Fiction: Desire is for the Brave

By Mark McConville

Can we make it to the echelons of safety? Or will everything be suppressed and will everything be dashed rapidly without a thought?

The lingering feeling of dread hangs around here, like dirty washing, like stale smoke. Your phone has no signal, and we’re lost in ourselves. Drugs, they don’t work, and every pore has opened, dripping sweat. We’re longing for exile, hungry for a place to rest easy, but the trains have been cancelled, and there’s no transport to take us from this swamp of dirt and decay.

Forever lost, we’ve become desensitised to being pushed aside, because we fell into the propulsion that drugs bring. We search for clarity in such a foggy world, and we try to seek optimism even in this negative space.

You trap a fly in your hand. How did you do that? You’re amazing to me in this unfashionable, one bedroom squalor, by pushing the boundaries when the drugs can’t. Preparing for power to run out, you take the candle and light it, letting it glow and radiate in our unclean, unspontaneous, universe.

I love you, I do, as we’re strung together like two bad apples, festering here, absorbing the last of the wine. And then it goes, the power, the electrical volts have stopped in the midst of our colliding love. We can't see each other much now. The darkness offers its gloom, the emptiness in our stomachs begins to create an obstacle in our minds.

The freezer will defrost, but there’s no food to spoil. The ice will melt over the encrusted floor, and it may make the floor resemble an immaculate base for a while. We begin to feel the chill now, and we lay under paper-thin covers, trying to warm our trembling bodies. Over on the messy table is some acid, enough to put us under a spell that will most certainly fire up the heat in an illusive state.

I grab it like a fiend, like a loveless junkie. You smile for the first time in hours, and you let me put the tab on your tongue. This arresting drug might go either way. It might ease us into a euphoric, vibrant world, where we feel a heat like we’ve never felt before, or we could descend into a tricky, broken atmosphere where ghouls and ghosts posses us, snapping at our unarmoured bodies.

This is it, though, the moment, the near conclusion to our day. We eagerly lie down and let the whirlwinds command us. In this cold, we take on reality, bracing the two worlds. One world can be frightening, the other idyllic. Forcing through, I fall into a broken landscape, and untrustworthy one eyed beasts run towards me, pushing through me, and cutting me away from you.

‘’Desire is for the brave’’ a voice echoes in my ear.

I can’t see you now. My eyes have been shrouded by darkness and smog so strong it reminds me of an industrial wasteland from my childhood.

‘’She’s dead and you’re starting to crash’’

My movements. My body it feels weighed down. I see smashed bodies levitating around me like they’re being attracted to the depths of terror. Spooked and yearning to be released, your face comes into frame, a face so blue, and eyes lacking emotion.

‘’Let me go’’

‘’Let you go, you deserve to be in this world forever’’

That voice crackles and then reverberates. Enough is enough, I want out….

‘’Open your eyes’’

My eyes suddenly open, and beside me you lay. I tremble in this unbearable cold.

It should have been me……

Mark McConville is a freelance music journalist from Scotland who has written for many online and print publications. He also likes to write dark fiction.