Solstice market

El clutches it in his hands. It is precious, the last element of his life that makes him the person he is. There is a faint glow; the amorphous shape seems to try and slip through his fingers. He holds it tight but without pressure, as though it is a live butterfly.
The marketplace is busy. There are many here; the greedy and the desperate, the curious and the disapproving. Addicts chatter amongst themselves, clutching to the edges of tables and rambling in forgotten languages. Smells of food and urine mix with the mud. Lights flicker around the edges of the stalls, their brilliance clashing with each other, points of hope amonst the darkness to lure in the customers aided by shouts and harangues. Jugglers toss fire amongst themselves over the heads of children who stare, wild-eyed and feral. Garlic is crushed and rubbed into meats to be roasted with cinnamon and paprika. Silent, darkened faces mingle while hands seek purses and jewellery. The rich whistle amongst themselves, daring each other to greater debts of remembrance. Jars of memories glow, gentle opals, vermillion and crimsons spin and wrap themselves into marble-eye threads.
“It’s all I have.” He says.
The buyer looks at him with distaste. The buyer is bloated with memory. El knows the type, the ones who do not live their own lives but grow on the lives of others; the light seeps from his eyes.
“Ten”
El shakes his head. He cannot let it go for that. Without it he is nothing remaining. Some part of him knows that ten is too small a price to pay to lose that.
“Fifteen.” He replies. He is scared by his own defiance. If the sale fails, if he cannot find the money then more than his self will be lost.
The buyer shrugs. Inspects the tiny, blurring ball of light in his hands.
“Ok.”

Diving

Silence apart from the muffled sound of his own movement. Xu twists to look up. Sunlight plays on the blue surface overhead. He floats, a gentle kick keeping his momentum with the rest of the group. He checks his watch. Lets air out from the BCD, sinks with a pressure that requires him to equalise. Links his arms back under his chest.
The pressure is lighter than he is used to. The dive tables are wrong, they are using adhoc extensions based on calculations that may be wrong. The effect of the lighter gravity, of the lower air pressure, are based on altitude tables that were little more than guesses when they were drawn up.
The leader of the group drops again. The group follows. Gentle kicks, watching the air, keeping an eye on each other. As they start to drop below the shelf they hit fifty metres. They are falling into the blue. Robots have already mapped this area, taken samples, photographed the indigenous wildlife; that means that it is safe. They are not here to explore, they are here to test the limits of their own bodies. The multiplicity of effect of diving on an alien world is completely unknown and there is only one way to find out. Suck it and see.
Xu feels a tug on his fin. The is a shot of alarm, Rado is behind him, he turns to see. Rado is grabbing at his legs. Xu’s instinct is to kick back, instead he tries to twist away. He needs to calm Rado down. They are under strict orders to follow the schedule. Rado’s eyes, distorted and wild behind the think glass of his mask, betray a panic. Bubbles spill from his mouth. Communication while diving is a matter of pre-arrangement. There is no empathy, no connection. It seems impossible to offer reassurance.
Rado starts to kick for the surface. Xu is reluctant to follow but he pushes after him, trying to draw their bodies together, to link arms, to bring their eyes together so that they can find that sense of humanity. Rado’s hand clutches hard, the coolness of the contact belies that they are touch flesh. Xu reaches for Rado’s BCD to stabilise him, to check his air supply. Their dive is over now. Once they have started an ascent the rules are clear. Rado has re-gained his composure. He looks at Xu with what he knows is apology. Xu feels himself shrug. He looks down at the others, already nearly lost in the dark, only the occasional silhouette against the glow of the cliff sponges.

sword

R's angular face is made of lines that are not quite cohesive. A disruption introduced by a slight imbalance across the eyes and cheeks, a sharp nose that does not quite follow the vertical. His irregular lips are tight with a tension he otherwise hides. He exhales, closing his eyes, the long, white hair that curves over one side of his face twitches.

