Electricity

1. I GOT UP and opened the door. The world outside seemed real, so I stepped into it. The resolution was amazing, the framerate too. I took a few steps - the ground held. 

2. THERE WAS ELECTRICITY inside the house, which pulled on me like gravity. Why leave the house, when all the stories in the world are available to you through the magic of electricity? I left anyway. Gravity is addictive but so is escape velocity.

3. THE SKY WAS radiant grey with a jagged white smirk, probably because from the looks of things it had pissed all over everything while I was asleep. Pretty childish really, but what can you say to the sky? Anyway, sky-piss cleans the dust off everything and if you drink it it cleanses you too. Some places it was traditional that the local visionary would eat something hallucinogenic and everyone else would drink their piss and partake of their visions, and the sky is the ultimate visionary, no? She sees everything. So it follows that drinking that stuff lets you in on what the sky sees.

4. I WALKED TO the creek and then ran up the path beside it. Everything was wet there too, everything drunk on sky-piss. The trees swayed gently side-to-side like Woodstock hippies. The grass lay on the ground in a wet stupor. We let each other be.

5. THERE WERE TALL electricity pylons running up the creek like me. They looked like wire-frame drawings of church spires, which made sense: this all happened in 2014 when electricity was some kind of religion. Because why leave the house? Why not stay home and commune with electricity &c &c.

6. THE CLOCK HAD fallen off one of these spires and turned into a football field. I could tell it was a clock because when I ran past it the other day there was a runner turning slow regular circles around it like a second-hand. The hours and minutes had turned into seven humans and seven dogs. The humans chatted and swayed affably like trees drunk on sky-piss. The dogs ran happily around like quantum weirdness. Today time had apparently stopped-

7.

8. -BECAUSE THE FIELD was just ecstatic grass, staring wetly up at the sky. Anyway it was fine with me if time stopped a bit, because this was 2014. In 2014 we'd invented this demon called climate change, and it was freaking me out. It was like a fist around the throat of my unborn daughter. I wanted to unclench that fist even a little but I had to talk other people into it too. This was a problem because I'd woken up in a death-cult: everyone had agreed secretly that we were going to kill ourselves and now no-one wanted to talk about it. They just kept smiling like amusement park clowns. It was creeping me out.

(I kept running.)

9. AND SINCE IT was all a trajectory, a certain movement through time, time stopping suited me just fine. It gave me a moment to think. I had this inkling there were gaps in how the death cult operated, a thermal exhaust port on the death star a skywalker could fly down, and that language had something to do with it. I thought if you could just find the right words they'd be like a bomb thrown down to the heart of the death star and the whole thing could be blown open.

10. THE HOLY SKY got cheeky and started pissing on me. I took it like a benediction, wet drops blatting on my red rainjacket. The trick was to cast a spell, that's what it was. There were demons all through us, they'd colonised us, turned us against ourselves. The trick was to shake the demons up but it was delicate. We had the guilt of an occupied people. If you said things wrong people thought you were attacking them, trying to make them feel bad, and they hardened against you and defended their right to die and the spell was wasted.

11. I TURNED FOR home, back where the electricity was, where I am now, typing. Electricity is good but it's good to remember your family name, and that's easier outside. Your family name is LIFE and so is mine. Our family is four billion years old. It made us. Thanks LIFE! You're the best. I am too small to find the spell but you are not. I am your sometimes-humble servant, drunk on the glowing world. Speak through me. X