Some Whole Wheat Words

I used to have a girl with whom I’d talk about sandwiches.

“People who really know their sandwiches,” she said, “—sandwich gourmets—always use butter, even if they’re putting mayo on there too.”

Why? I asked. And sandwich gourmets? Really?

“Really. Keeps the bread from getting soggy,” she said.

Nothing worse than a soggy sandwich.

“Nothing.”

We walked across a dry concrete courtyard. It was indian summer and on campus boys and girls smoked and read books in the colourless sunlight. The grass was still brown and freezerburnt. Geometric 1970s buildings cast mathematical shadows on rounded 1960s buildings.

Days later, the girl decided that what we were doing wouldn’t work. Among other things we no longer would discuss sandwiches. Afterwards I made sandwiches without her input.

2 Slices white bread
Hardened refrigerated margarine

Using cereal spoon, break margarine evenly onto bread. Put sandwich down, half-eaten, and slide it off the plate into the garbage. Leave house.

2 Slices stale springwater rye
1 Discount smoked mackerel fillet
Tzatziki

Spread tzatziki on bread, portion with mackerel fillet and cover with tzatziki-spread bread. Eat too many of these until your lips smell like fish and you feel sick. Lay on back, on bed, and look at the ceiling.

2 Toasted whole wheat loaf-ends
Canned anchovy fillets

At breakfast, use fork to dredge fillets through can, gathering oil and salt. Smash fillets into pores of bread. Chew mechanically. Repeat at suppertime.

1 Stale baguette
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar

Bite into baguette, cutting roof of mouth on petrified crust. Recoil. Pour oil into bowl. Add vinegar. Dip baguette in oil to soften. Chew. Feel sting as vinegar meets torn roof of mouth. Take call from father. Talk and finish talking. Snap phone closed, noting time, and place on table. Forget time. Check time again. Finish baguette. Run tongue, slightly acid-burnt, back and forth across bottom row of teeth.

When I was in grade school I had different, smaller teeth and a planner to help me remember things. In the corner of each page there was a quote from someone like Margaret Thatcher, telling me to be more opinionated or stating truisms. Some pages had facts:

Did You Know: Smiling takes x fewer muscles than frowning.

The implication is that smiling is justifiable even to someone who closely rations their muscle-energy. By maintaining a positive aspect they will save y(x), where y is a number of calories per facial muscle per exertion.

I have found that making no facial expression of any kind carries the lowest energy cost. To further save energy, I keep my eyes focused beyond the faces of the people I pass, and take no interest in my surroundings. I imagine a number of white sinusoidal lines slowly drifting over a field of grey (R:34.9; G:31.0; B:30.2). Efficiency is my goal.

My mother, when she was young, had a son, and
It was pouring rain..and we both found ourselves standing outside
you even cite the James Blunt tune
tune
you even
tune
Is it that you are you afraid that they will snub you?
and flashed a huge goofy smile
and flashed a huge goofy smile
and flashed a huge goofy smile
and flashed a huge goofy smile
Hume and Locke will make you feel better.
Trust me
me
TTTTTTTTTRR
My friend interrupted our brief encounter,
caught your eye and tugged
What harm is there in that?
What harm is there in that?
What harm is there in that?
What harm is there in that?

to your

to your computer to post your feelings on Craigslist
I am her daughter, and tonight, I found out about it.
the times we spent together,

the together the the times

You were ahead of me in the line
(Bloor West), approx 2:30 on Thurs, Nov 20
Maybe I’ll donate next time .
Would YOU be offended?
Or is this a cruel joke?
I can’t help but smile.

