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If you have not read the first part you may want to for a better understanding of what I am trying to convey, but it isn't too essential.
-------
The body lay motionless on the bed as the life force drained from it and coagulated on the soft mattress but the children’s laughter had died away with the encroaching darkness. The neon flicker from the overhanging light almost gave life to the glazed eyes of the corpse, until it too succumbed to the darkness and cut out with an audible pop that echoed off the grime smeared walls of the room. From somewhere the reassuring ticking of a clock slowed time down. And broke the silence. Reassuringly. And as all other sound died away, the clock became louder. And the corpse lay lifeless in the silent room. And the clock ticked. Since the wail of the shot ten tortuous minutes had penetrated the silence in slow, sonorous seconds.
The glass of the front door smashed and two men entered noisily, having smelt the decaying corpse before anyone else, and they noisily clattered through the house grabbing what they could and placing it noisily in a large bag that creaked and groaned under the strain of the multitude of objects it contained and then it broke and the random assortment of electrical goods and items of sentimental value smashed to the floor noisily and the men swore violently and watched as the personality of the objects they had hoped to leech evaporated in the cold air of decay and so they cursed even louder and moved towards the main prize itself: the corpse. The body sent the men into spasms of delight and they buzzed about the room in a frenzy of excitement, forgetting about their earlier loss and always moving rapidly from point to point, sent wild by the scent of the putrefaction all around them. Finally they deposited foetuses on the body and left as swiftly as they had arrived.
And the clock slowly marked each second with a steady tick. And time returned to its monotonous pace. But the clock had no silence to break, as the feeble slobbering of the foetuses filled the room while they tried to gnaw the body with their toothless gums. And then there was a great flurry of noise and Dr. Carrion flapped into the room and with an exasperated look he kicked the foetuses from off the body and slowly dragged it out of the house towards his parked car, all the while cursing the men who had got their before him and thanking Fortune for his swift arrival as he set the body upright in his car and again thanked Fortune that rigor mortiis had not set in. The motor roared into life and hummed contentedly as the car sidled out of the drive and far away.
The clock still commemorated each second until darkness finally consumed it and stopped time itself.
Dr. Carrion looked at his watch and on cue his mobile phone rang. Yes, an autopsy table to be ready when I get back… How do I know when that will be, time waits for no man and he hung up abruptly having just seen a most glorious sight to behold. He parked his car in a side alley and ran back to the seen of the fresh pile up, victims still unattended to and a sense of fatality in the air marked by the piercing horn that rang out perpetually in the half-light and as Dr. Carrion approached two men ran off into the night before he saw them and once again the doctor kicked away foetuses and cursed them.
In the silence of the car the corpse remained in a state of enforced lethargy, looking for all the world like a sleeping drunk forgotten. There was no clock in the car and the silence was perfect, unbroken, like a finished telephone call that both parties wish had never ended, and they listen to empty line and say the words they should have said before but were to scared to say I love you they say it again and again and only silence echoes back and so they each call again, desperate to knock down the walls and talk for the first time and the both hear the same engaged tone and despair that they were forgotten so quickly and they whisper I love you as a requiem to a hope now lost and consign themselves to lives of emptiness and lovelorn whispers. The silence of the car was perfect, unbroken like lost love and the darkness seeped in through the tightly closed windows.
And in the distance a passing gang of children noticed the drunken man in the car and wondered over to see if he had any money left in his pockets, which they were pleased to find he had, until suddenly the innocuous flicker of a streetlamp caused the glazed eyes to ignite for a second and the children laughed and dragged the strangely stiff drunkard out of the car and started kicking him you stupid tramp, you dumb their insults trailed off as they realised the drunk was motionless and one shouted that YOU KILLED HIM YOU IDIOTS YOU KILLED HIM NO I DIDN’T NEITHER DID I CHECK HIS PULSE they checked his pulse YOU’VE GONE AND MURDERED HIM YOU WERE KICKING HIM TOO and their voices rose into a tide of confusion as their panic increased, until they noticed the car keys were in the ignition and then they jumped in and left the drunk for someone else to deal with, while the smallest of the children offered a silent prayer to God that his parents would not find out.
