Ink - Flash Fiction

Ink had become a rare commodity. As precious in value as pearls. With e-readers, the market wouldn't sustain for continued ink manufacture, while trees were being preserved through the lack of demand for paper. As alternatives, squid and octopi proved a short-term fill-in, but we'd hunted and fished them to extinction, just as we had with oysters.

E-reader titles were produced by computer programmes, Linguistic algorithms and rapid speed digital analysis of word and plot patterns in best sellers churned out the next big thing. Human authors were nearing the endangered status of the humble biro pen. Yet they still resisted, still sought to publish their writing wares. Samizdat made a comeback, mainly written in charcoal from barbecue briquettes. which made its publication rather seasonal in the Northern Hemisphere. If you were caught asking for barbecue stuff in winter, you could be arrested. Some authors shortcut the whole process and composed in their own blood and other bodily fluids, despite the disreputable echoes with certain performance art of the previous century. They wrote on toilet paper which tore easily beneath even their blunted nibs.

In time even toilet paper disappeared from circulation. Authors took to writing on stones and pebbles. returning to the prehistoric dawn of art. They took to the forests where they could forge their own supply of charcoal by burning wood. They decided to further reach back and commune with their ancient brethren, and took to caves. They cast stencils of the alphabet and then holding them against the rock to spell the words they were compounding, they chewed charcoal and breathed its fine powder over the stencil to form the text. Their very breath giving life to and preserving their art. Their expression. Samizdat was eclipsed for artefact and unlike the memory capacity of e-readers which demanded periodic purges, these books remained permanently in print.

Bleed For Me - Flash Fiction

Cascading blood occludes his wound from my gaze

Scrabbling with my hands to excavate the crimson glaze

Two ring fingers stumble into the crevice of the gash

Now it’s my very own flesh veiling the slash

I bring the bloodstained tips up to my lips

Flick out my tongue like a skittish thrips

Wincing at the cupric sting salted mix 

Elliptical drips floor splash sero-eclipsed

The weep has ceased

His soul finally released

I rake his trunk up to my breast

Clench him fiercely against my chest

The glutting blood abutting my chemise

Blotting an etched scarlet frieze by degrees

Singularly my overhanging cornice so engraved

My navel neath twin promontories unscathed

I demand to match the exact contours of your wound

Attune you to see why my blade had you harpooned

How very dare you withhold your pain self-seeking
Matching weddings rings demand we share everything

Blood Ink - Flash Fiction

My self-styled stylus isn’t disposed with its own reservoir of ink. Instead it relies on its incised strokes to be infilled by the upsurge of blood. My improvised fountain pen spraying the gist of me. But you can’t control such red ink swell. The blood blotter smear of self. So it is only once the flow has clotted and the skin cicatrised, that such graphic calligraphy can be anatomised. The straight edge of the razor makes it hard to curlicue any flesh inscription (made worse when the unhanded side has to grave the more favoured limb). So my chirography resembles little more than cuneiform. The Rosetta Stone of me. Can’t you decipher it you illiterates? Why, it’s not as if I hide my verbiage encased behind dust jacket sleeves. Here, I’ll re-carve it. A palimpsest whose abiding runes are imperishable, but the surface scar tissue is recast once again. I aim for a blue vein, but the ink still emerges the unsparing red of the hyper-critical inner-editor. I have no words, but I do have profuse red ink flow to share with you. 

Pica - Flash Fiction

The man was lying asleep on his side, his handd tucked under his facee for a pillowwww, when he was shakennn awake. His whole bed was aquiverrr and he sufferedd that shooting vvertigoo as hiss block mattress was hhoistedd vvertically. The tetherss bound himm in place. Hee knew what was to ffollow. 

The mmetal probe projected horizontallyy towards hhim. Its stylus started ccutting into his sskinn. His wwounded fflesh responded by ppatching the cavities with bloodd, but thee duct mounted beneathh the stylus ssquirtedd some sort of aanti-coagulantt to sluice the blooddd away as ssoon as it tried to dockk with the sskinn. 

He shuttered his eyesss and gave into to the llapping swish of the cchemicall reagent jjets. He had eendured the ssensation so many times, his nnnerves had ceased to firee at the trespassss of the sspike. It was ggougingg out characters on his sskinn, some of wwhich he could flick his eyes to rreadd, others which remained bblockedd from his purvieww. Because of the iiirregularr cccontours of fleshhh, the words speltt thereon were not arranged in ssentencess. He was not a flatt pplanee like the lleavess of a bbookk. And that seemedd to be the veryy pppurposee.

