normal life. This day began a year before the factory closed.
She was late for work. This was normal. Lydia lived only a kilometer away from work so when it was time for her to wake up she felt that she always had time for five more minutes sleep. Of course, when we say “five more minutes,” we all know that this never actually means five more minutes. She rushed in from the car park where she had been dropped off for the day by her next-door neighbor who also worked in the same industrial park as Lydia’s factory. She took her punch card out and clocked in at 8:09. She scurried into the manager’s office, apologised for being late and said that she would: “make it up during morning tea.”
“That’s Ok Lydia.” The manager said. “I know you always do.” Lydia thanked her boss for being so understanding and swished away into the finishing room.
Her machine waited for her. There was a whole day’s worth of work sitting on her table and Lydia dived straight into it. The “feed off the arm” machine is what some people in some factories called her machine. Some call it a twin or a triple needle, still others called it a “Damn, bloody, stupid, fucking thing,” often in frustration. The machine would fold two edges of fabric together and stitch them as they were fed through the folder, interlocking the pieces in a consensual, manufactured embrace; you could never force two pieces together...they had to want it. The kinds of stitching that you see down the sides of leg seams of jeans was what Lydia sewed. If you turn the jeans (and I know you will look for it) inside out, you will see that the threads are actually chained together, unless of course the jeans you own are cheaply manufactured in which case you will not have chain stitching. Don’t pull on the thread! If you do the whole row of stitching could unravel. This made Lydia’s job a breeze. If she made a mistake, she could simply pick at these threads, unravel the rows of stitching and do it all over again.
The factory was a lovely place to work but it had its bad side. In the middle of a tropical summer day, the temperature would rise to about 40 degrees Celsius and chances were that the factory would be producing something to import to a western country, higher up in the food chain than Lydia’s, who needed new winter fashions to hang on the racks. Not to down play the humidity, in fact the humidity was even worse. If there was wool on the line, some of the girls would have to go home on these humid days. But the boss was not without concern. Actually it was the unions who had the workers’ well being in mind when they made the law that when the temperature reached 41 degrees Celsius in the factory, the workers would either go home or take a break until the temperature dropped. During these breaks the manager would often bring the girls some ice cream or soft drinks (this wasn’t compulsory but the manager liked to look after the workers.) This was not a cheap expenditure; there were over 140 people employed in the factory. The cost of this extravagence was more than Lydia made in a week.
This day was nice though. The pleasant morning spring breeze wafted in through the double doors and kissed Lydia as she bustled with some weatherproof coats. “Hey Lydia...” Sharon from the Bar-tacker shouted over the familiar buzz of the machines. “Yeah?” Lydia said over her shoulder.
“Could you do me a favor?”
“Depends on what it is...”
“I need someone to put a seam into this strap. It’s for Kurt’s back pack.” Sharon referred to Kurt in the cutting room. Kurt was one of those dudes. He was often the whipping boy for many of the girls’ sexually harassing remarks but, being male and a dude, he was never offended by these remarks, maybe just a little embarrassed because most of the girls who made the remarks were much older than him. Lydia wasn’t really fussed over Kurt. He was good looking, she had to give him that, but she didn’t really find him attractive so she could have declined to sew the strap for his custom made backpack but in this working environment you help your coworkers. “Yeah Ok. Put it in my pile and I’ll do it after this.” These kinds of things are a regular request.
Another sleeve and a turn to the left. A sewer’s job is a lot of repetition, before you know it your sewing in your sleep, or asleep while you are sewing. This is why Lydia often drank several caffeinated drinks during the day. Another thing she learned to do was to “zone out.” The sewer’s “zone out” is a simple form of meditation that many yogis and martial arts gurus use to block out pain or concentrate or clear their thoughts. It requires a bit of focus and a bit of practice. Lydia acquired this skill by listening to her personal CD player and repeating the same movements over and over at regular intervals and concentrating on clearing her mind. Sometimes she would focus her mind in a particular direction, like, for example, on a story-line she was developing, and these methods proved fruitful. The “zone out” also came in handy if the company needed to push through a very large quantity of garments in a small amount of time. Naturally the sewers would have to work harder to fill the order on time and repetitive movements can really take their toll on the hands, shoulders, neck, back and hips, especially when sewing. Lydia didn’t suffer from any major afflictions in these areas but at the end of the working day her shoulders would ache slightly and, if there was a rush to fill an order, this ache would consume her energy and drop upon her around 3 p.m. This is where the zone out would have its most beneficial effects. Pain management sort of came with the territory.
