Sugarcane

Purple clouds, streetlamp constellations. A dark world reflected on the wet concrete at your feet. The first few raindrops break the surface, a warning of things to come.\n\n[[21|2]]

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So you stand there, naked and shivering and oozing, every inch of your body bathed in poison. You stick out your tongue to taste and that's when you realise your nose is bleeding. The sensations coming in are overwhelming - you're pressed against the whole motorway at once, every raindrop a nerve ending. You smell things you have no words for, unless the noise of joyful helplessness that forces its way from your tainted lungs is a word.\n\nThis is it, then. This //is// better than the alternative.\n\n[[2|21]]

You lean on the cold rail edging the bridge. Breathe in deep, infect every inch of your body of meat and concrete and light. Shapes start fading out of order. Your head swims.\n\nThey lied about everything feeling the same. This feels like the first railing you've ever held.\n\n[[1|22]]

It is the first you've ever held so tightly.\n\n[[0|23]]

//I'm ready now\nTo let myself change colours with the leaves\nAnd let the wind come shake me out\nDeliver me closer to the ground\n\nI made a promise, show me how\nTo weave my way into a tight cocoon\nAnd let it push me inside out//\n -- Jason Webley, //Promise to The Moon//\n\n[[###]]

\n!STONE VALLEY AT MIDNIGHT\n!![[...........A STORY.....................................|A STORY]]<<fadeoutsound "https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167918054/Crystal%20Castles%20-%20Violent%20Dreams%20%5BSidewalks%20and%20Skeletons%20remix%5D.wav">>

Nobody has any business being out this hour on a Tuesday night. Certainly not on foot. You pick at the spot behind your ear where your protective film has started to flake.\n\nIt would have healed over already if you'd reapplied the coat like you were supposed to. You stop picking at it and press on.\n\n[[19|4]]

It turns to a steady, toxic drizzle as you make your way up - past the filling station with its bright windows and decon hissing. Droplets collect on the film that covers your skin, then run off harmlessly.\n\nCars sigh in and out of hearing, but the closer you get to the edge of town, the more you are left alone with the drum of the rain on the earth.\n\n[[20|3]]

Every house on this street is like a home. You know all their gardens, all the envious cats who watch from bathroom windows when you pass. Semi-detached roofs marshal the sky's blue and grey into neat slate rows. Strange to think you've never been here during the day.\n\nYou're within biting distance of your destination now. The spot behind your ear is rough under your fingers.\n\n[[17|6]]

A snaking trail of red catseyes leads you over the railway bridge. This is when you always feel the city start to relinquish its grip on you, when you make your turning into the suburbs. The weight of a million sleeping, invisible people falling away, the night sky opening up to swallow you.\n\n[[18|5]]

It barely lingers for a second before the torrent washes it away. The rain is coming so fast now, unbroken curtains in the still night.\n\nLooking down at the droplets still shining on your finger, you can't help but wonder how it would feel against your bare skin, with no film to insulate you. In primary school you learned how the membrane is so fine that everything feels just the same, something you've never had occasion to question. After all, your sensations seem vivid enough. Cold railings and warm sheets.\n\nThen again, you've nothing to compare them to.\n\n[[15|8]]

All their cars parked cosy in driveways. Like everything else in this place, they were built to survive the apocalyptic weather. Only the oldest have had a chance to rot. The rest stand gleaming in the poisonous rain; it slides in sheets down their windows and bounces off their bonnets.\n\nYou pause to write your name in the slick on one of their side windows.\n\n[[16|7]]

Trees line your path to the motorway bridge. Fresher ones, engineered to last, stand branch-to-branch with the occasional relic - survivors planted in a time when the air was safe to drink and the earth safe to spread your roots in. They are gnarled and rainbow mottled and grotesque and beautiful. You pick at the spot behind your ear.\n\n[[13|10]]

