This is one of the most difficult stories I've every tried to write. I don't think I've managed to pull it off, and I doubt that I ever will, but I still like it.

Another mind bender. This one is the result of a vivid, movie-like dream I had (possibly it's a mistake to put your dreams into words).

It's extremely confusing if you're not paying attention (and maybe even if you are), which is very likely its fatal flaw.

Let me know if you like it...

Content warning:Death, drugs, and other nasty stuff. Maybe some swearing.

Black Velvet

Immobility is death.

A gust of foetid air precedes the razor shock of the train slicing alongside the platform. Urgency crams me against the too close smells of foreign flesh. An old woman’s bag, disfigured with oranges, presses into me like small, hard breasts.

There’s this red wind whipping around her.

Slumped in a corner of the carriage, the other passengers shun me, as though I reek of death. My hands stutter towards my pocket to pat the wad of plastic, and the last precious crystal of Black Velvet.

A red scarf billows up and settles around her face like a gauze hood.

I’m escaping from him. Tall and lily white, dressed in a pale, crumpled suit. I remember him bending over the body, fossicking her flesh. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I know they were cadaverous and uncaring.

The squeal of metal on metal brings the train to a stop. The doors split open, and people spill out onto Kings Cross Station, marching or racing to their fate.

There’s five crystals of Black Velvet taped to the inside of her thigh.

I lag behind. Running from the implications of her death, but afraid of what lies before me. They’ll come for me now.

She’s lying there on the table in the doctor’s surgery, with all the smells of sanitised death lingering in the clean corners.

Just help her, please…

At the top of the stairs the misery of night awaits. I pass a newsstand. The golden glow of Hollywood, diets and royal scandal fills me with the sudden warmth of mundanity. The normalcy of prime time, K-mart and Chinese takeaways on Sunday nights. All the things I shunned, not wanting to be like my parents.

The newsstand guy gives me a hostile look and I lurk away into the darkness.

She was there, a witness to everything he did. She stood to one side, wrapped in a red cape with a hood. And when it was over the White Man took her by the hand and dragged her away.

The doctor demanded money, explanations.

They followed her, I told him. But she couldn’t tell them anything.

She’s cold as death. Part of her red cloak is draped around her wrist like blood, the rest drips and puddles on the floor.

Teeth-marks of needles between the doctor’s fingers. He flung me a look of fury interlaced with fear. What the fuck are we going to do?

Death defiles her, makes her human, reduces her gentle, trusting beauty to meat.

The doctor hovered nearby as the White Man placed the crystal in the tiny silver bowl. A drop of water swallowed the speck, suddenly magnifying it. Then the prolonged, painful rasping, and finally the whoosh of his lighter.

It’s beginning to rain, slanting and grey. I shelter in a doorway, lit on one side by neon signs proclaiming Sex, Sex, Sex. My hands are trembling and the call of Black Velvet is strong, like a wire hooked into my nervous system.

She’s his lover. Trusting and naïve, she agrees to be a mule for this run. Who would suspect her? She’s blind.

Did they find her? Or did he have no choice? Surely he had no choice? Perhaps, being blind, her death was inevitable.

All deaths are inevitable, she says, leaning forward and kissing me.

Of course she couldn’t see the White Man to describe him, even if she was caught. Which was why he’d used her.

I fumble a cigarette and lighter from my pocket. The damn thing won’t work and rasps for half a minute before I manage a weak orange flame. My hand trembles as the hooks of Black Velvet sink deeper.

She lies back on the bed, opens her arms wide, spreads her legs. She is naked but for the cloak tangled about her wrist like blood. Jesus on the cross, lamb to the slaughter.

There’s no place for me in this grease-wet city. Except the cop station. Or Rehab. But it’s too late for either. There’s a thorn in my back, severing my spinal cord, and any minute now my bowels will split open like overripe fruit.

I catch a glimpse of a tall man in a white suit. The man looks at me. An icy fist seizes my heart. But he looks sick and paler than usual. Half dead. His hair drowned by the rain. The furtive look of a man cornered by the truth and his past.

I love you, she tells me.

I raise my hand to my face. I trace the very whiteness of my skin. The long beak of a nose and thin lips. I look down at the sag of pale pants stained by the mindless running, and sleeping in garbage.

Describe the water, she says curling against my side. And I tell her of the shimmer like glass beads, the depths like iced water and the feather-soft foam fringing the breakers.

I haven’t eaten in two days, and only bile hurls up my throat and dribbles into the gutter. The rain bumps a crushed coke can, and a congealed mat of rubbish against my shoe.

I wipe my hand across my mouth, the lily-white hand that held her when she died. The pale fingers that ripped the surgical tape from her cold thigh.

I tilt my face up to the dirty sky. Drizzle pours into my fish eyes. I taste rain, and drink in the last of life. I reach into my pocket and hold the small plastic bag up to the pink stutter of neon behind me. A tiny crystal, dark as midnight. I tip it into my hand, watch it claimed by the rain.

Then I lie down, where they will find me frozen in regret, unable to run anymore.

Of course I will do this for you, she says, and kisses me.