All The Clocks Are Broken

I am sundial. My body blocks out the sun and projects an imago of me in shadow against the wall. As a child my clump absorbed the light and grew. But now it is only the relationship of light’s angle to my mass that can alter my amplitude. I have become fixed in dimension even as time creeps on.

I am horology. Marker of time. As much as I inhabit space and move through it in dragging hope of making it somehow bloom, I am just counting off the hours, minutes, seconds. My cells age. My muscles turn to fat. My sinews seize up. My tendons lose their elasticity. My skin wrinkles. All this change on the landscape of me. Spatial changes in the lone visual dimension of the three normally accorded to life. While time proceeds apace. The wrist watch of me is losing time. There is no mechanism for winding me back up or changing the battery to restore me to factory settings. So in fact I don’t inhabit space at all. My corpus is the space across which time marches. My body the clock face.

I can sire progeny, cheat time that way. Except that they too serve as dials. Integral and separate, despite the inherited mitochondrial quartz from which we share frequency but not periodicy. For when my pendulum finally stops swaying, apart from perhaps a slight wobble on their faces, my clock is stopped and theirs runs on. For a few more decades at least. But generational chronometry cannot buy us any more time. No persistence. No immortality. Time of death. Death of time. 

We are sundials. Horological markers of time. Across the space of our bodies. Exactly what we are counting out time for remains hazy.

Geriatric Or Treat? - Flash Fiction

He knew he would never ski again. Nor ever take a swim in the sea. No more playing football, not even kicking a ball around in the garden with his grandson, doddering versus toddling. And tonight, he gathered, was to be his last occasion of carnality. 

As the woman divested herself and confronted him with her nakedness, though hardly a mirror, her quailing, failing flesh reflected his own. She looked no less ravaged than he did, even though he adjudged her considerably less advanced in years. Her rot was presumably more protractedly drawn out, the pain more blunted than his own onrush. Nudity presented her scars, both surgical and unqualified corrective and regardless that he himself currently had no wounds, he knew his senescent body was beyond any ability to heal itself.

Prostitute propriety had proscribed kissing which probably represented a joint reprieve. A mocking respiration as each would be moiling to breathe some life into the other. His mouth usually so dry, was now brimming precipitantly with a necrotic bubbling of mucus and deliquescing squamous epithelial cells. She had her own earthy tang, but he certainly didn’t want to be trajecting his own inhumation reek into her mouth. 

Incrementally he winched himself atop his mount like a chainmailed cavalier of old. Immediately his body protested the (im-)posture. Muscle memory evacuated his tissue like vermin from a holed ship. Fluid drained from the interstices around what was left of his sinew definition. Blood fleeing his capillaries going god knows but where. Replaced by rheum and serum. Watering him down. Diluting his puissance. Depleting him. Swelling skin and tumescence everywhere except where it was required. He was drowning from within. Saturated and suffocating. He wheezed an appeal to swap positions, if she might otherwise mount him. Wordlessly she hoisted her dimpled flank and allowed him to burrow beneath. 

Perhaps this had all been a fiendish plan by his son. To kill off the old man. An Oedipal closing of the circle, from when he himself had inducted him into the art of lovemaking by taking him to a prostitute on his 18th birthday, as many fathers were charged with back then. Now returning the favour in full knowledge of its likely fatality. If the blue pill accelerant he had slipped into his hand wasn’t fit to burst his heart, then the exertion against the rockface of the woman might see the endeavour through. Dying while on the job, passing over with a smile on your face, wasn’t that supposedly the dream of every male of the species? His facial musculature so atrophied, that a smile was beyond it, rather it being set firm in a permanent rictus. But how could his son possibly possess such precise knowledge of the extent of his physical decay? Could he have precociously gleaned the indignities that come with age? He hoped for his sake he did not. 

She was jouncing costively over him, with each crush landing buffeting his legs as though he were on a Medieval torture rack. Her pigmentation atop him never altered a jot, while he felt his own becoming pallid and bloodless. He looked down at himself and saw the spreading bruises. His body was collapsing. Putrefying before he had actually died. He imagined the bones of his skeleton becoming disarticulated, no longer bound together by sinewy ligatures. Her hollowness was so stark, he couldn’t ascribe to her any intentionality, but it was if her movements were trying to shuck him from his body. In a quest to leave what, to distil his soul? He snorted mordantly, or perhaps it was his own inner corrosion that eructed forth the snort. 

