Skydekkerix

Hey little bunnies I got news and it’s good news and no I haven’t got a million dollars yet and probably never will unless something real big changes. The little collection I made with some very handsome firends o mine won me a big dang trophy and I am so proud of my chickens lemme tell you. And now I get to call myself a one-award-winning editor Samuel Maguire for the rest of my career or at least until I win another one. If you would please record your applause and upload it to a usb and mail it to me for the next time I decide to give up on everything and resign myself to a fate of casual hospitality forever (1-2 months time). Anyway because I love each and every most of you, here is another poem.

The Rope Comes Often

Pits and tunnels

Dark and darker more

It’s so easy to trip and fall

Into holes and fires and freezing waters

But the path still goes under

Through despair and rage

And dark hunger

Writhing with the worms and beetles

You claw forward still

Inches still become miles in eons of struggle

And, just as often as you tumble

Though more forgotten

You see the rope

Of gold and light and warm things

And you dance as far as you crawl

Along hills and treetops

Or maybe

Along the path you often forget

Much further

Hey hey wet butts, got a bit of a backlog of poetry to get through while I try and find four damn minutes of writing time so I can make new thing. This is a little something something about dad hood and back pain.

I try not to complain about dadding with various success. Truth is I love it and have some serious stockholm binness going on. Like i gone so bonkers ima miss changing nappies, miss rocking the kid till me arms go numb, miss the burps and vomits and shits that aren’t gonna be my business anymore in the rapidly encroaching future.

I think there’s something in appreciating the hard stuff, something that dadding brought out in me that was always there. Dragging myself over the finish line was always more satisfying than speeding ahead. It’s a kind of wholesome masochism, knowing you really slogged for something. And if it goes unremembered or unappreciated I know I will appreciate it, which is good cos I’m the one that’s gotta live with me.

Anyway good talk, got me back onside after the kid pulled my hair in a very appreciative blind rage. Here poem.

Cenobite

 

I am a tooth with a chisel splitting its middle. I

am a fingernail with a needle squeezing its way under. I

am a papercut in the webs of fingers and the corners of lips.

Primordial darkness, black as before and after

until my eyes adjust and a blade of light slits the crack

between the carpet and the bedroom door. My

 

spine twisted, voluntary

involuntary scoliosis.

My right arm jammed out at an awkward

                                                                        angle,

a broken limb on a storm thrashed tree.

My wrist excruciatingly stuck under

a toddler in a dinosaur onesie.

Between the bars of his wooden cot

my palm upturned, with the full

weight of my torturer pressed upon it,

a chubby shadow in the gloom.

 

My torturer melodies discordant dribble

of machinery and monsters

until his attention wavers.

 

I count away the pain, ten,

fifty,

five hundred, then

silently slip from the rack

and tiptoe

to the jammy door, wincing at the sound, the most painful

part yet, and as I push it closed

I miss his weight already

Hey hot bees, got another lil poem that’ll make me no money but that’s alright cos I’m not fart huffin on my own stink anytime soon. This one is a sound poem I didn’t for uni with plenty of swears and a disappointing grade. Comment if you hate me and can’t look away from this train wreck.

Corvid

 

Gurgle further murder

purchase on dirtier girder

fark this narc won’t cark

it, c’arn pass the dart

cos’ I need more

 

Words of blurred murmur

follow the fucked-up herd herder

sark my cock

fork the stalk

with your sharp jaw

 

Stumble on hurdles

blurb reads blurted dribbles

can’t cunt I’m munted

Carlton Draught up my arse

when I croak I’ll still snore

 

Crawl on the wall

lower law for the crack whore

laugh in the dark

mark the park

with our charred core

Hey I know you/ya’ll done thought I forgot about my beautiful collections of brain shits on this here website but truth is I been busier than the Devil on valentines day and I aint written a damn thing but what I had to as dictated by my responsibilities. I had a spare Ima say fifteen minutes cos I done better on my work than I thought I would so I knocked you up a lil poem to show that I aint forgotten and promise that Ima put some more regular bits of me up soon when I get some damn peace and quiet. Here’s a little poem about one of my favourite/least favourite albums depending on what period of Hystorye we are in (Time is a wave not a particle).