The corpse lay in the middle of the footpath with nothing much to do, as corpses are prone to do, forgotten, again, dehumanised and soulless, a pathetic sight and it was not for several hours that the true silence of night could protect it, unpunctuated by the loud horns that rang out and uninterrupted by the returning revellers, who seemed to ignore the body lying in the street, but then and only then the silence returned and stayed next to the body until morning: perfect and unbroken and the girl softly sobs into her pillow as she wishes she had told him how she felt before it was too late and the boy cannot hold back the tears from not telling her what his heart told him to and in the expanses of time those same tears would one day be united in a temporary bond and they both comforted themselves that it would never have worked out anyway, while secretly knowing that they would never convince themselves otherwise and they whisper I love you to the imaginary person sleeping beside them until languid Sleep casts his spell and in sympathy allows them to meet in a dream for what few hours remain of the night, but as the alarm clocks chime simultaneously at six am neither can remember the happiest moment of their lives and instead they ponder the fathomless depths of solitude.
The tide of human life had begun to flow through the streets, except where a minor blockage halted the flow until two burly men had pushed the body to one side, where everyone could ignore it, and a priest draped it in a cheap blanket for the children’s sake you understand we can’t have bodies littering the streets it’s positively uncivilised and he punctuated the final syllable with a sharp kick to the corpses lower back before parting on his way. Later a policeman stopped to examine the blanketed body at the side of the street and he swore silently, wishing that the citizens would remember to leave them in the gutter where they belong. Some time later an old man with a grey beard flecked with crumbs stopped to examine the object in the gutter, and bending down on ancient joints he lifted back the cheap coverlet and saw the helpless corpse. He looked into the glazed eyes and saw the torment of the barely discernable soul locked away at the back, forced to watch the cruelty of the world through unblinking, unsleeping eyes, and he cried silently, before whispering to the still hearing ears, in the beginning God created light and ensured that it was good, then He divided the light from the darkness and called the light "day", and the darkness he called "night" and the evening and the morning were the first day. And as the old man spoke, the darkness receded and there was light and then the policeman returned and beat the old man savagely and called him a dirty necro people like you shouldn’t be allowed to live in a civilised society, and the people all around agreed with the policeman and joined in shouting at the DIRTY OLD MAN GET HIM HE’S EVIL and they swarmed around him and a mother spat on him and called him a PERVERT AND SOMEONE KICKED HIM AND THEN MORE PEOPLE JOINED IN AND SOON EVERYONE WAS FIGHTING TO BEAT THE OLD MAN AND THEY KICKED AND PUNCHED AND BIT and a small child cried at the violence AND THEN HIS MOTHER SLAPPED HIM AND TOLD HIM TA GO AND KICK THE FILTHY OL’ MAN’S HEAD IN AND HE DID AND THE POLICEMAN WENT TO HIS CAR AND HANDED OUT THE SPARE BATONS AND THEY ALL TOOK IT IN TURNS TO SNAP THE OLD MAN’S WITHERED LIMBS YOU DIRTY CREEP YOU SCUM and then the job was done and they left quietly to go to work and congratulated each other for their public-spiritedness and promised to meet up in the pub to discuss their heroic actions. And the old man died. And the light disappeared. And two pairs of glazed eyes watched helplessly, condemned forever to live in hell.
And they sat by their phones waiting. Always waiting for the other to call and tell them that everything they had feared was wrong and that I love you more than I have ever loved anyone else and I will never love anyone else like this and I know you will tell me that I’m wrong and that I’ll get over it but I won’t because you are my first waking thought and my last whispered words and I love you more than life itself and they did. And as the pills took effect the boy decided to phone the girl a split second before she decided to phone him and her phone rang as she was about to put in the final digit I love you and then an indefinite silence followed. Perfect and unbroken.
-------
The body lay motionless on the bed as the life force drained from it and coagulated on the soft mattress but the children’s laughter had died away with the encroaching darkness. The neon flicker from the overhanging light almost gave life to the glazed eyes of the corpse, until it too succumbed to the darkness and cut out with an audible pop that echoed off the grime smeared walls of the room. From somewhere the reassuring ticking of a clock slowed time down. And broke the silence. Reassuringly. And as all other sound died away, the clock became louder. And the corpse lay lifeless in the silent room. And the clock ticked. Since the wail of the shot ten tortuous minutes had penetrated the silence in slow, sonorous seconds.
