Let's Work Out!

Put some music on and get our imaginary sweat on.

A leopard pouncing on you – yellow and white. Orange eyes! A rose bush in bloom: smell the heady perfume of rose petals after the rain. Can you hear the thunder as it moves off across the plain?

There’s a funny taste in your mouth like sweet metal, a kind of key lime pie flavour mixed with iron filings. Look down: there’s blood in the spaces between your fingers. Warm to the touch. The feeling spreads through you, cold as ice, past down your pelvis, drips into your boots.

Feels like you’re sloshing through three feet of water. Hard to get your feet out. Muddy, thick and gloopy. Feels like many hands trying to drag you down out of the cool calm sunlight into the fiery depths of your very own personal hell-chamber.

Creak goes the door on its rusty-ass hinges. ‘Come in,’ says a voice you thought you’d forgot. Creeaaaaak-wham goes the door behind you and with a sinking-heart feeling you realise you’re trapped. What now? What next? What can you possibly do?

A gun. A sword. A broken branch to grip and, bleeding or not, staggering or not, dying or not, you pray to your gods and rush at the beast, standing there stooping, hunched and quivering, all claws and knives and sulphurous fumes like toxic clouds of nuclear waste.

And, at the very moment of unity, where two forms become one and the shadows on the wall of the cave enjoin like amoebae, it crosses your mind that there is no Devil, no Heaven nor Hell, just a hand, a pen, and two eyes to dream with.