Out of Spiritus Mundi

         The boy sat in the tree. His face like maple syrup. Raindrops and lemondrops (and gumdrops) sprinkled the dewstrewn ground; a passable imitation of misery and sweeties.
         ‘You can really taste the rain,’ said boy.
         ‘God’s piss,’ said God to the boy.
         Splats of mud and clay like whirlpools and quicksand swirled their abyss. A brownish miasma belching and yawning, an Indonesian coastline after their sins cleansed. The boy had a penchant for hyperbole, it’s true. There was mud that squelched like fermenting puss when he…there was mud, pumping, he walked, and clotting heart burst.
         ‘I don’t believe Hamlet was mad,’ said the boy. For it seemed to him that, although people seemed to get on with each other, you only had yourself to really get to know, and whose right was it to say that so-and-so’s brain is missing a wire, all because the connection is a little ‘faulty,’ and whose right was it to decide this conception of ‘faulty’ in any case. For everyone needed help, it seemed, to the boy, and the escape from the arrows and javelins was something that could only come from…months of long study in the art of war, and the proper use of arrows and javelins. Raindrop. Drip. Drop. Someone had once told him that running to get out of the rain only made you wetter. And so, the boy’s brain set about applying the maxim to practicalities, and found that it was a pleasing illustration for other such ideas of self-reflection.

         The boy’s name was Stephen Bloom. Back at home, his mother interrogated him about his spending of time.
         ‘How was your day, darling?’
         ‘Alright. I spoke to Mr. Hitchcock. He can’t get it back to me until after the half-term.’
         ‘Well that’s a bit ridiculous.’
         ‘It’s fine, there’s no rush.’
         ‘And what about your history paper? The one about the role of Elizabethan parliaments?’
         ‘Morris says…’ The boy paused and took out a wedge of papers roughly stapled. ‘…He says: “Your grasp of the relationship between Crown and parliament in the early years is sound. The argument is a little stretched, however, without any historeographical support.” And so on.’
         ‘Well it sounds like you have some work still do to on that particular essay,’ she said, scribbling in her calendar. Piles of laundry scattered the space around her. Her golden boy length hair made her look like a pixie. A playful little pixie, captured and bound to the service of a cruel master, her delicate hands blackened by months of hard labour. Open sores festered on her face and bare arms, throbbing with lurches of puss that swamped the night caves. Light came only from her eyes, which alone retained their golden charm and promise of magic.

         The days were swallowed up by looking and listening; self-sustaining absorption. Sometimes he felt like his eyes had short-circuited months ago, and his vision played back over itself in a circle, like a ratchety hamster wheel spinning and creaking. The days passed by; paused, just beyond the alarm clock; and then fled. Always when he awoke the sun was grinning on beyond the horizon, resplendent in its looming anticipation of non-existence. Gradually, when the boy could absorb no more, the dreams started. Slow and faltering at first, like the awkward embrace of a relative spoken of, but never met.

         Sun-dyed skin brushed skin. Leaping lights, red jarring against orange and blue cavorting in between, each one a fish slicing across the waves of people lost in the froth and foam. The polished decks lurched as feet hefted bodies over to one side, overcompensated, and swung wildly to the other. Like the heartbeat of some terrible creature, noise pounded out an excess of ribcage crumpling feet shockwave-melting pools of skin and sweat distilling vapours -
         
