His unwanted guest smashed into his unconscious mind as soon as his eyelids shuttered reluctantly closed. It came in splinters. Shards. Sharp fractures of memory.
Or was it imagination? He could never tell.
He only knew that they cut deeply.
The rain drummed incessantly on the corrugated roofs of an early monsoon morning. Far away, across the iron and wood, strains of sleepless, intoxicated karaoke wafted across the silent desperation of a neighbourhood perched precariously on the edge.
Love is a burnin' thing
And it makes a burning ring
Yelling. Loud, angry, oppressive yelling.
Screaming. Deep, anxious screaming.
Pathways that splashed and sloshed around his feet, soaked with the tears of scandalised heaven. Heavy, heartless boots stomping and crushing those tears into the dust.
Narrow, nervous alleyways. Unbending, but always leaning towards him.
Threatening.
Snarling.
Lying in wait.
Onward his boots pounded. Others before. Others behind.
Anxious gazes of terrified locals staring at them in stony-faced, bleary-eyed disbelief from the empty window frames of their fragile dwellings. He could read the pleading of their eyes. 'Not here. Not now. Not us. Not this time. Please. Be someone else.'
He ignored them. As he always did.
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire
I fell into a burning ring of fire
A wooden door, thumped insistently. A demand to enter.
Met with fearful silence.
The crash and smash of a shoulder on plywood. The door swinging on one rusty hinge then crashing to the floor.
Yells. Insistent, furious yells. Pointed gun sights. Left and right. Frightened wayward souls backing against bare wooden walls, hands raised in terror.
Screaming. Howling. Almost visceral.
Children wailing at the end of their hellish world, mourning its demise, traumatised at the thought of a worsened future.
Hope lying bleeding on the floor. And no-one paying it heed.
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And if burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire, the ring of fire
The smell. That horrific smell. Of trash. Discarded detritus. Thoughtlessly disposed of. Next to human beings who knew how it felt, and lived from what they could scavenge.
The heat. The burning. Combustible waste, its flames the only light in the darkest of places, brighter than the incandescent bulbs that danced and swung in time with every flinch of their twitchy, trigger-happy muscles, but whose glow had long dulled.
The crackling and the spitting. Getting closer and closer. Fanned by a pitiless wind.
Unheard through the yelling and the screaming and the clicking of handcuffs. And the rough, heavy-handed shoving of protesting suspects past wafer-thin walls and appalled neighbours. And the rapid, panicked snatching of laptops. Cameras. Phones. Modems. Anything.
Anything out of place in a house such as this.
The crackle became a crash. A wooden wall crumpled. Succumbed to the flames. An iron roof slid hopelessly into the filth.
YOU ARE READING
Comfort Room - Or The Seven Dreams of Frank Diggory
Mystery / ThrillerIn many ways, Frank Diggory's life was idyllic. But Frank Diggory has a secret everyone wants to know. And Frank Diggory has forgotten it. Welcome to the hallucinogenic tale of a dislocated man, and the woman who brings him home. TRIGGER WARNING: So...