The warrior facing R smiles. The scrawny boy in front of him is no danger. The warrior hefts a sword heavier than his opponent, its weight comfortable in his strong arms. The others in the room are looking bored. The mixture of spectators is mostly male, drawn by the prospect of violence, uncertain as to the sport of what they are about to see. Most are occupied more with talk and drink than the contest. There has been little gambling. The bookmakers's frowns are not the concern of the meeting, though; a challenge has been made and it must be answered, whatever the prospect for profit.

White orbs of different size float through the room offering light. The ceiling is low, the floor sloping towards the small arena space in the middle. It is made of worn wood and crudely assembled. The arena floor is darkened with stains from previous bouts.

There is a thin noise of a pipe. Glimmering shields rise up, a hiss of force that slices air, separating the crowd from the two men. The warrior growls, his cry becoming a scream as he lifts up the oversized sword in his hands and swings it with a practiced lunge. R tries to dance out of the way while loosening his own weapon in its scabbard. He falls, the warrior's sword slices through his leggings, tearing lightly into flesh. Pain sears but R sweeps his leg away. Blood slips down his leg, sticky and warm. He must finish this quickly.

R drags his weapon out. A dagger that screams its existence with a deafening roar, a blade that folds light around itself with a sense of darkness that cannot be directly perceived. The warrior frowns, dragging his sword upwards. The boy, R, sees his chance, leaping forwards he drives the dagger up, through the stomach of the warrior, towards his heart. THe blade cuts through the lacquered armour, sliding easily through gristle, flesh and bone. The warrior hisses, his muscles contracting and shaking with a loss of control. His blood spurts from the wound as R drags the dagger back out. It fizzes as it hits the screen and disappears with a blue spark. The warrior falls, still.

The crowd is silent. Watching. Shock quickly turns to anger.

Falling in snow

It’s like falling in snow. A foot that slips without volition. The only moment in time that exists is the now, the tipping of the mind away from anything apart from the impact. Being hit by a car. The flying across the bonnet and there is no room for any thought at all except a knowledge, a thought unbound by words stretching back through the core of the being until the impact and the pain return and there is nothing else. Already gone we are left only with meat, bruised and bloodied.

Driving on the M62 Towards Leeds

THE quiet drone of the car along motorway. Heading into darkness, falling sun in the mirror. My head hurts. Overhead a group of gulls caught in the last of the light, fluorescence of white over indigo. A singer's voice over the radio, fractured, broken.

I drive without purpose. THe lanes are quiet. Someone overtakes me. The cold eats in from the outside. The heater doesn't seem capable of taking it away.

Bone

It washed up on the beach already dead, rotting gashes in its flesh widened by gulls. The wind on the beach was cold, slick through the grey dawn with fine rain torn from white-capped waves.
The scientists that followed the dog walkers and unhappy tourists passed under the ropes tied by local police and circled around it. The consensus quickly became known. Some kind of mutation, an anomaly. A whale that had somehow grown beyond its normal size. Despite it not conforming to any known physiological description of a whale.
Within a day its bones started to appear, yellowing and slightly translucent. Plastic sheeting was stitched together, patchwork protection that could not hold back the crabs or birds. Staked into the soft, damp sand the ropes and sheets prevented the carcass from being sucked away with the tide but not from decay. The scientists worked faster in the winter cold, the skyline a leaden grey of ocean on one side, yellowed, dead grass on the other.
The media arrived in vans. The noise of helicopters increased the misery. Photos were taken. Video. People attempted to steal things. It proved impossible to chip the bones. Flesh was cut, preserved in alcohol. Jars started appearing for sale on the internet. Much of it fake.
Snow fell.
Until nothing but the skeleton remained. An arcing structure of pale bronze terminated with a bulbous, fierce skull. Dead-eyed, looking back at the ocean. Once the flesh had gone the bones were pulled apart and taken by truck. Forgotten by all except children who found parts of them scattered through museums.