         His face like chaos, the man stood in the middle; absorbing. Bodies thrust and swung, in cadence with the colours and sounds rolling like storm-waves. The man’s eyes were closed, his face serene in an ocean of clutter. With a careful certainty, he began to lift his arms over his head. His body became suddenly rigid – and then began to shake and twitch; at first little shivers starting from his fingers, evolving into tremors deep within his ribs, his eyelids juddering as spasms ripped his spine. As the violent movements continued, the dancing lights flickered and dimmed…music stopped, bodies slowed, and finally all eyes were set and locked to the spectacle. In silence and invisible brightness, the man began to reach upwards, his juddering hands cleaving nails between the sinking air. His body ascended, its writhing fiercer, like a child screaming, sucking great gasps of air into parched lungs, bursting within a cage too small to hold the power of a star, the power of a universe, the power of a thousands Hyperions. Great golden eyes opened, suddenly, like cracks in an egg hatching, and now light streamed skywards – bodies surrounding shrunk away as the brightness overwhelmed the floor and broke the walls and ceiling; plaster and brick seared with the heat of a divine flame. Incandescence erupted now from his nostrils and mouth, as the skin of his body began to break apart. Clenching his fists, he roared soundlessly into the storm; his voice swept away by shimmering heat and light fizzing. The onlookers saw the man convulse a final time – and as he did so, light and noise and heat were sucked into his body. There was a half-second of nothing… The juddering stopped… and the man’s solemn face broke into a grin.

         The world ended.

         Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold…The earth is breaking apart – crumbs of stale cookies and bread dropping from a precipice. Is it hollowing from the middle, or flaking from the coasts? Is it the mind forg’d manacles that chain us to our bedposts, trapped in various states of emotional contradiction? Millennium Bridge rocking...there is always wind whipping between the borders.

         The boy sat in the tree. There was the scuffling of feat and the steady thwack of a tennis ball. Storm clouds were brewing overhead; billowing dragons racing to blot out the last vestiges of the sun’s cold blank stare.
         ‘It’s getting cold,’ said the girl next to him. He liked how solid her voice was. No twitters of feigned excitement. A voice of calm.
         ‘Wait till the rain starts,’ said Stephen.
         ‘I should really go. I have to be home in time for dinner.’
         Stephen turned to her and smiled. The girl looked straight ahead. There was a harsh, angular beauty present in her features; a kind of natural gorgeousness one would feel gazing across the world from atop Everest. A drop of rain landed on the palm of her hand, and she turned and wiped it gently onto Stephen’s cheek.
         ‘It’s time for me to be going.’
         The girl tried to slip from the branch, but Stephen grasped her wrist and held it.
         ‘Get off me,’ she said.
         Something wasn’t right here. Stephen turned his head and raised his free hand, sending it fast into the tree trunk. It shattered like glass, sending pieces of bark and dead wood cascading to the ground. Confetti. He knew the girl was gone before he looked, but his hands were still shocked. There was no trace of her. As the tree began to crumble like broken clay, Stephen flung himself into the air, hands clawing at the sky, fingers raking through the insubstantiality of a dream world. The puffy dragons were blackening the sky, closing him out. As he reached them, his hands flashed, punching a pathway towards the blue. The blackness immediately began to enclose him, and he felt himself drowning in vapour, sucked into a whirling cloud of screaming, writhing mass. Frantically, he wrestled through the mist, inhaling nothing but sulphur and corrupted sunlight. Around him, as he rose, the cloud-fabric reformed and circled his legs and arms, choking and binding him. The sound of rushing, thundering water pounded. 

         He saw before him a terrible beast, a shape with lion body and the head of a man.

         ‘Are you the falconer?’ said the sphinx, its yawning mouth enunciating carefully.
         ‘I am the man of sun and sky,’ said he.
         The sphinx’s giant head, shaved and bejewelled, seemed to incline slightly. There was a long pause. The man looked beneath him, and saw that he was standing upon a thin, white marble walkway. He then looked above and around, and saw nothing but fair mist. Finally, as if emerging from a deep sleep, the sphinx lifted its head.
         ‘The innocent will drown beneath the blood-dimmed tide. But for now, you are to return.’

         Stephen Bloom the man sat in the tree. The sounds of Finchley Road traffic whipped by, carried on the wind. The sky was grim and threatening. As Stephen looked up, a drop of rain splashed onto the palm of his hand.
         ‘God’s piss,’ said Stephen.
         
         Said God: ‘The Second Coming.’