I have the premonition that something dire and astounding is about to happen'�

My spine snaps straight and my fingers involuntarily clutch the armrest like spastic talons. Now comes a slow heaving of strange nausea; like the mournful ghost of nicotine craving. Psychic bile rises to my teeth and fills my mouth with the tangy, metallic taste of abject panic. I feel like my body is trying to exorcise my consciousness through violent vomiting. I cling on, fight to keep it down, and desperately try to defer these hideous emotions. I clam my eyes shut as tight as possible.

Memories flood into my minds eye like a river that has busted its dam. All chaotic influx. Me wearing a motorcycle helmet and running into walls. Me bellowing tearfully because someone has just propelled a toy truck at my head. Me walking with a little blond girl, both our parents smiling, conspiratorial yet benign. Me at four, five, six, onward, falling off a bike, in a playground scuffle, with a ginger best friend, with a different best friend, dinosaurs, throngs of aged relatives. Toys and excitement, charcoal grey trousers, crayons, a hotel on the seafront, cartoons, ephemeral bouts of minor sickness that seem like absolute devastation, vomiting spaghetti hoops. Hymns, maths, endless and lawless sports, a crude cardboard construction of a fighter jet sticking out of a dustbin, threats, thefts, misunderstandings, names, names, houses, parks, climbing over a fence emblazoned with a 'No Trespassing'� sign. A swimming pool, music, sweet bird-like girls huddled together in neat uniforms whispering secrets. Masturbation, violent movies, early and naïve conjectures concerning the meaning of life. Intense fears, idol hours of bliss, sunshine, fraternal friendships, tempestuous flashes of female flesh, blue eyes like perfect miniature models of the sea. My mind jerks violently.

The flux hardens to a pounding industrial production line; the memories are becoming self-contained and concise, like geometric slabs of objective rock. Education. Alienation. Solitude. Relationships and love sickness. Disappointment. Vice. Mental health. People, people, people, people, awash with a poisonous wave of intoxicants, locations, locations, like inert monsters, blind and uncaring. Money. Bureaucracy. Incandescent but cynical pleasures. Occupations and concerns and debts. Now the slabs are beginning to crumble into shingle, all the miniscule details of my existence are becoming perceptible as the time line draws closer to the present. Depressingly inane facts and pedantic exactitudes; bearing no discernable correlation to the romantic haze of the distant past. A vast, black horizon is looming into view and my being is hanging upon the precipice of the moment. Stillness and silence, a brief period of thoughtlessness'�

How incomprehensible all those summoned ghosts of the past seem, like ludicrous fictions, utterly irreconcilable with this present, like so many useless dreams and impossibilities. Euphoria surges up my veins (veins?) as I ruthlessly dismiss all this baggage. I condemn it all to the bonfire! It is gone forever and I am purged. My bones are shaking with laughter. Bones? Dear god I've a body, what comedy, divine foolery, my cool blue laughter is resounding through the pure totality of the present, and I am tickled pink by the absurdity of my physical existence.

I open my eyes and my joy dissipates instantly.

A room, a chair, my legs and my arms, my body! It seems spurious now, how can I be contained within such a husk. I try and leave the form, I can not, I try to visualise a world outside the room, I fail. I look about the room, take in the furnishings, the objects, I'm trying to stay calm, it is a fairly neutral bedroom.The pictures on the walls and the various musical instruments are the main idiosyncrasies.
Damn!
A man is sitting opposite, quite close and staring intently at me, I'm startled that I didn't feel his presence sooner. I feel thoroughly unnerved by his cold observation. A pang of recognition strikes me, I know him, his face, his hair, his clothes, I feel he is my friend, I know his name, but I have banished my memory, recollection is impossible. I try to stand up but he forces me back into my seat by gently pushing down upon my shoulders. I am so weak and unable to resist his quiet coercion, I look at him, and he looks back with detached curiosity. I want to weep with impotence.

Crystalline, electrical currents are beginning to reverberate in my eardrums. It is a sequential flow of sound; it is music, the most melancholic music I have ever heard. The male vocalist seems to be lamenting the past I have lost, the song is redolent of love, life and pity, O pity! It is so utterly saddening! I long for the past, but I can not recall it, it is gone. I try to speak, I merely whimper. Though my brain is soaked in confusion, I can sense a profound truth which I am unable to grasp; it is a deep and unfathomable dirge.