A smarter West-leaning Eastern European postbloc might wait until the Olympics were over before turning the sky violet with katyusha salvos. In this way it could ensure that the Western viewer would observe it being destroyed by Russia and come to its aid. Perhaps it could give out video cameras to its troops and civilians and send in the results to Western television networks, in this way building ground support for its cause. The more dramatic the footage, the more likely a response would become. The audience for war will be primarily males ages 18-35. They will enthusiastically share videos featuring their favourite moments; the perfect rocket-fire demolition of a khruschyovka apartment block; that one beautiful headshot. They will camp out at arms trade shows in XXL size camouflage gear, shining eyed and waiting to touch the knuckled curves and feel the cold armor. More interesting weapons will be designed for them to watch, more elaborate and loud and colourful, presenting options for tie-ins with popular video games. A machine gun which is also a chainsaw. A flamethrower on each arm. Bombs filled with fishooks and tanks with legs of heaving meat. I see a bright future. I see a bright future.

In his imagination the author stood in the kitchen of his future house. The kitchen was well appointed in concrete, steel and wood. A bottle of olive oil was open on the counter, reflecting a skirt of bright halogen spotlight. It was otherwise dark in the kitchen. The author had a glass of alcohol over ice in one hand and he wore a blue striped jacket, which was buttoned wrong. One side of the collar of the jacket was fighting with the other, pushing it downwards.

“I sure am glad that I wrote some sort of bestselling creative work,” said the author, “for now I have made an indeterminate amount of money which means that I am set for life, though without feeling like all further work on my part has been rendered meaningless.”

Yippee. The name of the work changes but was always uninspired in the vague sort of way book titles tend to be. Inanimate Objects Doing Things Such as Singing or Crying, Someone Performing an Action in a Foreign City, The Name of an Emotion or Strong Feeling, Two Foods or Spices Juxtaposed To Imply a Rustic Earthiness, Doing Something Which Your Mother Warned You About, A Fictional Organisation of People With a Single Unusual Job or the Friends or Close Relations of These People. A Plural Word Prefaced by “The” Which Will Make Sense if You Read the Book. Secret Lives of Everyday Objects or Types of Wild Animals.

“I wonder how many people Missing Connectioned me on Craigslist today,” said the author to himself, wishing he had a more clever way of saying “Missing Connectioned.”

“I bet like a million people Missing Connectioned me on Craigslist today,” he said. “Like a million people. It is a good thing I wrote that work, whatever it was, for now I have good fashion sense and no longer dress like a clown.” He smiled a smile which seemed in his mind less broad and stupid than it looked.

“Hello darling,” said a blurred amalgamation of half-glimpsed and changing parts which loosely conformed to a female silhouette. “How are you?”

“Ah, the significant other which I also magically have as a consequence of writing whatever it is I wrote,” said the author. “I am well. How are you?”

“I’m fine but I should tell you that we can’t go any further in this conversation, or really even this narrative,” it said, “because then you wouldn’t be Writing What You Know, and it’ll seem forced.” It crossed its arms. They were changing skin tones so rapidly that they looked grey in the glare of the track lighting.

“I think I can fake it,” said the author. “Faake it till you maake it,” he sang tunelessly before wondering if the quote was from a song. It wasn’t, was it? Maybe it was just something that people said.

“I don’t think it’s going to fly, Joe,” said the blurred silhouette. The author grabbed its arm and tried to reach its lips with his but felt only a numbing static.

“Reach its lips with his,” it said in a tired voice. “See what I mean?” Daylight flooded the room as the roof was peeled off like shoe leather. All things began to rot and wither and curl and dissolve. Swarms of glossy cockroaches exploded from under the appliances to breed furiously over the bucking floor. He’d installed the floor in another dream scenario and now he felt attached to it and it was this which made him act.

Moving toward the bubbles in the floor through a low tide of insect bodies he attempted to press them down, first with one foot, then the other. Each time he managed to stick one back into the underlay another section peeled up leprously. If he just had a hammer and some nails, maybe he could do something but now the room had filled itself up with shining water. The pressure increased in his ears and his movements became slow as his limbs were stretched like gnarled taffy and his fingernails corrugated on themselves like potato chips and his skin browned and grew cancerous. He had a hammer in the basement and a box of nails, as well. If he could just

Poetry removal is what I’m working on lately. Not poetry in the way that literary critics use it but poetry as the desire to construct sentences which conclude with “in the dryness of the night.” That is hardly a telling detail. It’s what’s called purple prose and it stems from a lack of structure, or at least that is my guess. Structure is about beginnings and endings; for instance, this paragraph began and ended with the word poetry.

