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 ^{(it's beta!)}

I should have known when she broke out the rope, back when we first spent the night together. Rope in itself wasn’t unordinary. We’d touched on the matter before, and she knew I’d enjoyed such experiences in the past. But… when she took that rope out of her briefcase, some unsettled mechanism in the depths of my subconscious clicked its acknowledgement. The rope I’d been tied up with before had been smooth, clean, shiny; the kind of rope used to tie down a tent or to hold two logs together.

But this rope… this rope was thick, harsh, with scratchy fibres sticking out. Like she’d untied a boat and cast a sailor adrift in the sea just to get it.

She moored me, and it hurt. But I didn’t say anything.

The burns on my wrists stuck fast for days. Every time she saw me, she would trace the abrasions with her fingers, her eyes fixed to them with a lustful smile. Once, when we were arguing something, she dug in her fingernails. She claimed it was an accident, but her eyes were bright with desire, and she didn’t leave my wrists alone for hours afterwards.

When I started two years ago, I thought it would be fun to combine food and books.

How wrong I was.

I was flicking through my dessert recipe book, and I happened across a delicious warm-filtered photograph of an egg custard tart. I felt my saliva glands ooze as my eyes passed over the smooth yet textured surface of the creamy filling. I wanted it. I knew it, she knew it, we all knew it.

Luckily, I had one in the fridge.

Nobody is here.

Who am I talking to?

It’s been a slow process. I’ve watched that film god knows how many times, and still every time I watch it I notice tiny faults in my replica. Maybe the bathroom door Jack hacks through doesn’t splinter the same way mine would, or the carpets aren’t quite the same, or the blood doesn’t flow through the hallway quite right… Little things, you know, but enough to keep me working at it.

I remember thinking to myself, ten years ago… that the vast majority of my experience of fear had been through some kind of image. We simply aren’t given the opportunity to experience genuine fear anymore, it’s been almost entirely removed from our environment. So, like a teenager whose childhood was protected from all decay, we develop allergies. We make things up, attribute fear to things that don’t really deserve it. The dark, mice, that sort of thing.

For me it was film. I watched every horror film I could get my hands on. I always watched them with my wife, because her overt fear made it easier to stay lucid. I was always scared, but I felt compelled to keep watching. There’s nothing like the immediacy of fear… the urgency of it… suspension of disbelief isn’t even a choice at that stage. You can look outside of the borders of the screen, as I did when it became too much, but it never fully extinguishes the fear.

That’s partially why I decided to make this place. After watching The Shining, I thought about what it would be like to be truly unable to escape. How that could affect a person. Would they eventually get used to it, after they found the shadows empty enough times? Or would it gnaw at them, etching marks onto the brittle surface of their sanity.

I felt I owed it to myself, and the world, after so many years of

I’ve been looking at the moon every night for a month now, tracing my eyes over the discolourations of its surface. I swear I know every nuance now, every grey and white spot, every anthropomorphic permutation. I listen to music, of course, occasionally the odd audiobook, but my eyes are always gazing up, or across, or diagonally, depending on where the moon is.

I think about all the other people who are watching the moon. I wonder who they are, what they’re thinking, how they like their crumpets, whether they’d love me.

So I started shaving with a straight. It was more difficult than the barbers make it seem, but I suppose they’ve been doing it for a while. Much closer shave though, much less irritation. And if anyone tried anything while I was shaving, I could slice their face off with one deft flick of the blade. Try doing that with a disposable. Though I suppose electric razors can be a bit scary. They’re very unlikely to hurt you, but if they do… you’ll not be in a good place.

I nicked myself once, while using the straight blade. It was the last time I used it. I was confused to notice that the cut was bleeding some kind of clear fluid. At first I thought maybe I’d caught a spot, but the fluid was thin like water, and bodily fluids generally aren’t like that. It was just odd.

Just odd, that was, until I started the next stroke of the blade. I felt what must have been the blade slipping under my skin, and when the blade slid off my jaw, a long slice of my cheek just slid straight off, falling into the sink and splashing water all over my stomach.

At first I was a bit annoyed, which still makes me laugh to this day, and then I realised what had happened. I looked in the mirror, and where the skin had slid off, there was just smooth white flesh. But not human flesh, I realised as a drop of fluid dripped onto my lip, not even animal flesh. Somehow, my face now consisted of sweet and tasty apple flesh.