The glass of the front door smashed and two men entered noisily, having smelt the decaying corpse before anyone else, and they noisily clattered through the house grabbing what they could and placing it noisily in a large bag that creaked and groaned under the strain of the multitude of objects it contained and then it broke and the random assortment of electrical goods and items of sentimental value smashed to the floor noisily and the men swore violently and watched as the personality of the objects they had hoped to leech evaporated in the cold air of decay and so they cursed even louder and moved towards the main prize itself: the corpse. The body sent the men into spasms of delight and they buzzed about the room in a frenzy of excitement, forgetting about their earlier loss and always moving rapidly from point to point, sent wild by the scent of the putrefaction all around them. Finally they deposited foetuses on the body and left as swiftly as they had arrived.
And the clock slowly marked each second with a steady tick. And time returned to its monotonous pace. But the clock had no silence to break, as the feeble slobbering of the foetuses filled the room while they tried to gnaw the body with their toothless gums. And then there was a great flurry of noise and Dr. Carrion flapped into the room and with an exasperated look he kicked the foetuses from off the body and slowly dragged it out of the house towards his parked car, all the while cursing the men who had got their before him and thanking Fortune for his swift arrival as he set the body upright in his car and again thanked Fortune that rigor mortiis had not set in. The motor roared into life and hummed contentedly as the car sidled out of the drive and far away.
The clock still commemorated each second until darkness finally consumed it and stopped time itself.
Dr. Carrion looked at his watch and on cue his mobile phone rang. Yes, an autopsy table to be ready when I get back… How do I know when that will be, time waits for no man and he hung up abruptly having just seen a most glorious sight to behold. He parked his car in a side alley and ran back to the seen of the fresh pile up, victims still unattended to and a sense of fatality in the air marked by the piercing horn that rang out perpetually in the half-light and as Dr. Carrion approached two men ran off into the night before he saw them and once again the doctor kicked away foetuses and cursed them.
In the silence of the car the corpse remained in a state of enforced lethargy, looking for all the world like a sleeping drunk forgotten. There was no clock in the car and the silence was perfect, unbroken, like a finished telephone call that both parties wish had never ended, and they listen to empty line and say the words they should have said before but were to scared to say I love you they say it again and again and only silence echoes back and so they each call again, desperate to knock down the walls and talk for the first time and the both hear the same engaged tone and despair that they were forgotten so quickly and they whisper I love you as a requiem to a hope now lost and consign themselves to lives of emptiness and lovelorn whispers. The silence of the car was perfect, unbroken like lost love and the darkness seeped in through the tightly closed windows.
And in the distance a passing gang of children noticed the drunken man in the car and wondered over to see if he had any money left in his pockets, which they were pleased to find he had, until suddenly the innocuous flicker of a streetlamp caused the glazed eyes to ignite for a second and the children laughed and dragged the strangely stiff drunkard out of the car and started kicking him you stupid tramp, you dumb their insults trailed off as they realised the drunk was motionless and one shouted that YOU KILLED HIM YOU IDIOTS YOU KILLED HIM NO I DIDN’T NEITHER DID I CHECK HIS PULSE they checked his pulse YOU’VE GONE AND MURDERED HIM YOU WERE KICKING HIM TOO and their voices rose into a tide of confusion as their panic increased, until they noticed the car keys were in the ignition and then they jumped in and left the drunk for someone else to deal with, while the smallest of the children offered a silent prayer to God that his parents would not find out.
The corpse lay in the middle of the footpath with nothing much to do, as corpses are prone to do, forgotten, again, dehumanised and soulless, a pathetic sight and it was not for several hours that the true silence of night could protect it, unpunctuated by the loud horns that rang out and uninterrupted by the returning revellers, who seemed to ignore the body lying in the street, but then and only then the silence returned and stayed next to the body until morning: perfect and unbroken and the girl softly sobs into her pillow as she wishes she had told him how she felt before it was too late and the boy cannot hold back the tears from not telling her what his heart told him to and in the expanses of time those same tears would one day be united in a temporary bond and they both comforted themselves that it would never have worked out anyway, while secretly knowing that they would never convince themselves otherwise and they whisper I love you to the imaginary person sleeping beside them until languid Sleep casts his spell and in sympathy allows them to meet in a dream for what few hours remain of the night, but as the alarm clocks chime simultaneously at six am neither can remember the happiest moment of their lives and instead they ponder the fathomless depths of solitude.
