The Comets Decide: Chapter 6 - Asylum

Louis Biggs didn't want to think any more. At this point, with the sky paling and the birds chirping their tired evening songs, he just wanted his mind to close down. He was looking for an off switch to pull; a lever in his skull that turns everything black and sweeps everything downstream.

It felt as though the river of thought flowing from his consciousness was drowning any perspective he once had and his mind was gasping just to stay alive. Where once he had enjoyed control or at least the illusion of it, now its motions and currents seemed strange and threatening.

The images of his reflection darted this way and that, all disturbed and distorted under a torrent of menace; a shadow of the comets that were crowding his sky.

He found himself glaring at the patterns in a leaf, into its veins and intricacies; he came to imagine himself as a leaf - to flutter in the wind, extend from a tree, be eaten by bugs, absorb sunlight in the day and become dewy by night; to grow and be fed and to feed; to die in shortening days, fall from a branch and be driven by the wind; to coalesce with the dirt and break down into the soil that feeds the tree.

For a moment Louis knew what it was like to be a leaf.

But then he thought what idiocy it was to be a man becoming a leaf and the image shattered around him and he slipped under the surface of his rushing torrent.

He seized himself, curling his shoulders up to his ears and breathing out in a slow motion of defiance against chaotic thought. This time, he became the little deer he could see some distance away, tentatively grazing beside an artificial lake.

But being a deer carried too much stress - he constantly feared for his life and swivelled his head so much so often he got dizzy. Deer are fickle and run in panic, sprinting for a safety that never really exists.

"All right" he said to his hands; "I'll be your damn comet".

His head thrown back, he gazed into the sky; motionlessly careening through space, dipped in star dust like it was wet paint and propelled by inertia and attraction; his body at absolute zero degrees and disintegrating; he was more than just the dying remnant of an unborn star; he was destruction and creation and being in balance; lighting the void briefly and eternally; absolutely no criteria to satisfy, no observer to entertain - what is a 'good' comet, anyway? - like the leaf became soil, so the comet became life through death and Louis became light and plunged into darkness.

An hour passed and the sun fell. Louis Biggs woke from the doze and stood to walk home, turning to examine the flattened grasses where he had sat, propped up by a beech tree, whose trunk could have been carved for his back and head to slumber against. He could hear the brook at the bottom of the bank babbling and the occasional springtime cricket call.

For a moment he paused, then he sat down and listened until, once again, he fell asleep.

The Comets Decide: Chapter 5 - The Comets Decide

What does it say about a household that all the locks are controlled from a panel under daddy's desk?

Shannon Insane Soldier used to come home and beat his wife half to death. It happened with such regularity that it was almost ritualistic, though it never lost the sense of wild chaotic fury that terrified the poor woman.

Rituals have a stately progress: they are considered and controlled. Shannon Insane Soldier's nightly ceremony was anything but.

After leaving his wife in a bloody mess, he would swagger over to the nearest wall and pound a cubed inch of brick off it.

"Keeps me sharp" he'd mutter, cradling the fragments of wall in his shirt to carry outside.

He would then fasten them to the inner wall of his Doomsday Bunker, with the aid of super glue, accompanied by a justified sense of self-hatred.

There's only a finite number of times you can take a cubed inch of brick out of a wall until the wall begins to look threadbare; cracks appear, drops of moisture seep through in the rain, the bitter smell of mould infests the home and heat just seems to disappear into the night.

He knew, his wife knew and the children knew that it was only a matter of time until he brought the whole structure down around his and everybody else's ears.

Why ears, anyway? What kind of sense does that make? What's so special about the ears that they should be singled out as that particular physical attribute threatened by structural collapse? These were the thoughts running through his head as his bloody fists pounded the wall of his kitchen one sunny afternoon in late spring.

Tiny fragments of brick mixed with mortar mixed with blood fell to the floor as the rhythmic pounding lulled Mrs. Insane Soldier between unconsciousness and the awful reality of her life. Her husband had brutalized her and had then dragged her with him to watch as he repeatedly punched at the structural walls of their home.

"Don't marry a guy call 'Insane Soldier'" Her mother had told her "Seriously, it doesn't sound like a good omen"

"I don't care, my life is meaningless, I may as well get beaten up everyday by a seething mass of violent hatred for the rest of it. We'll scar our children in all sorts of ways and maybe, when they grow up, they'll be sad for me." She might have said that. Of course, she didn't:

"You don't care about me! You're just jealous! Leave me alone!".

And the doors. Let me get back to the doors.

At that moment they were locked from the control panel under the desk, turned on its side in the corner of daddy's den. Today, like every other day, Shannon Insane Soldier was angry and wanted everybody to suffer for it.

The children (son Captain, 11 and daughter Leotard, 9) had been slapped about a bit and thrown into their room, where they huddled together, listening first to their mother take a few haymakers for the team (as Captain explained to Leotard, they were a team) then the walls buckling under the constant pounding of their father's fists.

