Ship

One of them makes the chalk outline of a deck there on the concrete floor.

Another sits on this deck scratching absently at two angry circles, red anklets, loops, just above the jut of bone. The deeper of the two seeps something clearish, sticky, where nails disrupt the crusted surface. Shrugs: scurvy or something."Did we forget to bring limes?"

    "Leave it alone" growls the one holding the chalk, the boatwright, unconvincingly.
    " It itches though" and he spits on a finger, seals the wound with glisten, a snail or salt track.

One more of them - forget this one now. It's not like he can do anything except breathe these almost imperceptable and too intermittant wet half-breaths. Put two fingers to the throat occasionally, if you remember. It's okay.

He drops the chalk: " Move him, he's dying on the fucking sail"

Double Date #2

    When you tell him to stop touching you he doesn't. He twists an earring in it's hole, a tiny blue lightening bolt made of perspex. Thomas cut it for you the last day he worked in the school and had access to this kind of machinery. You slap his hand away as sober creeps here at the softened edges of things. Sober hurts and aches places you weren't sure existed. Like this bus itches; is somehow both too hot and too cold.

    He wants to fight, links fingers, stretches them above his head and checks the mirrored effect in the window, darkening now. This bus fills, moves only slightly.
    "Is he hot?" he watches his lips' double in the window. You look too until your eyes meet there, blurred and outside. You shrug trying to scratch between shoulder blades. It isn't the right place.
    "I - dunno - I hadn't thought about it"
    "Why not?"
You shrug again, without the scratch.
    "I mean - for fucks sake" half stands, leans over you.
    "Stop speaking" you say, very quiet and he laughs, lifts the edge of his shirt, looks at his stomach.

    You close your eyes and dream, the flimsy outlines of the bus concertina fold beneath the pressure of the truck that ploughs into it's side. We all die horribly, it's for the best really.

I watch him watching me. My watching is this sly, furtive thing. His watching has complete faith in human invisibility.

I can see you so much

Everything here wears a filter of sick grey, especially the yellow walls of my room:
("Look, your very own room.")
But some things glow, and they stare at me like I can't see them.
"Idiot" I snort. I can't believe my luck.

Bad Hair

    I dream this again: a slight scratch of cough, something discreet-ish, behind a napkin. It's a restaurant, I don't know which one. I mean, I don't know if it's a restaurant that exists outside of this dream. It seems really expensive. I cough again and it's like - inhaling the fumes from dry frying chillies or burning tyres. My eyes water and it's becoming embarrassing,even though I know it's a dream. K's sister pats me on the shoulder reassuringly.
    I can feel something lodged in my throat, or just beyond my throat and this thing needs to go somewhere, up or down. I push two fingers as far inside my neck as I can and this makes me retch fruitlessly a couple of times. The third time the tips of my fingers brush against this thing, this foreign object or it's tail at least. I try to grasp it between the two fingers, make this confined scissor motion, but that feels freaky and kind of sexual. It's useless anyway, I can't get a hold so I try to force it further up with these rhythmic muscle spasms. Whoa, I'm thinking, this is some heavy psychoanalytically significant kind of dream, isn't it? Now it's in a place where I can fix this tail-like wisp between the fingers enough to start pulling and it feels huge. Because it's a dream I'm expecting some real Gothic monstrosity - a decaying rat, a very deformed foetus - but it's just like, hair matted together with some gooey grey substance. Like the stuff you have to pull out of a plug hole when it gets blocked. Yeah, kind of gross, but not that scary. I keep pulling and it's wrapped around a bunch of complicated flesh stuff that I guess are my internal organs, or some of them. It's a sizable, messed up pile on the restaurant floor and I feel much better, kind of light and empty, with a sense of mission accomplished.
    I wake up then and notice I've thrown up on the floor next to the mattress and a little over my right arm. I take my t-shirt off and use it like a wash cloth. Then I face the other way and go back to sleep pretty swiftly. I don't dream anything else, or if I do, I don't remember it.

    When I wake up again I'm thirsty and my throat hurts some. I drink three glasses of water from the tap. The place where my tooth was aches from the cold of it, it's like a phantom sensitive tooth. The cats sniff at the soiled shirt and the patch of whatever soaked into the carpet. I wet the shirt and rub at it half-heartedly, blot it with a magazine. They weave around kind of menacing with their tails straight up in the air, the tips twitch like signals. I tip something foul that's their regular breakfast into their bowls, before things get nasty. They're pleased enough, I guess. I pull on someones hoody I find on the back of a chair. It's white and a little too tight across the shoulders, short on my arms. I'm thinking: I probably should have washed or something, before wearing someone else's clothing. I'm thinking: this is an uncharacteristically impolite action. I sniff my arm, but it just smells bland and slightly unfamiliar. My housemate stumbles into the kitchen, bleary and morning-like, starts making coffee. She says "You look rough" I can't see myself but I explain it's because my things are white and ill-fitting, it makes me look like a patient, or a jumble-sale ghost. She frowns, holding the  coffee pot between us defensively. "Go back to bed" she says. But instead I watch these heat resonance cameras tracking the captive animals.Sip coffee while giraffes glow in patches, rhinoceros horns register blue and cold.
    Smoke two cigarettes laid flat back down on the table outside. The sky is this unreal thing, wide, colourless and empty. I fall asleep as two magpies try and rip the felt from the roof of a shed.