The first sign of trouble was a dull ache at the depth of his belly. He felt it, looked up at his wife, expecting her to know already about it, but she knitted, in front of the blank TV...

The pain grew in intensity and, although not unbearable or even, at this stage, worrying, he decided to break the silence which had arisen out of a marital disagreement earlier in the day. But, first, he glanced round the walls; part of him, without his conscious realization, summing up its candidature as a living-room fit for a death. The painting on the wall facing the TV, an original, in fact, by a local esteemed artist, was fixed behind its varnish and glass-frame, but, uncannily, he felt sure that items of the subject-matter had subtly shifted: like six rose-petals instead of seven; three shapes of two men and a woman become just a pair; the lake duller, the sky dusk not dawn...

“I’m in a spot of bother, dear,” he managed to say, at last.

The wife did not turn, still smarting at the words they had had previously.

The pain doubled up, and spread. He also noticed the skin on his visible parts was losing pigment. He snatched up his sweater, to reveal the paunch where, to his consternation, the belly button was pushing out like some unknown, fluxile orchid. He spluttered at his wife...



Nomicos lnge was a name he had forgotten. Not surprising, as he never believed in reincarnation.

He was in the boat, like a pair of wings bobbing on the pure mirror of a lake, with a lady he did not easily recognise. She held up a parasol, more as decoration, as it perfectly matched her dress. She held a single rose between her teeth and, with the last glints of the sun splashing it with a darker hue than it really owned, it was more a tearful epiphyte growing from her mouth...

The lake around them shimmered, as mist banks began to scurf over like unto petrific pain.

“We must return,” he found himself saying, a rehearsal for another part, another stage, another day.

“No, my dear, it is the longest day, and it seems the sun has only just got up...”

“It’s the mist...it’s hanging round us like skimmed milk: the lake’s darker too...”

She did not answer; put her hand to her bosom and worked the nipples up from inside the dress. The pleats rode up her thighs as she slid further into the bottom of the boat...



The TV screen was not in fact blank, he could see. But, just at an exciting bit, his chest caved in and the heart did a one, two, three round the living-room, in a rather belated attempt at resuscitating itself. Ending up a suppurating sucker-growth stuck to the glass on the painting.

Click on, click on, said the needles, as stitches fed on stitches.


(Published ‘Dreams & Nightmares’ 1991)