“The sky can fall on our heads…”
- Antonin Artaud.


A humiliated woman walks at a normal pace, beside her runs the man who humiliated her. She feels what she calls nothing rather than feeling what she felt before. Which wasn’t the love you meet when you fall into it after meeting for the first time not realising that this moment was important because it would create the rest of your life. Answerless questions hang themselves politely on the boughs of the heavy conker trees, their question marks sprouting lizard green leaves as if they always had. So walking she walks by the man, the rules of the game she knows. Just as, without looking, yes, there sits his maudlin mother watching from the sidelines, her features frozen, like a child’s the day a tragedy happened. So she continues to walk, watching the trees flirting with the light breeze and the seasons changing, causing cherry blossom to float though the air blowing the man away and now she knows with out knowing she knows that he is no longer beside her, that he is now sitting on the bench, whilst his child-mother walks, like a doll brought to life. And then she starts to laugh, it is funny, she thinks a thought and then elongates her walk. She skips, spreading her arms thinking, I can fly, until she is, until she is swirling above their dark heads, her smiles as wide as their frowns. And she lands again only to drift with the softness of an astronaut up to the skies again, falling again to the ground, running and leaping and pirouetting, smiling a joy that is total. An unlocked lock. It is almost as if she and they were free.

Almost.

It was the water, said the receptionist in the hotel. It makes you fly. (The smile became smaller). We put it in the water and it works like a drug, yes you feel high, you laugh, you smile. You feel happy. That’s the endorphins. And because you have had such a burst in such a short period of time, you will come crashing down. A come down. A downer. You will feel sad. (A beating heart thrashes inside her). The man and his mother are walking away down the stairs. Smile, keep smiling. Mind the mindful madness in the mind. But she feels the claws of fear creeping its way from her stomach up to her throat, every atom pumping.

She feels sick. (The receptionist walks away).

Then without choosing to, she is walking back towards the garden, where like a bee in the summer she flies up into in the sky that is blue like a lake like a sky with houses and pineapples that taste bitter and make you feel safe. She sighs as she glides through the air her hair dancing and flowing, a mermaid in her ocean swimming in a tank where eyes so many eyes go and look and point and smile as a new born that’s been born a baby boy, but we wanted a little girl. Eastern foetus’ swirl up ahead in the sky with the pineapples, tarnished and bruised, smack! A brick into mortar, a diver into the pool. A young man shakes the hand of the one who wanted to attack him, a’right mate, how’s it goin’? I’m Charlie. Puzzled eyes lead to stern faces and unsmiling mouths where cars speed out of, a man with a married woman a woman with a married man, classic. Hotels in space, cattle that pull sprouting grass, machines that whirl clothes, fireworks explode a pupil that enlarges as lips kiss and throats swallow.

And so she keeps flying, soaring and dipping, testing Icarus who lies snoring in her belly. Daring him like a bull in a ring to come and challenge her, whoever that may be. Because she no longer knows what she was, who she was, or why. She considers words wondering what they meant to her before. A bird body woman, person daughter dog. A Grown-up monkey whirlwind, a wife a passion star. She thinks using words like what? And, am I? And then finishes with a No. None of these things. Or all of these things? But what’s the point in thinking? Bellows a voice she knows she’s never heard before. Her fingers scream in the air, as they dissolve like a cloud, her hair slowly releasing itself from the scalp, dancing away and catching the light of the sun as they blow like a chariot across the sky. Her eyes burn, her ears roar and her heart catches fire, blazing and destroying every molecule that she is.

Ma! Ma! Look! Look! Look at the sky! It’s alive! It’s fire, the sky’s on fire! People begin to run out of their buildings, the sense that something was about to happen too hard to ignore. Me moi, me moi, me moi, the mechanic siren of the ambulances slices through the air, then stops as a psychiatrist sits down in a chair with holes in the road leading to mountains overlooking the leaping leopards sprinting with the Masai men, (not women). And all this while the fire is blazing. Blazing! Blazing! Dancing girls mirage in mirrors facing kaleidoscopes in hands putting money in pockets with popcorn that crackles in the sky above the heads of the many manymany money funny people, running, skipping, walking, crawling, tiptoeing, pig-a-backing, wheel-chairing sick people out of hospitals where mothers stop giving birth, bending over to push the baby back in so that they can leave. Lovemaking people slip away from one another inside their rooms, sliding outside, their forked tongues slithering out slowly touching the fire in the sky. A million masses of heaving and pointing and upturned faces of the people look at the flames, no one speaks of death, coffins, this is the end of the beginning-less end. Silence stops their talking chattering mouths below clear water tears slipping out of eyes who see awe spread over the features of thousands, humility with others.

A few, the meditators and yogis sit with sublime bliss in caves simply looking, their faces a calm sea in the early hours of the morning before the sun rears up in the sky. Winter goes straight to summer, to deserts and tumbleweed rollingrollingrollingrolling

away from the melting buildings sweating crumbling bricks. Molten metal moving with a melody it had had never had, like the last song of a dying composer - the spectacle even the psychics failed to predict.

Could they though have seen the autumnal scene of human leaves leaving the world forever? Flowing with bricks, cement and slate like water flooding over; Noah lived too early. The doves have all gone, perhaps having flown higher than the fire to the astronaut in space who thinking right now ‘something’s definitely happening.’[/i[ How in months that used to be weeks of days made up of hours really minutes of seconds he’ll sit weeping with fire in his eyes and then as the flame flickers, he disappears - lips having come close to blow him out.