The Bends

Hey, let me slip

on the memories of arseholes past.

                  Let my self-pity puddle

                  so I can slurp it up like a mongrel dog.

                                    I will guitar solo my woes

                                    into high percentage tears,

                                                      and relax my weary bones

                                                      into a depression hoodie

                                                                        the size of my

                                                                        sad, little world.

                                                                                          Boo-hoo, I say.

                                                                                          Boo-hoo.

                                                                                                            I don’t have time

                                                                                                            for Radiohead.

Fuck you

                                    If you’re going to walk slowly don’t do it in the middle of the damn footpath so I can’t walk past without walking at a weird pace and convincing you I’m a fucking serial killer.

 

Fuck you

                                    Don’t walk right behind me on the stairs I have big feet and can barely fit each step as it is and the noise of you is setting me on edge and making me kick my heels up even more and increasing my chance of fucking braining myself.

 

Fuck you

                                    For smoking rank cigarettes and hosing out donut smelling vape on a crowded footpath I know I don’t have my kid with me right now but if I did you’d be killing him and I gotta push the stroller through a different fucking suburb just to avoid you.

 

Fuck you

                                    For trying to lock eye contact with me and force me, through the immutable laws of politeness and common human decency, to have a conversation about buying raffle tickets for some made up fucking charity that is most definitely corrupt which I know because last time I thought I was buying a single ticket and got roped into a sixty buck a month payment plan and I know I’m doing financially better these days but it’s the fucking principle.

 

Fuck you

                                    For screaming the c-bomb at the world while walking through the busy intersection and punching a bus that almost ran you over. I know you probably had a hard life and are mentally ill but I had a hard life and I’m mentally ill and I’m just here trying to buy my fucking groceries.

 

 

Fuck you

                                    For pushing in front of me to grab a god damn basket like we’re fighting for bottles of water in a post-apocalyptic wasteland we’ve all got places to be and believe me I’d rather be anywhere else than in this damn grocery store listening to this damn song dealing with pushy fuckers like you stealing my nice clean basket when there’s fucking sixty of them.

 

Fuck you me,

                                    For forgetting your medication you’ve been doing this for nearly two decades and you should damn well know one night of bad sleep without them sends you into a murderous rage you have a toddler and three damn jobs and you can’t afford to be mentally ill because you have a mountain of shit to do and we ran out of fucking

                                                                            Milk.

Hey sweet and sour nuggets I am slaughtered from various events and I’m saving my very something poetry writing for an assignment that I don’t wanna get flagged on so instead this week Ima put up an oldy but a goody from the depths of my dropbox. Got this lil thang published back in my early early twennies back when I was way more nervous but about the same amount of batshit. I like it though it is old because I like me even though I am old. You’re welcome or I’m sorry depending on your reaction. Love love

Take Me to Your Lover

 

I had a fitful sleep; the news was filled with things I had hoped for since I could remember hoping. I was in bed with my eyes squeezed shut. I rolled over into a dream of green smoke. I let my feet be taken and dragged out from under the covers. I was pulled along and out. I went over the ocean in a tube of green light. Then I floated in space with the stars watching over me like a concerned bed partner looking to see if I was breathing. I tried to work up the strength to speak. I managed a weak, choking sound.

Hey.

She spoke to me and I can still hear it now. Her voice was young and wise, the rise and fall of her cadence telling a story of manic romance and hard-fought lessons.

Hey.

She is an alien and I love her.

We met at a party the next night. I was lying on the ground and it was midnight and snowing. She tapped the glass sliding door right next to the permanent nose print I had left there the year before when I was too drunk to see the fog on the clean glass.

She was half my height and bottom heavy with eyes like the lost seeing stones. I had spent my life preparing to meet an alien so I wasn’t freaked out. I opened the door and we sat at the outdoor setting where I found some cans of rum and coke and we drank them.

She told me she was young but old enough to make her own damn decisions and nobody was going to tell her otherwise. I told her that I was older than I used to be and that I had learned a lot in the past few years and it had made me a harder but better person.

She took me for a ride in her spaceship.

That doesn’t mean we had sex. I didn’t know if she had sex parts but that was okay because I had been telling myself that sex was for boring and ugly people.

