Acta Physiologica

You are somewhere in this city. But it's not you I'm so concerned with. It's your ghost. I don't really believe in ghosts, but I find them a useful fiction, much like when people pray but what they're really doing is accidentally meditating. And meditation is its won kind of fiction. As I said: your ghost. Your small, faintly musky, faintly unwashed. It smells like skin flaking off. I can't get it out of my chair, and with this smell here I can't sit and read my PDFs in peace. No, the whole time I'm ruptured by visions. For the fist time, I feel like these eruptions are happening to me. Not like before when I could summon them up (kind of) at will. What's sad is they're kind of bullshit visions. Mountain peaks blowing off and going out to space. Unicorns clubbed to death by mastodons ridden by harpies. The whole scene wiped out by the Tunguska meteor. Stuff like that. Czar Bomba extinguishing all traces that people ever peopled here. Weird arabesque representational art frames the picture. And there you are: the woman on the pedestal in Dali's Temptation of St. Anthony strangled by streetcar wires, writing as superheated coils make me gag on the taste of burning hair and ozone. Saturated fat pops out of its storage place in the things and dribbles down the as-yet-unmarked skin, hissing and popping little bubbles. It makes me want to vomit. And then suddenly I am in a white place. Clean smell of laundered clothes. A gargling brook in the background--in surround sound. A little boy is holding a candelabra, whose flame flickers and turns from yellow to blue and back to yellow. Red Xs in his eyes and a hungry, vampiric look on his face. Behind him an altar with a red tableclothe and gold trimmings spread. A silver bowl stands in the center. I dare not apporach the altar. I back up. It feels mossy. I am spit out through a damp, warm cave into the street in front of my house. It is sporadically haling. Each hailstone is the size of a basketball. From here, I get the impression they are being aimed individually. A man across the street is hit by one in his solar plexus. His torso is mangled beyond recognition. Another falls through the roof of our neighbour's house, and screams can be heard within. Planes and helicopters are crashing out of the sky. A wounded dog drags his two broken legs down the sidewalk. Panicked drivers duck for cover under their cars. To no avail. I can see a bird's-eye-view of myself and the hailstone the size of my head that will hit my neck, severing all contact and blood flow to the brain. I have a few seconds, and I can't help thinking that the moment will just drag itself out more and more, until I realize that I still have all the time in the world.

Consider: "In lieu of creativity, there is an undue emphasis on sexuality."