Fog

"I feel it closing in /Day in day out / I feel it closing in /Day in day out.."

I woke to the vinyl skipping irritably, like it had been stuttering for hours. Lifting my head made the contents slosh around like a snow-globe so I waited for the room to swim into focus before staggering to my feet and shoving the record player. "I feel it closing in / As shadows start to form.."


I was in a roomful of derelict figures. Everywhere there were prone kids buried in coats and blankets with messed up haircuts. Last night everyone was glowing and cartoon-faced, eyes like saucers in an approximation of love. The room was a castle, with a moat. This morning it was some club kid's dingy East End apartment.

My come-down and the soundtrack were making my thoughts overly poetic so I fished a crushed packet of Camels out of my pocket and knocked 5 minutes off my life whilst I decided what to do next. Took a deep, nourishing drag and tugged my boots from under some collapsed body.

Something smashed in the kitchen and I heard a girl swear.

"Oh..hey, morning." She said, looking up as I walked in. It was some waifish, pixie looking girl I remembered from the night before. She was crouched over a smashed bottle, spreading a pool of red wine around on the lino with a scarlet soaked towel. It looked like a murder scene.
"Wow, you keeping it going?" I asked, smiling weakly. Rubbing at the black smudges under my eyes with my knuckles.
"Na, was just leaving." She got up unsteadily, pulled a face at the mess of broken glass and red. "Hey, you wanna get a Coke or something?"

(Her lips were chewed and bloody, jaw still working out the amphetamines or whatever her poison was. Pale skin drawn tightly over sparrow bones. She wasn't as super-natural as I remembered, but her fragility in the cold light of day was sexy.)

I keep a spare wrap in a plastic Igloo for my comedown but pixie girl was worth half a bag. She held her arm out, rested it in my lap and I stroked the crook of her arm with my fingertips.

(She looked like some beautiful thing I couldn't touch, like she'd stolen her persona from my fantasies but was pretending it was a coincidence or that she didn't care.)

White light flooded the comedown tics and our hollow souls. We slept fully-dressed, lying face-to-face with our hips pushed together and I traced her bones with a fingertip until I fell asleep.


'It's all because we're in love with fog! We gulp down fevers with our soggy vegetables. And drink! Tobacco! Ignorance! Cults!

.. Why bother with a modern world if it spawns so many poisons?'