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I blame the road perhaps, one often looks at the pieces and makes rules based on factual remnants, frangipani fragments of eternity that end up stuck to dishwashers and other people’s weighing scales. This imbalance, an unfair dividends soured and left wanting, components gathered on the worktop inert, under the counter caress, counterfeit surpluses touched by the Gods of Wholesale, revelled and hated by the coiled centipede lines, feet in harmony, minds in beige turmoil: nobody wants to see how things are really made. There is never a shortage of vanilla ice-cream in this conglomerate oasis, my hands are scorched by holding this umbrella to keep the sun out. These cuticles, they’ve never been so warm. Herds of cattle travel up my arms and eat grass off my aorta, it’s a little disheartening, sometimes even uncomfortable, but I can’t refuse this free range revolution, the turning of a wheel gone right round. I find them on most public transport, munching Werther’s Originals and sitting in the disabled seats when they know not to, they leave the wrappers on the chairs to remind others of sin that has just escaped us. Don’t worry, I’m about to tell you something very important.

 

I guess there is a Devil on every street corner prowling the shadows away. Those dark bits, monkey puzzle delineations of night and day, would have no purpose if there wasn’t a basin that needed concealment. Humans were so stupid to have concocted the means to spread outwards, stasis is the only true form of safety, hold me closer in familiarity, the fear begins at the start of every journey, no matter what you have in your knapsack. My advice? Stay alive darling, by staying exactly where you are. It’s those connections, entwinements, aggregations; that joining of paths between one and the other which is dangerous; volatile, murder hides in the gutters of taking the high road, towards somewhere that isn’t, well, quite here. 

 

Could I describe the precise location in which I ran into destiny and fell not just off a curb but into a new Oblivion? That horrible white light I’d always avoided, sunglasses fixed onto bowed head, lead glue lamenting my ears even as I lay in that other world, not faithfully like ours. Now this extinction I’d run from is subject to a second coming, the rising of an untold layer just below muddied ground. It has everything and nothing locked into its mantle skin, indestructible because nobody thought to see if what we assumed was knowledge was just a pursue-mirage; an AstroTurf bouquet of lies.  

 

She was waiting for me just behind the recycling bin for assorted glass. I confess I had seen her on a fleeting number of occasions and had been suitably bewitched, I’d never been given the opportunity to get close, however the beauty was strong enough to be duly enamoured by afar. The day had already been one of great passion, my lover and I had rendezvoused in a mid range city hotel with chocolates on the pillows and dressing gowns with a good thread count in the wardrobes. We had made promises we wouldn’t keep and bitten the insides of each others mouth with something akin to longing or a nasty itch. If those four walls could speak they would speak only of a prodigious reverie; an all-consuming, storm-tempest love.

 

Maybe my shoes were not fastened on retrospection of the event, I certainly was not in my right mind, brain filled with the flesh elixir of illicit duvet waltzes and stomach sated by a temporary morsel splayed where one indulges their dreams. She came out of her cubbyhole of unexpressed Hell, the Cat with the perfectly formed tail, eyes shiny as desiccated moonbeams and leapt straight at my lungs, beginning to unravel my outward as she travelled further within. The whole globe turned into a scatter graph of disgusting stars, I feared for my life and my underwhelming, less than average children; I did not know what she was trying to reach, regrettably. Her fur was an ombre cloud of transplant A-negative brilliance, burying me a thousand times over and throwing sand in my face; the Glamourpuss, Amazonian wanderer, that wrapped her gesticulations round my biceps and purred revolting secrets in my empty, drought canals. I can say with almost complete certainty that was what happened, the Cat, diablo daycrawler, touched my surface with her doom claws and shattered everything tangible in my alleyway. She took my cream, cold sores and life and mewled whilst she did it. The expiry yowl that reverberated to the very depths of the earth, shaking the linearity of our coherence on mutability for its foundations on forever changing. Everybody’s coffins moved one more over every time she opened her mouth, she told me as such, controlling the direction of the incessant queue, giving out fast passes with tiny paws, jam spattered hotcakes at at crematorium, we are all so very hungry at the end. My lips ached with the encumbrance of the world’s secrets, swirling round a dead tongue that no longer felt like mine to orchestrate.

 

I don’t know why she chose me, I have my suspicious of course, but nothing concrete like the curb, my next fated step into the abyss, wisped delicately and deliberately; iceberg rinsed cirrus leanings of pure evil. I was taken to the edge of everything I once believed to be the case and flung off, into the road where large cars dwelled, she pushed me with sticky pads into endangerment and expected me to deal with the weight of what I had just heard. Needless to say I was deeply injured by the affront and my resolve and ankle gave way under the bonnet of a BMW three series coupe with a dodgy matte respray. Pain quickly became the most prominent of my possessions and I sat and cried loudly, tears of immeasurable jug sadness filling humanity’s brim to an uneven tide. The Devil Cat, as she preferred to be called, circled round my broken body and rubbed up against my stationary legs. She let out another abysmal roar, perhaps signalling to her master of ceremonies that her task at another corporal sacrifice had been a resounding success; I both hated and loved the puss that stuck her furry neck out and ruined me.

 

A small crowd began to gather, somebody started administrating first aid, I was elevated, iced and kissed by the good will of light under the watchful eyes of the above. I got somewhat claustrophobic by the attention of well-wishers and longed for the unmade bed of before. She disappeared in the throng of anxious do-greaters, who were somewhat concerned about the structural integrity of their frozen produce in non-branded supermarket bags: those little things we do that save instead of destroy.