The day moved on. Lydia sat with her friends at the smoker’s table for morning tea and lunch. She put the strap through for Kurt. The end of the day came without event. At ten minutes to 4 Lydia tallied up her quota. With two minutes to spare, she cleaned out the fabric dust and grime that had collected inside the machine. The bell rang and the girls, who had been waiting at their machines anxiously, ran to the punch out clock to line up. Lydia didn’t jump at the sound of the bell. She was still cleaning her machine. The elegant shine of the diesel over the metal and the old metallic blue paint gave her machine a grace; the airs of a widowed queen. Lydia got up, collected her CD player and wandered over to the line, which hadn’t really moved.
The girls chattered excitedly. Lydia was quiet. She’d worked hard that day. The boss surveyed the line with a smile. Lydia was still zoned out. Her mind drifted into the day’s work. A bundle of weather proof coats, some jeans, the strap. Lydia punched out and looked for her neighbor’s car. It wasn’t there so she sat at a cafeteria opposite the factory parking lot. “I wonder if my mother's home.” Lydia pondered a walk home. The journey wasn’t far but on top of a long physical day’s work it would certainly be arduous. The car park emptied as Lydia sat alone in the closed cafeteria, waiting for her neighbor.
Lydia stared at the greying sky. The street of the factory was vacant but a road that led into the street was busy, the cars were full of mothers picking their kids up from school and workers rushing home. A street light came on. It was still daylight but the timer on the light was broken so this light always came on two hours before the rest of the lights.
The industrial park spoke to Lydia and she listened to the distant murmurs of drills and clangs of shelves. It was alive. It whispered laments to Lydia in a voice that was semi-corporeal; omnipotent like an angel, like a brooding willow, the beloved annulled. Lydia felt sympathy for the park. She wanted it to rejoice in its awkward buildings, the churches of the 20th century. A new building, freshly painted with pastels, jutted out on the corner. Next to it sat an elder, wiser building. It sat on concrete courtyards like an old woman on a recliner watching silently and knowing better, the iron bars on her windows, the years of experience, mapped out for all to see, the lines on her face, ever knowing, ever silent and more the wiser for it.
The cafe was still but there was still noise, the echoes of the happily fed working class. Lydia knew that this was the park’s most beautiful place. The temple of labor was not the factories but the factory’s lunchrooms, a badge on the chest of the unions.
Another streetlight came on. The sky had been getting darker as clouds moved in from the west. A storm was brewing but it was not threatening to rain yet. Lydia lit a cigarette. The industrial park was lonely. She tried to comfort the park with a smile. It only made it worse. “I am alone now.” It said. Lydia was taken aback. The park sighed with the noise of the traffic passing him by. “Alone.” It sighed again as a car drove out of its bitumen veins. The few trees next to the cafe swayed in the gentle breeze. The park wept. “They’re all gone, they are all I have.” It said.
Lydia began to doubt her sanity. She shook off the zone out and walked back to the factory. There was a public phone next to the punch clock. Lydia eyed the boss’s open office. The boss looked up from her desk and nodded in recognition to Lydia. Lydia waved a finger to her as she picked up the receiver and dialed her home number. It rang... it rang four times before the answering machine picked up. “...Leave a message... beeeeeep...”
“Hi mum its me. If you are there could you pick up please?...” No one answered. “Ok if you get this message, I’m at work still and I need a lift but I’ll probably walk home soon... Ok?...Bye.” She placed the receiver back on the handle. At least she could smoke in the cafeteria.
Lydia wandered back over the car park and sat on the bench. She lit another cigarette. The park looked on with puppy eyes, a doteing, amalgamated look that melted Lydia’s heart. She got up and started walking. “Don’t leave me. Please.” The park begged. Lydia had a choice of two paths: the long way through the industrial park or the noisy way along the main road and through the battered, lower class suburb. Lydia pondered this for a moment. “I have to go,” She said to the park. “But you can walk me home the long way.” Lydia tightened the laces on her boots and began to stroll home.
