You see a boy get knocked off his bike. He dies in your arms. The accident wasn’t your fault. You can’t explain what happens afterward. The dead are visiting the living. The dead love the living. Even if they don’t love you. They want to cling on. Take an influence in your life. Complete the trials of their earthly life, or repeat challenges that they believe they have failed. And one of them wants you, innocent you, who held him as he died.
“Remember me?”
Surprised, I turned around, and saw my reflection beckoning from the mirror into which I”d just stared. The eyes were more red than a moment ago, and it seemed as if my reflection had suffered even less sleep than I had recently. But this wasn’t really much of a concern, and as my eyes made contact with themselves my legs made it clear that they wanted no part in this reunion.
“You can’t reun, you know. How can you possibly avoid your own reflection?”
It was saturday morning, and once again the kids were playing with the gas mains. Mother was out, shopping, whilst father had only just returned from a busy night at the pub. Martin and Jerry sat in the basement cellar, with only a torch to guide them, and attempted once again the connection to the meter. It was no good. Either the meter would require a hole, or the pipe would have to be ruptured. A tough choice, but they knew that really it was no choice at all. One swift blow with the axe, and the gas would be able to fill the space. The brothers were excited.
If you stare at life for long enough, it starts to make sense.
Isolate. Hide away. Deny name when called. Abuse, avoid, destruct. Again, louder. Ignore the olive branch. Think of nothing, constantly. Refute the positive. Notch up the days. Don’t learn. Don’t change. Compound thoughts. Self obsess. Portray one aspect as a whole. Desaturate. Drown out life. Live in white noise. Hurt friends with rebuke. Embrace guilt. Risk everything.
Repeat.
They say that history repeats itself. Who am I to argue. But I didn’t know it would be the case.
The face of death stares through the glass at the woman asleep by the fire.
Sitting. At the desk. The computer tries to block my vision but its easy to see over the top; a middle distance stare that would put me in good stead for a job as a model in the freeman’s catalogue.
The park stretches ahead from the office window. To be a squirrel. In summer time. With some peanuts. Close to the path.
No good.
Summer has gone, taking with it the park dwellers and their bags of pre packaged vermin food. But the squirrels here have forgotten that they’re vermin. Too used to being fed.
There’s a crash, as another small furry body falls out of the tree nearest the office. This time, instead of landing in the mouldering heap of grey fur from other failed squirrels, who move only to play with the rats, the branches of the tree catapault the starving creature through my window. It lands in a small sea of glass and blood, in the centre of a report that details the newest business paradigms that will allow us to square the circle of perfection and avoid being sent up river when we’re trying to go downstream.
It is not surprising that the paper pulls the life blood from the animal, although the speed means that it is not so much a blotter, but a suction pump. The squirrel is left, still and silent, its pale face screaming the same silent “why?” that I was expecting from anyone else who encountered the document.
I dreamt that I was a murderer. Waking was horror itself, as I cast my mind back to the night before, focussed on the need to discover who was dead and dismembered before remembering that this was just the internal, the mind’s presentation of things past, imagined, or trying to comprehend, and that really there was no evidence to hide.
In the dream it was one of my friends. A fight. A victory. But such loss, and the realisation that I had to hide what I had done. And how?
This had been the dream. This was why I hadn’t slept well, the turbulence of my disturbed sleep waking her on so many occasions that, by the irony of morning, she was ready to kill me.
She always did this, tried to find new routes or short cuts, and claimed that she was making time when I could see the seconds fall away in waste.
—
We don’t need a short cut. We’ve got to get to the airport. The plane leaves in.. fuck.. come on.
In the back, the woman whose car Maggie had stolen was beginning to come out of her shock, and seemed to be trying to call the police on her mobile phone.
“This is a short cut. Its the only way we’ll make it.”
She turned back to the road, and looked straight into the eyes of an old man.
“Stop!”
The impact came in with the sound of the tires. We stopped. The man was in the middle of the road. Maggie and I got out of the car and rushed over to see him. His breathing was difficult. What to do? We looked at each other. Looked around. And saw the owner of the car driving away.
“Shit.”
We’d missed the plane, and now we were lost in a side street in Prague, surrounded by derelict buildings, and with our luggage and money rapidly driving out of sight in a car we’d hijacked. With a old man dying in front of us.
“Shit.”
That was when we first met Satana.