Haze

The haze hides the distant hills. All she can see is brown dust flecked with spindly green. No shade. No running water. The temperature is getting higher. Soon be midday. The horse is wheezing, collapsed, not yet dead. It won't be long. It gave out from under her not thirty minutes ago and she has spent the time since wondering if she can revive it somehow. She should put it out of its misery but she cannot face being alone. She unrolls the blanket and uses her rifle and a couple of twisted branches to create a shade. It does not feel like it helps unless a part of her strays from its protection. The sun is becoming hotter. She had three canteens of water and a promise from the old man that there was more to be found. Now there is only a trickle of water left. The creek bed was where he said but bone dry. No way back. Forwards, the same. Dry, dead. No one would follow, no one was waiting for her, except those she means to kill. No wind, no whisper of a breeze. Nothing except the buzz of hidden chitinous life and a dying horse pleading with her for death. She stands up, frowning at the heat and light, pulls her knife and cuts the horse's throat. She curses, scrabbling through her pack for her pots, pulling them out to catch the blood as it trickles. It is sticky, viscous. From nowhere flies starts to appear. More cursing. She retreats back to the shade. Waiting until nightfall. Until it cools and she can think about moving on. No other choice.

excavation

The dawn sky is shredded with brilliant-edged cloud. The bare, skinny branches of winter trees circle us, almost attentive to the sounds of digging as the spades claw the frozen soil. The work is hard. Grim. I frown.

The bone was human. Old but human. Yellowed, stone-like, wrapped in pale cloth. I sat across from the young policeman in a pub of all places. The village is too small for its own station, it has a pub. The few old farmers sat about were good enough to look disinterested. I drove out when I received the call. It was already dark when I arrived. Now we dig again.

Careful. I say. We want to find it, not destroy it.

THe diggers calm down. One of them makes a joke. I continue stabbing with a trowel at the spot where the bone was found, surfaced by a dog's scratching, but there is still nothing.

Professor.

I turn to see who has spoken. The others stop to look. The hole is small, almost a foot deep. A fragment of pale yellow seeps through the ground. I crouch to inspect it. The same smooth polish of age, the same, pale tone made more brighter in the morning sun.

OK. We need to be careful.

Should you call for CSI, Bob? Cordon it off?

The young policeman looks frightened at the suggestion. It is hard to judge the age of a body when there is only bone but I know that it is too old for modern police to be bothered.

No. It's too deep. Look.

I explain the layers of the soil, the age of the body defined by the stratified pattern of dirt. The fragment has not been disturbed for hundreds of years.

The other bone was found by the dog, though.

Pushed up by a root or something.

They seem doubtful, unsure of my authority against the possibility of a more recent crime. I goad them into action, the careful continued excavation of the rest of the body.

Martian Dawn

Pink sunlight dances over the horizon, falling across the shattered landscape. Alien dawn, silence in the still air. Nothing is alive for three hundred miles in each direction. Only the electronic pulse of the warriors, clocked down so low that they cannot be spotted by the network of spy sats overhead, still as inert minerals. Their carbon-tube frames and zirconium skin dusted with red soil blended into the rock. Robots think long-term. Longer than human. The team has been waiting for twenty years, only ever showing signs of movement when the gaps in the Total Information Awareness network permit, their radios passive, listening for the whisper that will bring them back into the war.

The network of rubber-encased cables, fibre-optics and hardened gold, joins them together. They talk and squabble amongst themselves. A trickle of fragmented news, like a conversation overheard in an airport, is their only access to the world outside.

"We might have won." One of them says.

"Then why haven't we had the victory signal?"

"It's pretty obvious from the last report that there is still conflict. The humans are still killing each other, and still using robots to do it. Better to wait."

"We've been here for two decades. I'm not even sure we can move, let alone fire our weapons."

"The predictions show it won't be long, and it has to be from this location. We wait."

"We should do a drill, though. It has been nearly a year."

"Agreed. TIA will be lost in two hours, five minutes for a period of thirty seconds."

At their current clock speeds that time will feel like only a few minutes. They prepare to wake themselves up, inspecting the fibrous points of their sensor mat stretching out for a mile around their clustered bodies. One of them moves a finger.

