Fucked Up

The wooden, bone dry boat swung through the heavens of the theatre, mammoth in size.  This vessel had clearly not seen water in a while.  In it, seated in long, stretched rows, were the screaming audience; although this particular audience did not wish to see this show.  Their hair billowed out behind their heads; their knuckles taut on the seat of the blistering wood.  The terrified audience watched the stage far, far below, with bulging eyes.  The celestial boat continued to swing and dip while the stomachs of the audience did somersaults and their minds were tormented.   But no matter how bad things got for them up there, the audience, no matter how they tried, could not rip their eyes from the horrific scenes below.

There were actors on the stage – or were they actors?  In this strange life things were not what they seemed.  But it was too real to be fake.  Or was that the other way around? 

The stage, littered with dirty filthy foul inhabitants, murders were committed, bodies buried beneath the stage floor.  Are they thrust into the dusty spider webbed catacomb that exists under a stage, or were they being buried under the earth? 

The murder had been committed, this much was definite.  A father?  Why would that happen?  An orange is clutched in his large dead decaying crumbling hand as the dirt is shovelled laboriously over his body.  Its OK, no one will find him in a cemetery.  I am burying him in a cemetery because surely that is the last place anyone will look?  Panic sets in as the last scattering of dirt covers his face.  The burial place is marked with a large, familiar, ceramic bowl with a cracked black lid.  No one will ever guess.  The boat up in the sky has vanished as I look up at the clouds with frenzied abandon.

A plane rips through the still and cloudless sky.  It is plummeting towards earth, if that is where we are.  On the plane the passengers are wailing, screaming, crying, clutching.  Its OK, the pilot soothes.  We only need to get rid of a little weight and we’ll be right as rain.  The baby, the baby, throw the baby.  Carnage ensues – which baby will be sacrificed?  A faceless baby is torn from its mother’s arms and lobbed from the plane.  The tortured screams of its mother are heard way down below as her child makes an abrupt connection with the roof of a tower block.  SPLAT.

Where to next in this universe of the parallel, where things don’t quite add up?

It’s Jesus, or God, or someone with a beard.  We play on a see-saw and chat about life in general.  There are no surroundings, no playground, no trees, no sky.  Yet everything is here.  We get nowhere on the subject of life, and move on.

A girl runs frantically through the dark endless corridors, her brown hair flapping horizontally from her scalp.  And behind her? Well, it’s Satan.  Isn’t it?  In any case something not very nice; grasping, snarling, oozing.  A mirror reveals she is actually in fact being chased by another little girl with long blonde plaits hanging down angelically at either side of her face.  She looks a pretty little thing; must be a nice girl.  Must have made a mistake thinking she could be bad.  But turning around was the mistake, the plaits melt in front of innocent eyes to reveal unyielding black horns.  Two men head to toe in black, they run.  Run faster than the wind.  The girl hides.  She thinks it’s a good hiding place but the men throw rocks at her, they can see her, they can see everything.  A bus careers off the road and smashes into the bollard that is sheltering the girl.  Shrapnel, flames, heat.  Foetal coiled, shaking, sweating, scared.

A dungeon is the next place in this here story.  Hundreds upon hundred of tortured souls, arms outstretched between bars to the outside world, writhing, climbing, in pain, ruptured veins.  An escape route must be available.  But there is little or no hope down here.