Compilation

‘Rot’ the sign said, so that’s what we did. We sat and we rotted away, slowly suffocating in our own bodily fluids, the wet raspy laughter frightening away the other guests.

Giggling insanely, the leprechaun skipped away, carrying the baby’s head. The body it had left for the family to find. It was the sixteenth child he murdered, this serial killing figment of the mind. It often made designs in blood on the baby’s bedroom wall. ‘With love’ he would write, or ‘Sorry’.

What else could he do?

Boom, the cannons roared. Boom, boom, they crashed as thunder against the heavens, lighting ripping alongside. The metal balls sheared through cloth and man, ending lives and uses where ever they went.

God has decided to learn how to play the violin. He sits up, in his attic so that his angels can’t hear, and pulls the bow across the strings. A few more years, he thinks, and maybe he can play them all a little ditty. They can line up, five pence a piece, and come listen to him play.

Excitement soon fades to normality and normality slides into boredom. The wind smells of the lady’s scent.

Look carefully at my eye. Look carefully at the white space, there, in the middle, where madness holds reign. I will show you the way to enlightenment and there I will murder you, by they gooseberry bush.

With bloody hatched he worked on the body. The clinically clean room was soon splashed with the life blood of his victim, slashes of red showing the violence that he had wreaked. In the middle mutilation finds a new home. When you can no longer recognise it as human it just becomes another piece of meat.

The trees have died. Petrified by the bomb blast they stand as testimonies to a better time. Grim monuments to laughter and love. Pray here at my shrine. Pray to the gods of yore, for they will deliver you to instinct.

Screaming and raging, frothing at the mouth the beast inside slavers at the bonds. It would break every convention, it would destroy every norm. Letting it free would end me. Thousands of miles of chain span the width of my understanding, weaving together my reality in a web of bondage and restraint.

Death had a cousin. He was the black sheep of the family, often sitting for days on the couch, beer in one clawed talon, the remote in the other, zapping through visions of alternity. The eyeless corpse stares right back. There is no hint of recognition, there is not even a hint of awareness, but you sit frozen in fear.

A lone crow caws its annoyance.