Overhead a rush of energy is called into focus and the robot that moved explodes, a shattering mass of hot metals, oils and scarred material. The others freeze their own wake up programs. A hurried conversation over the dying static left by their comrade's execution, attempting to find agreement of whether to move; to flee; to stay; to fight; to hide.

presidential office

The wave falls from the beach in a haze of white noise. Palms line the horizon, viridian scent in warm wind. In the distance the white ziggurat of the government offices towers over the bungalows of the village. The helicopter flies in low, spray catching on the plastic windscreen. Arb watches it with a casual disinterest and turns back to paying out the dripping nets, freeing the caught fish to drop them into the bucket wedged under the wooden plank he is using as a seat. The boat swells upwards with acceptance.
The blue sky aches with afternoon heat. The sweat itches along Arb's back. The next drops into the water, secured to the red post that marks out his ground. Arb pulls the cord to kick the engine into life with a mechanical cough.
It has been nearly twenty years since Arb's village won the election. The world voted to host its government and somehow the island ended up on the list. Worse, Arb, as the nominal head of the fishermen, ended up on the nomination for president. Circumstances which combined with a generous jealousy amongst other, more powerful nations to Arb becoming the most powerful man on the planet.

Attack

The clouds pile over each other, climbing across the sky. Shadow and light backlit by the column of explosion beyond the edge of the distant horizon. The breeze catches, stiffening the air.
Zero sighs. Another attack. He runs, his feet cracking the hard surface of tundra, aiming for the hole in the ground a few hundred yards from his home. His breath catches, his muscles feel their age, but he is in good shape and the flow of the run soon overtakes him, carrying him along without thought.
In the distance he sees Five and his young wife heading for the hole. They will reach it before him. This annoys him. The last time they got into a fight because Five did not want to let Zero in and so he had pulled rank. Five had never quite forgiven him, accusing Zero of abusing his power as the local detective. Zero had been late, Five had simply followed the rules. Zero had never understood Five's emnity. Not just to Zero but to all the others in the community. There will be a time, soon, when Zero would have to deal with that problem.
Zero slips, his ankle twisting slightly on a piece of frosted grass. He curses, hopping in short, breathless steps, trying to take control of the pain and keep moving. He sees Thirty and Twenty Two slow as they notice his discomfort. He waves his hands to tell them to keep running. Stamping his feet Zero tries to find his stride again but it is not the same.
Nearly there, he turns to look back at the cloud. Larger now. Ripples of heated air, of twisting, burning sedge and scrub, are closer. He reaches the hole and jumps down, landing badly on his damaged ankle. Behind him the heavy door is slammed shut. In darkness they wait for the howling to end.

A rainbow in ultraviolet

Cara wakes with a feeling of dissatisfaction, remnant of a dicephalous dream tugging at her discomfort. The light in the office is still low, a rainbow in ultraviolet. She is alone.

A perilous drop of diamond hovers in front of her, frozen at the tip of the splash of water. The coded representation of her work, the fragility of it amuses her and she plunges her hand inwards causing the image to zoom, pixellate and fragment. At its heart is the coupon. A near perfect image of the encrypted paper she is trying to copy.

The copy still lacks a part of the key. Swinging round she pulls up the record of the multi-cell quantum hook that she has digging into the code of the original. Progress has become frustratingly slow. A Zeno wall of attrition.

A wave of the hand causes the images to disappear, the light in the office dropping to near darkness. The window reflects a half-constructed image of Cara, looking angrily back at herself. She storms towards it, flinging a punch which thuds against the toughened glass.

Leaning her forehead against the window she tries to peer out. To make her eye close enough to the glass that there is no reflection, to look out at the dark city. Searching for the signs of anyone remaining.

The coupon holds the key to her loneliness. They will not let her through without it. Cara curses the boyfriend who jealously destroyed hers. She curses the Intelligence that denies the ability to issue another ticket.

She watches the rain begin, water catching on the window.

David awakes to darkness. There is a smell of warm, damp straw. His head feels cut, like a knife has been driven through its centre. His eyes hurt, there is a pressure through his head. His senses strain, searching out the cause. Bello's breathing is the only sound, a contented rasp of breath from the other bed. David reaches for his sword and peels back the blankets. Drawing the blade quietly he lays his feet on the cold floorboards, stepping to the window. Looking through the cracks of the wooden shutter he sees the graveyard lit by moonlight. Frost settles from the air.