The sun was still shining off the windows of some million dollar homes in the middle distance on top of a hill. The park hummed an Edwardian children’s song with the hundreds of octaves of the grey noise from cars and machinery. It hung an arm over Lydia’s shoulder and pulled her tight, close to him. “I like you.” It said but its voice was different, menacing and subdued. Lydia shivered a little as some drizzle pattered onto her shoulders. She folded her arms. “You will stay with me won’t you?” Lydia stopped. The voice was more succinct, more defined. Before this, Lydia thought that the voice of the park was just her poetic imagination running away with her but now... “the park couldn’t possibly be alive...” She insisted to the creative hemisphere of her brain, “it’s impossible” Logic further asserted. Lydia didn’t like the way the park looked now. It was unfamiliar. The buildings had transformed into old decrepit, rotting timber and empty lots, full of rusty old car parts and rubbish. There was a dirty old dog tied up next to a truck station. It didn’t bother to move it only watched, pitifully, desiringly, as Lydia passed it.
The rain had touched the ground and recoiled as though it were testing a bath that was too hot. “mum won’t be looking for me this way” Lydia thought. The buildings now loomed like gargoyles on a gothic church, one snarling a grin in Lydia’s direction. The silence of the park now frightened Lydia. “Are you there?” Lydia asked the zone.
“I am always here.” It replied. “I will always be here until long after you are dead. Until mankind slithers back into the slime from whence it came, until the sun...”
“Why are you saying these things? Stop it!” Lydia was now very scared. The buildings on this side of the park were all closed and had been for years. The rusty garage doors had been darkened and spotted by the drizzle. She stopped. “I thought you liked me.”
“Oh, I do.” The park whispered.
“Why did you say such things? Are you trying to frighten me?”
“I am only telling you the truth. The truth can sometimes be frightening.” The park had changed its tone again. This new tone cramped at Lydia’s heart. She looked for a path to the main road. There was one about four buildings away. She stepped carefully, showing off her confidence. The park breathed heavily. “Don’t leave me!” It screamed. Lydia ignored it. She picked up the pace. “I thought you felt sorry for me. You are just like all the rest of them.” It said. Lydia turned the corner into the alley. “You come here, use me and leave.” The alley smelled like sulfur. Some kind of greasy run off had collected in a puddle with the modest rain. Lydia looked into it as she stepped over it. She saw her reflection and it made her heart jump. “I won’t let you go!” The park asserted. Lydia began to run, past the drum, past the used syringes and the Dumpster. The alley grew tighter, restricting light and movement. Great piles of metal junk lay on either side of it. Lydia slowed as she skipped over metal pipes that had escaped from their piles. Suddenly, a force that came from every way at once threw Lydia up against the wall. It was the park. It let her fall into one of the piles. Lydia tried to pick herself up but the park had her pinioned into the dry dusty rust and dirt. It forced itself into her, the power tools screaming, and scoured her insides. Something hit Lydia, a blunt object on her shoulders. “I only want you to stay. Stay with me forever.” It said as it invaded her body through her mind. The park ground Lydia into the metal junk like a mincer, penetrating her sacred thoughts, raping her, corrupting her. Lydia struggled against the automaton, the tautological violence, but it had her pinned to the rusty pile. “I just want you to know, this was not meant to be this way.” The park said. It was gunmetal cold, automatic, souless.
Finally the industrial park was satisfied. Lydia fought against the machine and broke free. “Only a couple of meters.” She wept as she ran. The metal parts had dug into Lydia under her weight and the weight of the force that had raped her. Dusty rust stains on her cheeks ran dark, iron like blood, as the tears streamed down her face. All over her legs and arms were cuts and warm blood, real blood trickled from them. “I love you...more than you will ever know.” The park said as Lydia dashed out of the alley and into the main street. She ran across the road and into the park, a real park with children and play gyms, a living park, humane, botanical and recreational. The suburb where she lived. Lydia was home. She ran up the stairs to her unit, opened the door and slammed it shut behind her. She cried. “No one would ever believe this.” She sobbed. She walked into the bathroom, undressed and jumped into the shower. She sat and wept under the steam and water.
