Anxiety Dream (For A Bird)

The shell cracks and crumbles away revealing, within the egg, another egg.

WHAT YOU WANTED TO HEAR

‘It’s money.’ Said the doctor, gesturing to the coins which were now gushing from Peter’s wife.

Helen, for her part, had put aside the pained expression which had dominated her face for the majority of her labour and now looked vexed as still more coins of differing sizes flowed from her. The bulkhead of the child (now presumed to be entirely composed of money) had at least taken the shape of a baby’s head but had quickly given way to a formless stream of bronze, silver and gold pieces.

Outside the room midwives were gathering, discussing – they had, it was agreed, never seen anything like this before. Peter and the Doctor took this opportunity to allow the midwives and their piqued interest to keep an eye on the situation whilst they sloped off to the canteen for a coffee.

‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’ Peter asked the Doctor, whilst sipping a mocha.

‘No, I have never seen anything like this before.’ Revealed the Doctor, candidly.

When they returned to the maternity ward, the rattling of change-on-change action could still be heard as more coins fell onto the already sizeable pile at the foot of the bed. Peter considered briefly the dimensions of his Helen’s womb. Many of the midwives had lost interest and returned to duties elsewhere, but one remained and delightedly informed Peter:

‘None of your child is legal tender.’

Peter’s face fell and he lowered himself into a crouch in order to scrutinise his child, coin by coin. The midwife was right: the majority of Peter and Helen’s child was composed of old European currency – centimes, lire, drachma – with an odd smattering of pre-decimal British currency – sixpence, halfpennies.

The Doctor fetched a broom as Helen birthed another shilling.

A Coward Reflects

Ossian Bone gazed at the map. His eyes, drawn to Africa, were having trouble ascertaining where in the great expanse she lay. Perhaps, for her, the borders no longer held any significance and it was just another shortcoming of his that meant he was constrained by, and obsessed with, the imposition of lines. Maybe it was out in landscapes that he couldn't conceive that she had found her place, found herself happy. He saw her in a shallow trench, kneeling, in desert boots, brushing at a fragment – skull? Pottery? Perhaps at night she would sit outside her tent gazing over the calm absence, the sun setting, the stars bolder in the absence of streetlights. Perhaps it would be there that her sadness would ebb away – its borders dissolve and the volume which had been contained within spill out, in a great wave and seep into the ground, to percolate through the earth and into the sea. Why did he imagine that nameless grief to be a liquid?

Lines and borders continued to govern him. One drew him, daily, to work - its more literal iterations allowing the trains to roll onward, the others engendering him with a vague sensation that this had to be done. This work-line ran concurrent to the line of time, wavering – an analogue signal. Certainly, his life – his subjective interaction with time – was not a binary. It had not been switched on at birth, operated at the level of life until being switched off at death. It flirted with these extremes, at times finding him a little closer to death, before some unseen momentum dragged him higher. Why did he consider life to be the high and death the low? Was it some proximity to the ground? Maybe in these low moments it was because he felt closer to the surface of, or perhaps deeper within the liquid grief. He imagined it to be a pool into which one strode slowly, acclimatising all the time until one day knowing what it was to be submerged.

He remembered the night on which she had walked into the sea. Ophelia, gowns and all, wading into the frothing channel. It had been a night when their erratic, teenage lines had almost intersected, but, at the crucial moment had missed, knocked askance by something cruel, something human, something innately within him. She had come out again, but perhaps left something beneath the freezing water, for the pale moon to keep watch over. Either way, this visualisation required the conception of a third dimension, for the Ossian signal to no longer be a flat analogue, but to spiral around the constant of time – a drab dragon pursuing unknown quarry in the distance. The quarry, surely, was her signal: a beautiful, melancholy note, at a similar frequency, but just a little removed. A tonal way of thinking would suggest that together they would form a discord, so Ossian abandoned this thought, realising only later its relevance.

When she speaks again, over the phone-line, it becomes clear that the line to which he had fixed his hopes was not, in fact, strictly speaking hers at all. It was a crude copy of which he was the sole author. Sure, once, they were similar enough that when he looked upon her he saw sufficient of his own version, but gradually as she and Ossian had diverged, the copy he has held in place had become abstracted fantasy. Qualities were exaggerated, others diminished. His own relevance and meaning  relative to his construction heightened beyond belief until he lay at its core, cocooned in its innate need for him. 

It lives outside, away from him, yes, but it is only truly alive when in Ossian is in the presence of its inspiration, and even then the disparity has become clear to see. His copy is flat, borne of a desire for stasis. She has grown, known others. Laughed, drunk. Played tennis.

Other lines have come and gone, leering in from a rogue orbit to cross Ossian's path, just once. His model has reduced them to mere freak appearances. Comets to be observed at an emotional distance and he has been unwilling to lend them the gravity to keep them close, holding near to him instead, his ridiculous construction.

As she holds up the exhumed bone in an imagined wilderness, time bends back on itself and touches the points at which she and Ossian had converged. His model dissolves. He looks at a wall, blank but for a smudge here and there. He looks at a towel, he looks at a bag, he looks at his arms. He looks at his watch and what it means. It means a million things.

