He hated the spectre-creating machine. It was like the other: wild, rough. It made him sick. But where there is a weapon, man will use it. Where a man hurts, he will seek.
Through a tube the egos turned into colours showing their relentless and eternal state of emergency. Humans are perfect green. A green glow will be a girl tingling with energy and probabilities. Me.
The invitation I ripped and emptied, but autocorrect stitched it back in there from another angle. I had no choice. My youth tipped out into a pool beneath my feet. At night, this would be interpreted as the return of what was once cut off by a priest. Now it was merely the clumsiness of a broken flower press turned image producer.
His face, his body, his dreadlocks, charts and trays. Just for a minute, I remembered. I’ll trust you, weeped my memory. He is fake and persuasive like this, but perhaps he will dry up this impossibly cloudy day.
Our own minds, big and juicy, restarted the fire in our veins. Nothing needed to change, but still we stripped away our dreams and our shirts. We whined for hours in our sensor suits until, finally, he lay down and began sleeping furiously. I watched his beauty like a crash in the media.
In the morning, his face held a fresh silence unmatched by all my unconscious songbirds. He made me coffee and I saw myself. I knew the rest of me – my astral body – was close. His too, perhaps, though his objects were gone.
I looked over at the building opposite, and we were inside trying to disguise the danger of the present by merely mentioning the past. We spoke all that should remain lost. Voicemails, black torsos wrapped around one another, falling. The letter M. All those almost parties. The letter M.
Words, phrases, and partial sentences from my book Mind in the Gap, stitched back together in a new pattern with the aid of the automatic writing technique.
The photograph in the header is my own: a series of jumbled hexes cut out of a misprinted copy of Mind in the Gap.
C.R. Dudley 