When the sstyluss had finished its ccalligraphicc ffurrows, there was the ccustomary ppopp as the lliquidd stream was shut offff and replaced by a more vviscouss fluidd. Here it comes, as a blackkk inkkk was ssprayed into the sscoress in his sskinn, until the ffurrowss were ffullll to the bbrimm. The pprobee pperformedd its shuffling rretreatt as it was wwinchedd back. He leaned his hhead back against the mmetalll blockkk and turned to one sside. He saw the aaarrayedd ranks of others ttrussedd and ccoloured exactly the sssame as him, though he could not make out the iiinscriptionss on their ffleshh. A pprinting bblockk aarmy. A typeset ttextual host. And then it bbegan.

In rrrapid ffire, the ttypebars were llaunchedd fforward headlong, pppressingg the composed hhhuman mmmonotypes against a giant wwhitee ccanvass of indeterminate ffabricationn, to createe the iimpressionn of tthreee-dimensionalll llletteringg. For this was the jjusticee ssystem’s's rrecordd—kkeepingg of its ppproceedings, or at least the fffootnote aaannotationss thereoff. SSince it was important tto have the sssentencess pproducedd with dddifferinggg dddepths and aalignmentss and not just necessarilyyy llegible in a linearrr fffashionn. This rrace’s's jjusticee rrresonatedd with ggreaterrr and moree intricate pprofundityy in that wway

The iimpact at rrapidd vvvelocityy against the ccanvass always kknockedd the human printtt stampss immediately ssparkk out. They came to when a ssprinklee of waterr wwashedd over their ffacee. An alertt that the cleansingg and mmaintenance pproceduress were upon tthem. Now their bblockss were ppositionedd to the hhorizontall and they ppassed through a vverticall pplanee of some mmuslin like mmmateriall ingrainedd with ann aastringentt tthat sservedd to flush out any vvestigess of inkk ssquattingg in sskinn recessesss. A blast of hheatt was quickly aaappliedd to evaporateee any surface lliquidd and scourrr the fflesh prior to silkyyy ssspurts of an aqueous ppolymerr ccoatedd the ddegradedd ffleshh and qquicklyy flowed to seal it ssmoothh. The ffusible sskinn would hhharden and set within an hhourr and the hhhuman composite stickk would be gggood to go once again the fffollowing day to rrecord the jjudgements hhandedd ddown. 

Except, only he possessed the secret delight of knowing that his typebar was uniquely warped. That the presence of his conjoined twin, albeit dead though largely shrivelled, distorted the output of their impressed script. Clearly the clerks and notaries of this giant race didn’t set much store in proofreading their verdicts.

Stained Glass - Friday Flash

He stood in the centre of the church’s murk. The heavy wooden pews were empty, but he conceived the devotees kneeling there would be swathed in darkness. Only the votive candles gave any illumination. Kindling the memories of the dead in order to light the ways of the still living. And thereby keeping them plunged in gloom.

As he moved he saw he cast no shadow. No place for light and shade in this particular realm he mused. He studied the stained glass windows. The only stab of colour in a world of black or white truth. The reds and blues were heavy and thick. They absorbed all the brightness from outside and devoured it. Imagine that, windows that actually served to stop up the light. The lapis lazuli ultramarine was very pure, untainted. While the cochineal reds were smoky, full of tiny grains. The reds were mainly used for the clothes of supplicants and the headwear of women, covering up the sinful flesh. Blue was for the garb of the saints. It was crystal clear to his eye the message of the glass. Only the halos were yellow and less dense, admitting a tiny amount of light to make them glow. 

He looked up into the heart of the cupola. There the colour was in the murals, while clear glass allowed the light to stream down into the upper reaches of the church in ribbons. The dizzying heights where man could not scale and approach the face of god. They would have to content themselves with contemplating him from far below on their knees. Looking up into the divine light as insects. The architecture of power was so transparent. How could people have fallen for this? Did they really believe this to be the natural order of how matter was arranged? One step outside of the church’s heavy wooden portal would have delivered them into the blinding sunlight of summer. That should have informed them of the artificial manipulation of light and dark they had just exited.