The tide of human life had begun to flow through the streets, except where a minor blockage halted the flow until two burly men had pushed the body to one side, where everyone could ignore it, and a priest draped it in a cheap blanket for the children’s sake you understand we can’t have bodies littering the streets it’s positively uncivilised and he punctuated the final syllable with a sharp kick to the corpses lower back before parting on his way. Later a policeman stopped to examine the blanketed body at the side of the street and he swore silently, wishing that the citizens would remember to leave them in the gutter where they belong. Some time later an old man with a grey beard flecked with crumbs stopped to examine the object in the gutter, and bending down on ancient joints he lifted back the cheap coverlet and saw the helpless corpse. He looked into the glazed eyes and saw the torment of the barely discernable soul locked away at the back, forced to watch the cruelty of the world through unblinking, unsleeping eyes, and he cried silently, before whispering to the still hearing ears, in the beginning God created light and ensured that it was good, then He divided the light from the darkness and called the light "day", and the darkness he called "night" and the evening and the morning were the first day. And as the old man spoke, the darkness receded and there was light and then the policeman returned and beat the old man savagely and called him a dirty necro people like you shouldn’t be allowed to live in a civilised society, and the people all around agreed with the policeman and joined in shouting at the DIRTY OLD MAN GET HIM HE’S EVIL and they swarmed around him and a mother spat on him and called him a PERVERT AND SOMEONE KICKED HIM AND THEN MORE PEOPLE JOINED IN AND SOON EVERYONE WAS FIGHTING TO BEAT THE OLD MAN AND THEY KICKED AND PUNCHED AND BIT and a small child cried at the violence AND THEN HIS MOTHER SLAPPED HIM AND TOLD HIM TA GO AND KICK THE FILTHY OL’ MAN’S HEAD IN AND HE DID AND THE POLICEMAN WENT TO HIS CAR AND HANDED OUT THE SPARE BATONS AND THEY ALL TOOK IT IN TURNS TO SNAP THE OLD MAN’S WITHERED LIMBS YOU DIRTY CREEP YOU SCUM and then the job was done and they left quietly to go to work and congratulated each other for their public-spiritedness and promised to meet up in the pub to discuss their heroic actions. And the old man died. And the light disappeared. And two pairs of glazed eyes watched helplessly, condemned forever to live in hell.
And they sat by their phones waiting. Always waiting for the other to call and tell them that everything they had feared was wrong and that I love you more than I have ever loved anyone else and I will never love anyone else like this and I know you will tell me that I’m wrong and that I’ll get over it but I won’t because you are my first waking thought and my last whispered words and I love you more than life itself and they did. And as the pills took effect the boy decided to phone the girl a split second before she decided to phone him and her phone rang as she was about to put in the final digit I love you and then an indefinite silence followed. Perfect and unbroken.
FilmBuff wrote:
> what is the point? "the corpse lay in a state of enforced lethargicness
> blah blah blah..."
its a load of crap, thers no real reason for your drawn
> out, lethargic piles of dull "sentences". it reminds me some what of
> Geoffry Archer, and maybe one day, maybe, you will be as great as him.
It's easy to criticise what you don't understand. You ponce.
Jeffrey Archer is a gimp.
The long sentences are deliberate. Go read a little you moron. Once you start reading different things you might understand that it's stylistic. I've read a book with a sentence that goes on for an entire chapter and then just ends and it was one of the best written, most moving things I have ever read. It was written so well that you didn't notice, you just read on and on, literally without being able to stop until you reached the tragic end. It took the author two years to write those sixteen odd pages and he said that at the end every single word was set in granite, having been refined and debated. My story took me just over an hour, and it takes a hell of a lot of practise to write well, which I haven't had. So I know my stories aren't always perfect and when I post them on here I don't mind and expect to receive some criticism
But not from gimps like you who think they are clever and really cool. One day you'll over step the mark and 90% of the people who come to this forum will report you and hopefully SR won't just ban filmbuff they'll ban whichever moron of a regular/notable that thinks they're being ever so funny.
And why don't you tell us who you are? Why don't you stop hiding behind that username and come in here as who you really are and tell people what you think "to their face". At least then we would all know who you are.
Filmbuff you are a moron, a gimp and a whole load of other insults that the filter won't let through. You don't contribute anything to these forums you just mock and knock things down. People like you are idiots. And you know what the worst thing is, you probably don't even believe what you write, you just write it because it's part of the filmbuff persona and that's why you don't just come in here under your real name and insult everyone.
Go away.
> what is the point? "the corpse lay in a state of enforced lethargicness
> blah blah blah..."
its a load of crap, thers no real reason for your drawn
> out, lethargic piles of dull "sentences". it reminds me some what of
> Geoffry Archer, and maybe one day, maybe, you will be as great as him.