Lydia didn’t go to work the next day. When she did return her job was very much the way it had always been. The park never spoke to her again but Lydia still felt it there, brooding like Milton’s Satan, Lydia was not afraid of it, she still felt sympathy for the devil, an industrial Stockholm syndrome of sorts. She was never alone in the park again.
©Amber Waves 2003

Jabberwocky

How can you describe that which is indescribable? Something that is so vivid and ghastly yet intangible, something obvious yet invisible and undetectable. The streets feel it. There’s something in the air or underground. It’s nothing you can touch or smell. Sometimes you can see it or feel it. It touches everyone. I myself have no word for it.
Anton was a desk jockey. He wore it well. The building he worked in wore it’s cold sleek monolithic metal like appearance well. His job was one of those types where if you do a whole lot of nothing and everything is still fine, you’ve done your job. The company respects you. His life was a nice place to be. Nice, not great, not particularly exciting, or fun, or even interesting; it was ordinary; uninspired. I present Anton’s life as a case to prove the existence of the monster that feeds off dreams. The creature that sucks meaning from existence, the dreary skies that bear down upon blackened bruised imaginations; the digital emptiness of negative land is the Jabberwocky.
Anton had enough. He wasn’t poor. He had a wife, a family, a car and of course he had his job. Every day he would wake up get out of bed, shower, dress for work, eat breakfast, talk with his wife and drive to work in his car. Like clockwork. Every day the same little routine. Every day at work he would sit at his desk, trying to sort out some problem that the company had assigned him. Every midday he would join several of the company’s employees in a cafeteria for lunch. This is where it gets spicy: the conversations ranged from four wheel drives to politics. Then he would mosey on back to his cubicle and try to figure out how to implement his solution to the problem of the day. At 5, he would drive home, occasionally singing along to a commercial radio station’s 80s pick of the day. At around 6 p.m. (traffic permitting) he would arrive home. The evening’s activities varied from time to time but usually involved watching the news, eating dinner and maybe tinkering around with his 1967 Trans-Am, Anton’s pet project. “Hey, you gotta have a hobby.” He’d say to anyone who would listen.
So, what made Anton special? What was unique about his existence that makes him a perfect example to write about? Nothing. Nothing at all. Anton was completely without culture (unless you call the discovery channel culture), inspiration, or difference. He was un-unique, so ordinary that he was extraordinary. You probably know someone like this. It is so common that it is not at all extraordinary that there are so many people like this. But that in itself is extraordinary.
Anton’s life was like this pretty much up until the day he died but there was nothing ordinary about the day he died, at least, not what he went through. I’m not talking about calamitous airline disasters or spontaneous combustion or anything as stupid as that. The best way to give it justice is to simply tell the day as it happened.
One autumn day Anton woke up and went through his ritual of going to work. It didn’t occur to him that anything was wrong or different about this day because there was nothing spectacular about it. He got to work on time and ready to solve yet another problem with management; a few performance records needed to be reviewed. He went to lunch with his co-workers where the conversation had taken the ordinary route of weekend getaways. None of his co-workers made any kind of interesting statements.
The interesting part of this day began at about 2:30. An hour and a half into working out a way to make the art department run more efficiently, Anton had some kind of breakdown. He began to sweat. This is one of the first signs of an anxiety attack which could account for what happened next. Anton looked at his desk, looked around his cubicle and then the office. “This is the world.” He muttered. “This is all we know.” He stood up. The patterns and fluorescence swirled and bore down upon him. He walked swiftly into the bathroom. Even the bathroom was no consolation. The cool tiles and the running water only stirred his stomach acid. A co-worker walked in on Anton as he was washing his face.
“Hey what’s up?” His voice was like a mincing machine, grinding Anton’s thoughts like a chicken carcass and driving away any focus that his eyes could grasp. “Not much.” Anton said.
“Still feeling the heat of the summer?” The blur inquired.
“Yeah it’s a hot one today.”
“Tell me about it! I wish I hadn’t worn wool!” A laugh, so hideous and infuriating, arose from the blurred grey and white suit and bounced off the porcelain like machine gun fire, each bullet hitting Anton in the face, chest and stomach. “Ha, ha!” Anton said and added: “See you later” as he walked out the door. No solace in the bathroom, no solace in the office. With no where to hide Anton returned to his desk.
