Bedtime in the 1960s

The boy in the flannel pyjamas finds himself alone and afraid in a room, a cold, dark room.

Not quite full dark, as there is one small lamp on a night table to his left. But drear as old London in fog, the lamp diffuse as nineteenth century gaslamps, impotent before the resounding slab of night.

It should be cheery, its porcelain stand cast in the form of a swirling flamenco dancer, her death-white dress daubed with crimson rose motifs. But its burnt orange ambit is feeble and ominous.

Why is he so alone? Did his family abandon him? Whose room is this?

He senses a bed in front of him, alongside an urgency to reach it, image-conjuring the harsh carpeted floor into a dire terrain bristling with clawed and ravening things covetous of boy toes. He ratchets his courage, glances at the incomprehensibly terrible lamp for the last time, and runs. Something swishes around his legs in the dark. Something wet and sharp and salivating with need.

Without a second to spare, he makes it, almost flipping over the opposite side, just able to hang on. His breathing is animal-like, a bray of trauma.

On top is a scratchy blanket, with a polyester sheet beneath. Some internal imperative insists his only hope of safety lies in plunging his bare feet and flannel-clad legs under these covers forthwith, which he does.

The cool sheet feels good, as his feet descend into the depths of the bed...

...only to sink further into something warm and soft and wholly slime-ridden, releasing from the boy a querulous cry of anguish as he feels a sluglike mass begin to dissolve his flesh like an acid, beginning at his toes and oozing—wretchedly, interminably, unhurriedly—upward.

But what the boy feels before the agony is worse—an infinite hopelessness, awful beyond measure, the colour a ceaseless grey moan marching to the most wretched and endless of horizons.

By Nectar Neglected

See him. He is the walker.

The kinked arrow of his wending takes him past the fitful sleep of murky settlements, past the stitched brows of crepuscular forests, his gaunt and stringlike frame a hauntscape for the murmurs of night guilt and uncompromising schemes.

No one has ever seen him in the glare of sunlight, and even during the darkest hours most sense him only as an inkling, like they might a brief visit by a lone black hummingbird in some forgotten back field, by nectar neglected, by nature abandoned.

His kindred, his compañeros, whose fugitive trails he here and there crosses and even more rarely shares, are lonesome castoffs too, exiled coyotes bereft of their pack, silent, unmoored, whether from fear or shame no one knows. Or likely cares.

"I run to death, and death meets me as fast,

And all my pleasures are like yesterday"

says the poet.

"That's why Monday, when it sees me coming

with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,

and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,

and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the

night"

says another.

Yet there is more. Under clear Iowan skies he's a mere whisper, a momentary flash when a sunflower blinks. Beside dire mangrove swamps his brows tangle amid roots. Along lovers' lanes he watches expressionless from shadows, awaiting the secret puzzle word. In lost caverns where the world's heartbeat can be heard (after which you will hear no other sound), he licks the slime from shuddering walls. He climbs towers of ancient skinbound books in forgotten libraries and recites random fragments, calling Twain a charlatan and Steinbeck a liar. He interprets the raw dreams of bats so marauders might understand.

He enters your quiet towns and your silent villages, his jointed shadow angling over facades, his cantilevered insectivore jaw pensile, and wherever cracks and crevices present themselves, he slips inside, breathless as ice in your hallways and corridors, caressing the handles of silent bedrooms…

…where upon entering he places the spatulate tips of his long arthritic fingers on the velvety lips of sleeping children to hush their unspeakable dreams, though he be their source.