“Let there be light” the holy writ had commanded. So he picked up a floor candelabra and swung it at the stained glass. The glass shattered with a dull tintinnabulation. Ha he thought, let these serve as a call to prayer. He continued striking at each window in turn. The light outside seemed almost tentative, as if it were unsure whether flooding in might be a trespass. This only enraged him more.

“What are you doing?” spluttered the priest who had been summoned by the bruit. The man turned to face him and struck him with the iron candelabra. The priest fell straight to the ground groaning. The man leaned down and picked up a shard of the broken glass and drove it into the priest’s neck. The holy man’s white collar began to stain red. The red against the blood was of a light hue. The man studied the glass in his hand. It was a red slither and he regarded how the man’s blood was the same shade as the dark cochineal and couldn’t be picked out against it. Just as he imagined it would be. He drove it back into the man’s jugular.

He examined his hand as it too was bleeding. He was about to bring the cut to his mouth, when he caught himself. Leaded windows and five hundred year of insect dye was probably not conducive to his future wellbeing. He smirked and moved to exit the church. As his last act of desecration, he blew out each of the votive candles. Extinction was the only indisputable truth. He turned back into the interior of the church and was delighted to see that the light had apologetically begun to flow through the broken windows and begin to lift the gloom.

*

With slides spotted with red under microscopic lenses and the DNA drawn from his blood on the glass shard recovered from the dead priest’s neck, forensic science were able to bring the man to book. This was the natural arrangement of matter. And god’s, or was it man’s, arrangement of justice.

Human Viscosity - A Short Tale about Human Fluid Dynamics

(This is a densely written story about density. It's left open as to its interpretation, but some may find this study of human fluid dynamics a tad unsettling, so this is a content warning. Of sorts)

Oil slicked the inner thighs. A sleek insulation coating the skin. Dampening all subsidiary neural agitation amid its cloying diffusion.

The basted skin’s temperature began to rise. The glaze slowly began evaporating as it was warmed from beneath.

But the grease also served to adhere the tissue to the abrasive material of the bare mattress, as it gently tugged the hairs and skin into its coarse embrace. Such suctioning choked the swaddled suspension of sensation, returning the body to an awareness of its proneness.

The fumes of the unguent engulfed the olfactory system. The brain was firing frenziedly as the liquid slither leavened the weight of the body where it was in contact with the mattress, while the unrestricted flesh was surfeited beneath the clamp of the dense liquid.

The oil was continuing to cede the surface, as it either seeped in through the pores in the epidermis, or percolated the mattress where the leg abutted the fabric. Goosepimple promontories rose to signal the balefire of a tremulous chill invading the body in its wake.

With the unctuous cladding duly degraded, the body’s water table was on the rise once again. Stopped up previously, the pores hadn’t been able to respire, so their tributaries had turned tail and seethed inside. Stretching the integument tight under its tamped swell, the humectation buffeted and surged against the subcutaneous membrane, as if trying to dissolve its dam. Now finally the moisture could muster, cohering into beads of perspiration. Like paratroopers awaiting the green light, they blistered and twitched at the aperture of each of the numerous glands. Finally with the surface tension now as unbearable as the mental discomposure brewing up the effluvium, they absconded. Distended globules forging their cooling runnels down the glistening flesh. Some fell prey to the tangled follicle foliage and became fatally snared. Others were beached upon impermeable vestiges of the oil. But the surviving sapper drops achieved their mission and delivered localised alarum to the recoiling flesh. Each one was eventually picked off as it evaporated, leaving only a dirty salt sediment smearing the quaking skin like dried up stream beds.

The next pressure was far more parochially located. It had been present from the onset, but displaced by other deeper piercing insistencies. Now its prod was pushed to the fore once homeostasis had regulated and relegated oil and sweat from bodily sentience. For this was the most regulatory flow of them all, the one customarily controlling waste. Its constriction was plenty fierce, but when the spill came there was not the anticipated spate. A dribbled exudation of urine rather than a gush. The discharge was warm against the flesh which served to exaggerate its imagined volume, but the laggardly flow rescaled its attributes back to a trickle. The acid tang corroded the mind’s levees as to an appreciation of what this flux portended. It represented an elongated tributary of fear. Its source high up in the brain’s troughs and crevices, fermented by the realisation and concomitant reflexive reaction to terror. This liquid release sirened that there was unlikely to be any such release. 