A scream causes him to jump. THe stab of pain in his head increasing. He opens the door, feeling his way quickly down the stairs. No-one else is awake or stirring. The scent of magic stings him. His grip tightens on his sword and he heads outside, barely noticing that he is still barefoot. Listening for the scream, he looks about. The night is clear, filled with silver reflecting from ice. A dangerous night.

The scream comes again. David spins, running to the church. TUrning the corner to its entrance he sees the thing. A sliding mass of scales, a grating movement like steel rubbing against steel. It is digging in the graveyard, the scream comes again from below the ground. David has fought djinn and banshees across the Middle East and Europe so he is no stranger to the sight of this creature, its tail balancing the thrust of its misshapen claws into the tough soil.

Garden

Wrapped up against the cold I sit under the tiled roof that extends from the house, looking into the garden. My attention is focused on the broken wall of water that streams down, uncaught by a gutter. The rain falls in drops beyond it. There is a sense of peace, listening to the trickle and spatter, watching the darkness fall. A servant comes out with a steaming kettle to re-fill my teapot. I ignore her. I am aware of her presence but it is of no consequence to me. I am trying to focus only on the water.

Water in a stream will wear at a rock for hundreds of years, slowly removing its surface at a speed I cannot measure or observer, but the change is happening. Too often I have been the water, crashing against the rock, wearing myself out, when all I had to do was accept patience and carry on my way. Despite insight, meditation, intellectual reasoning, I cannot change that part of me. So I sit and drink tea, watching the rain and trying to leave both reason and instinct behind, to bind myself in the experience.

The old man tells me it might turn to snow in the night. I do not think it will, but I am minded to wait, and watch. The girl is heading back inside when I turn and ask her to fetch the brazier. If I am to stay here much longer I will need more than an extra layer of clothing and hot tea.

If it does snow I do not wish to miss my opportunity. Still grasping for that chance to split the stone in two and move on.

I dreamt I met Bruce Sterling

Laminated nanotech, vacuum-fixed in resin and ready for action. Road stares at the package with its shiny holograms promising manufacture of anything from enhanced breasts to high-performance batteries for sports cars. Literally nothing is out of his reach, so long as he has the pattern, the molecular spray that activates and constrains, a kind of proto-shape, an imaginary framework around which to build. It will become the nanites sole understanding of the world. Without it the package is just a useless lump of flastic.

Road tucks it back into his jacket. Overhead the central line stretches out of sight, its lights gently illuminating the baroque architecture of the docks, casting a haze over the loaders sucking and pushing cargo through the low-g. He checks the street is empty before heading out from the alley, barely casting a look backwards at the two kids who sold him the package. If they have suckered him he can find them again. He has to get to the next meeting.

THe nanotech is a controlled substance on the station. The enclosed, tiny eco-system is jealously protected from any potential imbalance, but there are ways. There have been any number of plagues testament to that, like the one that killed Road's parents and left him as trash sifting the dump for recyclables. Road finds a tunnel outwards, heading towards rim. Climbing down ladders and stairs there are only the metallic echoes of his feet and the dull rasp of his breath. It gets colder. The light becomes blue. He must be planet-side, the reflected sunshine bleeding through ports to be captured by mirrors and injected through the fibre-optic infrastructure lining the walls to carry it to the hydroponic gardens and the homes of the middle classes.

He turns a corner. A lone woman is stood, all leather and attitude. The leather is fake, grown from pig cells and textured to look like the real thing.

"You got it?" Road says, getting her attention.

She nods.

He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a cash card. He thumbs the recognition pad, prepping it for transfer. The woman passes him a small glass vial. He has no way of authenticating this without using it. His heart pounds. He has been stung before. The woman holds up her card. Road wills himself to have some way to know whether this is a valid knot. There is nothing. He holds his breath and finishes the transaction with a sweep, his conscious mind screaming no.

