Get back before dark, those were the rules, the rules that had been hammered into our heads since the day we learnt to talk and every day after. Never forget. Never question. Never be outside at night. These rules formed the backbone of our choices, our decisions and for good reason following the rules is …
“You’ll be up there for 18 months and then we’ll come to retrieve you and your findings.” I replay the recording again and again through the speaker embedded in the dashboard of the ship. Alarms blare all around me, signalling the impending crash as I hurtle towards the dusty planet. Months of travel has led …
Time is losing its texture, flattening out until I can no longer keep my grasp on it. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, suspended in space and time like a star in a vast, uncaring sky. Laboriously, as if moving through a viscous substance, I turn my head stiffly to my left. …
And I am greeted by the whirr which greets me every dawn. Reluctantly, I widen my eyes to the fake room I sleep in: fake posters of product placements, fake gifts from fake strangers; none of it real. A sour taste floods my mouth as reality yet again greets me, the same reality that greets …
And see that Yankee with his belt undone and his shirt unbuttoned. Talking to some Trinis, look at all of them around his lap like he was recounting a world far, far in the distant future. The echoes under the tropical lights and his hand in her hair, her hand on green glass Solos, …
The painting was ugly. An atrocious thing. An insult, with “MAMA” written in funky, scraggly, scrawling handwriting in the bottom corner. A blob of greyish brown with two skeptical eyebrows arched too close to the hairline- or perhaps the hairline was too close to the eyebrows. Two circles for eyes, smaller, smudged circles for nostrils …
The storytellers told us the legend of the tower trials. “No one knows where it came from. One day it appeared, and then the games began.” they said. For millennia, a colossal spiralling tower would appear every century and challenge the most desperate and worthy entrants. The tower was made up of many floors, each …
Art thou truthful in your serpent tongue The one that writhes on a silly pun For thy soul hurts each time When thyself spurts a crime Mystery endeavours to find Thy instrument of reality Of every note that sings To thou truth of people. How thine lives are intertwined With the string of …
Praise, praise until that’s all you know Until the blood dries Until they sharpen their knife’s Until they slit your throat Until you beg for it again Until you vote for your decease Until your eyes go grey and your skin turns blue Again, again, again Die, die, die Again, again, again Lie, lie …
