Ping, the smaller of the two, naturally (everyone was smaller), did not quite cower, but close. He was afraid, and though his head was filled with the image of this monster’s giant fist coming down and cracking his skull like an egg, his eyes still managed to see what was in front of him. A big man, full of violence; an angry, red scar from left armpit to right hip; Ping did not want to see the other guy.

Step back. It was not a suggestion. No invitation, no entry. The couple at the head of the queue, expensive clothes, expensive hair, expensive expressions of disdain on their faces.

Day One

Really, I’m just oput of practice, and the trial/tribulation of the Island ordeal has done nothing for me. Trying to write any long form piece as piecemeal as I was doing with that is pretty much destined for failure. Not only do you not remember where you are or what’s going on, you also have no feeling of fluidity and confidence while wiring.

The scene takes place in a corner, with the disintegrator door a couple of feet out from the abutting wall. The wall is green, but the paint is scuffed and where the scratches are deep enough, there are thick red scars of rust and cut through it. The mirror Orson catches himself in is on the abutting wall, to the left, which is red, and like its green cousin is covered in graffiti of every colour and level of depraved perversity.

The woman is stuffed into the hatch ass-first, folded like a flexible dancer doing a perfect pike that has gone to wilt. Her lank blonde hair hangs down between her legs, which bend down in an L and serve to hold her in place and keep her from falling down the chute. Her arms also stick out, but because of the only half-rotation of her elbows, they don’t fold downwards, and instead jut out horizontally into the air in front of her. She seems forlorn, abandoned there, folded up and discarded like an old ratty ragdoll outgrown and left behind by a child too distracted by the trauma of its parents’ divorce to worry about the threadbare transitional object for which it once felt so much love.

The floor is white plastic, underlit, which was someone’s idea of a bright idea, and probably looked pretty good when it was first put in. After after a couple of decades, however, it’s now brown-grey and beginning to crack and the light it casts is dour and murky.

The black mirror (la mirror noire) is an attempt at a PKD kind of thing, which I”m not sure I can really pull off in the all-to-sane state which I find myself in these days. I’m really not crazy enough to write well, I think. I dunno, sober life is too boring for the intereesting thoughts and the anxious energy to write them down artfully. I’m also very much in a depressive phase at the moment, which does nothing for the creative mind, and I’m totally repressed because of the whole pretending-to-be-sensible-and-knowledgeable thing I have to do in therapy.

I do think I need to be in therapy again, and I do think it needs to not be psychoanalysis, even though that seems like a good idea. What I really need is to absolutely dominate the conversation, to allow my mind to fizz in grand cascades of sparks.

The lights under the floor flickered, a sharp cut from light to dark and dark to light, a visual stutter, a brutal, disjointed, lacerating strobe. The entire floor cut to black and flashed back to white light. Well, it ought to have been white, but the plastic floor tiles had long since gone yellow with age and brown with grime and slightly green with trapped moisture.