Hello again you delightful, smashing humanpersons.

I, like many of you, have been pretty disgusted by some of the animalistic, criminal behaviour that has been displayed by a small proportion of “people” in recent weeks. This is my new story, inspired by the events of the riots. I do not intend to preach, or judge or propagate hatred and intolerance, like many other commentators have done so. I just want you all to stop and think for a moment. And that is all. This is a story about what might have been.

As always, thank you for your time.

G.

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Part 1:

A Drive Into Forever

We are driving away from the smouldering wreckage that we have left behind us. The city has been on fire for days and the acrid smoke curls up from the broken and twisted carcasses of buildings. The shops are empty. The dead lie rotting in the street. There is nothing left. We held hands for hours under the red arching sky, just watching it all burn. And now as we drive away from it into the unforgiving night, we both realise that we regret nothing and we regret everything, now that we have reached the end.

We have been driving for around two hours now. We don’t really know where we are going, but it is exhilarating just to be driving and still breathing. We are driving far too fast and I struggle to maintain control as the curves and bends scream towards us. I unsteadily jerk the wheel to the left and the right. I pretend like I know what I’m doing. I know that I am driving erratically, but I am developing a perfect connection with this machine, I can feel it.

I am part of this machine with its oiled cogs and grinding gears and controlled conflagrations. I am a greased component in smooth perfect motion with the road.  There is a half empty bottle of vodka between us and we pass it between our smiling wet lips. The warmth of the alcohol spreads between us as we hold each other so tightly. We laugh incessantly and kiss with hot hungry mouths, full of the agony for each other. We are the epitome of life itself: every laugh could be our last, every whisper could be the last we ever utter, but we don’t care, because this is the way it is meant to be, the way things were always meant to happen. All we need is each other.

We were destined to be together at this very moment with the glittering, infinite heavens above our heads. This night was made for us. The celestial arc of the sky is laid bare before us, glittering with countless stars. I look out into golden triangle cast by the headlights and I feel like I can look into forever. There is nothing before us but optimism and hope. The road seems endless, just like it was always designed to be. It is a clear night and the stars are breathtaking. We turn the music up and drive faster as the pulsating beats drill into our effervescing synapses.

She slides her hand down my thigh and furtively smiles as she touches me. Her eyes shame the stars with their infinite, immeasurable sparkle. I love her so much I want to pull open my ribcage and tear out my heart and give it her. She could keep it in a Tupperware to keep it fresh. She delicately slides off her silk top as we drive along the never-ending road into the unforgiving, seemingly impenetrable darkness. She doesn’t care if anyone sees, because no one else exists in the world at this very instant. And the trees have no eyes.

Her luscious caramel breasts are lit up by the warm glow of the instrument panel. They are more full and perfect than the pale moon hanging in the sky. Her laugh reverberates off the painted silver plastic and the dials wink back at us and we drive on and on into the void unfolding before us. I am sure my heart has stopped. It has ceased beating, just for her. I could take this single crystalised moment and live inside it forever. I doubt we will ever again feel this unencumbered and free, as though we owned the Earth and everything in it. We own the trees and the sky and the mountains: they were all individually designed and constructed just for us and these precious seconds that we are sharing together.

At this point I fleetingly recall that the body is still in the boot and we will have to think of a way of disposing it, it has already started to decompose, but that doesn’t seem to matter so much now.

It doesn’t matter because we feel so tiny on this great expanse of lies, corruption, dirt and rock. But none of that matters anymore. We finally realise just how pathetically insignificant we are and it is electrifyingly beautiful. Driving away from everything and leaving it all behind. We are escaping together into a great expanse of perfect anonymity. In this speeding vehicle there is no one that can tell us where to go or what to do. Inside the confines of this little metal box we are the kings and queens of our own destiny.

I know that for the rest of my pathetic little life, I will never forget that night we spent together, the night when we drove until we disappeared into each other.

Part 2:

When We Plunged Into The Depths

Recently, we seem to be constantly captured within flux and perpetual motion. Forward, always forward: progress, progress, progress. No matter what I attempt to do, I never have time to do it properly or how I intended. I have been at the centre of a whirlwind of swirling lost hours. But today, for the first time in a long time, I felt fvcking fantastic. Sometimes there are days that just everything goes right. Every little tiny thing went according to plan and that hardly ever happens, every little piece just fell perfectly into place. Every now and again a day comes a long and it is just absolute perfection and it makes life worth living for another day. Sometimes you have to just keep breathing and wait for it all to end.