The airlift seat sank under the weight of fear beating down upon him. The fear of being alone, the fear of being in a crowd, the fear of failure and success; fear. Great, painful, unimaginable fear washed over Anton. Afraid and alone in a crowd he did the only thing he could: he worked. He organised a management plan with the machine guns pointed at his head and ringing out around the office like a Muslim wedding, threatening his very being.
The patterns swirled and became more patterns. Even the chaotic nature of the human element of the office became a series of movements to be repeated at identical intervals. Anton didn’t even have to look up to know that the patterns were there. A phone rings, someone deletes something, the scream of a modem, photocopier, small talk, the shredder, a silence, a politically correct joke, machine gun laughter, another silence, some murmurs from accounting... the phone rings...
Anton was stifled. He had stopped sweating and was now in the first stages of a migraine. The bleak musical patterns squeezed his mind. “How can we do this everyday?” He thought. Denial hit him like bricks toppling off a wall. He got up. The patterns were still swarming but at least now his head had stopped pounding. A familiar smell invaded his nostrils. “Ooh is that coffee?” He said to his neighboring co-worker. “Yeah, Jan just put on a fresh pot.” The man sipped the hot, dark brown liquid out of a forest green mug. “I think I need one of those.” Anton said and wandered over to the coffee table.
He picked up the jug. Anton’s thoughts disappeared. He looked aimlessly at the room. The patterns were still there. Green mug, grinning idiot, busy power pussy, shredder, silence, a joke and machine gun laugh... Anton shuddered as he poured the coffee into his “Worlds greatest husband” mug. Anton was not the world’s greatest husband. In fact, he was having adulterous thoughts about a busy blonde, two cubicles away from him, right at that instant. He slobbered on the mug. This, for now, was his oral fix. He stared at the woman. He didn’t ogle her. The office is too much of a bland place for ogling. His eyes were transfixed. He was hypnotised by her, by the mind-bendingly neutral way in which she moved. She was without sex. She was without a face, breasts or hips. She did, of course, have all of the afore mentioned but it was as if they didn’t exist. Anton blinked. She moved again and looked up to him. Somewhere in the recesses of Anton’s delusional mind it looked like she was winking at him. The same way a prostitute winks at a potential customer: business like and with a purpose; the hard sell.
The woman’s face transformed. Where once she wore brown lipstick now he saw a sickly syphilitic red. Her cheeks became blushed like that of a drunk. Her hollow, bored eyes filled with the fury of a tropical cyclone, a flicker of ice surfaced in Anton’s direction. She pulled herself out of her chair in the most difficult way one can get out of an office chair, with her back hunched over the desk. She moved towards the tearoom where Anton watched on against every instinct in his body.
The strange creature that lurched towards him was neither woman nor beast, it was much worse. A corporate whore, a company slave. She threw herself into the isle and shuffled up to Anton. He was afraid. She now stood less than inches away from Anton’s face. With all of Hells might, all of the rage of the eternal fire, with every stolen breath from the lungs of every victim she screamed. She screamed in Anton’s face. Anton didn’t move. The creature lifted her hand and brushed his cheek softly and gently like the way a mother would wipe the tears away from her child’s face. The screaming ceased. Her hand moved away from Anton’s face and explored its own. She pinched her nose and pulled off her face. It all came off in one go. Blood flicked onto Anton’s face and down his shirt. The woman was faceless. Such a vial little Freudian image but this is what she was. The skin gone, there was nothing left but a grey pattern. Anton spat out some of the creature’s blood and doubled over. When he stood the woman had vanished down the corridor and was walking into the ladies room. A co-worker coughed, a modem screamed...
Anton recollected his thoughts. “This isn’t right.” He wandered back to his cubicle. It was there that he realised he had spilt coffee down the front of his shirt. He shuffled some of his papers and passed time by formatting some disks. The computer at least didn’t pretend to be anything so despicable as a half-biological, semi-existent automaton. Computers are without pretence, if you are lucky. Anton sweated as the clock ticked. It reminded him of some TV show that he had seen when he was a child about a guy with one eye who was dead and whose heart had been stashed under the floorboards. The second hand beat into his mind like the tell tale heart; infuriating, godless, ticking. Another minute passes and nothing gets done.
