‘She lights a cigarette she shouldn’t smoke. It gets stuck to her lip and rips a bit of skin off. Cloudy snapshots of last night’s dreams hover through her mind, but never quite materialise. She wants to remember but knows it brings no comfort, only confirmation of the dark places ahead. Yet another man hacks and spits as he passes her window. She takes it personally. It’s disgusting.
Here comes the black dog stalking. The shadow poised above her head, the salivated drip, a familiar scent of shit, and the effortless drift into oblivion where even sorrow flees…’
‘…Why don’t we just enjoy the birds today ey?’ I say, but the old fart ignores me and continues,
‘Anyway’, he drawls, like he’s been rudely interrupted, ‘She drives to the river with a bottle of booze and a length of rope. We’re entering the dead zone, where she hangs from a tree someone else planted. Suspended in time and space. Numbed, but fully aware of her miserable state. Alone with the accuser, her long-time companion, but never her counterpart. She surrenders to a woeful quiescence as maggoty thoughts burrow deep into the arsehole of her soul…’
‘Arsehole of her soul?… You must be fucking kidding mate’ I say. The professor laughs and continues,
’Eat shit you filthy demiurge she says, this is all your fault, if I die you die too. And the demiurge replies, There’ll be no dying today! Not today my daughter, my wizened little one, forged from the eons with a line you can follow all the way to a sunburst and further. And why stop there? You are after all a child of chaos. Your most distant ancestor is an explosion, whose bits have not stop spinning. Relax. Take your time. It ends slowly with a whimper. You know the man was right. REJOICE!’ he shouts, jerking his arms skywards, and startling the Indian Mynas that are fighting over half a ham sandwich he’s thrown to the ground.
‘You’re an arrow of time. The passage of conscious matter through space, observing itself and its environment. What more do you fucking want? She fights her mental torpor, and although she sulks she has to admit she’s being ungrateful. Then the demiurge adds, And the underlying principle of matter is, and always has been, the requisite descent of organised matter into chaos and disorder. See for yourself, peer through the veil. She looks through the mist and into the abyss. She could not deny it. The shadow was right, why fear it. Why fear how it is. So the rope loosens, the fog lifts, she hears the birds that twitter. Fuck it she says, if the birds can rise automatically each day until they don’t, so can I’
‘Oh good, she lives happily ever after then’ I say.
‘God No!’ the old rascal replies. ‘She eventually hangs herself. She drinks her bottle of expensive scotch under a tree by the river and leans forward, drunk as a skunk, with one end of a rope tied to a branch and the other end ‘round her neck. Leans forward. Can’t feel a thing. Just passes out and can’t lean back again. A passing kayaker finds her at 5 am next morning. She looks like a mannequin at first, so still and pale that the colour of her skin bleeds into the grey of her tracksuit.’
‘That’s horrible’ I murmur but loud enough to hear.
‘Not for her though, she didn’t feel a thing. It is said she’s still there on the river. Still sitting under the tree with the full moon shining. String theory see. Still drinking expensive scotch’, and he shakes his head up and down and gives me a cheeky wink.
‘What made her do it?’
‘It was the fatal combination of chronic despair and a moment of courage’
Rozee Cutrone ©
Benighted © 
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