The final emission was the most viscid of them all. 

Again a bubbling up, but a reluctance to cleave from the arterial wellspring for all the seething. This serum was too thick to squeeze through the fissures of pores, but rather required greater gouges for its proliferation.

Pulsing like magma, finally the haemal weep was reluctantly birthed through a cleft canal. A rupture in the embankment of the skin.

The beads formed were more conspicuous than the previous deliquescences. They had burnished the horripilated flesh as they slicked along, whereas the globules of blood eclipsed the very skin beneath its deliberate overlay.

Nevertheless its course was laboured, meandering over the contours of flesh made salient by muscle flex, pausing at any hairy scrub like a tourist stopping at every beauty spot to take in the vista. 

Eventually the first drops of this metallic Nile forged its path to the mattress and stained it red as it pooled and washed up hard against the flesh scarp of the legs.

Taken from flash collection "28 Far Cries" available from Amazon

Tendering Her Resignation - Friday Flash

She gingerly lifted the soiled bandage from her shin, but still her mother winced with the discomfort. Even the faintest friction from the lint must have caused her pain, while the sting of fresh air inroading against the denuded skin could only ratchet up the agony further. She glanced at the bandage and saw the telltale red corona imprinting the white cotton. She averted her gaze and for a moment commuted it in her mind's eye as a white napkin bearing a fresh lipstick kiss before a date.

She refocused her vision and saw that her mother's ulcer was weeping again now that the compression bandage had been lifted. She started massaging her toes for her. It was the closest locus away from the wound she could caress without prompting further suffering in her mother. Tears were welling up behind her own eyes.

Gazing upon her leg it seemed as though the sore was boring through the layers of skin. But she knew the opposite dynamic was at work. Failings in the blood supply within, had starved the skin of oxygen and thereby corrupted the integrity of its tissue. A parochial suffocation.

She tore her gaze away from the suppurating wound and instead scrutinised the veins and arteries around her mother's ankles. The red and blue capillaries were raised right to the surface of her skin, like oxygen starved fish in a waterhole receding under a fierce orange sun. The reds and blues put her in mind of a road atlas, the major trunk routes and motorways out of the city. A spaghetti nexus of escape arteries that she had never taken. Held here in place by her mother's immobility and venous constriction. Her mother splayed out on her bed there, like a catafalque. Yet it might be she herself having her coffin drawn along by hearse to the cemetery at the city limits. Her body undertaking the longest journey of her life and breaching the confines of the city only once in death. As she disposed of the soiled bandage, she apprehended that it could never be lipstick, only ever blood and purulence.

It hadn't always been like this she was certain. She had seen the family portraits. Delicate colour photos sweated behind the dividing wax leaves of an old fashioned album, that suggested it was consonant with the days of sepia tints. But the evidence was still there in place. A porcelain skin so alabaster white, that the lens managed to pick out the filigree blue veins in all their delicacy. Her mother had assuredly been a beauty in her youth.

But that white skin was now bruised, burnished and livid out of all recognition. She wiped the moisture from the corner of her eye with the heel of her hand. She didn't want to get any germs on her fingers that would soon have to reapply the bandage shroud. But her good intentions were undone when she reflexively scratched her own lower leg, bringing her skin up in a chalky sheen, though there was no eruption of any efflorescence.

"Hold on Mama, I have to wash my hands clean."

As she squirted the antiseptic soap into her palms, she mused on whether the condition might be genetic. Her mother had been invalided for as long as she could remember. Certainly at an age younger than she was herself now, so that it seemed unlikely to be stalking her own vascular system. And yet her circulation had also furred up, since she rarely exercised save for errands after fresh food, clean bandages and repeat prescriptions.

Anti-septic was right. She had allowed herself to be contaminated by the stasis of her mother's plight. Caring and tending had made her utterly dependent on her mother's stagnant rhythms. She was actually the sore and her mother the lint pressing her down. She didn't mean to, but when she applied a new bandage, she pushed it with a bit more force than normal. Her mother cried out.

"I'm sorry Mama, so so sorry."



taken from the Flash Fiction collection "Long Stories Short" available on Amazon Kindle free to download 3rd-7th June

Threads - Friday Flash

It could go in one of two ways...