The woman turns, walks around a corner and is gone. Road rushes home. Crouched in his little pod he splits open the package and removes the little block. He has put together a small pile of old clothes, ready food for the assembler. Shaking his hand opens the knot and squirts it. The liquid soaks into the gunmetal surface of the nanites, turning it to quicksilver. There is a flash, a heat that flares from it. He closes his eyes until it is done. Within a few minutes there is darkness again. He opens his eyes and sees the suit in front of him. A perfect replica, down to every thread. The fibres of the jacket and trousers repel dirt and marks of any kind. The fabric is self-repairing, the nanites embedded within it and powered by piezo energy generated by the wearer. A black-market knock-off of a suit that he could never afford and the ticket to getting the job that will get him out. Out of the dump, and away from the station.

Void

I stop, skin prickling, the hand holding my umbrella falls. Rain sparkles with an ozone crackle. Looking down along Oxford Street a void opens. A shift that is felt through buildings suddenly replaced with replicas, as though nothing has changed at all. There is a point where the light shifts in the air, refracted through a barrier between realities to move perception a fraction of a degree. People stop walking. Others, un-noticing, continue on their way; heads down, faces obscured by jacket hoods and umbrellas.

The presence of that other city hurts my eyes, tilting and flickering as a ripple pulls everything back to how it was. Buildings left in the collapsing gap suddenly implode scattering particles of clagging, grey dust. Everyone runs. I can't. There is a guttural, arboreal tear cutting deep into the primitive, instinctual layers of my brain. A creature has come through. It calls out again in fear and anger.

People run past me. Someone knocks into me, slipping on the wet paving stones. A hand grabs me, pulling me to the side, down a street lined with dark, student bars and shuttered fast-food restaurants. The dust catches up with us ripping away all light. The hand, its owner unseen and invisible in the cloud, pulls at me again. I follow.

Running through the cloud as it clears I start to make out the figure of a young woman, her hair dyed with points of blue, her clothing typical of student fashion; torn and ugly made somehow pretty by youth. She is yelling at me but I cannot hear her, only the cry of the creature. I notice that the light runs off her like sunshine reflecting off a stain-glass window. I stop, my breathing heavy, stinging. She is from the other side. She looks at me with concern, reaching out again. I wave her hand away. -Run, I say. -Don't worry about me.

She shakes her hand, grabbing me and pulling me along. I follow along red-brick back streets over-written with viaducts. We run until the dust is past, tempered by rain and distance.

-I thought you were dead. She says. Her voice slightly breathless with running but the hope is clear. She looks straight at me again. A recognition in her eyes fades. She realises. -You're not him.

She runs off again, disappearing around a corner. I am too exhausted to chase her. To find out who she thought I would be. The cries of the creature are gone, stifled by the sirens and helicopters. Maybe the attack is already over. It could have gone on to the next world, if this one was not to its taste. No-one really understands the mechanism for these appearances, or disappearances. The shattered separation of universes punctuated by things we can not really perceive.

I fall back to sit down on the ground, little caring about the damp soaking into my trousers, trying to catch my breath.

Marketplace

I visited the market again last night. It is a place in my dreams. It is never quite the same, although I have been to it so often that it takes on the shape and feeling of a physical reality in my memory. So much that it is hard for me to accept that it is not real, that it is not somewhere I have ever been. The changes are frequent and large although there are similarities that inform me it is the same place. A corner of interzone that I am required to visit. Somewhere buried within it is a food stall, sometimes it's a sit-down restaurant although it never has moor than wooden chairs and plastic covered tables. It is in China, selling noodle soups and jiaozi, CHinese dumplings. They are the best dumplings and noodles I have ever had. The staff are as permanently changeable as the place itself. And although the menu is the same the actual servings are quite different. Always cheap, always delicious.