Anton left work five minutes early. The clock had mocked him enough with its arrogantly infinite toll. He avoided any contact with the people that he ascosciated with in the office on his way to his car.
The parking lot. More patterns. Anton took his keys out and searched for his car. He looked down the isle. “Its Ok.” He said to himself. “Just don’t worry about the patterns.” He assured the concrete columns and the Saabs. Just a little further and the whole world will be fine.” But Anton’s car was not where he thought he had parked it. Three stories underground and without a soul around, Anton felt assured that no one was watching him. But he was unaware of the three eyes that watched on, one was digital and closed circuit, the second was not so easily defined as alive or not alive. It was not a machine, or an animal. There were no people in the car park. The thing that surveyed Anton wretched and the car park wretched with it. It was in the building, in the walls and floors, and the concrete columns and Saabs he had sought a sympathetic audience with. Anton dropped his case. The fear came flooding back all at once. Slowly the creature writhed, heaving its breath over Anton’s back. Anton shuddered. He could hear nothing but white noise. This worried him even more. If there had been an explosion, a bomb, he could explain the way the floor rocked and teetered like an aerial in a violent storm. No, this was not a bomb. He wished it were. The car was not on this aisle. Anton turned and went down the second aisle. The building reared and continued heaving as though it were an Iron lung hooked up to emphysemic old man. Anton stopped. “Is it fear that this thing thrives on?” He thought. He turned around. The car park was breathing in great, furious gasps like a fish out of water. “I’m not afraid of you!” He yelled but in a way as though it were open to debate. His voice trailed off into the cliffs of metal and concrete. The creature was unperturbed. Its wheezing continued.
Anton found his car. He hurled himself into the driver’s seat and took a second to calm down. The building was still gasping. He turned the key in the ignition and reversed out of the park, wheels squealing like a pig being led out to slaughter. The car was in motion and Anton was struggling to handle the wheel but he was out of there. The second story whirred past. The first story threw itself at him. The ground floor barely ruffled his hair. The parking guard, a beacon to life and the outside world sat in his cubicle, face down in a book. He smiled and waved Anton through after Anton had slid his ticket into the machine.
Daylight trickled down from the buildings that loomed over head, the only source of life in the corporate district. There was no sunshine but the sky was lit. Anton’s eyes adjusted. His pupils dilated and contracted. He almost laughed at his big, dumb fear. The weight wasn’t gone but the shock had left his system. The sky was a shade of gold, draining into the west on the obscured horizon. There were other cars on the road. Normal cars, cars that were rusty or patched, cars with bumper stickers that said: “Mafia Staff car,” cars with Garfield on the rear windscreen, Taxis! God forsaken, slow, rusty old taxis. Cars meant life. Life meant reality. Reality meant real people, not corporate logo banners.
Anton turned on the radio. Static stifled the song. The radio farted; someone was on a cell phone near by. The shops bustled with noise, movement and colour. Real colours, colours you would never see on TV. Anton relaxed and fiddled with the dial but he still felt that all was not right. Something itched at his subconscious. He felt under the seat for where he hid a packet of cigarettes from his wife. They were still there. Relief washed over him in a deluge of satisfaction as he pulled out a smoke and put it to his mouth. He pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter but it didn’t work. Luckily, the man in the next car at the lights had a cigarette. “Can I borrow your lighter please?” Anton said as he wound down his window.
“Sure buddy.” The man reached into his pocket and produced a green lighter. Anton took it and rolled his thumb over the ignition. The lighter sparked. The flame rose beyond the end of Anton’s cigarette and balled around the car. It consumed the other cars. The people on the streets and the buildings were crumbled as the flame devoured the entire street. Ashes swept through the void in a digital breeze. Anton was alone, in oblivion. He fell into the void without screaming.

Two months later, Anton’s decomposing body was found in the gutter of that same street. His body was bloated and blue like he had been sitting in water for a long time. The coroner put the cause of death down as drowned but there was never a full autopsy conducted on Anton’s body. The company paid for his funeral and his boss read a eulogy.
©Amber Waves 2003