Serving no other function now without enough cash to buy a gym pass the metal lock on my desk points at me. I lie at 53 on the dial. After being spun around thousands of times the mechanism is loose which makes the combination fuzzy. I don’t remember it, but my fingers do.

I’m again fooling myself about getting a job today. I handed out a single resumé and I think I wrote a cover letter. Maybe the cover letter was yesterday. Since I fool myself about having trouble getting out of bed, sometimes the productive period around midnight blurs into the furry half-consciousness of the following morning. I didn’t get a job today but I fooled myself very effectively.

Paragraphs should begin and end on the same topic because they are like hamburgers, or well tuned cars. Occasionally they are like human bodies which are peeled away in layers. The skeleton is the bottom layer. Often in classes where this is the case, the teacher will say “now we have to put some meat on these bones.” However, the rules of English generally dictate that human bodies do not contain meat. This has never clearly related to paragraphs in my mind. I am not good at writing paragraphs. See?

It is accurate to say that I do not feel excellent today. A more accurate description would involve the term dysphoria. My moods seem to change from high to low at random. It is possible to wake up bad; for instance, I woke up bad today. Yesterday on the toilet I came up with the title of the book I will write if I become a miserable unknown: The Failure. It will be semi-autobio— how did you guess?

I feel no strong attachment to anything unless I am on drugs. This strikes me as a very ambivalent way to be. If anything ambivalence is punished in nature. All things are a part of nature. I am a thing, therefore I am part of nature. Therefore I should expect punishment. Even severe punishment does not much concern me; right now I feel ambivalent about it, actually. Therefore I am not on drugs.

Circumstances

Do enough drugs and eventually you start to wonder about baseline. Back in the distant past unclouded and young there was a baseline level of energy that did not require maintenance. At some point almost forgotten creativity did not arise as a set of biomechanical complications associated with substance intake but existed on its own like a bright corporeal haze. Like a patch of unexpected sunlight magnified in contrast to a day of rain.

Live in enough places and eventually your sense of place is scratched and clouded. This for instance is a basement which has followed a living-room. Memories of other places can be recalled and examined but not trusted. Houses are interesting to observe from outside but they are no longer easily remembered. There are both windows and walls in a house, instead of one or the other.

There are tapping noises in these walls. The small windows are deep set into them and high up along them and very little sunlight makes it inside. When I am deprived of sunlight it is difficult to guess at where I am in relation to my baseline. My guess is far away.

A Dream I Had

I had this weird dream. I was somewhere and somewhere had moist peaty red ground and the atmosphere was throttled by heat. I was a hunter and always had been a hunter and I was armed with a bow. I notched my bow and crouched waiting by the salt-crusted shore of a lake which had been clarified by acid. The sun was nauseously bright, bouncing off the surface of the lake to strike me in the face.

Things came from the lake. They looked as if trees and elk and carnivorous dinosaurs had melted together or forgotten to separate and evolve individually. They had pineapple skin and antlers and long butcher-knife teeth which I saw as they opened their mouths towards me. There were no eyes; twitching feathered antennae grew from the sockets. Something stank powerfully of bleach and airplane glue. I let an arrow fly into the nearest Thing which buzzed electrically and twisted with its skin creaking in the killing sunlight. My head was splitting with the brightness and the afterimages of the glare clawed at my eyes. Avoiding a gout of pressurised blood which spat from the wounded Thing I notched another arrow and loosed it and it struck heavily into the soft flesh around an antennae and the Thing collapsed into the lake with a blast of pure white noise. Suddenly I found myself looking at a mirror; feathered antennae sprang from my eye sockets and explored the cool surface in gentle non-human motion. I woke up suddenly.

It wasn’t a very good dream.

