Pomegranate Juice
an excerpt

Each morning is darker than the one before. Under this dim sky the building seems to have been made, not from whitewashed bricks and mortar, but from a plasma that glows like a creature of the deep sea. My fairy castle. Emmerging through the gloom of a cold October morning, it is a half submerged ruin; like the smoke that clears around an old photograph.

Once upon a time it was a cotton mill. Some developer gutted the place, dividing what remained into the office and warehouse units that enclose this bleak square of tarmac, which is home to several dozen cars, from flash company Mercs to the bronchial old bangers owned by mere mortals.

And wet. It rained last night; puddles gape across the car park, most of them stained with oil. I seek out those which remain unspoiled, like mirrors of the grey sky. Looking down you can become lost in them, leaving foot prints across the clouds as you imagine that the ground has give; that you are walking on the membrane between two worlds.

The light alters and I look up. In this queer half-darkness the shadows seem to have been put on backwards, and you can still taste the breath of a summer that died too slowly, clutching at the bricks like the fingers of dead thorns. Stagnant. It fills me with a peculiar kind of depression that seemed weightless and yet becomes heavier day by day, dripping down my back like the strange blue milk this fog becomes., that must waded through each morning on my way to work.

Inside now, through the swing doors and listening to the scuff of my shoes on the concrete steps. Fear settles between my shoulder blades as I climb them. A vague sense of doom; perhaps to spend the next hundred years here, numbed into submission, wondering if there’s anyone out there who is awake enough to rescue me.

But then I suppose we are all in our own sort of coma.