All day, my entire body was buzzing and bubbling with energy. For once, my feet didn’t drag along behind me, reluctant and miserable. For once my heart wasn’t bursting with hatred and disgust and I saw the good in people, glowing from behind their glazed jellied eyes. I noticed a baby in a pram and it looked over me and the shine of her little new teeth made my stomach feel like it was going to burst and spray soaking red entrails and viscera over the pavement at my feet.

I felt like I could have beaten Superman in a knife fight to the death, or I could have beaten Batman to a bloody pulp with his own utility belt, then callously watched Robin weep into his Lycra-bound chest as he desperately tries to disguise his thinly veiled homosexuality. I felt like at that moment I could achieve anything, even the most stringent of life’s challenges I could have destroyed, obliterated. I can do anything, I’m invincible.

But, I was pretty sure at one point I could see through the pavement. I could look right through it, just like a sheet of glass. I looked down and it was like I was standing in the centre of an iridescent, transparent lake. I was suspended over a dark precipice and I was looking right down into it. I was looking directly into the darkness. The sunshine was bouncing off the surface of the lake, so I couldn’t see the bottom. The glare was blinding me, I had to shield my eyes and look deeper under the surface of the glass. The darkness seemed absolute, impenetrable and it was calling to me.

But then I started to see dark grey shapes. There were bodies down there. There were hands reaching up with the skin burned off. There were young ones and old ones and skulls partially covered in hair. There were babies down there; they were all together in one heaving mass. Some of the little ones had wings, but they were blackened and burned and they were crying, their faces contorted in pain. Some of them were in agony, but some of them were smiling. It didn’t make any sense at all. There were limbs and broken bones entwined together in a huge ragged maelstrom. There were fingernails dug into the walls of dirt where they had clawed at them trying to escape. There are little animal bones down around their feet; they must have feasted upon them to try and stay alive. Absolute panicked desperation.

There is a shining light at the centre of them, but it is blocked out by the bodies and the lank streams of hair. The light cannot escape from the tangle of arms and legs and fractured skulls. There is a baby down there with wings of purest white; he is smiling at me, so it can’t all be bad. He has golden hair and he breathes rainbows. He has been sent there to help them, to bring them relief from their torment, he is there to tend their wounds. He knows everything and I know nothing and he is still smiling even now.

I can see the bones and dust of the dead underneath the tarmac. There were thousands of them, all piled on top of each other. It was a like a rusting mass orgy of dead, rotting flesh. Some of the bodies were wildly contorted in postures of agony, with their spines bent back and the vertebrae straining and cracking against each other. Bones scratching bones, ribcages ripped open and gaping. But, it must be said that some of them were smiling, relaxed and contented in their eternal slumber encased in soil.

Evidently, they had been decomposing for quite a while, but some of them still have rough patches of leathery skin and the jagged remains of teeth. Some of them were cut into pieces, some of them are scorched and blackened, but most of them were whole and pleading with me to help them, with their scarred angel wings curled underneath their decaying bodies.

I don’t know who it was that cut them up, but someone is responsible and someone should really find them, probably the police. I always secretly knew that they were lurking under there, under the thick black crust of tarmac. I always had just a sneaking suspicion that there was darkness hiding beneath this city. There were always the echoes and whispers of the past under my feet as I listen to the daily chaos swirling around me. The secrets that were buried with them, I now wear them around my neck like a ghoulish ritualistic necklace, because I am the only one that knows. Some of the secrets were secrets that no one was ever meant to hear. These are the secrets of abusive drunken fathers, secrets of surreptitiously whispering Uncles, secrets of cuts, bruises and cracked finger nails: these unspeakable secret truths that were never meant to be revealed in the cold light of day.

These are the secrets of the dead that were meant to burn and die with them. It was all buried and hidden where no one was meant to ever find them, with the dirt piled upon their heads. And sometimes, late at night, I can still hear them screaming. I can never quite make out what they are saying to me, but I know that the messages are for me. They think that I am to blame, that I am the one who did this. But I know that I am not responsible, it was someone else who cut off their wings and left them here to die. Some of them speak too quietly and I can’t make them out, but most of them just scream and scream until my ears start to bleed and I can sense their hatred. Then their voices become one piercing shriek, a deafening crescendo of sound, a wall of pain and anguish flowing towards me and I can’t breathe as it hits me, I take a few steps back and I stumble into the abyss and it consumes me along with the bodies and the hair and the agony and the chaos and the darkness.

And now that I have lost her and the sun is gone,  I can always see holes where the stars should be. As this visceral underworld birth has split the sky open, releasing the cool breath of vengeance, the golden morning sun caresses the burning twisted metal and the shards of broken glass, as the cities weep.

Thanks for reading, you can check out more of my work here.