A Dream I Had

I had this weird dream. I was a little green being in a daisy chain of other little green beings deep underwater. I was finely constructed like the motion of a watch and I glowed like a wintergreen spark in a dark room. Comforted by the warmth of the Ocean, I let the tide move me and watched as it turned my daisy chain into a bright green sine wave. All the people I know were part of the daisy chain as other little beings with their arms linked in mine.

“It’s dark,” I said to everybody. “I’m afraid of the dark.”

“We can’t help you with the dark,” they said back to me. “But we are here. We’re close by.” A bubble passed me on its way up to break surface.

“That helps more than you’d think,” I said to them.

“Funny how that is,” they said back to me.

On the wing tonight, back to my hometown. Edmonton.

I hope they haven’t bulldozed my old neighbourhood.

Stopped with the pills the other day. Too many, to wake up and to sleep. Shouldn’t post this. Google scrapes it up with my name. Ruins future job opportunities. Strains parental relations.

They’re more of a mental help, it’s just as easy to pretend I’m taking them. Wake Ups and coffee allay the sluggishness I feel in the day, it’s been harder to go without. I had a coffee today. My sister pointed out to me that I never write without coffee. I brushed it off at the time, but you know what? She’s right. Here we are, writing mostly without coffee.

Saw Kieran today. He’s fine, thanks for asking. We hadn’t talked in months. Evolution was our topic, mostly. Life, both in the sense of “what lives” and “choices we make with our time.” Life, in a biological sense, has been my topic with everyone lately. I can’t get my arguments straight, can’t seem to stick my conclusions in place, so I’m going to skip them if it’s all the same to you.

City is cold again. Snot freezes to the sidewalks. I play cleanliness roulette with the subway; sometimes I win, and the windows are clear and the seats are washed and crimson. I won today. The stations are always in the same state of slight dirtiness, with a greasy texture to the gaptoothed metal slatting on the ceilings. I read. Today I read Underground, it’s about the Sarin attacks on the Tokyo Subways in the mid-1990s. Good place to read about that.

I ate at a Korean restaurant called Home of Spicy Taste. Spicy Taste lives there. Our waiter wore black harem pants. The food was a culinary assassination attempt. It tasted good for five chews, then it turned into boiling lead. The base of my tongue is still sore.

Nothing to give you today. Wish I had something.

SO, for whatever reason, this took me five months to finish. By being bizarre and abstract, it has reminded me that I work best in minimal realism. So, for that, it’s been useful.

IF it looks like rainbow vomit to you, you’ll be pleased to know that it also looks like rainbow vomit to me.

———-

He’d come upon a bed of oysters clinging to a shelf of black lava rock about twenty feet down, and now he hung in space a moment, trying to commit their location to memory. Distorted light brushed back and forth over the sea floor, picking out the roughness in shells, running gentle fingers along the arms of bright anemones. The water was cold for this late in summer, and the current was strong and came in chilly pulses which carried with them the feeling of great depth. Stones clacked together, moving forward and back. His lungs tickled; he kicked back upwards.

The diver took a short breath, the sound quiet against so much water. He glanced around himself, looking for competition. There were voices from behind a sandbar to his left, and he heard the drone of a radio from the cabin of the boat behind him. The captain of the boat was asleep in a chair on the deck, and one of his hands was curled over the side, a gold ring shining in the sunlight. The diver heard the cry of gulls, the birds hidden by the sun.

He dove, disturbing bright fish, picked up an oyster and slid the point of his knife hard into the hinge of the shell. Something gave way, the shell cracked, and he twisted the knife, cut the muscles from the lid, and pried the oyster open with chipped fingernails. Nothing; a quick puff of brine issued from the molten pink mouth. The diver tossed the oyster down. It clattered against a toothy outcrop of dark igneous rock and settled into the sand.

Picking up a heavier oyster, he opened it, found nothing, and discarded it. He tried two others, which were both empty, then kicked forward and bashed his foot on something hard.