We flew to Mars and it was cold and we held each other for warmth and watched the sun rise. I asked her if it counted as flying if there is no air and she told me there is always air it is just very thin.

I wrote her a poem and did not show it to her and she wrote me a poem and I think she lied when she said that it was not about me.

We went back to Earth even though I did not want to. There had been a lot of war and cannibalism lately and I told her the world was getting colder. She said she wanted to see all the cool things on Earth and I kissed her right above the point where her huge, oval eyes met and I asked her if she wanted to see it with me. She dropped me off at my house.

I sat at home and I tried to think to myself that it was okay and that she shouldn’t have to spend every minute of her life with me even if that is the way I felt about her. I ended up thinking of all the more interesting men and women she would probably meet and that they were probably funnier than I am and they could probably afford better clothes. So I tried to think that she loved me because she chose me out of everyone on the planet but that did not work because everyone has to start somewhere. I got so angry that I smashed a glass and I cleaned it up right away and thought that it is probably a good thing that she is gone because I am the kind of guy that smashes glasses even though I am not. I tried to sleep that night and couldn’t. I tossed and turned in my bed with the light off and then I rolled over and picked up my phone and it beeped in my hand.

Hey.

Want to hang out?

She picked me up in her spaceship and we went and got dinner from a restaurant in Japan. We ate and she said the food was good and I said the food was great. She said it was the best and I said you are the best and she tried to smile but it was hard because she had an alien mouth.

We slept in the same bed that night. I slept on my left arm and it was painful but I did not want to roll over because I did not want to stop holding her. I could not tell if she was asleep because she had no eyelids and her eyes were like solid glass. I eventually fell asleep and dreamed about my ex-girlfriend and felt guilty in the morning.

We spent all morning wandering around each other as if it was a ritual. I touched her hand and she grasped mine and squeezed it and then I made coffee and we drank it until the dregs stuck to our teeth.

The next night we walked to the football field near my house and we sat in the middle of it and watched the night sky. People arrived and gradually the whole oval filled, all of us together and watching. Sitting by the moon was a circle of lights that spun. As the crowd gasped jets flew over and the night erupted. Bombs of light fell errant to the ground and disintegrated the houses around us. Jet streams connected the stars into polygons. We all ran.

She and I hid in a storm drain and sat bunched together as the air lit up with red and green. I said that it was like Christmas and she said she didn’t know what that was because she is an alien. She turned and looked down into the dark pipe and then looked at me and spoke.

Hey.

You are a human but I love you.

We crawled into the depths of the pipe.

I’m across a lotta shit at the moment. Got two jobs, a toddler, study. Trying to to keep my writing career going with regular blog posts and working on two different novels. Trying my hand at whatever I can get that hand on. On top of that looking for a professional editing career in both the corporate and creative sectors. Those things and of course being on the front lines of the eternal war between the good lord and the dickhead devil. Life is big and busy and messy but I always got time for you my babies.

Giving you an excerpt from my next book coming soon/late/whenever the fuck it comes don’t push me please I’m Sensitive. It is a horror memoir, with true stories from my life about my encounters with the demonic and how I grew to be a sorcerer and battle with dark forces. It definitely all happened but I’m probably not the right person to ask if it was real or not. Sometimes you just gotta live the life you been dealt and pick up your broadsword and say desperate prayers and have wizard fights with monsters. I aint gonna say its a common experience so maybe take any of my advice with a grain or circle of salt.

Bon apperteet:

Excerpt from Daemons Chapter One: Swingset

I called a taxi to the new house because I still couldn’t find it in the maze of inclines and split roads. Between the cab and the sixer of Jack and Colas, I’d drained my meagre $7.95 an hour wage nearly dry. The house was chockers with drunk uni students, playing beer pong in the living room or smoking joints on the bamboo crowded balcony. I crammed my Jacks into an iced-up fridge and joined the fray.

            I drank quick, running through my stash and moving onto any sugary premix that was lying around. I hadn’t eaten all day, so my tolerance was that of a flighty period drama lady wearing too tight a corset. By eight I was fading, sitting on the balcony as a joint passed from each bum-puffer to the next. I’d have normally not gone anywhere near weed at that point. All through high school I’d been offered joints at parties, but I wouldn’t touch it. I knew how bad my head was and I was terrified of developing schizophrenia. I mean, I was regularly talking to demons and having vivid hallucinations, but weed was definitely going to be the thing that made me mentally ill.

