Agate Scotland

My blood ceases effervescing, and the watercolour moon tinges crimson. The night vegetation is starry with ice crystals. I have been swallowed by a chandelier, in a Moscow blackout in a snowstorm whiteout, in a time that cannot exist. A Tuesday, in fact.

 

I awoke tangled in the strandline, dowsed in lukewarm slime, grit scratching my teeth and without either socks or shoes.

 

I blundered over a blot of field, staining the map, towards the car, as snow began to fall like the ashes of a burning forest.

 

Trying to access the Toyota cockpit was too much for my staved, broken fingers, and the frozen air at my naked, perspiring navel, became too much for my sickened galloping heart.

 

 I died on my haunches like a shot rabbit. Immediately I stepped outside myself, shedding a greying corpse like a suddenly rapturous shadow, and refusing to submit to tradition I remained corporeal and tangible, if rhapsodically hallucinogenic to the casual observer. Flaring rhythmically like a magnesium taper, between worlds and straddling dimensions.

 

I slipped into the car cab, slapped my hands on the wheel and she came to life under my heels like a squashing spider. The life that burns brightest only in the agony of its extinction.

 

I could have performed a sullen vamp on teleportation, using the ley lines, hedgerows and waterways, but driving is so reckless!