You take yourself down to the end of the street where at last the motorway spreads itself out before you. The lights here are taller and brighter, brilliant rings in parallel rows.\n\nYou have made this journey almost every night for months now. You know how it feels: the vulnerability of open sky, the luxury of all this space to yourself. Tonight feels different - or the same, but more so. Everything stands bolder and closer and more real against the image in your head, everything hums. The last semi sits silent and dark as you leave it behind.\n\n[[14|9]]

\n<<timedinsert 1s>><html><b>KEVIN McGOWAN</b></html>\n[[twitter|https://twitter.com/untiltheygo]] / [[tumblr|http://smegandtheheads.tumblr.com/]] / [[blog|http://thekevinmcgowan.wordpress.com/]]<<endtimedinsert>>\n\n<<timedinsert 3s>>macros by [[leon arnott|http://l.j-factor.com/]]<<endtimedinsert>>\n\n<<timedinsert 5s>>music by [[crystal castles|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5p9APmPF9Q]]<<endtimedinsert>>\n\n<<timedinsert 7s>>thank you for clicking, I hope you enjoyed :) go to any of the three links above to find out more about this thing and / or tell me what you thought<<endtimedinsert>>\n\n<<timedinsert 9s>>[[start over|1]]<<endtimedinsert>>\n\n<<fadeinsound "https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167918054/Crystal%20Castles%20-%20Violent%20Dreams%20%5BSidewalks%20and%20Skeletons%20remix%5D.wav">>

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Picture a face.\n\nPicture a human face in blue and green, ocean colours, forest colours. City colours. An expression of pain that looks almost like ecstasy when the details twist in your mind's eye.\n\n[[11|12]]

When you step into the bridge, lurch, gravity and distance. The motorway is dark and very far. Straight ahead in two directions, empty lanes promise the existence of other places, the lights recede and rain fills every space.\n\nStock still, eyes closed. The sound of rain is everything, rain touching road, touching trees, touching you. Not touching you. Picture what you have been picturing all day, since you saw it on the billboard this morning.\n\n[[12|11]]

Dreamily trace the outline of the blight on your own face, plotting strange imagined shapes - horns, scales, knots, fissures. The shape of the city's design for you, the changes its chemicals would etch on you if they were only allowed in. The warning plays temptingly on your tongue, obsessing you with gruesome possibility. You work at the spot behind your ear.\n\n!//Don't corrupt yourself.//\n\n[[9|14]]

Lids distorted, lips eaten away to nothing. Picture growths like the whorls on an old tree, skin rusting like an old car. Friendly government warning.\n\n!//Don't expose yourself.//\n\n[[10|13]]

\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYou've no excuse to stop.\n\n[[7|16]]

It rips quiet agony. You gasp. A long strip peels away from your ear to your chin. If you'd reapplied the coat, you were supposed to. If you'd done that. You didn't. You were supposed to.\n\nWhen you touch your newly exposed skin, it stings and your fingers come away sticky. In the dark you can't be sure what colour. You take a desperate breath but all you can see when you close your eyes is that face.\n\n!//Don't transform yourself.//\n\n[[8|15]]

A long, transparent strip lands at your feet. Ripped and deflated, it still holds the shape of your neck and shoulders.\n\nA shudder rocks through your muscles. More scraps of your casing collect on the ground and you feel empowered: equal parts flower budding and boil bursting. There's no sense regretting anything at this point.\n\n[[5|18]]

Don't think about what your hands are doing. Here on the edge of town, the edge of the sky, think only about how unbearably little it is to be just a human body. If you were a city, trees could be your fingers, chemtrails your hair, cats your eyes. Quivering and glistening all night long.\n\nDon't think about what your hands are doing.\n\n[[6|17]]

You peel the film off your legs like tights, if tights took a layer of cells away with them. Finally you kick it off and let it fall from the bridge down to the motorway. The last shreds of your insulation.\n\n[[3|20]]

As the rain hits your newly exposed face and the pain starts to take shape, you picture your skin reflecting sky colours like slate roofs, repainting them in your own organic language. Everything is happening harder now and there is so much more of everything to happen.\n\n[[4|19]]