Agate Scotland

A desperation in this cold then, my feet disappear into a shambling weight that aches like bruises. The pebbles collect. The gulls mutter and call, the sea laps patiently like a vampire nursing a carotid. I keep moving.

 

People have overpopulated this earth. Some form of pandemic is required to thin-out the overburden of pretend scholars, post reality charlatans, ghosts of fraudulent benefits and anti-depressants in vogue, politicians of post-truth, and  the i-fucked.

 

This eve I must check the mouse trap in the attic, for last night I heard the little swines squeaking to one another across the vast gulfs of chipboard.

 

Turns out the trap was stuffed. Totally full. I froze, hypnotised by the earthworm-like tendrils wavering in the cold. Something that looked like a garish collection of the entrails of many animals of different sizes filled it. A shoddily moulded face that was an anaemic impersonation of human, furred with bird-like claws.

 

When I returned to my vigil at the refrigerator glow of my laptop, I kept my right eye on the television. Subconsciously absorbing meaningless babble into my soul, and into my subcutaneous fat as digital script.

     The Proclaimers appeared, in some archival clip from their questionable heyday, playing "Letter From America" acoustically in a whore-haunt under Edinburgh's South Bridge. As the song drew to its usual conclusion (a major seventh I think?), the brothers chose to forge on, growing steadily more manic, simultaneously in their playing, singing and gestures. Soon, they were chanting demonically, putting particular emphasis on their "r"s "send me, will you send me a letter, from, America", persevering with that one chord like krautrock visionaries, while a junkie and a whore nearby were tapping wheelie-bins diligently sharing a pair of high heels. The moon blushed vermillion, as a few thousand miles to the south-west Krakatoa spewed billions of tons of slate grey ash into the atmosphere. It began to snow indistinct blacknesses, while waterspouts exhumed deep sea grotesques and exhibited them on Princes Street. Miniature tornados plagued Greyfriars churchyard, plumbing the grave deeps and carrying myriad skeletal remains skyward,then thrashing them down onto the Royal Mile, bright with electrical discharge and unaccountably bloody.

       My God, as it rained blood,  the Proclaimers played on.

 

I awoke, the room in darkness. I remembered that I really needed to check the rat-trap in the crawlspace. I had heard scratchings there during the witching hour of the night before. A sound like the crackling of flames, all around.

 

The apocalypse is still playing in my head. The Proclaimers are by now bludgeoning each other with their fiery guitars, still grimly chanting. The dead junkie has a high heel embedded six inches through his spine. The whore cradles a dying Greater Spotted Woodpecker, frightened here by the burning woodlands.

 

 A brunette saunters up, "Time to be moving gents" she exclaims, motioning for the duo to follow her into the maelstrom that surrounds them on all sides. She's smiling, totally free and easy in the caustic air. Sweeping the blood from her hair, the entrails of seabirds gathering around her shoulders like garlands. I've seen her somewhere before. "Come on you two,let's not dawdle!" She takes their hands in hers and leads them away, the smoke and deluge quickly swallowing them, and then, just as suddenly as it began,my vision is through.

 

A sound like the crackling of hungry fire in the wickerwork. I remember just then, I really must check the moth trap I laid last night, by the dying elm and that ticker-taped crime scene that never made the news. Where the standing stone was transplanted to the bank vault of a Chinese businessman. I really had better take a look.

 

His writing is spiky, his 4s are too sharp. He can smell matchburn and menstrual blood. Milkskin, kissing mouths, bride's blossom, oranges. Who the fuck wrote this? Why is there a handwritten note in my moth trap? The dark scales from a black moth's wings smudge the brilliant white. An unidentified hawk moth, possibly an outsized hybrid, lies dead inside, its drying juices gluing it to the trap's base. Truly macabre patterning on the wings. What appears to be eyes with disfiguring cataracts, in deep waxen yellow in the furry black body. A furious, waxen, septic yellow.

 

I don't want to be here anymore, he said, ventriloquising a nearby spider's cadaver bundle from within his cavernous chest. It leapt up, frying in the skylight like a raw prawn. He turned away from her, looked at the pale dawn and remembered why he was here. There is no reason for me in this. The spider's oily abdomen popped like a saveloy, spraying the legs like oak twigs in an autumnal gust. "Goodnight" he said. "Goodnight" Someone answered, from amongst the frantic hedgerow. It was the woman from the previous night's reveries. Soft feline eyes regarded him with an unpredictable virtuosity of passion, and insurmountable kindness. Could she be real? The moon blushed pink, as if bringing a bloom of fuchsia to one cheek. They would have the moon written as a patchwork of dead seas but like sleep, she is more than you can gather in glances.

 

We walk together through a beautifully full silence, each content merely to lightly caress the tips of the other's fingers. Stomachs flutter in euphoric nausea, and a microcosmos of crimson electrical storms flower along two spines that long to intertwine.

 

The great red spot of Jupiter, the Dark Spot of Neptune, coalesce like amoebas as the planetary bodies collide, birthing a wormhole of storms wine-dark and ditching. We part lips only to breathe, hyperventilating through a kaleidoscope of fever. Kissing in septic shock, and leaving our bodies to live millennia in moments, each cast in the bright cosmos of the others lightning heart.

 

Or nothing. Just a dream. I'm throwing stones.