            This night, however, all my inhibitions had been thoroughly drowned. I puffed, coughed, and passed it on. That seemed to be the end of it.

            I Irish shuffled and walked out into the night twenty minutes later. I stood at the gate, golden fairy lights, music and wafting smoke behind me, twisting dark paths and the chittering of bats ahead. I looked each way, left seemed the right way to go. I walked left. Left wasn’t the right way to go.

            I made my way along a split terrace on the side of a steep hill. My steps fell wayward, like artillery strikes in no man’s land. I got to a four-way intersection and leaned my slurred frame on a street sign. I tried to look down each path for a landmark, but the intersection

            Swung

                        And spun around me, rearranging as my head rolled on my slack neck.

            My feet found the path of least resistance, and I made my way downhill. On my right was a tall wire fence, on my left houses stuck from the steep hill at odd angles, like splintered bones from a broken wrist.

            I stumbled as the road ended abruptly and my threadbare converse tramped into tall grass. I looked up. Tall, dark, bat-infested trees formed a wall in front of me. The light of the last streetlamp, halfway up the hill I’d come down, crept between the trunks tentatively and hung from half-seen shapes by the tips of fingers. I heard something move and squinted into the dark.

            I saw the hoof first, then the matted haunch that lifted it. Brown furred goat legs stepped a sunburned pink torso into view, then horns and that face of torn guts. It moved between the trees, its steps mismatching its progress as it strode towards me, streetlight glinting off the ripped skin that surrounded its disgorged throat.

            I felt a heavy pressure on my spine, and my voice hid deep down my throat. I turned in a wide circle, losing balance halfway through the arc. I tried to step forward up the steep slope. My head rolled as I put one converse in front of the other, watching the streetlamp ahead. It spun around behind me

            Swinging

                        Until I was facing the trees again. The demon from the swing set still strode towards me, hooves slipping across the ground like ice. No longer short and stubby, it had grown with me, becoming towering and muscular. Meaty fists with cracked yellow nails were balled at its side. I turned again and tried to climb the hill. The streetlamp bobbed in my vision like a firefly, swinging closer before

            Spinning

                        Out of my sight. The lamp silhouetted me as I faced down the hill, unsure of when I turned around. Waiting below, just at the edge of the tree line, was the demon. Gore sprayed from its face as it panted. Its shadowed eyes narrowed at me as it waited for my drunken steps to take me back. I tore my rolling eyes away from it, tried to turn around but faced it again. I heard a car turn onto the street up the hill behind me. I turned and saw the lifesaving lights of a taxi descending, a Valkyrie come to whisk me away. I waved at it with wild abandon.

            The taxi pulled over just ahead of me. The tinted window wound down and the driver stuck his head out. I stumbled over.

            “Alpha Street, Taringa,” I said. I couldn’t remember the number.

            The driver said something to me as I walked around to the passenger door. I tried to open it but it was locked. He wound down the other window.

            “Sorry mate, I’m here to pick up someone else.”

            I stumbled back from the taxi door.

            “Are you gonna be okay?”

            I looked down the street, saw the demon waiting for me in the trees. Turned my head up to the intersection, just an Everest climb above.

            “Yeah, I’m… I can do it.”

            A woman burst from one of the houses on the street, giving me a wide berth and a wary look as she climbed into the back seat of the taxi. The driver looked concerned as he pulled away.

            “Sorry mate,” he said as he wound up the window and drove off.

            The red lights of the rear of the taxi pulled up the street, leaving me once again alone under the dim streetlamp. I stumbled in place as I looked up the hill. I took a deep breath, not looking behind me. I walked, slowly, each step a tense and careful procedure. My thighs burned, my head sunk beneath deep water. I don’t know if it took hours, but it felt like I lived a life on the side of that hill.

I reached the top, somehow.

            Standing at the intersection, I tried to remember the way back to the party. The intersection spun again, rearranged itself and

                                                                                    Swung

                        Me down to the ground. Sitting with my back against a street sign.