He awoke under a thatched roof as the sunlight streamed in through the straw's interstices. Shackles of light pinned him to the floor, a vestigial auspice of the convict's recent status prior to his breakout.

The forensics team built an exact replica of the shoot-out room, die stamping holes through the doors and walls where the bullets had punched into the room's interior. But it was only when they used red thread tracing the trajectories through those holes, that the room took on the appearance of a cats cradle that had raked and clawed the lives of a whole family.

He squeezed the atomiser of the spraycan, sending vapour fanning out until the fine droplets illuminated the infra-red tripwires through the filter of his night-vision goggles. He performed the action repeatedly until he had a mental map of the beams, knowing that his own sinuous movements would have to be as light and airy as that of the hairspray.

The problem with doing your own cornrows is that you can't but help pull the hair tighter away from the scalp, than when someone else was doing it for you. He missed his daughter's supple fingers that used to braid his locks for him and though his arthritic hands could still twist the braids, they were too gnarled and bent to thread the beads.

Having unpacked the six foot of DNA coiled into the cell nucleus, a gob of spit bound like Samson between two pillars, she proceeded to photograph it. Not diffraction images, of building up pictures from absences and lacunae, but actual direct light exposure, she knew would likely bring the whole damn human edifice crashing down on all their heads.

He leaned over his sink and spat blood into it, mottling the white porcelain with red until the water from the tap fretting away at its tensile strength finally overcame its resistance and swept it away towards the plughole. When finally the blood-flow had slowed so that it was just a streak of red spittle stretching down past his chin and on to the folds of his neck like a stalactite, he knew he would be avenged of this insult that same night.

It wasn't his hemophilia that did for him, seeing as the bullet had wrought destruction on too much tissue for even a fully-functioning coagulation cascade to be able to plug with platelets and clots. Lying there clutching his gut with a slow bleed, the fibrinogen chain gangs forging fibrin chains still performed their futile toil, like breaking rocks under the burning scorch of the sun.

The string ballistic trajectories emanating through slits in the surfaces, unwittingly modelled the quantum world in which the act of observation collapsed the wave function and made the bullets seemingly behave with the singularity of solid matter. Therefore the police were never able to fathom other possible behaviour patterns behind the arc of the projectiles.

Microclimate - Friday Flash

The wind was blowing the sheet rain away from the vertical. Where the trajectory propelled through the wash of the streetlamp, it was briefly illuminated like tracer fire. Then it dived back out of the spill into the blackout just above the ground. Only the bombination of their report against the concrete, evinced their persistence.

The occasional dipped car headlamps bounced their skittering rays along the slicked road. Cast an illusion of the rain recoiling upwards off the tarmac, spiting gravity. Even from those headlamps with their own runty wipers to keep their lenses clear of waterborne refractions.

The cars precipitated a further, less transient coalescence in their wake. Those miniature rainbows formed in oil stained puddles by the kerbside. Molecule to molecule interdiction with the forsaken slick perdus, while the rest of rainwater sped by through the gutters plunging towards the storm drain.

As with the car headlamps, the mound of matter on the pavement was wreaking a distorting effect on the local meteorology. Its bulk served as a levee, damming up the water coursing across the paving flags. Until the flow reached critical volume and spouted like a cataract, inroading the gutter.

The blood running with the runnels of rainwater failed to break up into any rainbow spectrum. Blood being thicker than water but not oil, it just sat there in its own immiscible layer, gradually diffusing through the sheer volume of the rain.

The blood was seeping from a body. Where the bullets of rain hit that body, their soft-tipped heads penetrated the sodden clothing and bit into the flesh. In the dark, it appeared that the lump of flesh was being riddled by gunfire.

As the body lay there with its mouth draggled open, the rain zeroed in. Maybe the corpus would be extinguished by drowning rather than exsanguination from the hole in its gut. But the water kept sluicing back out through the downturned corners of its mouth. The body seemed like it was trying to speak, but only liquid words poured out.

The wind was also whipping through the body. As if the skin breach was a vacuum sucking in the air trying to staunch itself. The street litter propelled along in the gusts brushed the body, but none would stop to seal the hole. The magma eruption of blood that had attended the initial piercing, had ebbed as the tectonic waves of pain subsided into equipoise. The body's internal pressure now effaced by the sensation of the driving rain against the numbed flesh. The body's temperature had dropped closer to that of the surrounding atmospehere, so that the weak puffs of expiration emerging from the mouth no longer condensed against colder air.

