Tag Archives: dark

Sky Dependency Unit

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Daryl hadn’t seen a full open sky for nine, whole, working years; un-retractable visors had been fixed above his eyes to protect them from the elements, to focus his attention on his work. His perfectly symmetrical, amber, tear-shaped eye-slots were unable to look up; limiting him to sporadic glimpses of a pixelated horizon.

It seemed that the sun set and rose perpetually, kaleidoscopic in their beauty but increasingly cruel to Daryl (something incomprehensible to human thought).

Over the recent days, gradually Daryl felt oddly distant, and a coldness had bred; invading his core, it was like he was viewing himself slipping away, into ever-more denser, industrialised fog.  He felt his visors would soon be taken off him, only to be fixed upon another; his younger brother.

Seemingly, his hardship was nobody’s fault, just the way things were, part of growing up as a simulacrum; in a brutal, un-empathising, nonsensical world.

By his calculations, he would be free in hours, to take in as much sky as he had desperately yearned for — only that moment never arrived, because he broke down that very moment his visors were to be removed. He was left in numerical order amongst faulty prototypes, lying against his predecessor, in a stuffy, dark, windowless room; to desperatly decay without burial or ceremony, to be replaced by a newer and more advanced unit.

One of Daryl’s amber eye-slots still inexplicably flickers in the otherwise overwhelming blackness; momentarily revealing some evidence of limp limbs that filled the room poorly.

Visors were never to be fixed upon his brother…

 

Is There Anybody Out There?

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“I see.” Replied the Apprentice, he was unnerved.

“No, I don’t think you do see! I’m not dead yet! Get me…to…the…Hospital!” croaked the Dying Man.

His apprentice did as he was told; he hadn’t driven for a good few years, but felt the time was right to get back behind the wheel.

The Apprentice held the Dying Man upright, until he threw him into the backseat of his car, the Dying Man was now semi-conscious; with his treatment that bore resemblance to raw meat on a butcher’s slab.

The Apprentice then drove to the hospital with extreme caution. Slowly through the traffic he went, every wrong turn possible, he even began to enjoy the drive, he slipped an old John Williams Film Soundtrack tape into the cassette player for old time sake.

The Apprentice screamed, “Yeeees!” Suddenly, maniacal to the nostalgic sounds of Indiana Jones; whilst somehow, simultaneously, surprising himself at his over-reaction to joy.

He sang along, “Da dadada daa da da, dada dadaa da da da da da!” He cracked his imaginary whip out of the driver’s window and bucked his hips into the distressed driver’s seat of his knackered Ford Mondeo. The Apprentice had become somewhat hysterical; a middle-aged demon away with the fairies.

The music, so thunderous and active, so out of sync to his Mondeo’s pathetic speed that a mini epidemic of voyeurs were gathering like bacteria, and with more pace than the car itself.

Finally, two hours later they arrived at the hospital, music still blaring.

As soon as the passenger door was opened by a passing paramedic, the paramedics face rippled with distorted brass notes as she then bellowed, “He’s dead!”

As the day’s passed the result from the autopsy concluded that the Dead Man wouldn’t have died had he not spooned his own eyes out with his seat belt latch plate, and consequently stuffed them into his despairing ears; he simply lost the will to live, his illness was a mystery to all except one.

For many years after the Dead Man’s death they continued with their tempestuous relationship. To the Dead Man’s indignation his colleague had become one of the most successful entertainers on earth, and revoltingly rich.

The Apprentice was no longer the Apprentice, for he had gained worldwide fame and made an absolute killing from his live and often violent televised séances as Jenson De’ath.