On the surface, the diver cursed softly through his teeth and watched blood spool from under his toenail as he cradled his foot in his arms. There was a hint of storm on the horizon, no more than a thumb-width smear of charcoal clouds. The radio had dissolved into static. He dove.

He opened oysters roughly, breaking the shells, and finally found a pearl. This he pulled from the flesh with three fingers. His hands were strung tight, thick wires of muscle stretching backwards from the knuckles, skin the colour of coffee. The pearl was dropped into a cloth bag at his side.

A spindly, long-whiskered sea-bug watched him from the shell of a large oyster. It extended two pointed forelimbs toward him, pleading or questioning. He waved his hand near it; it recoiled and clung tighter to the shell, but did not move.

The diver grabbed the oyster from the side and jerked his arm upwards. The bug lashed out, both arms piercing the top of his hand, and dropped to the seafloor.

Sharp pain climbed up the diver’s arm as he shucked the oyster, followed by a wash of electrical numbness. This faded into static buzz, warmth, then nothing. He found a large milky pearl and put it in his bag.

On the surface, the captain was awake. He leaned over the side of the boat and called out to the diver, pointed at his watch, flashed five fingers twice. Other divers sat along the gunwales with their backs drying in the sun, or rested along the railings, their legs dangling and the soles of their feet dripping into the sea. They slung towels around their necks, waved.

“Hurry up, Rui,” the captain yelled. “I’ll leave you behind this time!” The divers laughed. Rui dove.

A school of hand-sized silver fish surged upwards, each turning at the last second to avoid his face, metallic-rimmed eyes shooting like sparks on either side of his vision. A sudden current stirred up the silt, and something glinted through the sand. Rui combed the bed and picked it up.

It was a stone of some kind; smooth, asymmetrical, tapering towards a dull point, dark. It caught light, warped and deflected it into harsh golden angles which fell into the darkness of the stone, passing through endless layers. It looked a little like the flesh of an onion, he thought. It felt cold in his palm, and carried the weight of tremendous pressure, like a diamond. He put it his bag.

On the deck, there was laughter, loud conversation, tobacco smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes. The divers sat on the planking, bags open, white plastic buckets clasped between feet or knees. Rui sat between two younger divers, who talked energetically of mermaids, miming enormous breasts and arguing over the placement of genitalia.

Shreds of pink flesh clung to the pearls in the bucket, waving like pennants. Water dripped from the tips of Rui’s hair into the water. Five pearls; neither bad nor good. The diamond-stone was still cold. He left it in his bag. The captain fiddled with his radio without success and engaged the ship’s engines. The ship woke with a cough, and they pulled slowly away.

Rui rubbed the cramped muscles on the top of his hand with a thumb, and watched the storm gather energy. It was a black curtain now, a godly frown. The young divers discussed complex sexual positions real or imaginary. An older diver told them to be quiet between drags of a bent cigarette.

One by one the divers took their buckets to the scales, dumped out pearls into the sieve on the plate, and received a small wad of bills. They complained casually with one another, folded their money, and secreted it away into waterproof pockets and change-purses.

They approached shore and anchored, younger divers cannonballing off the side of the boat and older divers slipping into the water like frogs, without a splash. Rui dove and swam to the shore.

The afternoon had darkened. He felt the shadow-weight of clouds pushing down on his back as he pulled himself out of the water on all fours. There was grit between his toes. The beach was deserted.

Blown sand had blurred the margins of the road. Heat from the asphalt licked at Rui’s feet, and he felt for the stone in his bag. It seemed to have grown colder.

Sunlight had clotted in the streets, rebounding endlessly from glass windows and whitewashed shopfronts. Bicycles leaned against concrete beds of bright flowers, their riders absent, possibly melted. No gasoline had been delivered this month; none of the town’s few cars were running. Rui listened for radios, but couldn’t hear any.

One of the town’s part-time drunks was reclined on a bench, snoring softly, a potted flower tilting sideways in his lap. No-one else stirred. Rui looked through a window into the café. The building was dark, customers absent. Motes of dust nodded in stray sunbeams, disturbed by an invisible breeze. The sign was flipped.

