Queen Mab
Mornings are easier these days. Brush teeth, piss, wash hands, realise I’ve done all this in the wrong order yet again, then wander round the house bracing for the day. I touch each of my fingertips to my thumbs as I pace, a grounding technique for panic attacks I saw on television. I keep a rhyme in my head. Doesn’t matter what it is, so long as I can’t think anything else while it’s going. As I was going up the stairs, I saw a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish, he’d go away. As I was going up the stairs… you get the idea.
It hardly ever happens anymore. It used to be all day, every day, several times a day. I’d turn a corner or blink or walk up some stairs and there she’d be, half her head blasted open, a shard of windscreen nestled against livid pink brain, the breach in her skull lined in vivid red the colour of strawberry biscuit jam. Then she’d slump sideways and I’d see the little boy behind her, panting short as he drowns in his own blood from the hole the penetrating round had ripped through his lung after passing through his mother. I can tell myself it was a clean shoot, but legality’s not really the issue here.
I sit down cross legged to meditate – I do seven long breaths. Each breath takes thirty seconds, so it’s three and a half minutes of meditation, not long enough to squirrel off into ill discipline, but just long enough to open my eyes into the feeling that my forehead’s open and the world’s sheened with that diaphanous layer of silence.
I stand up, grab my phone, scroll through looking for a longform podcast. As I was going up the stairs, I saw a man who wasn’t there. I find one. It’s a short history of the ancient eastern mediterranean and it goes for two and a half hours. I set up the phone on my stand and hit play, so I’m not alone with my thoughts while my computer’s booting up.
Work looks stupider than usual today. I check the tasking on my phone, going picture in picture while the lecturer drones on about problems with relative stratigraphic dating systems. I watch my computer’s boot routine. Updates. Apparently I’m 0% there, which seems appropriate. I touch my forearms in turn, then touch each of my fingertips to my thumbs in succession. As I was going up the stairs, I saw a man who wasn’t there.
The computer’s finally done and, of course, I need coffee. He wasn’t there again today. The linear B record contains no literature, being instead a painstaking record of livestock, slaves, and taxes which have been erroneously interpreted as evidence of a command economy. I head to the kitchen and smell coffee already made. She hands it to me. I thank her, politely ignoring the gaping hole in her head.
