Two weeks without The Internet.
Deep inside an office block, between floors, within walls, stuffed in the offal of pipes and wires, in the parts that people never see, sits a wretch of a man. A Jonah amongst the dank dripping tubes and ducts that secrete some hideous viscous bile, he hunches over an antiquated keyboard muttering obscenities to himself as prayers. Vile waves of putrid liquid lap at his ankles for attention as he skitters back and forth on an ancient office chair, the wheels squeal like long tortured souls. A red light blinks faintly beneath the layer of filth and dessicated insect cadavers that cover a cobwebbed monitor. He brushes a lank cloying shank of hair across his greasy skull and laughs, or rather a sickening gurgle bubbles up from his diseased lungs to escape like a gas leak. He reaches bone-white chop-stick fingers towards an wooden magenta switch marked “Internet” and clacks it to “Off”, coughing blood and mucus victoriously.
I wake.
I am in my room, floating at the ceiling. The instant I spy my body below I feel myself swimming down, sucked like food scraps down the plughole.
Shoom.
I open my eyes. All seems normal until I try to move. I cannot. I am a limbless torso, arms and legs shorn at shoulder and hip. My eyes bulge with terror like egg yolks in a hot pan, yet I cannot scream. I am mute and insensitive.
Days pass.
In my fever, I roll from my bed and face-plant the floor. I chin my way through the hair and skin and pizza droppings towards the telephone.
Days pass.
I wander between worlds, between fear and resignation, but manage to nose the word H.E.L.P into the telephone, and collapse into the irreal, a carrier bag once wafting loose now stamped flat.
Days pass.
I awake. I am in my room, this accursed cell, afoot ; stark and rigid like a storm-struck tree, sharp blackened limbs reaching frozenly, ossified finger-twigs remembering the double-click.
Flick your switch you wretch! I recognise your power, just deliver me from this life-in-death!
Days pass.
I am the bumblebee that you step over, briefly shocked, on your way to work, left forgotten and robbed by the side of the road, trying to crawl, unable to find my way back to the hive.
Curse these horrid modern tortures. Are you plugged back in yet? When I was little I used to think that ‘ossified’ meant ‘horse-like’.
Yeh, back. Didn’t really miss it, thas jus drama.
I had ‘gorky’ for horse and ‘wodgy’ for orange, although they might have been my brothers, I seem to have appropriated some of his memories over the years. I have actual, visual memories of things I have never done.
Darkly rich and deeply turbulent. Original and electric. Cheer up, life is full of surprises.
A ‘friend of mine’ also thought that horses’ hooves were made of wood.
Is hooves a word? It looks wrong.
All words are essentially wrong if you look at them hard enough, but hooves is/are good. Wooden hooves are better. I knew a kid who said ‘moply’ [moe-plee] for ‘most probably’, he was horribly bullied. (moply by me, I’m ashamed to say)
For some reason I keep coming back to read this piece. It’s like it’s a dream I had or something. Seems oddly familiar…