At the far end of the café, the door to the patio had been left open. Luisa was outside. He tried the door.

Unlocked. The paddles of the ceiling-fans were still. Dishes– a few chipped mugs and saucers– lay drying on a wooden rack behind the counter. The fridge was off, its insides fogged and sweaty. Rui heard thunder in the distance.

“Luisa?”

“I’m out back,” she called.

A single table was outside, with four chairs around it. A closed umbrella thrust up drunkenly from its centre. Luisa put down a nub of charcoal and looked up at him with shaded eyes. Her fingertips were black.

“Hello, Rui,” she said, and smiled.

“Hi.” He sat down quickly. The diamond knocked against the arm of his chair.

“How was diving?” she asked.

“Medium,” he said, looking at the piece of paper between her hands; young man’s face, stark and white against a shadowed background. The man’s eyes were half complete and canted upward. His hair suggested motion underwater. His mouth was open. A pause. “How was business?”

“Pretty good until the power went out.”

“Everywhere?”

“The generator failed again,” she said. “Too much current— or not enough. I don’t remember.”

Rui pressed the back of his hand against the hot tabletop, trying to work out a cramp. The storm was almost overhead. There was another rumble.

“Doesn’t look good,” he said, pointing upwards. She looked up and brushed stray hairs from out of her eyes, leaving behind soft smudges of charcoal. He watched the curve of her breasts move under her shirt before looking up as well. His stomach was upset. His hand had fallen asleep.

“Listen, I,” he said. Her eyes moved down. There was a picture, he noticed, between the pages of her sketchbook.

“Here,” he said, and leaned to one side, fished out the diamond from his bag. The picture was of the young man in Luisa’s drawing. He’d a sailor’s cap on, tilted at an angle. He was smiling. “Found this. When I was diving.” The air was thick; it swallowed the sound of stone on metal.

Her fingers picked at the photograph, pushed it further into the leaves of the sketchbook. His stomach churned with acid.

“I wanted,” said Rui flatly, going through what he’d rehearsed, “you to have this.” Luisa looked down, went back to sketching. Clouds circled the sun like sharks. His mind seemed to lean forward over a great height.

“No,” she said. He stood up.

“Keep it,” he said. She didn’t answer.

The latch on the gate opened quietly. He looked back, once; she’d put down her charcoal, had the picture between a thumb and forefinger. The gate closed silently behind him, and he walked into the alley. Power lines swayed soundlessly in the wind. He kicked an aluminum can, and it flew end over end into the gutter. The air smelled of heat and poplar. He stopped at a rusted blue door inset into the stained plaster of the alleyway, and fumbled for a key.

The fridge light didn’t turn on, and he could hear the cracks of melting ice when he opened the freezer. The bottom of a glass knocked on the counter. The glug of rum; he finished the glass in two long gulps, stomach complaining ferociously. Up a set of stairs, into the bathroom; a few jerks and an obliterating blankness that coalesced back into thumbnail-sized tiles, turquoise and navy and white, pressed into the grout of the wall like fishscales. Misshapen pearls of no worth or enjoyment fell into the toilet bowl. Branches scratched at the window. His head spun oddly on an axle just above his left ear; his arm felt charged with static.

He showered in cold water and washed his foot and hand with orange carbolic soap, which stung. It began to rain as he dried himself off and changed into a two-day-old shirt and shorts. He steadied himself on the doorframe, feeling sick.

Down a flight of stairs; three swallows finished the rum. He began to sweat, under his eyes and under his arms. His hands were slippery as he placed the bottle back on the counter. He sat down heavily in a damaged chair, stood up, sat down again. The house was silent, the usual buzzes of low-watt bulbs and appliances absent.

Outside, there were hurricane lamps hanging from pitted driftwood posts and candles in the windows, supporting a low ceiling of uneasy glow. He heard music, and walked towards the town square, leaving the door open behind him. Two voices sang in fits and starts, with breaks of guitar. Rain dampened his shirt and spattered on faded canvas awnings.