Tears filled his eyes but were too insipid to break over the levees of his reptilian folds of skin. Tears elsewhere on his rind, stretched taut by desiccation until the rolls and wrinkles of his puckered ancient parchment rent. Where there were lesions he could only picture writhing worms. Where there were blisters he envisioned scurrying flies laying their eggs. He conceived his own stench to be even more flagrantly putrid now, beyond the parochial hook of his own nostrils. None of this exhumed any lust. Liquid discharge from every place on his body except the essential, focal one. His own member was the ultimate recruit to the army of worms, mucilaginous, shrivelled and blind. He closed his eyes. 

The best (?) sex was that in which you surrendered awareness of your body. Either your mind was so transported in bliss that it could no longer register its containing husk. Else your whilom wrapping had melded with that of your lover so you could not tell where one ended and the other begun. But here he was utterly conscious of each grievous corporeal symptom. And not because it was borne out of the commercial nature of the congress, nor down to the lack of intimacy through being two complete strangers to the precise nature of each another’s mien. The best (?) sex could either peel you or melt you sweatily clean away. But always at the agency of the other’s body rather than your own. Yet gravity’s grubby force was archly engineering this cast. A geometry of failed configuration and solipsistic arrangement. Two incongruent bodies, blankly bearing neither surfaces nor curves, instead succumbing wholly to the pressures brought from within. Mutual self-absorption without any design on autonomy. Lacking any stout tensility, his vermicular organ kept squirming out from her shaved crevasse. She must have been sensate enough to register this slippage as she bevelled her pelvis to try and handlessly re-inter it into her catacumbal vault. But her stubbled apron only served to triturate and thresh, as if his stub were a cigarette she was grinding extinguished under a booted heel beneath her lamp-post. Sometimes in the past, sexual agonies could be thrilling. Tonight they were just annihilating.

The brain would be the last thing to go. But then it would be forever persecuted by the constant realisation and acknowledgement of each preceding deficient organ and wanting apparatus. Of all the activities its courier was no longer capable of. Lashing it cruelly by constantly revisiting unobtainable memories. His ausgespielt body was too decrepit to sustain his rage against it. It shouldn’t be like this. It was never like this. The act of coition which ceded life and germinated cell reproduction, now disintegrating his cells and culling into death. 

Gieger Countering - Friday Flash

This is a sample story from my new flash collection "28 Far Cries"

URANIUM:

With our mutual leaden marital cores, affection was stopped up by my blockish shields, while it merely passed through yours like gamma rays.

PLUTONIUM:

We are each charged with containing the neuroses and blind spots of our partner, it being rare that we both share the same agitators. But such were the reciprocal irritations that more and more were classified as neuroses and blind spots, until it reached the critical mass of every single word out of our mouth, or every single one of our actions being deemed as being beyond redemption. We were both balls of seething fissile material.

THORIUM

In respect of cleaving together in a fusion that makes us more powerful, we manage to effect a fission that only serves to cleave us apart and bleed away any supposedly enriched energies. We were both left depleted.

CALIFORNIUM:

Each live radioactive substance will naturally decay and transform into another element, which if isotopic will in turn decay further, until finally a stable, inert element is rendered. My spouse and I have hit our inert basal states and yet I cannot say we went through the transmutations into other constitutions along the way. Spontaneous half-life decay takes eons to occur. We achieved a rapid acceleration of the process.

NEPTUNIUM:

It has been pointed out to me that smashing the atom in order to release the pent up energy of rage is a particularly destructive practice. And yet it was one we were both content to pursue.

AMERICIUM:

In order for a chain reaction to be unleashed, we both had to stockpile an impressive and intricate battery of sleights, grudges and other grievances. We conducted our own arms race to mutually assured destruction with barely a bat of an eyelid in the direction of the concept of deterrent.