It's easy to criticise what you don't understand. You ponce.
Jeffrey Archer is a gimp.
The long sentences are deliberate. Go read a little you moron. Once you start reading different things you might understand that it's stylistic. I've read a book with a sentence that goes on for an entire chapter and then just ends and it was one of the best written, most moving things I have ever read. It was written so well that you didn't notice, you just read on and on, literally without being able to stop until you reached the tragic end. It took the author two years to write those sixteen odd pages and he said that at the end every single word was set in granite, having been refined and debated. My story took me just over an hour, and it takes a hell of a lot of practise to write well, which I haven't had. So I know my stories aren't always perfect and when I post them on here I don't mind and expect to receive some criticism
But not from gimps like you who think they are clever and really cool. One day you'll over step the mark and 90% of the people who come to this forum will report you and hopefully SR won't just ban filmbuff they'll ban whichever moron of a regular/notable that thinks they're being ever so funny.
And why don't you tell us who you are? Why don't you stop hiding behind that username and come in here as who you really are and tell people what you think "to their face". At least then we would all know who you are.
Filmbuff you are a moron, a gimp and a whole load of other insults that the filter won't let through. You don't contribute anything to these forums you just mock and knock things down. People like you are idiots. And you know what the worst thing is, you probably don't even believe what you write, you just write it because it's part of the filmbuff persona and that's why you don't just come in here under your real name and insult everyone.
Go away.
Hey, I think you having a life is pointless, but I don't make sure I point it out as often as you point out your little nuggets of wit. Go die somewhere.
Great, once more. I really do admire how you use words.
These all annoy me.
Not because they aren't good - they are excellent.
But I cannot reply, so I won't.
Not because they aren't good - they are excellent.
But I cannot reply, so I won't.
If you have not read the first part you may want to for a better understanding of what I am trying to convey, but it isn't too essential.
-------
The body lay motionless on the bed as the life force drained from it and coagulated on the soft mattress but the children’s laughter had died away with the encroaching darkness. The neon flicker from the overhanging light almost gave life to the glazed eyes of the corpse, until it too succumbed to the darkness and cut out with an audible pop that echoed off the grime smeared walls of the room. From somewhere the reassuring ticking of a clock slowed time down. And broke the silence. Reassuringly. And as all other sound died away, the clock became louder. And the corpse lay lifeless in the silent room. And the clock ticked. Since the wail of the shot ten tortuous minutes had penetrated the silence in slow, sonorous seconds.
The glass of the front door smashed and two men entered noisily, having smelt the decaying corpse before anyone else, and they noisily clattered through the house grabbing what they could and placing it noisily in a large bag that creaked and groaned under the strain of the multitude of objects it contained and then it broke and the random assortment of electrical goods and items of sentimental value smashed to the floor noisily and the men swore violently and watched as the personality of the objects they had hoped to leech evaporated in the cold air of decay and so they cursed even louder and moved towards the main prize itself: the corpse. The body sent the men into spasms of delight and they buzzed about the room in a frenzy of excitement, forgetting about their earlier loss and always moving rapidly from point to point, sent wild by the scent of the putrefaction all around them. Finally they deposited foetuses on the body and left as swiftly as they had arrived.
And the clock slowly marked each second with a steady tick. And time returned to its monotonous pace. But the clock had no silence to break, as the feeble slobbering of the foetuses filled the room while they tried to gnaw the body with their toothless gums. And then there was a great flurry of noise and Dr. Carrion flapped into the room and with an exasperated look he kicked the foetuses from off the body and slowly dragged it out of the house towards his parked car, all the while cursing the men who had got their before him and thanking Fortune for his swift arrival as he set the body upright in his car and again thanked Fortune that rigor mortiis had not set in. The motor roared into life and hummed contentedly as the car sidled out of the drive and far away.
The clock still commemorated each second until darkness finally consumed it and stopped time itself.
Dr. Carrion looked at his watch and on cue his mobile phone rang. Yes, an autopsy table to be ready when I get back… How do I know when that will be, time waits for no man and he hung up abruptly having just seen a most glorious sight to behold. He parked his car in a side alley and ran back to the seen of the fresh pile up, victims still unattended to and a sense of fatality in the air marked by the piercing horn that rang out perpetually in the half-light and as Dr. Carrion approached two men ran off into the night before he saw them and once again the doctor kicked away foetuses and cursed them.