Forget the music, ignore it, I must piece reality back together, this room, and this sickening eternity. There is a low table next to me, upon which are several items, a cup, a book, some kind of electrical device etc'� I lean over and begin moving them instinctively, trying to uncover some significance from my interaction with this world, it is reassuring, my panic and sadness subside. There is a safety pin, it looks promising, it feels nostalgic. I pick it up and impulsively draw it towards my bare arm, O inspiration! I see a way out; through a pinprick I could escape this useless glume and fly free! Escape! Before I can act, the man calmly leans forward and removes the pin from my feeble fingers and smiles ambiguously. Curses! I am a prisoner! Of this body, this room, of this man. I am seething with consternation.

That languid undertow of realisation swims closer to the surface, but I am reluctant to entice it, I suspect it to be hideous; catastrophic even.

Claustrophobia is reigning down upon me, the anxiety! I must make a pact with this cumbersome body and get away! I stand up and make for the door, escape is imperative, disaster is surely upon me.
It has occurred to me that I am awaiting execution!
Yes that is it, but not all of it, there is more'�
No time for conjecture now. I've made it out onto the staircase, the man is casually following me, my mind reels and I feel faint. I loose my balance and drag myself desperately down the steps like a worm. Casually the man assists me as I slither down, it is confusing, and I sense malevolence in his charity. I look up at him, his countenance flickers with an unearthly greyness, something dark and threatening.

The beast of comprehension breaks the surface of my subconscious and confronts me with the full, unbearable terror of my situation!

I am a scapegoat! A faceless martyr! No less than that, I am a lubricant. The past was a long meaningless dream leading up to'� the time is nigh, everything is in place, me, the man, he isn't a man, and nor am I. All invention! We are loaded, finally set in perfect formation. My comprehension has become ubiquitous; I look down helplessly upon my doom. This moment is destiny. I have an aerial view of the staircase and the room, my form grappling uselessly at an object, trying to bring back the false reality, and the man holding me in position, perfect position. Next to the layout I can see another identical duplication; the room, the stairs, the man, and I. Beyond there is another, and another, and another, an endless row! They are only differentiated by time, in the distance I can see copies where I am still in the room sitting down, it is like a colossal reel of sequential film stills. My perception is becoming ever more extensive, my understanding becoming ever more horrifyingly complete. In the direction of the future, the row of scenarios are changing, flattening, hardening and the colours desaturating. Damnations! It is a wheel, a vast cog! And I see a second cog that correlates, I can see the point where their two sets of teeth meet, the scenes are the teeth, locking together, how gargantuan the cogs are, suspended in an endless abyss. As the scenes draw near to the meeting they become mechanical and grey, the rooms are a tooth, the man a vice, and me'� I am a lubricant, a sacrifice to the astronomical machine. No wonder I had required the pacification of delirium!

A grim wave of mortification overcomes me.

Those other forms, in the other teeth, they are not me, I am only one duplicate. They are my brethren, condemned to an identical fate, once trapped in identical solipsism, isolated and innumerable, steadily conversed to immense holocaust. My vision descends back to my eyes, I am morphing, distorting; it is painless but unendurably sickening. My flesh is melting into a greasy resin. I am filled with humiliation, I am being raped, reduced, debased, and I whimper a pathetic requiem for my lost humanity! I am a lubricant! I am drawing closer to the interlocking point, the locus of Atropos! I am held in perfect positioning by the mechanical vice, ever closer. Excruciating despair, the teeth have locked. Rape! The defilement! The horror!
And now blackness'� dissipation'� nil'�

'�

An aeon of emptiness'�

A soft and tranquil sleep within a dark, warm sanctuary'�

Now a deliverance, I know nothing, I am new, everything is new, there is much light. I have no recollections, I am wailing, I know not why; I can see my podgy limbs flailing, now I see the faces of gentle giants peering down, I accept them as my protectors, I am confused but curious, I am alive'�

Want to comment on this Prose? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Prose and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...