Sönaris.

I have been here before. I wish I could remember more of it. Everything is familiar – I am catching the same train, and looking at scenery that I have inhabited first hand. There is a bridge over a gully. Both ways are guarded and usually I have trouble negotiating the crossing, but this time I get to travel past unhindered, rolling and rocking to a mostly felt sound-scape; I watch the perplexed glances of its guardians, and for the first time feel some kind of relief.

The thing growing in the remote void – a recurrent something; a heart beat in the blood stream rushing in my ears.

Fade. Transition: Scene.

The footsteps on the stairs grow louder. The presence is felt rather than seen; is weighty upon the stillness of this room, and in time; upon the surface of my bed.
Stains on the ceiling – carbon burns from an inept placement of the flame. It emphasises the corners of the space – the designated perimeters of this tiny chamber.
My perimeters expand yet there is always the ceiling present.
Fade.

I understand the prescription of lines for the even-ing of keels. I am obsessed with entropy. Let’s blame the neverending story for my skewed perspective of nothingness.The smell of dirt.
I am always enveloped in these subterranean spaces. I walk a corridor - it is lit - where the light – hits - it is golden and dry but - in the darkness it is moist - a mouthful of foetid clay - I know this place - as surely as the back of my rapidly aging fists.
Flick. The other is; large and sweaty; I can smell them from here – I walk in a stream of hardening mud, slowly waiting for the descending hand.
Mine encroaches on flesh; is consumed by a gelatinous organ, swallowed inside its considerable mass. Beside it stands the fragile structure of the enslaved, and we meet eyes briefly and I ponder escapes.
The mud has turned. And dried. And become a different mass. My feet are slick with it, and my own fluids – boldly red against the blueness of what I now realise is glass.
Pluck, peel, it has dissolved the layers between my self and its, and when I remove it I feel myself slipping away and wonder at this kind of escape.
Fade.
It’s always dark here – always that kind of late afternoon grey here, always the same kind of light under the great ceiling of here. I never see the sky just a dull grey neverending something – a set façade, a strange neutrality constructed from plasterboard and faded paint and cosmic whatsits. I look desperately for stars – signifiers that something has managed to puncture through the bleak constancy.

I met eyes with her twice in different places. The first time I was hiding – I have no idea how she knew I was there, bearing witness to her terrible actions. The second was a call to arms through a broken window before my boat was upturned and I swam through the air to plummet through the surface of the ocean brine.

My pockets are full of sodden fur and I know intuitively, the degree of my failure. We're all here for a drowning. The land breaks, the bridge breaks, the ocean swells and the world withdraws. I have managed to save nothing; not even much of my self.

The droplets fall a cacophony upon the surface of the still.
They ripple and cross, infect and amplify
Until this surface is a distortion upon itself; until the stillness is the exception and the surface forgets temporarily the beauty of its uninterrupted splendour.
Likewise the night sky; the forgotten pond, the hour before dusk.
Clarity for that singular second fails spectacularly; a constellation of matter; the Pandæmonium, the overflow, the undertow, the un-expect-ion of the sudden dark.

Acer, Taxus baccata, Betula, Corylus, Fraxinus ;
Victims all to the merciless tyranny of children, the requirements of war, the actions of thoughtless men.
I dreamt of one of you; an inverted construct white against the darkening storm and surrounded by rockfall and ruins.
I am haunted by this dissolution, by the treachery of architecture.
A sudden distant swinging from the lowest of your branches.
The pathway curves and spirals. I return to the point of origin many times before finding the path to the top.

Lights like the headlights on motorcycles sweep through the grey landscape. A forest; a carpet of fallen leaves disguise the lay of the land and I fall out of the night and into the rotting mulch time and again. Everything is grey except the lights which compete ineffectually with the moon.
Sometime later I am slapped in the face inside a concrete bunker and I feel for the first time the crushing weight of love.
Until then I am hunted like a beast – brutality in place of skill.
The rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain. I am immune to its ministrations, and am forced to run.

Again those cruel Erinyes; Confabulation, Apophenia and Pareidolia are how they are actually named – I have followed them through the dark dank mud, I have avoided the larger fungi growing beneath the elder trees: I am intimate with their workings.
Once I shot one with an arrow but she merely glowed for a second and studied me with cold, cold terrible shining eyes.
It was a post-nuclear apocalypse and I was hunting myths. Carrying supplies in sturdy brown paper bags and walking through the softest of powdery grey dust that coated me solidly up to my knees. I walked these streets of ashes, the carpets of remains (of days, of people past – of history) listening out for voices, however muffled by sentimental fiction.

Transition. Fade.

Blue lightning within a cloud indicates the presence of hail. Red lightning within a cloud indicates the presence of rain. Yellow or orange lightning occurs when there is a large concentration of dust in the air. White lightning is a sign of low humidity (amount of moisture in the air). White is the colour of lightning that most often ignites forest fires.
I have never dreamt of fires, but I have dreamt often of their source.

I was a sword in fist - I was a shield in battle - I was a string on a harp.

THIS HERE IS UNCHARTED TERRITORY

Sönaris is this place – this in-between world of flick fade pulse switch. Everything shifts. I watch the scenes play out disembodied. A large grey spider embraces my one seeing eye from behind, negotiating an unreliable optic nerve. It swivels, controls, manoeuvres. My eye is entirely transparent. I am dead, I’m aware of this; the passive passenger privileged perspective.
I am being shown much, but I suspect I see very little.

Transition. pulse. fade.

Out.