"One day" said Captain "the house will fall over. Daddy wants us to be safe, so he keeps us locked in here. We're safe." Captain knew he was lying, but wanted Leotard to believe it like he used to.

The children couldn't see the sky because there were metal shutters that dropped over the windows when the doors were locked. Neither could Mrs. Insane Soldier see the sky, as she had blacked out.

They couldn't see the comets falling and, even if they could, they wouldn't have known what it meant.

After all, I couldn't tell you what it meant, and it's coming out of my mind.

Shannon caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. He thought for moment that the wall was coming down and prepared himself to be crushed by the almighty weight of an entire building.

He had often thought that the house coming down on him would be like getting hit by a train, only that a train would pass by and you'd only get hit by it once. But if a house fell on you it would be in the process of hitting you until the firemen find your mangled corpse.

Shannon wanted it to fall. It would make him the only man capable of single-handedly knocking over a house built of bricks and mortar.

He'd be known on internet forums everywhere as Bigger Bad Wolf, who had killed his wife, his children and himself in a glorious act of manual demolition. He'd never be forgotten. He would even trend on twitter for a while.

But the building didn't collapse.

A rock had smashed through the metal shutter and lay smouldering on the floor. Shannon wandered over to it, and bent down to pick it up - it was burning hot to the touch and he recoiled as another rock came searing through the shutter, opening a larger aperture in it and revealing, behind it, a dark spot in the sky.

Shannon dumbly squinted at the comets as they fell. "But" he squealed "any idiot can get hit by a comet".

He was proven right instantly.

One after the other they came pouring down on him. The first one struck his crotch, the second his forehead, then his little toe.

He shrieked and fell, angry and embarrassed at the awfully painful, but not yet deadly, peppering he was receiving.

Suddenly, his penis had been ripped out of its socket: does a penis even have a socket? Whatever the case, juices that defy description were flowing from a wound where his penis used to be, visible through his torn trouser crotch.

He started to cry.

One flaming rock severed the bicep in his right arm, and another the left. He was lying prostrate, unable to lift his hands to protect himself, unable to move or even to strike at the sky uselessly.

As abruptly as they came, the red hot chunks of astral matter stopped falling on the now severely debilitated, pitiable Shannon Insane Soldier.

Later, when Mrs. Insane Soldier went to her husband's desk and freed their children, the mother and her children hugged for a long time.

Then they decided to get a rescue dog. They settled on a Cocker Spaniel-Collie cross they saw in a nearby sanctuary. They called him 'Harald' and he was so happy and proud to be trotting alongside Captain and Leotard as they made their way from the car back into their home.

Shannon had regained consciousness by this point, but was still lying in a pool of his own juices. The dog ran over to him, licking bits of him clean. Captain was happy; Leotard was happy; their mother was happy, the dog was happy when he found Shannon's severed penis and had something to chew on, Shannon threw up; they were a team.

Leotard looked quizzical, like she was struggling to make sense of something. She was remembering a school lesson and the words of a priest. They had meant very little to her at the time, but now they seemed more apt.

Eventually she asked: "Mummy, did God judge daddy?"

"No." She replied: "The Comets Decide."

The Comets Decide: Chapter 4 - Prayer (Everybody Prays)

I like to walk the streets with a bottle of wine in each hand: one to throw and the other for dough.

That's for if the bastards try anything.

My Syrian friends at Smokemart do two for five pounds on the Italian red and I take advantage of their generous offer.

Call me paranoid, but I can't help it: I think of how I'm going to make it three hundred yards to my home without some troupe of thieves and drunks accosting me for my wares.

It's worse if I've picked up bread and milk and am making a whole round trip or maybe it's a night for take out pizza and a movie, which complicates matters in the case of emergency self defence (though not insurmountably - I'd just drop the bags and guard it all like a starving mother).

But - listen - the comets are coming, so damn the bastards.

Just look up and you'll see salvation in the dark patches where on a clear night you can see nothing - no stars, no wisp of cloud, no giant moths lost on their journey to a sun that has once again abandoned them, spreading softening red light between lovestruck couples and eternity - just nothing.

That's how you know they're on their way, in those gaps of black on an otherwise bright starry night.

No one will tell you because it'll scare you out of your skin and then you'll have bones draped in Addidas at every shop counter and no legal tender will get you those cigarettes.

Is it the self-service machines? A government initiative to cope with the time when the streets and stores will look like osseological lecture halls.

Tonight, so far, I've got the weapon wine home and I've drunk it down and, whilst swimming in confusion, I notice the black patches of night from my window before dropping to a half sleep and dreaming only of falling from impossibly high precipices.

I think that it's the end of the night but the radio keeps up its whispering the whole night through and, fading in and out, I make out a thousand comets between the stars and I laugh.

I wrote a poem:

I hope that if there is
some laughing God
who looks upon this earth
for his amusement
A man would one day look back at him
And laugh the same laugh

The cool wind comes bustling through the window, the radio crackles and sings, a thousand comets crowd my night sky and I can't tell if I'm dreaming at all.