After a few moments of “Oh, well this is weird”, I realised my advantageous position. Apples have always been my favourite fruit, and now I had a seemingly endless supply of apple, both juice and flesh! And an excuse to give to my wife so she’d let me grow a beard! I picked up the slice of my face that had fallen into the water, rinsed the hairs off of it, and took a bite. It was sweet, and a little tart. Perfect.

Of course, when my wife came home and found me, my left side covered in blood from a horrific wound on my face, and me gnawing the flesh I’d sliced off, blood spitting everywhere, grinning at her, she wasn’t quite as delighted as I was.

She left me soon after, though, so I got to grow the beard anyway.

Twice a day, I walk the streets.

Numbers 3–45, 32–86, 53–99, and 1–3. Once in the morning, approximately 9AM, once in the evening, approximately 9PM. I add them up, one by one. 7855. Seven-thousand-eight-hundred-and-fifty-five. I’m not compulsive, sometimes I skip days and it doesn’t matter if I lose count, it’s just a habit I like to keep. It puts some order in my life, some reliability, consistency, even if it is artificial.

It’s more difficult recently, though. A group of burly middle aged men have been removing the house numbers. One every day, seemingly without any kind of pattern. So every day my total will reduce by some indeterminate number. The more troubling part is that one house, having had its number removed, becomes—over a series of days—impossible to distinguish from the other numberless houses. In the morning I’ll walk by a house with blue curtains and notice it has had its number removed, but in the evening the curtains will have somehow been displaced by red ones, just like all the others.

As the houses become indistinguishable, so do the inhabitants. It is not that the people change, so much as they diffuse over the multitude of houses. Such that a row of three houses, inhabited by three separate families, will merge so that one house contains three fathers and a newborn child, another with three mothers, and another with three boys and two girls. These do not stay static either. Once, in discussion with two of the mothers, they mentioned that they were thinking of moving to a bigger place, because twelve people is far too great a number for a three bedroom detached.

When I ask them, why not split your number between the three houses, they are silent in confusion for a few moments, before claiming with an edge of uncertainty that they couldn’t possibly afford three houses. I left them soon after, and noticed them both glance at the other two houses, with a look of slight bewilderment on their faces.

I fear that one day the desire to be close will drive us all into one house, bursting at the seams, all of us gasping for air like immigrants trying to slip under some impossible barrier. Should this be so, I must remember to choose a spot near the door, so that I may alight each morning and evening, to count…

Twice a year I work the mines.

Autumn and spring, out of a sense of tradition I suppose. I trek the two days down to the pit, stick my spade in, and start digging, throwing compilation CDs over my head.

It’ll be a few hours before I get past the upper crust of compilation albums. The surface has been mined so thoroughly that only 100 Best Dance Anthems and similar remain.

When I’m through that, I start to see a bit more colour. A few CDs by The Cribs, Evanescence, and that CD with the banana on. There are still quite a few compilations, some catch my interest; “Songs To Leave Home To”, or a slightly chipped “Songs Your Mother Loved and Everyone Else Hated”. I’m tempted to put them in my sack, but I don’t. Many a man has gone mad this way, listening to compilation after compilation, noting down all the artists they like, and then exhausting themselves to death in a frantic effort to find the CDs, all the while picking up more compilations.

I can see one now, shovelling the top off of a hill, sweat drenching his clothes. No use trying to stop him.

I tripped over her. We fell and twisted and my foot crushed her throat. I felt a snap as her neck broke over the handlebars of my bicycle.

Two years later it was like she’d never happened in the first place.

He stood up and left. I never saw him again.

It’s been twenty years.

Who knows where he is now? Sometimes I think I catch his face on a youtube video. Others, I glimpse his name on his old facebook account just as he signs off. I always try to printscreen it, when it happens. Sometimes I catch it, print it off, save it in his box, along with printouts of all his web-profiles, all his blog posts, all his surveys.

I’ve got thick files of letters, some returned, some never sent. Professing my love, my faith, my apologies. I still write them, knowing he’ll never read, just as a way of not letting him go. He’s still here, in my head, even if he avoids me in real life.

He still avoids me.

Maybe it means something.

Maybe he’ll come back.