In the silence of the car the corpse remained in a state of enforced lethargy, looking for all the world like a sleeping drunk forgotten. There was no clock in the car and the silence was perfect, unbroken, like a finished telephone call that both parties wish had never ended, and they listen to empty line and say the words they should have said before but were to scared to say I love you they say it again and again and only silence echoes back and so they each call again, desperate to knock down the walls and talk for the first time and the both hear the same engaged tone and despair that they were forgotten so quickly and they whisper I love you as a requiem to a hope now lost and consign themselves to lives of emptiness and lovelorn whispers. The silence of the car was perfect, unbroken like lost love and the darkness seeped in through the tightly closed windows.
And in the distance a passing gang of children noticed the drunken man in the car and wondered over to see if he had any money left in his pockets, which they were pleased to find he had, until suddenly the innocuous flicker of a streetlamp caused the glazed eyes to ignite for a second and the children laughed and dragged the strangely stiff drunkard out of the car and started kicking him you stupid tramp, you dumb their insults trailed off as they realised the drunk was motionless and one shouted that YOU KILLED HIM YOU IDIOTS YOU KILLED HIM NO I DIDN’T NEITHER DID I CHECK HIS PULSE they checked his pulse YOU’VE GONE AND MURDERED HIM YOU WERE KICKING HIM TOO and their voices rose into a tide of confusion as their panic increased, until they noticed the car keys were in the ignition and then they jumped in and left the drunk for someone else to deal with, while the smallest of the children offered a silent prayer to God that his parents would not find out.
The corpse lay in the middle of the footpath with nothing much to do, as corpses are prone to do, forgotten, again, dehumanised and soulless, a pathetic sight and it was not for several hours that the true silence of night could protect it, unpunctuated by the loud horns that rang out and uninterrupted by the returning revellers, who seemed to ignore the body lying in the street, but then and only then the silence returned and stayed next to the body until morning: perfect and unbroken and the girl softly sobs into her pillow as she wishes she had told him how she felt before it was too late and the boy cannot hold back the tears from not telling her what his heart told him to and in the expanses of time those same tears would one day be united in a temporary bond and they both comforted themselves that it would never have worked out anyway, while secretly knowing that they would never convince themselves otherwise and they whisper I love you to the imaginary person sleeping beside them until languid Sleep casts his spell and in sympathy allows them to meet in a dream for what few hours remain of the night, but as the alarm clocks chime simultaneously at six am neither can remember the happiest moment of their lives and instead they ponder the fathomless depths of solitude.
The tide of human life had begun to flow through the streets, except where a minor blockage halted the flow until two burly men had pushed the body to one side, where everyone could ignore it, and a priest draped it in a cheap blanket for the children’s sake you understand we can’t have bodies littering the streets it’s positively uncivilised and he punctuated the final syllable with a sharp kick to the corpses lower back before parting on his way. Later a policeman stopped to examine the blanketed body at the side of the street and he swore silently, wishing that the citizens would remember to leave them in the gutter where they belong. Some time later an old man with a grey beard flecked with crumbs stopped to examine the object in the gutter, and bending down on ancient joints he lifted back the cheap coverlet and saw the helpless corpse. He looked into the glazed eyes and saw the torment of the barely discernable soul locked away at the back, forced to watch the cruelty of the world through unblinking, unsleeping eyes, and he cried silently, before whispering to the still hearing ears, in the beginning God created light and ensured that it was good, then He divided the light from the darkness and called the light "day", and the darkness he called "night" and the evening and the morning were the first day. And as the old man spoke, the darkness receded and there was light and then the policeman returned and beat the old man savagely and called him a dirty necro people like you shouldn’t be allowed to live in a civilised society, and the people all around agreed with the policeman and joined in shouting at the DIRTY OLD MAN GET HIM HE’S EVIL and they swarmed around him and a mother spat on him and called him a PERVERT AND SOMEONE KICKED HIM AND THEN MORE PEOPLE JOINED IN AND SOON EVERYONE WAS FIGHTING TO BEAT THE OLD MAN AND THEY KICKED AND PUNCHED AND BIT and a small child cried at the violence AND THEN HIS MOTHER SLAPPED HIM AND TOLD HIM TA GO AND KICK THE FILTHY OL’ MAN’S HEAD IN AND HE DID AND THE POLICEMAN WENT TO HIS CAR AND HANDED OUT THE SPARE BATONS AND THEY ALL TOOK IT IN TURNS TO SNAP THE OLD MAN’S WITHERED LIMBS YOU DIRTY CREEP YOU SCUM and then the job was done and they left quietly to go to work and congratulated each other for their public-spiritedness and promised to meet up in the pub to discuss their heroic actions. And the old man died. And the light disappeared. And two pairs of glazed eyes watched helplessly, condemned forever to live in hell.
