At War with Abominations

With each passing year, the distinctions in my life become ever more blurred. I no longer know if I am sick or well, awake or asleep, rich or poor, intelligent or bog stupid. My days blend together. The substance of my existence eludes me.

The peaks and troughs of my emotional life are progressively levelling out. Music does not move me, though once the making of it was my principal joy. I enact my feelings as if long ago, at some forgotten time, I metamorphosed into an automaton. The source of my love for Jenny, my wife, is unclear, though the fact of it is certain. My daughter of four years, Polly Eileen, is vivid and scintillating - a font of miracles, beauty incarnate - but I know this more from deduction than from direct experience.

Perhaps uselessly, I struggle against these trends and the drear powers behind them. At the age of thirteen, I received an Olivetti Lettera typewriter for my birthday and subsequently writing has been my work and my love. But the act of creation has less significance in a life where the act of subsistence is paramount.

Steadfast endurance seems to be my most potent weapon, as I stage a staggered retreat before the inexorable advance of my enemies: The Quinquagesima, a constant and dessicating wind that finds its source beyond the atmosphere of the Earth; the Slammerkin, a tiny reptilian possum whose incursions leave toxic exudates and whose bad vibrations resonate destructively with my liver; and, finally, most dreadfully, the Spores... the black, deadly Spores, that insinuate themselves into every domain of my life - the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, the intellectual, the financial - and there engage in lethal infestation. It is against this vile and feculent adversary that I struggle most desperately, even this day on which I write...



Jenny, who is sitting her mother's house, arrived early to pick up our daughter. It was only ten and already she was rife with Spore activity, (the Spore abomination most commonly takes strength from the night time hours.) Black pinpricks danced on her too-pale skin, defocusing her physical presence. They clustered in her every word. They had taken root in her mind and were directing her thought. She spoke of abandoning a beach-head we had established - specifically, a medication - in order to engage in a risky long-term strategy that would give the enemy a short-term advantage. It made no sense. The Spores would use this advantage to lay us perilously low. The Spores were talking through her sweet and sensuous mouth. It was awful to observe the one I love so thoroughly enslaved. It was a struggle just to meet her eyes.

Smiling, she indicated the jeans she was wearing. Formerly, they had been tight and exceedingly flattering - now they were noticeably loose. A disquieting symptom, I thought, presented as a point of interest. Of no greater import than the odd striped spider she showed us in the toilet cubicle this morning. Sporecraft. Deadly Spores on a deadly mission.

In nature there is a parasitic fly which lays an egg upon a living snail. Once hatched, the grub burrows into the flesh of the host, makes its way to the brain and from there influences the snail's behaviour - ordering it to an inevitable and putrescent death. This modus operandi is analogous to one of the innumerable sleights employed by my most pitiless foe.