lightning garden

There are ways of killing and hurting that leave no mark. Everyone has heard the one about phonebooks; that's not true, but not every blow needs to land in order to hit. There are ways of building that require no foundations, and ways of taking down that leave the walls still standing; ways of hunting and stalking that leave the prey unaware they were the quarry even after they have been eaten...

The train comes like a great crawling hairy worm with its long snout held in a snarl as it twists through the tunnel and clears away the snow that has accrued on the tracks between the platforms. The passengers are things with spindly limbs and torn-open necks and flayed faces… they cluster in awkward queues craning their necks and huddling their limbs swaying back and forth to avoid shoving one another.

Your television is slowly filling with liquid. At first it was only a small blurring at the bottom, easy to overlook. You got used to it so quickly it took you weeks to realise it had been rising. When it had taken over a third of the screen you could no longer ignore it.

A high, rocky outcrop reaches over the sea at the eastern tip of the isle. On that outcrop stands a tower, and has stood perhaps for hundreds of years. Its walls are uncut black rock, each piece of a different size and shape, fitted together so snugly that no cracks remain. The tower leans dangerously over the edge of the outcrop and towards the sea. Numerous ropes attach it to the rock and poles support it from below.

We hunt them for their bodies, their flesh, their sinew, their bone, their blood, or the fluid they have instead of blood. We don't know why they fall — winged shapes big as buildings, mangled and broken by their descent — only that they do. We set upon them, we the hunters though in truth we are much more like scavengers, as they struggle to stand or crawl in craters filling with their pooling not-blood.

The snake is old and very cold. There is only one — or, at least, I've never seen more than one at the same time, or tracks of two different sizes left on the same day. The snake changes size through the year. He grows larger as the days grow shorter and the weather colder, and attains his greatest size after the solstice.

I wake up and realise I’m bleeding. The floor in my bedroom is not quite level and the blood has sept downward so that the head of the bed is dry and the foot squelching wet. Blood drips steadily onto the floor, fat globulets of it breaking and splattering into the pool that has grown to cover most of the room. I can find no source for the blood, though everything from the waist down is covered in a film of it. It comes right through my skin like perspiration, or condenses on it like heavy, metaltasting dew.

You hate feeding day. You hate the mausoleum where the old people live, its irregular stone blocks stuck together without plaster (which would have been eaten away generations past, anyway), the effusions of fungal growth that seep through their gaps.

Cosmic juggalo jokers plying the hyperspatial pathways, hunting for commerce, for unprotected ideas, for free-floating numina... pirates of the Jungian unconscious.

Picture the scene: a flytrap in the shape of a voluptuous human figure, a Venus of Willendorf only the head that of a carnivorous plant, swaying in a beguiling rhythm, unmistakably sexual, vagina like a pitcher plant... Would you? All sex is fundamentally murder, the mantis only makes it a little more literal than most.

I feel unreal. I'm inert, sterile, out of phase — I cannot touch or be touched. Trapped in insignificance, locked in impotent corporeality, denied any weight in the world. I am doomed by dull, bleak fate to fade out, to gradually recede into my lonely void. Do I even breathe? Is my blood warm? Do my eyes shine? Is there strength in my muscles and bones — any force at all?