And they sat by their phones waiting. Always waiting for the other to call and tell them that everything they had feared was wrong and that I love you more than I have ever loved anyone else and I will never love anyone else like this and I know you will tell me that I’m wrong and that I’ll get over it but I won’t because you are my first waking thought and my last whispered words and I love you more than life itself and they did. And as the pills took effect the boy decided to phone the girl a split second before she decided to phone him and her phone rang as she was about to put in the final digit I love you and then an indefinite silence followed. Perfect and unbroken.
-------
The body lay motionless on the bed as the life force drained from it and coagulated on the soft mattress but the children’s laughter had died away with the encroaching darkness. The neon flicker from the overhanging light almost gave life to the glazed eyes of the corpse, until it too succumbed to the darkness and cut out with an audible pop that echoed off the grime smeared walls of the room. From somewhere the reassuring ticking of a clock slowed time down. And broke the silence. Reassuringly. And as all other sound died away, the clock became louder. And the corpse lay lifeless in the silent room. And the clock ticked. Since the wail of the shot ten tortuous minutes had penetrated the silence in slow, sonorous seconds.
The glass of the front door smashed and two men entered noisily, having smelt the decaying corpse before anyone else, and they noisily clattered through the house grabbing what they could and placing it noisily in a large bag that creaked and groaned under the strain of the multitude of objects it contained and then it broke and the random assortment of electrical goods and items of sentimental value smashed to the floor noisily and the men swore violently and watched as the personality of the objects they had hoped to leech evaporated in the cold air of decay and so they cursed even louder and moved towards the main prize itself: the corpse. The body sent the men into spasms of delight and they buzzed about the room in a frenzy of excitement, forgetting about their earlier loss and always moving rapidly from point to point, sent wild by the scent of the putrefaction all around them. Finally they deposited foetuses on the body and left as swiftly as they had arrived.
And the clock slowly marked each second with a steady tick. And time returned to its monotonous pace. But the clock had no silence to break, as the feeble slobbering of the foetuses filled the room while they tried to gnaw the body with their toothless gums. And then there was a great flurry of noise and Dr. Carrion flapped into the room and with an exasperated look he kicked the foetuses from off the body and slowly dragged it out of the house towards his parked car, all the while cursing the men who had got their before him and thanking Fortune for his swift arrival as he set the body upright in his car and again thanked Fortune that rigor mortiis had not set in. The motor roared into life and hummed contentedly as the car sidled out of the drive and far away.
The clock still commemorated each second until darkness finally consumed it and stopped time itself.
Dr. Carrion looked at his watch and on cue his mobile phone rang. Yes, an autopsy table to be ready when I get back… How do I know when that will be, time waits for no man and he hung up abruptly having just seen a most glorious sight to behold. He parked his car in a side alley and ran back to the seen of the fresh pile up, victims still unattended to and a sense of fatality in the air marked by the piercing horn that rang out perpetually in the half-light and as Dr. Carrion approached two men ran off into the night before he saw them and once again the doctor kicked away foetuses and cursed them.
In the silence of the car the corpse remained in a state of enforced lethargy, looking for all the world like a sleeping drunk forgotten. There was no clock in the car and the silence was perfect, unbroken, like a finished telephone call that both parties wish had never ended, and they listen to empty line and say the words they should have said before but were to scared to say I love you they say it again and again and only silence echoes back and so they each call again, desperate to knock down the walls and talk for the first time and the both hear the same engaged tone and despair that they were forgotten so quickly and they whisper I love you as a requiem to a hope now lost and consign themselves to lives of emptiness and lovelorn whispers. The silence of the car was perfect, unbroken like lost love and the darkness seeped in through the tightly closed windows.
