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.