            I pulled my Nokia brick from my pocket. It had one bar of battery left. I scrolled through my list of contacts on the green, pixelated screen. I found my brother, pressed call and navigated the phone to my ear. The phone

                                                                                    Rung

                        And Nic answered.

            “Hello?”

            Nic’s voice was as cold as shaded concrete.

            “Can you… come pick me up?” My words dripped from my mouth like spilled porridge.

            “Are you fucking kidding me? Again? I’ve got to get up for work at 3am.”

            “I’m… lost. Please.”

            “Fucking fine. Alright. Where are you?”

            I looked around. All I saw were electric shadows.

            “I… don’t know.”

            “Fucking hell, Sam, find a street sign.”

            I slid my way back up the pole using one hand. I got to my feet,

                        Stumbled

                                    Forward. Stood straight. I turned to the street sign.

            My phone died.

            I slumped back down to the ground. Slid my phone into my pocket. I took one last look down the dead-end street. Saw pink skin and torn flesh between the trees.

I

gave

up.

Hey fat ladies you know I done released a new book with lots of good people and had a launch and swore in front of a crowd and everything. Here a breakdown of the launch night as it happened in the chronological order that I remember it being in though I am an Unreliable Narrator:

I woke in the morning, threw up while I made coffee which takes a bit longer but it’s good to get two things out of the way at once. Got a text from Sue(boss) saying we would actually have books for the launch. Looked at the photo of the books and had massive buyer’s remorse on every decision I’ve ever made. Questioned whether I ever had any talent or wrote anything even remotely sensical or if I should just become a manager at a fast food store and spend my waking hours frustrated by unruly teenagers doing the same dang thing I used to do nearly twenty years ago. Made breakfast for toddler and wife. Wife went to work and I juggled checking my phone for emergencies and building a rocketship out of every object within reach of toddler. Made rocket engine noises while toddler released the booster engines into the ocean and released the space shuttle and opened the solar panels. Me Mam arrived, I paced a bit then headed to a meeting with Sue(boss).

Had a prelunch beer for my nerves and Sue(boss) brought a stack of goddamn gorgeous books. They looked good, they felt good, they smelt good. I wanted to lie in a pile of em. Opened it up and saw several typos but had a beer in me so just did not fuckin care it was party time.

Got back home. Gave toddler lunch and actually decided to eat something was very proud of myself. Put together outfit at the exact right amount of serious for my writer persona. Was torn between nice button up or metal shirt with a wizard drinking beer on it. Sanity prevailed and I wore beer wizard shirt. Dressed toddler, Nanna dressed herself. Waited for wife to get home from work.

Paced

Paced

Paced

Had a whiskey

Paced

Paced

Wife got home and threw new clothes on. Piled into car, sat in traffic fukn sweating. Tried to remember all the interesting things I had to say at the launch while planning the best parking spot in West End on a Friday night. Toddler did not want to be in the car. Brain felt like melting butter. Got there 20 minutes early. Met my Good Friend Trent Jamieson at the pub across the road. Slammed down a pint while wife and I juggled toddler climbing every piece of furniture in sight. Walk over to Avid Reader buzzed as an apiarist.

Got through logistics, hid outside with a beer even though I knew pretty much every dang person waiting inside.

Sat up the front with Good Friend Trent Jamieson as the audience piled in. Waved individually to each of the like thirty people I knew. Made some jokes. Started riding high on my own goof juice. Good Friend Trent Jamieson introduced the collection and was way too nice about me considering who I am.

Cool Guy Jamie Stevens read first. Brought the dang house down. Took credit for myself to myself for discovering him. Cool Lady Grace Hammond read next. Story about fast food workers in dystopian polluted Brisbane which Speaks to me. Answered some questions about the collection and spec fic from Good Friend Trent Jamieson. Tried to sound smart, unsure about success, ask my wife she is Honest. Had toddler try to climb me for a bit before Grandad took him for a Walk. Answered some real thinkers from the crowd. Time was almost up and got a question about what makes Brisbane special. Said Brisbane is the arsehole of the universe, and I want to explore the arsehole of the universe. Suddenly had a new catchphrase.

Signing table was chaos. Had six people. Massive scramble while trying to at least make contact with the people I knew who’d traveled long miles to make me feel good about my terrible career choice. Saw toddler dragged out of bookstore screaming and red-faced. Promised a lot of people I’d sign their books later. Filed out of Avid cos they were closing. Time flew like a stealth jet.