CURIUM:

One segment of the fission process could, I concede, be considered as successful. Parts of our material corpus divided and split off. Eczema, weight loss, hair loss, hearing loss, incontinence, ulcers, thrush, hives and a host of other dermatological rashes afflicted us. Although perhaps some of these could be viewed as a gaining rather than a reduction. In a quantitative rather than a qualitative way of course. 

RADIUM:

Though we have long separated from one another in physical space, we remain contaminated with one another’s toxic waste, rendering us useless for future generative power. We are both decommissioned. 

URANIUM:
Two half-lives do not make a whole. 

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

Staring At The Sun - Friday Flash

He pinched the bridge of his nose. When he removed his fingers, it seemed as though a flyaway strand of hair had been caught up in his pincer and now dangled irritatingly over his eye. He must have failed to dislodge the follicle, for it still caused his vision to writhe and squirm. He sent his fingers on a sortie, careful to draw his nails in like a cat with its claws when preening itself. And still the prickling sensation continued, as his brain fired barrage after barrage in protest at this trespass on its visual cortex.

It didn't feel like  piece of grit, since there was none of the usual burning sensation that usually accompanied such a thing. He bathed the eye in water and though that appeared to have shifted the interloper, soon enough back came the impression as he was drying his face with a towel. He pressed his face right up close into his mirror and lifted his reptilian lid to scour for the troublesome detached cilium. The problem was his hair was turning grey, so it was harder to isolate in contrast to his skin tone.

Still there was nothing there. He didn't like to do this much, since he didn't like to admit he was growing older, but he even put on his spectacles to try and bear down on the invisible interloper. It only made things worse, like a magnifying glass, though he still couldn't find anything trespassing across the focal plane of his lens.

He removed his specs and scanned them for fluff, dust or hair of their own. He wiped them clean on his shirt, maybe it was the little stains in the glass itself. But no amount of polishing yielded him any better vision. He inspected the goggles and was appalled at just how much gunk and grime was wedged beneath the nose pads. He cleaned it out with a pin and noted its flocculent texture. It was disgusting, especially when he considered that he donned his glasses so rarely and yet here was such an accumulation of his shed skin, pressed and layered beneath the pads' plastic.

But no amount of scouring ameliorated the hairline crack laying across his sight. If anything it had got worse, now taking on the appearance of some of the strands of a spider's web. He even convinced himself he could see part of the bloated body of the spider. Clearly his mind was running away with itself and playing tricks on him. He was so damn tired and that couldn't have been helping his overwrought brain.

As he turned his head in despair, his glass lenses seemed to catch the bathroom light in them right at the side of his vision. That was all he needed to compound his current inconvenience. He switched the light out and two tiny electrical flashes seemed to fizz across the periphery of his perception. Or just below where the glass lenses ended. This was getting ridiculous. Now his addled brain must have been overcompensating, or going into hyper-drive perhaps, as he failed to clear this agitation from its sensory apparatus. He could take a hint, he needed to go to bed and wake up fresh, when hopefully his brain would have settled and the hair itself might have been shaken free.

The next morning he awoke and while not quite a Gregor Samsa moment of imagining himself turned into a cockroach, it did appear as though an insect might have inhabited him and was busy crawling across his retina. He shook his head, partly to clear his watery vision, but also in terror. He slowly unsheathed the eyelid, but still some mote was fluttering and wafting there. It was like viewing bacteria under a microscope. That his eye had become a petri dish prison and insects were slithering over his eyeball. He felt turned utterly inside out. Tears on the inside of his peepers.

He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. Again two shooting lightning bolts seared past him. He saw them and yet knew that they weren't there, so that it was his brain which had extrapolated or maybe constructed them. So much for his rested and clear grey cells. Perhaps such corsucations were an after-image of the brain's flare of distress. Perhaps he was being afforded an insight into the brain's electrical transmissions themselves?

He got out of bed. Standing on the floor, his eyes were filled with laboriously moving flecks, like the motion of a lava lamp. They formed shadows on his vision and this freaked him out as he wondered if he was losing his vision entirely? Was there a micro-organism living inside his eyes, scuttling over his irises so that they amplified their own size like when a bug crawls over a movie projector? Either it was on the move the whole time, or there were many of them. A veritable army of invaders parasiting his brain perhaps?

