The House That Shadows Built

It had been almost a year since I had found the Fat Man’s house. I wondered if I was better in any real sense, any more prepared for the world that had been working out full strength this whole time in spite of us, throwing up new apartment blocks and front lines while we had been in here readying ourselves without a deadline, playing catch up with a slowly unfolding apocalypse. The feeling was ge...

I woke up with a stabbing feeling, a sound I felt,  the screeching of braking a train on the tracks. Awake but unable to move I knew that the Fat Man was in the room with me. I could smell the putrid dampness of his skin. After a moment my body suddenly let out all the coiled up tension and I sat up in bed screaming with a dry mouth. On my mattress was a greasy black handprint.  Once awake my mind...

It was the great chasm that motivated me. The unassailable gap between the bombed out villages and thriving city centres. That abscess of white noise and polished floors between the churchyards and dirty backrooms, spaces with no greater purpose than to provide a spot in which to try and meet oblivion at a low price. Everything was set up to sparkle and catch our eye. We were magpies and vultures,...

I crisscrossed the first room with torchlight revealing that the wall was floor to ceiling with stacked VHS tapes. I searched the wall for a light switch and to my surprise the light came on. I turned off the torch and then gathering my courage approached the wall of tapes… As I got closer I saw that every video was labelled with the date and a title in careful almost runic biro script. I slid a t...

I swilled the mixture of blood and toothpaste and spit around my mouth and let it dribble out spoiling the perfect white of the sink.  My teeth were crooked and stained the same mustard colour as the walls of old pubs. I ran the nail of my thumb along them and think about how they barely fit in my mouth, all competing for space and purpose like the shops and houses on the terraced streets I grew u...

Soon after meeting The Kid I moved in with him in the Last Free House in the World.  It was during a cold winter, the kind which cracks cobblestones and the room we shared had broken windows that he’d hastily repaired with gaffer tape and cardboard and a corner bed made from an old door stacked some beer crates.   Our room was on the first floor, only one flight of stairs away from the backyard. O...