Loitered out front trying to figure out where to eat. Group disintegrated and ended up across the road with motley assortment of writers plus my dad. Ate fish and chips and drank more beer and talked writing. Was once again proud of myself for eating cos I aint the best at it. Dad headed home which is fair enough he’s over sixty.

Wound up at The End. Place I first met my wife, long years ago when I was a hopeless mess. A lot of memories there, most of them involving kick-ons after book launches and writer events. It is the logical place to hole up into the morning slamming pints and talking about being what we are, which is writers. Lost track of the amount of beers I downed, swore a lot because I didn’t have a two-year-old audience. Felt good to swear. Wanted to walk home but was convinced to share an uber with one of my uni lecturers and an author I am publishing.

Got home about 2am. Wife and toddler were asleep. Did something I aint done in a long time and had a 2am whiskey by myself and thought:

Writing is a lonely pursuit, hundreds of hours spent in your own head living in a different universe and fighting your ego like the greedy dragon it is. No wonder when you get a bunch of writers together with something to celebrate we get loose and go hard. There’s a magic in unravelling, when you’ve put your blood and heart on the page and had someone dissect it and rearrange it until you were numb to your own insides. When you’ve bared your throat to the wolf and it wasn’t the end of the world or the big event that suddenly makes the universe right, but just another thing you’ve made. When it’s time to just get a bit drunk and move on.

I love this book. All the authors made some really good shit to put in it. The cover is exactly as handsome as I am (Very). The typesetting and editing and all the little gribbly bits. The stress and late nights and second thoughts. The typos and things I’d do differently. It is a thing that was made and it adds a positive amount to the universe and all our caveman ancestors are howling in heaven and yelling “they made thing.”

Buy it here at Avid Reader: https://www.avidreader.com.au/p/far-flung-2796474?barcode=9780648403456

Now all that’s left to do is make a continuous stream of new books until I die.

I Tried. I had a couple a hours yesterday and I tried my dang hardest not to write poetry. I wanted fantasy or memoir of fukn anything. My writing time is very precious because of two year old, studying and two jobs, and I wanna spend that damn time in outer space or middle earth but my hot poo brain just wouldn’t can. I sat for two and a harlf hours just squeezing myself like the last little bit of expensive of moisturiser that you can use now because it’s twenty twenty four and it doesn’t make you gay anymore. All I got was some stupid little haikus and I’ll be damned if I ain’t gonna share em with you right here and now cos thats the whole point of me going tippy typey on the lightning box. Maybe I’ll write something good next week? Tune in to find out please:

Five Writers Block Haikus

 

Precious writing hours

Wasted, with nothing to show

But a pleasant buzz

 

Koko wa doko

Watashi wa dare. I

Don’t speak Japanese

 

What if I wake up

Right now: it was all a dream,

And it is still dark

 

Turbulent waters

Brown and murky, crocodiles

Like turds in the bath

 

Poetry, a wank

Or was I a wanker when

I didn’t like it

It always stormed. Sitting at the top of a high-rise, more than three quarters submerged into the deep city below, all I could see was dark sheets of rain, dark clouds and dark, turbulent ocean. The rain knocked against my layers of raincoats like the cops with a warrant, and the wind swayed me around the rooftop, with its busted air-conditioner vents and bolted-on ashtrays that hadn’t been used since the waves came. I emptied the makeshift water purifier into an empty, plastic gin bottle, waved to another yellow raincoat in a building across the water. I’d never spoken to them, never seen them closer than a yellow blur with a dot for a face. I pushed my way through the propped open fire door and the wind slammed it behind me.

I grabbed a battery lantern from the top of the stairs and tapped it into life. The fire stairs stank of mould and stagnant water. Deep below in the black, I could hear water lapping against the concrete, slowly rising with the ocean, counting down my life level by level. I descended several flights, to just where the waterline was encroaching on the lowest dry level. I’d been working my way upwards methodically, scrounging whatever supplies I could and picking each level clean before moving as the water rose. I was severely malnourished from surviving on stale biscuits and packets of chips, but I’d managed to piece together a makeshift still, so at least I was boozed for it.

