Teeming life picked out an instant of harmony from dissonance and this choir sang hoarsely and rhymed and reasoned for no reason and no rhyme nor reason rang forth. In fact, but for brief episodes of striking, startling perfection pain and pleasure, nothing of very much worth rang forth at all.
In a long abandoned cement plant, put to new, more agonizing uses, the chorus, firm muscled apprentice butcher’s boys and girls with always a crude song on their lips, or football chants, lounge about languidly smoking what smell like John Player’s Navy Cuts, no filters, choking back on phlegm obstructed vocal chords, the virus of words held in check a moment. Butchery on the front line. War film computer war game the bullets, fast silent and invisible, thud into the plaster and red brick dust bursts, and floats, then settles in their hair, on their pallid, naked bodies, his shoulders, her breasts. The smoke, blue curlicues of dead smoke rising unconcerned through settling brick dust write unread stories against the sky but it is the dripping blood that adds the punctuation.
“Wake up for Christ’s sake....Let’s go, let’s go....Move it....”
“Shit....”
“You sergeant! Get him and her up and about and get rid of that body. The domestic violence routine for this one. Here’s the address and implicate the father. There’s his fluid samples from the registry. Cut her up a bit. Use some of the bottles from his wine cellar....erm, cupboard....Just look where they live for....Oh, and lots of blood...cover up those burns....”
“Images?”
“Why not? Waste not, want not!”
“She moved....”
“You suggesting I don’t know how to do my job? Enough electricity been through her to light up....god....get it the hell out of here....”
“Tip it in the back of the lorry, you two....”
Today the sky is stunning summer blue but the aircraft are knitting an intricate weave that so effectively delineates humanity’s suffocating prison time tick tack wool over the finger tick tack tick tack prison like time grandmother’s birthday sweaters, always too tight sleeves too short too rhomboid last year’s time bright colours my universe crushed into chainmail, an adolescent body. On a sick, invisible screen, our space junk orbits high above the vapour trails, knitting at even higher altitudes, tick tack tick tack through the void, any fantasy that one day you and I will climb aboard our shiny silver Dan Dare spaceship and set off for a new world shot to Swiss cheese by all the nuts, bolts, flakes of paint, chip pans, satellite dishes and pregnancy testers tick tack tick tack tack tack.... I gaze at her out there and down here, on earth, on solid ground too.
Nettle lined path trails slip sliding down through the trees, through the almost solid shafts of summer sunlight insects flitting gaily from one to the next through the trees to the brook and polished roots trip The Pretty Girl. Cut and bloody, bruised, burnt and battered, polished roots trip her, The Pretty Girl stumbles and, yet again, stubs her toes but even that pain, after all that has been said, all that has been done to her, is a pleasure. She, angelic, floats through the woods, ghostly naked, almost not really there at all, to the stream. The brook.
The sun glints colours so gorgeous you could never even remotely imagine them, glints pure white light into her eyes from the rippling skin of the water and I understand how mightily she wants to melt into that moment of truth. You had to be there. I was there.
Through fields of poppies I flittered, and over dandelions and buttercups. I thought red and silken yellow sun hot and comfortable on my back and pollen in the air and failed to decide between buttercup here and dandelion there silken yellow and I was silken yellow on white wings sun hot on my back powder white wing flits and flickers I was in the air, pollen in the air through which I flutter and stare. I settle onto a flower, an Arum lily almost as perfect as my wings, same colour, same perfect powder white, and I flex my wings, once, twice, slowly, elegantly, again, and I gaze into the light in her eyes which blink once, twice, slowly, elegantly, again, almost nothing there, almost nothing left, but she watches me too and we are in harmony.
For a moment it little matters what she might do or what might be done to her, in this harmony I possess the essence of what I imagine her to be, a moment of truth, and she has possession of a universe and so, so do I. I can gaze at her there, and she at me too. The brook smells of sweet spring rain on grass, a moment of truth. She splashes cool water over her face. Me too.
Nettles hang over the brook.
Nettles hang over the brook. I stare back at myself in the gutter over there in some future, looks like I am praying into the drain.
Sound of a diesel engine working in reverse gear whine. Sound of a diesel engine. Silence after a diesel engine. Two doors slam sharp shut. A fright of animal shrieks. Silence after animal shrieks. Smell of diesel exhaust. Smell of death. A wiry middle aged man, a young boy and girl, all three muscular looking lager drinking types dressed in grubby white forensic overalls and heavy rubbery white aprons, come crashing down the path, come to an ugly stupid dead standstill, as does our possession of a universe. One, two, three, like some kind of beer in bottle tsunami, they swig from half full Stellas.
“Well, well well, wouldn’t you just believe what I see here right in front of my very own eyes, eh? An ashtray. Just look at ‘er!....Cigarette?”
“Ta....”
“Waste not, want not! Who said that, eh?....Ta....Cheers!”
“Mmm....Ok then, help yourselves kids. Half an hour, then we gotta dump her in her father’s place, you know how it goes!”
The gutter smells of sweet spring rain washing urine into the sewers, a moment of truth. I am praying to the drain. Scraggy nettles hang over the kerb. I am beaten. They beat me here and there. They tore my wings from me, from The Sunrise Girl. I was crushed under boot, me, my name is Alba, ground under boot heel into the sewerage.
I splash foul smelling but cool, oily water over my face and remember with a clarity that shocks, chills me to the bone, a conversation I had had some weeks before she, The Pretty Girl, was found in her parent’s flat on The Cambridge Estate.
She asked how I could write such horrible things and so I suggested that writing them down was infinitely better than actually doing them....
“....or suffering them.”
“But it’s not true, none of it is true Alba....”
“Truth! Truth is simply what works. What works for the moment! Nothing more, nothing less, and me, you, us, all of this, is just a thing of the moment and this is the moment. It functions, that's all!”
The image used to illustrate this part of the "SPACE JUNK" series of stories is a photographic collage titled "LAS HORTIGAS Y EL EFECTO MARIPOSA" by the artist David F. Brandon. Copyright belongs to the artist.Click here to see more of his artwork.
The "Dan Dare and his silver spaceship" idea was helped along by a-soma.Click here to visit his universe.