Luisa leaned on the wall at the end of the alleyway, her back to him, watching people gather in the square. More voices joined the singers, and the guitar steadied into rhythm. She put her arms around herself. Paul drowned, he thought, in a storm. He took a side street out of the alleyway, and walked north, towards the cliffs and the lighthouse. He stumbled, shivered.

At the top of the cliffs the air opposed him, grabbed him coldly by both shoulders and forced him to kneel in the dry grass. The sound was of one continuous wave, dissolving the island, grabbing it by the shorelines and rocks and pulling it underwater. Gulls crouched among the peeling red and white banisters that crowned the lighthouse, rocking slowly, quiet and no larger than dandelion seeds. The wave moved inside him, dissolving his stomach, creating icebergs in the folds of his mind. He vomited over the side of the cliffs, into the water. Pulling himself to his feet, he began walking toward the lighthouse.

Luisa rounded the last hill before the cliffs, in time to see him fall over the side. She began running, slowed to a walk, and paused, just out of sight of the edge.

The water was cold, much colder than it’d been that morning. He did not float, he noted, but was swept end-over-end in a tunnel of fast-moving current. The buzzing numbness in his arm spread to his chest, and his skin stepped back from the coldness of the water; he felt the ocean through an envelope of glass. Fish the colour of mangoes passed him briefly, uninterested. Distance began to sieve the weak sunlight out of the water; there was a bright pressure behind his eyes, a pair of thumbnails, gentle but growing.

The current pushed him down, past a ring of black smokers, into the mouth of a lava tube. The walls were black and smooth, clotted at random with slow-moving anemones, picked over carefully by cat-sized octopi. Now I am Paul, he thought. The current crushed air from his lungs. Seen from below, The bubbles looked like jellyfish, curling into themselves, racing back up to be lost in the surf. The walls of the tube widened. He was aware of burning panic, suddenly, but it became tangled in numbness and could not move. I am Paul. The pressure behind his eyes grew. There were indentations in the lava-rock, impacts or outflows, pieces of meteorite older than the sun. Craters around him predated the evolution of eyes, rested within the final unobservable blindness, outside of time.

Now the current was colder and faster. Now there was no sunlight. Fish grew strange, deformed and exiled beyond the reach of the sun, hunting and hunted, endlessly. Patterns simplified, changed, became once again complex. Paul drowned. These fish carried glowing messages on their skin, but were blind. They would dissolve like wet sand if you brought them up to the surface, he remembered. They are baked to death by sunlight. The walls of the lava tube had disappeared into nothingness. Below himself he saw chains of light.

The bacteria was arranged in primal forms, stitched into chains of meaning, glowing, consuming proteins, excreting proteins to be consumed by those even lower. Left behind by strange children. Marine snow, flakes of dead matter, brushed his skin softly. He felt small collapses, saw flashes of blue and green and white, light he realised was pain. Other lights came, as well, in geometric nets, moving with tide or thermal drifts or to rhythms unseen. He could no longer move. There were nails behind his eyes, puncturing.

The ocean flooded him suddenly with grey brightness, like milk. He was compressed, bent. In his mind he saw or heard a person, talking slowly in a language he could not understand. Shapes of no colour sheared from themselves and became other shapes of no colour. No colour and no consequence. I, he thought. There was a sudden change in pressure, some threshold reached, and his bones collapsed.

His body folded in half, then in half again, and again, falling into itself darkly, layering together like the flesh of an onion, gathering in heat and downward speed, absorbing the weight of tremendous pressure. Time blurred, societies rose and fell and rose again. Rui’s self fell into a bright abyss of dying magma, reached the point where it could be compressed no more. It glittered there at the blind heart of the world, lit by jostling shoals of molten iron, hard and dark and final. Like a diamond.

I just finished I story that I’ve been working on for five months, and I don’t even like it now.

Crappy McSweeney’s and their devotion to quality writing.

Crappy everything.