Month: February 2026

Her tied hair pulls her face taut while she makes proprietorial comments about him.

You know she says addressing him you only drink because of the pressure they put you under.

He is removing piece by piece his clothes and soon presents with the baleen look of a former athlete. 

The sympathetic mate takes one last filched beer away in the dark while she follows slyly. He advances steadily toward catalepsy with only myself – the stranger in the room – remaining.

Sit down he says.

He tells of swimming race across the heads he won for his father who could not walk, and of the woman whose life he heroically saved.

I am thinking his stories are like the touch up of paintings on his psyche.

He tells of the award they gave and says to me his jaw as wide and still as bronze, “I don’t like your words young man just listen”.

I had not spoken once but he was right, words were thoughts yes, I was trying to figure was there any word gesture I could make to try to save his life.

So much life left in them, the son with disability, woman must have been his mother. Extravagant tributes flow joyfully from her, she is taking him out, such an explosion of colour and hope, such a wonderful luminous day. In those summer days the bright sun, I see the pure shapes it makes lighting up bricks, the concrete honored, the trees lightly burnished, as the odd couple went forth. Death was never far away for both, something forgets and helps to believe this life can last forever.

Qualities of the human body and its psyche evolved to give an evolutionary advantage and so be more likely to be passed on and normalised.

There is a moment between sleep and wakefulness when a commanding voice may be heard, coming perhaps from a drama further back in the dream. It seems to be the sudden intervening authority of an awesome power.

Without the benefit of the hard headed skepticism, which we have also evolved as a species, it would only be exactly as it seemed – a presence and voice that moved though a veil from another world.

The digestive parts of this person, were perhaps at war with each other sparring and gurgling while the sleeping brain for its part had tried to withdraw amid troubling fears perhaps of relationships with loved ones or a lurking sense of mortality.

But after that  moment, imagine how his authority and importance began to swell, to impose various doctrines and religious themes born for the adherence of others.

The whole charismatic show for a thousand years collapses apiece if you take away that moment he mistook his own mere inner voice for the interactions of a god.