Inside a building, another body was drumming its fingers against the window sill in syncopation with the rain striking the pane. A cloud had descended upon that body and occluded the previously warm front. A storm was surely building.

This story is published in my third collection

available from Amazon

Gustations Of The Cross - Friday Flash

The boy lost his footing and fell down. Although he'd gashed his leg, it was the jolt of the impact on the ground which his brain reacted to first. He burst into tears. He called for his mother, for such was his shock, he'd momentarily forgotten that she'd walked out on her nuclear family and would never hear his plaintive cries. He called for his father, yet he too failed to heed the call and ride to the rescue. The boy was on his own.

By now the tears were streaming so heavily, they were running into his mouth. They were salty on his lips and tongue. His nose was also emitting fluid. In wiping it with his arm, the mucus was smeared against his lips and again he tasted his insurgent self. He faintly recognised the taste from the smell of being housed in his olfactory apparatus. It had similar sapidity to his tears, but was more glutinous and full-bodied. It was clammy and warm on his tongue.

Finally his attention was wrenched to the pain in his leg. He was small and supple enough to bring the wound tenderly up to his lips. He sucked it to staunch the bleed. The blood hit him with an acrid, metallic taste. It made him want to retch. But he managed to maintain his labia over the laceration, until the bloodflow clotted and ceased.

*

The boy's father fell down. His son strode over to him and knelt down by his prostrate form. His father had been crying, but in his collapse the tears had ceased. Only the dirt trails down his cheeks gave evidence of their existence. The boy inclined his head towards the limp face of his father and flicked his tongue out, tracing the tear tracks. His father's dried tears had no taste to them. No saltiness or anything saline about them at all.

Mucus had collected under his father's bottom lip. The boy dabbed the pad of his little finger into the viscid spherule and felt it adhere to him. He slowly pulled his finger away, drawing the bead into an elongated string. He brought his hand to his mouth, folded all but his pinkie down and smeared some of the mucus on his tongue. While he could sense its consistency and texture, it to lacked for any sapidity.

There was a gout of blood from a depression in the back of his father's skull. The concavity took two of his fingers to span. Withdrawing them, he could see that they were covered in his father's gore. He rubbed his fingers together and the powdery red cruor was brushed from his skin. He returned his digits to the indentation and drove them through the fibrous plasma that had started to clot. His fingers could feel a warm, thick fluid beneath. He ensured they were coated in the serum by whirling them around, before once again withdrawing them. He followed the prints in his fingers, now cameo'd in red. He rubbed them together, but this time nothing fell away into the air.

He smiled and inserted those bloodied fingers deep into his mouth and brought his tongue up to plaster and plate the blood around every part of the inside of his mouth. There was no metallic tang, no smack of iron forcing him to wince. Nothing at all. And yet he relished it, every last layer clotting his own chinks and clefts in the membrane of his cheeks; the pits and perforations in the roof of his palate; the fissures and hollows in his gums and between the teeth. It tasted of ... Victory!

Urban Renewal Cubed - Friday Flash

A panoramic eyesore. A blot not just on, but which wholly constituted the landscape, blotting out all sunlight behind its monstrous compass. This housing estate a prototypical design for living back in its proud flesh heyday, garnering architectural prizes. Yet for those denizens forced to dwell there, it represented nothing but a suppurating sore of violence, degradation and stunted horizons.

Nonetheless, today it was coming down. Walls purged of graffiti, in order to have 'marked for demolition' daubed on them instead. Raised by geometrically theoretical architects without reference to the asymmetries of human life, now their grandiosely rash vision was being razed to the ground. The final Euclidean lines, being those as the dynamite blasted the buildings plumbline straight in an elegant curtsy.

However the residents weren't being returned their lives. Having inhabited this area their entire existence pre the pre-fabrication, as well as during it, now they were to be further-flung. More atomised than the levelled bricks and steel.

Over the settling mounds of rubble, the pallid sun emerged from its thirty years of eclipse. The wind no longer had the stilts to whistle through like a bowling alley and skittle any human pedestrians. Earmarked for reconstruction, the site would first have to be cleared of debris, the guilty town planners surveyed about their gross failings. But neither took place. The city fathers' coffers had run dry of money to redevelop anything, while the master builders had hightailed their way into academic tenure. Lecturing the next generation of urban blighters, while sat in oak-panelled Medieval collegial towers.