And in the distance a passing gang of children noticed the drunken man in the car and wondered over to see if he had any money left in his pockets, which they were pleased to find he had, until suddenly the innocuous flicker of a streetlamp caused the glazed eyes to ignite for a second and the children laughed and dragged the strangely stiff drunkard out of the car and started kicking him you stupid tramp, you dumb their insults trailed off as they realised the drunk was motionless and one shouted that YOU KILLED HIM YOU IDIOTS YOU KILLED HIM NO I DIDN’T NEITHER DID I CHECK HIS PULSE they checked his pulse YOU’VE GONE AND MURDERED HIM YOU WERE KICKING HIM TOO and their voices rose into a tide of confusion as their panic increased, until they noticed the car keys were in the ignition and then they jumped in and left the drunk for someone else to deal with, while the smallest of the children offered a silent prayer to God that his parents would not find out.
The corpse lay in the middle of the footpath with nothing much to do, as corpses are prone to do, forgotten, again, dehumanised and soulless, a pathetic sight and it was not for several hours that the true silence of night could protect it, unpunctuated by the loud horns that rang out and uninterrupted by the returning revellers, who seemed to ignore the body lying in the street, but then and only then the silence returned and stayed next to the body until morning: perfect and unbroken and the girl softly sobs into her pillow as she wishes she had told him how she felt before it was too late and the boy cannot hold back the tears from not telling her what his heart told him to and in the expanses of time those same tears would one day be united in a temporary bond and they both comforted themselves that it would never have worked out anyway, while secretly knowing that they would never convince themselves otherwise and they whisper I love you to the imaginary person sleeping beside them until languid Sleep casts his spell and in sympathy allows them to meet in a dream for what few hours remain of the night, but as the alarm clocks chime simultaneously at six am neither can remember the happiest moment of their lives and instead they ponder the fathomless depths of solitude.
The tide of human life had begun to flow through the streets, except where a minor blockage halted the flow until two burly men had pushed the body to one side, where everyone could ignore it, and a priest draped it in a cheap blanket for the children’s sake you understand we can’t have bodies littering the streets it’s positively uncivilised and he punctuated the final syllable with a sharp kick to the corpses lower back before parting on his way. Later a policeman stopped to examine the blanketed body at the side of the street and he swore silently, wishing that the citizens would remember to leave them in the gutter where they belong. Some time later an old man with a grey beard flecked with crumbs stopped to examine the object in the gutter, and bending down on ancient joints he lifted back the cheap coverlet and saw the helpless corpse. He looked into the glazed eyes and saw the torment of the barely discernable soul locked away at the back, forced to watch the cruelty of the world through unblinking, unsleeping eyes, and he cried silently, before whispering to the still hearing ears, in the beginning God created light and ensured that it was good, then He divided the light from the darkness and called the light "day", and the darkness he called "night" and the evening and the morning were the first day. And as the old man spoke, the darkness receded and there was light and then the policeman returned and beat the old man savagely and called him a dirty necro people like you shouldn’t be allowed to live in a civilised society, and the people all around agreed with the policeman and joined in shouting at the DIRTY OLD MAN GET HIM HE’S EVIL and they swarmed around him and a mother spat on him and called him a PERVERT AND SOMEONE KICKED HIM AND THEN MORE PEOPLE JOINED IN AND SOON EVERYONE WAS FIGHTING TO BEAT THE OLD MAN AND THEY KICKED AND PUNCHED AND BIT and a small child cried at the violence AND THEN HIS MOTHER SLAPPED HIM AND TOLD HIM TA GO AND KICK THE FILTHY OL’ MAN’S HEAD IN AND HE DID AND THE POLICEMAN WENT TO HIS CAR AND HANDED OUT THE SPARE BATONS AND THEY ALL TOOK IT IN TURNS TO SNAP THE OLD MAN’S WITHERED LIMBS YOU DIRTY CREEP YOU SCUM and then the job was done and they left quietly to go to work and congratulated each other for their public-spiritedness and promised to meet up in the pub to discuss their heroic actions. And the old man died. And the light disappeared. And two pairs of glazed eyes watched helplessly, condemned forever to live in hell.
And they sat by their phones waiting. Always waiting for the other to call and tell them that everything they had feared was wrong and that I love you more than I have ever loved anyone else and I will never love anyone else like this and I know you will tell me that I’m wrong and that I’ll get over it but I won’t because you are my first waking thought and my last whispered words and I love you more than life itself and they did. And as the pills took effect the boy decided to phone the girl a split second before she decided to phone him and her phone rang as she was about to put in the final digit I love you and then an indefinite silence followed. Perfect and unbroken.