Horror

There is only one way to start, with the tiny chill down your tiny spine. We watch the girl in the bath take her final soapy breath, following the inevitably fraught move into a new house in the American suburbs. Perhaps there is a little stream in the garden where furry animals can pile up and die. Stood in a public place, the grimaces of life hammer more directly into the soft innards of your brain; the test of true Horror, with a capital H and a semi-colon to precede it.

It becomes more difficult to hold the stale liquid in your mouth as the minutes pass. The frequent and not quite unwelcome ideas of worthlessness hold your pathetic heart in their metal claws. You muse listlessly on the benefits of suicide, too unhappy to find another solution, too bored to run a bath and pick up the radio. Other people’s secrets are greater than yours, and the blood pumping inside your wrists is too warm to be comfortable. There is sickness in the air you breathe, or in your mind, or in your hands. It is all too literal, you find this absorbing, almost.

Strange coffee perfume lines your nostrils and you see the posters outside, refusing to dissolve in the rain, plastic sleeves protecting them from watery death. They depict visions of beauty, though of course it isn’t, though of course it is. Everything is watery death, and it raises the corners of your mouth in an alarming fashion, to the woman stood behind the counter. Another woman outside pushes the fourteenth child from her throat in the pouring rain, and an old man sits upon the concrete bench in the concrete square breathing acid into his concrete lungs. At your right elbow is a girl with a latte, reading Poe, as though greatness is obtainable and lunatics only ever take over their own asylum. How you hate her.

We had achieved nought but intrigue, and Horror. Damp finds its way onto the back of your hand and you rub it into your skin, standing in the corner, calling ‘Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty…’.