*

The city's antiquity had taken away visitors' breath for centuries. Approached from the hills, the vista opened up into the spangling splendour of its domes, spires and minarets. Yet the stucco had plastered over the cracks. Frozen enmities glazed behind the friezes. Grudges moulded over the centuries now hard set into the cornicing.

Some of the houses had still borne the stigmata of a painted red cross to indicate Gothic plague. Well now all the houses bled with the pestilence brought down on everyone's heads. Furious fusillades of neighbour against neighbour.

Since the mosaic of races had started to unravel. The hand-woven gaily coloured welcome mats, no longer adorned domicile entrances. Only piles of sandbags instead. Once harmonious pediments, pockmarked through the impedimenta of military ordnance, triangulated through their cross-haired sights up in the hills. The picaresque daubed facades now pebble-dashed by shrapnel. Bricks and mortar torn up by Realpolitik's mortars raining fire.

Brightly coloured houses were gouged by the scorched carbon trails of shells. Rendered further drab by blackout drapes, tarpaulin and camouflage netting between the husks of houses, likely secreting a gun emplacement. The miscegenated colours of the city's terracotta and slate, now uniformly turned sombre olive or grey. Telescopic theodolites surveying for urban clearing, by way of ethnic cleansing. The clot that never heals.

*

He sat on the window sill staring up at the wan disc of the sun. It had yet to burn through the clouds, so flattening it against their filmy shroud. The moment it did so, he risked the sun also burning through his retinas. He thought he might rather welcome that.

Resembling little more than a stage lighting gel, he tried hard to imagine the sun as a seething ball of nuclear fusion. Nothing but brute raw power, smashing of atoms and remaking matter into energy. He speculated on the sound all that elemental pounding would forge. His own fire roared as it burned its pipe-fed gas in a humble Newtonian and Charles' manner. Yet such rumbling was outmuscled by the hiss of the gas valve releasing it into the duct.

But then he recalled that there was no air out in space. That it therefore lacked for a medium for the sound to be carried. The light energy from the sun could pass unhindered, yet the energy converted into sound died on solar lips. Much like the voice of god.

The creeping advance of the light had woken the birds. Their aubade broke out across the trees. Flowering and nourished under the sun's tentacular reach. A programmed growth and an instinctual repertoire of song. An adaptive symbiosis between bird and tree. Light the conjuror summoning striking everything into life.

He sensed that the sun was growing stronger, its orange hue intensifying. He closed his eyes, but a corona was still imprinted on his retinas in an after-image. Like scar tissue. With his eyes still rammed shut, he rubbed the skin over his forearm. It was bumpy and welted from when he had sat here before and simply driven his arm out through the window glass, gashing it sufficiently to engulf the feelings swirling around inside his head. Trying to attain the zenith of touch, to promote it to the perigee of his constellated senses.

The blood transfusions he'd required to prop him alive. Somebody else's pith and plasma coursing through him, yet he felt nothing different from before. The delightful tug of the synthetic thread of  the stitches long gone now. Something not him intimately welded to his skin, until they dropped away. Then there was the plaster cast set in place to thwart his wanton unpicking, to let the ravaged tissue heal. A protection from himself. His so-called loved ones had adorned his false cast with their signatures. Peeled off and disposed of when the cast came off. But they'd had the last laugh when he came home from his hospital sojourn and found that his mother had organised for the broken glass to be replaced. Didn't they understand that he was engaged in trying to alter his very own fabric? Yet they persevered in the notion that the house and every other surface appearance was to be restored to familiarity. When all he wanted was to forge a new seam.

He'd garnered some satisfaction from the wound's raised fibrous gnarl. And still he picked at it remorselessly. Piquing the baby pink keloidal skin. He was desperate to override its code. His code, that DNA programme which recloned him time after time. He yearned to cast himself anew. Even if only this tiny portion of his arm. If successful, there would be other vitreous panes and glass shards to recontour his body. The gorgeous scar tissue that reverberated constantly under his sleeve. That fired his nerves and suggested that he was alive. With touch finally at the apex of the hierarchy of sensation. Eclipsing the light. The sound of nuclear fusion in his ears from across the void.