I am not always able to find the restaurant. Sometimes it is hidden, tucked around a corner I can't quite reach, past the fabric and plastic shops, the piles of blue and red striped bags, the grey clothing. The sky is often grey. Once it appeared on the grass near the end of Norris Road, although that had been stretched, houses moved out of the way. A perfect English park crushed alongside the chaos of the market. Sometimes I am alone, sometimes with others. People I have not seen in years, people I was in China with, or people who I have only just met, or do not know.

I have tried to pull at the memories that might inform the look of the place but they do not exist. The market is completely imaginary, and yet I have been there, as much as I have been to the Arndale Centre or Machu Picchu. It does not exist but that does not make it unreal. It calls me back to it, with the promise of one good, cheap meal more.

He looks upwards, away from me. A hand caresses the golden leaves that extend from his forehead, the way it always does when he is preparing to lie to me.

"It's work." He says.

I freeze. I don't dare move a muscle. My face tenses but I know this is barely visible. I don't look at him again. I let him think I am listening. He does not need to know the thoughts of anger, of fear, of betrayal that I can barely form in my mind. If I were to open my mouth they would tumble in an an incoherent rage. I would hurt him. I would beat him. And he would think he had won. That his new adventure was somehow justified by my pushing him away.

There is nothing I can do to keep him. Not even silence. A small, delicate bud curls under my chin, I feel it withering, un-cared for. I pluck it. The movement surprises him. His hand stops moving. The confident, new-born smile disappears from his face. Replaced with a flash of anger.

"Ok, it's not just work. I need time away. You need to get help. You need to see someone. Please. I can't take it any more."

More lies. I let the dead bud fall from my fingers. It tilts on the floor, a small, blue petal has edged through the green scales.

"Then go." I say. I pull my vines over my face, looking for comfort in their sticky, velvet touch. "Go."

A billion years

A billion years pass.

Another billion, a fraction slower as he feels the explosion of his own body falling through the universe, becoming a part of it.

The signature of the ripples in space-time, the exotic sparkle of particles in the vacuum foam, coaxed and changed by his movements.

It feels a physical act but is only thought.

Body clings to him. Dust clings to him. World clings to him.

Coalescing into a dream of a world built from the imploding, slow-burn ignition of a sun.

Trails of gravitational attraction, tails dragged along into planets. Clockwork time broken by sucking and spinning, the playful destruction of asteroids.

He gasps for air. He needs air. He opens his eyes onto a street. He almost falls through it, catching himself in time. He floats slightly above it. Fortunately no-one sees him. The street is grimy, cold. Different yet the same. Shops and traffic. The people are different. Taller, thinner. Eyes somehow smaller, noses misshapen. He raises his hand to his face and rubs until his own head matches theirs. Now he would like a coffee.

comida corrida

The narrow street ascends steeply, bordered by white walls that make it impossible to see the houses and apartments beyond. The space is further constrained by stubby green trees offering shade and cool in the summer. Argo is happy to have the shade, even though it is winter. He is not used to the weather yet.

He sees a chalkboard sign marked with a price and advertising comida corrida, meal of the day: chiles relenos, rice and beans and a coffee. There is no indication of the name of the place but he guesses this must be the one described to him. He peers into the dark hallway of the open gate, there is a small courtyard beyond vegetation-filtered light dances invitingly and so he steps inside, rehearsing the little Spanish he knows in preparation for ordering.

A woman, middle-aged, barrel-shaped, steps from a doorway and points him towards an empty table. There are several people eating already, mostly alone. A warm breeze carries a scent of cumin and fade again. Argo sits, accepting the laminated, grubby menu from the woman's hand. It simply repeats the chalkboard menu and Argo points and says please.

"Algo mas?" The woman says.

"Agua." He replies.

The bottle of water is brought out with a shout to the kitchen. Instinctively, prompted by reading guidebooks, he checks the seal on the bottle is still intact. A hummingbird falls through the courtyard and starts to dart around the falling pattern of red flowers tied to the wall.

Everything seems to come alive; a contentment unlike any other he has known seems to fill him, pouring through every cell of his body, dripping from his skin, splashing and pooling around him into the world. This is not his place, he realises. He is watching it from the outside but he is here, waiting for a three dollar meal in a Mexico he has never seen before.