I moved the where the still was set up in some office break room, on the counter next to the kettle, hooked up to a small generator I’d found in a janitor’s closet lower down. The water purifier had drained all minerals and pollutants from the water, if I drank it now it would just make me thirstier, but I wasn’t planning on drinking anything non-alcoholic for the rest of my life.

I emptied a teabag, put lemon and ginger tea, honey, and cinnamon powder into it, put it into the still with some pure alcohol I’d found in first aid supplies, and waited for the drips. Turfed the initial runoff, didn’t want to be blind for the rest of my short miserable existence, then diluted the rest with pure water. It was not too bad this time. I scribbled amounts into a notepad, then filled a plastic watercooler cup and made my way to a window.

The whitewash frothed against the bottom of the windowsill, giving me brief glances of the dark blue world below. Fifty stories of shadows and suffocation. Of reversed gravity and disintegration. Of sharp teeth and shadowed hulks.

I always knew it would be the sharks that got me in the end. When I was a kid, most nights I’d dream of shark attacks, black rolling water, dead eyes and fountaining blood. I avoided the ocean because a deep part of me knew what the end was. As I lived and filled my life with mundane tasks and pleasures, the violence lurked beneath the surface. It was waiting in the water where my feet couldn’t touch the bottom. Waiting for me to decide when to dip my toes in. And now that choice was rising to meet me, metre by metre, until there were no other choices to make.

I saw fins between the high-rises. The shark population had exploded when the waves came. There were seven billion meals suddenly entering their domain. Now that resource was all but depleted, the biggest ones had eaten all the smaller and they were starving.

I tried to think of something else. If this was to be the last of humanity, then more thoughts should be had. Things that needed to be worked out, questions to be answered. But now my brain was empty. Civilisation had trailed off mid sentence and left silence. I blamed the booze and the noise of the crashing ocean.

I looked at the plastic bottle in my hand. It was a damn good bottle of vodka. The taste had mellowed out with my drunkenness. Now, with droopy, unfocused eyes, the flavour was filled with culture and civilisation. With purpose and drive and collaboration. It tasted as if there was something before and something now and something after. I nodded to the empty dark room. This was the time to go, with one perfect bottle of booze to my name. I downed my cup and swayed my way to the fire escape, vodka firmly grasped in my hand.

On the roof, the wind whipped my raincoat and stung my cheeks. I placed the plastic bottle down on the sodden concrete and stripped down to my skin, water drenching me until I felt the world was one liquid. I climbed onto the ledge of the building, gazing down at the dark water, vodka numbing my dread. Glancing at the opposite rooftop, I saw the yellow raincoat jumping and waving with both hands. I jumped.

Pain filled my nostrils like a crack in cold glass. I was tossed and thrown, then scrambled to the surface, the bottle of vodka swallowed by the ocean in one gulp. I floated amongst the waves, gasping and spitting saltwater. A hulk bumped my leg, and I glanced around at the fins dipping and rising between the waves. Panic squeezed and wrenched me, but I closed my eyes and emptied my head. I waited for the final, violent end.

I heard shattering glass and then a voice between the roar of the waves. Opening my eyes, I saw the raincoat in a broken window. Clearer now, panic and despair in a woman’s face framed by yellow plastic. I felt another bump on my leg and my drunkenness drained from me instantly, water from a spun bottle.

I swam desperately, coughing and spluttering, the waves tossing me up and down and over. I was getting closer the the broken window, panic now bursting through my veins like trains through subway tunnels. If the right wave came, I could reach it. The yellow raincoat was reaching over shards of glass, ready to grasp me.

My ankle tugged downwards, sharp pain quickly replaced by adrenaline. I went under. Foam and shadows and teeth and red swirled in my vision, and then I hung suspended, looking down at the deep. Shadows squirmed, maggots in a bowl, devouring and writhing. I clawed my way to the surface. A wave rose me, and fingers curled into my hair. I was wrenched out of the water, and I scrambled onto a ledge, glass slicing my fingers. I rolled onto sodden office carpet.

“Please be alive. Please be alive,” a woman’s voice said, hovering above my face. Blurred yellow filled my vision. I coughed a fountain of salt.

“I’m alright,

You got me.”