{This is for last week-sixth, when I was unable to post in time.}

The distant bark of a dog in the night somehow brought him wide awake with a beating heart, as it had never done before. The house was quiet but for the hum of the refrigerator, and other similar intermittent or constant sounds. Something had gone wrong, as when one’s mother has died, and you wake, feeling that horrible wound throughout and out of your sleep, but do not remember why at first. He got out of bed, went downstairs, went outside. There was little moon, little clouds, no wind. Going through the front door sounded like going from one room to another in the house.

Too much like. There was a sound that continued, even increased, when leaving the house, which should not have. The hum of the refrigerator, or one of the other sounds, a hushed level buzzing. It was not coming from his car, and there were no other cars in sight. The AC and the metre-box were on the other side of the house. It was coming from “out there”, not far off, nor in the sky.

Images that came to his mind, that his eyes now looked for: the silhouette of a man camouflaged against the dark patches all around; the thin, spreading limbs of some spidery being; a narrow pillar with a minute, sinister light.

What he saw he did not see, till it worked into him that it was not as it should be: a lighted area in the lawn where no light shone on it; rather it was like a door left open a crack, with a glimpse of scene and movement beyond. Foreshortened at that distance, he could discern nothing. The interminable buzzing came from there.

As he drew nearer, the hair of his skin became hot with tension; he shook off a fly with a start, but it was a drop of sweat. The buzzing was clearer, but still quiet; it made his inner ears itch. The thing he approached was a round hole in the lawn, cut as if with a knife, covered over with fluttering tatters of translucent membrane, as though something had torn through from that lighted space into this world. A rising of air through the hole kept the tatters in motion, and kept them hiding what was through the hole, where the moving light came as if from inside a building. A fleshy, raw, metallic smell touched him. He took another laboured and slow step forwards.

And he was lying in his bed, with light coming through the window into the bedroom where the lights were still off, like in late morning. He had not wakened, he had not slept: he had been walking on the indistinct grass, and now was lying here looking at his room. His heart was no longer beating fast. Something had gone wrong, and he still did not know what it was. He felt a pang go through him: if he had overslept, was he then late for work? But that could not pierce him with this fundamental degree of fear. He got out of bed, looked out the window: then in the full light he began to weep, to plead, to pray.

What did he see! What was outside the window!

Above the house, below the house, and in every direction, was empty white, infinite and blank as the number zero.

2023/03/31 #DailyCreatedOOM

Something like a greyish porridge flecked thickly with umber. Jansen was about to think, “That’s not right,” when his observation was preemptively justified by a large and wet explosion.

When it got in his eyes he grimaced—and it got in his mouth. It had quite the sour sting. He hastily purged his face with a menthol scented handkerchief (already bearing many other smears and smells from that day), and blearily looked to assure himself that the West Satyr candle was still alight; it had taken him three attempts and several hours to make it burn. There seemed to be a blot of the miscarried goop which had landed on the very wick of the candle; however, it sizzled and popped away, the flame remained bright, and Jansen stopped sweating.

2023/03/30 #DailyCreatedOOM

Tinker on the falling sill, craters fleck the washer’s hoe, broken under the hasty brow. Trucked into the mouth of drain souls, the arched sounding-board of the atmosphere takes credit at its foot, and never places an even dime on the ring of Matterhorn. My will be turned in the handle of the pit, and look out for me in the rainy dust, dregs of the summer cup, pinched and blown into fealty’s screw deepened, tapping into the abyssal rim.

2023/03/26 #DailyCreatedOOM

A pride of yellow jackets, honeycombs of dry grass nests, forming the pate of a domed monolith. Lightning hums in the cloudless summer sky, the hearth of coming times, the tuning pins that tighten day by simmering day. Mazes of uncut stony walls, dusted with gnats, lichen, and smells from unseen sources. Beards of lifeless plants perspire from every post and sign and beam. Linked arms in the clouds of dust, kicked it up to clothe the air in motion, kicked it up to shade us from the heat, the coming days, and years, to sprinkle us in the shady “today”.

2023/03/21 #DailyWrittenOOM

The masses, dolls of pastel neon pixels in a little crowd, beneath the sides of a conveyor overpass. Some woke from their program, and cried out, scaling the sides of the overpass. Their heads were cut off by the crouching overseers on the bridge – but the hairless pixelated oval head of one waker, still screaming, fell inside another man who walked below.

In the hall he faced the choice: to turn left and leave the fight, or to go around the corner and face his training companion. When he faced her, and they began to spar, he caught her fist, and she could not escape his grip; he swung the fight around, and found he was spinning them not on an anchor point on the ground but on an axis he chose.

On the airship they had found the basket fan they needed: a rod with radiating angled metal strips. They banked too far downwards away from a cliff, but pulling all the way through it was alright. Looking down on the level brown coastal sand, they had room to maneuver, but few visual landmarks to guide it.

Seen through a cracked periscope, the film peters away to empty clatter.

2023/03/20 #DailyWrittenOOM

Kalamity, kalamity: the fall of apeman’s ring. Power duct failure feature entry stream. Withered on the doorstep of a flagrant domicile, the smell of old car upholstery fills you. Dream in the face of the wondering meal, for the stretching of Lancaster’s autocratic pile. Leaping tresses under stained kanopies, they rail the flying fair with brash “hi there!”s.

Winterness grovels at the pointed toes of you; pain pencilled in the fresh burg on reel. The wildness mask is crumbling away: they trucked the shambling planks across to the receiver, in high trust of dance. Kept it within the ring.

2023/03/19 #DailyWrittenOOM

They stood on the trampoline; he laid his hands on the shoulders of the boy, and began to make the boy and himself bound, more and more slowly and forcefully, and he chanted invented words of an Arabic style. As they landed over and over the rolling ripple down his clothes changed them from suit to suit – not the intended power, but curious. He flicks small spiders from their thread in the muddy hollow copse.

2023/03/17 #DailyWrittenOOM

Two half wheels with many knobs and no spokes, raised as wings for the Fleur-de-lis, the black cat in the headlights. The bowing carpet, the dry enveloping wave, down over the whiskers that stab outwards, each penetrating slenderness feathered and frayed with tasteless sparks. Western halves jointed to the parting path, the minute thoughts that shine indistinctly with the colour of its eyes in the headlights. The raised catapult of joined wooden leaves would stray, but wrapped in forgetfulness will flash out and disintegrate.

2023/03/16 #DailyWrittenOOM

Zipper on wheels, trundled millipede, under tile, framed in right angles, jumping in the flat space of an unfolded map. Carthaginian hospitality settles the dust of seven numbers, bent along bicycle handlebars. The grass chews up the dirt, up into seed and serrated edge to cut paper. Splintered wall surfaces from the pencils held, dove-tailed to a compass, and shaved to a dime. The tiny wheels rattle in the silent spire.

2023/03/15 #DailyWrittenOOM