Though such notions made him feel queasy, he managed to stumble over to his computer. Squinting through his compromised eye, he managed to discover that he was probably experiencing floaters. Just like the degrading ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun's rays, the protective gelatinous barrier of his own eyes was deteriorating. Thus light was being refracted in strange, debilitating ways his brain was struggling to process. Or else it was projecting shadows where none had previously existed. He flopped back against his chair with relief, that at least he wasn't playing host to some alien invasion. He knew floaters were not themselves threatening blindness or any more serious impairment.

But then he was struck with a wave of despondency. It still represented a decaying, a degeneration of his physical being. Another marker on the migration towards death. And everyday now, he would have reminders of putrefaction's flies hovering right in front of him where they could not be denied. The veil of permanent darkness was drawing in over him.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this story was prompted by me waking up a couple of weeks ago and having these strange sensations appearing in my vision in my right eye. it took me a couple of days to figure out what they were and then I had to go get checked out that there was no retinal damage causing them, which it turned out there wasn't. This was merely a feature of aging and I haven't even reched 50 yet! 

Taken from my 4th published collection of flash fiction

Available from Amazon

The Forsaken - Friday Flash

Every town has one. Or one at the very least.

A patch of unhallowed ground. Some forlorn stretch of shattered tarmac. The pockmarked wasteland.

Terrain once staked out by man, now ceded by him. Bereft of signature jetsam, the condoms, syringes and empty rotgut bottles indicative of an agonised withdrawal.

Yet within an urban jungle, Nature does not make so bold as to reassert her dominion. Dereliction's removal men seemingly having thrown petrifying dust sheets over these fixtures and ill-fittings. The mosaic of the pulverised concrete, akin to the pebbledash cast of the surrounding building walls. As if the scene has been turned on its side. Even rootless litter appears to have been nailed down in permanent display. Blown from pillar to post, this particular spot has been deemed refuse's final blotching place. A potters field for the non-biodegradable. Devoid of potters and any living organisms at all.

Notionally delimited by the chain-link fence. But the border is indeterminate, for the fence has been trampled down. The negative space between the twisted metal links presents the only barrier now. Bayonet reeds jutting through these apertures. Chlorophyll halberdiers, braided with nettles and brambles sagging under their load of barbs and thorns. Sapper tripwires for where no feet ever tread. Tributary Nature's token conscription all present and correct, yet unable to advance any further. Held in suspended animation, just like the metal and brick all around. There is no nourishment to be derived here.

Wooden palettes charred from hosting obsolete fires. All colour long bled into their black hearts. Yet still this is not the predominant hue tugging the eye's apprehension. Jagged scars of livid brown rust uncannily funnels all sightlines. Oil drums, drainpipes, corrugated roofs, each a corroded excremental brown. Shed flakes like metal dandruff speckles the ground.

A brick building with entrance boarded up and all its windows put through. Thick gobbets of crystallised glass, a sheet laminate atop the torn up concrete. Razor wire lines the low roof. Strips of fabric and plastic bags snagged on its barbs ought to billow in the disdainful drafts, but they too are pinioned fast.

Aloft the building, a boxy metal housing. An air conditioning unit or electrical generator. Here where nothing respires, nor is any drawing of energy invoked. The caged blades are fossilised, like silted anchors dredged from the sea. Clamped to the building's walls, some outsized toy duct piping. Terminating in a chimney of simple geometric lines, a scaled down version of a watchtower at Auschwitz.

In among all this stasis, there is yet one outpost of movement. At the very verge of vision, something flaps fitfully, with just the faintest of feathery deviation from the rigid and the upright. Playing breeze-borne peek-a-boo from behind an unencumbered fence post, a bouquet of cut flowers. Desiccated. Mummified. Lifeless like everything else in this rubblescape. A fitting tribute to that other importation. The murdered little boy dumped here yesterday, today or last month. The forsaken living memory here can't quite recall.

Every town has one. One at the very least.