Duncan McAllister

At 11.24 a.m. Duncan McAllister, on his walk from his desk to the office toilet, ascended. His physical atoms dispersed and his essential consciousness manifested itself in a parallel existential plane as a faint aura. At 11.24 a.m. Duncan McAllister got up from his desk and walked to the office toilet, banging his shin on a box of copier paper. Once in the toilet he disintegrated – mentally; sinking to his knees, allowing his face to sag and exhaling in a wheeze. The metaphysics of this new realm meant that it did not register on the visual spectrum, inhabitants instead identifying one another by auras and parascents – anosmic smells calling to mind temporal and emotional fixed points, much like how freshly cut grass or the musty scent of a favoured toy, when returned to years later, can act as a gateway to a very specific moment in time and sentimental space. Close to the floor, the acrid stench of errant urine was stronger but mixed in places with cleaning fluids and other smells which it was harder for the ever lessening Duncan to place. The gusts under the door as oblivious workers bustled past created overwhelming olfactory fluctuations in the toilet’s microclimate which Duncan was entirely unable to process. The essence of Duncan McAllister discovered that it hadn’t the faintest knowledge of its own psychogeography and stumbled, figuratively, from one long lost emotion to the next.

Around 11.53 a.m., Duncan composed himself, brushed the dust and urine residue from his trouser knees. He looked at his reflection in this mirror, and then in the tap, and then formed a composite picture of himself from these two versions – neither of which seemed entirely familiar. Around 11.53 a.m. Duncan’s atoms reconstituted themselves, and his faltering consciousness was gently imprisoned back within them.

The 12.00 p.m. admin team meeting was typically unedifying.

STOCK PHOTOGRAPH - ABUSE AFTERMATH

‘You don’t look quite disconsolate enough.’ Muses the photographer, fag in mouth, rising from his crouched position and stretching out his back, scrunching his face as he does so.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Asks the woman on the bed in the bare room. She sits up straight and flexes her wrists. She aches from resting her elbows on her knees, arching her back and cradling her head in her hands.

He runs his hand through his hair, unconsciously prompting her to mirror and brush hers from her forehead.

‘I just think you need to look more…’ searching for a word, ‘bereft.’

The sun has rounded the wall of the adjacent building and filters through the blind to her left, his right. Now, the crisp spring light should juxtapose nicely with her affected despair. She intuits that this is the moment to try again, stretches and returns to her pose.

His gaze, via the lens, is a funhouse mirror image of what she is used to: desire is warped into pity which carries with it its own eroticism. The shutter clicks and she is incarcerated – ready to have the fantasies of the viewer, the writer, the editor layered over her, complicit in her own manifold abuse. Rather than a demonstration of power, this is its post-coital calm, it reclines, relaxes and admires. This is the tropical lagoon after the hurricane and she has become the island – still, essentially, the same shape but somehow irrevocably different.

And now a template, a byword, a symbol – a graphic replacement for understanding.

He packs up his equipment. She hops off the bed, stretches again and considers where to have coffee – she has to remain in town as later she is excitedly presenting a graph to the board, then relaxing in the park with a girlfriend and then teaching maths.

PRIOR and PROCTOLOGIST

Isn’t it a wonder that, not so long ago, the atoms which now constitute your brother were spread about across our globe, possibly even our universe. When you look at him, you are looking at material that has travelled further than you could possibly imagine. Eternally recycled.

A star,
Joan of Arc,
A real peach,
Your brother.

He is leasing his body from the cosmos.

Annie down the road is dying. Whether they burn or bury her, chances are she’ll end up as food. Maybe your son or your son’s sons will eat her. You can eat anyone provided you leave it long enough.

Look at him, sitting there, entirely unaware of his place in a lineage running back to the beginning of time. Probably beyond that, I’m a little unsure of the history of time.

Transubstantiation seems a silly concept, but it is entirely conceivable that some part of Jesus Christ served time as a wafer.

Our little boy will, for a while, consider himself the most important thing in the world. In this way, every atom gets a little chance to be king.

‘I said: Mummy, can I have something to eat?’

*

I am a star gazer. I gaze at the stars and at the mysteries inside you. So many people, so many wonderful things have travelled through this tract, and I do not mean to be coarse.

Pig,
Peach,
Person –

It all comes out the same way. Why not steal a bite with a kiss?

I’ve seen all sorts. I know what you eat, but in a very real sense I couldn’t possibly guess.

It’s around this time of year I like to celebrate the birth of our lord Jesus, who sacrificed himself in order to become a grape and perform a miracle upon himself.

Freud would have had a field day with my chosen profession, but what would he say now?

‘Ribbit.’

It’s difficult to remain moral when you see everything for what it is – Everything. A murder is just a stage in the ceaseless redistribution of matter. My brother is now a crunchy bunch of carrots.

BLUNTED - A Play

Ian smokes a spliff really fast, curls into a ball and vibrates a bit. John is in the corner

Ian (uncurling): I’ve just fucked myself to death.

[ENTER ELAINE]

Elaine (screeches): What about our unborn baby?

John stuffs a grenade up his arse and does a line of drugs. Ian and Elaine share another couple of spliffs.

Ian: Would you like me to rape you?

Elaine (pondering): No, not really.

The grenade up John’s arse explodes. The smoke spells the word ‘Kosovo’.