Chapter

Shades of Between

EXCERPT

THESIS 1. IT HAPPENS TO EVERYBODY

Cross-cutting colours are shades, various complicities with darkness, fog-tones. The lights in the sky are going out.

Last time you noticed, it was five past two. Suddenly it’s five to six, and rapidly darkening. Something happened on the road, as it does for everyone. Something that comes back later, in waves.

Mystic return to the core of identity through nosebleeds, black-outs, orange lights, and humming. They were star-gods, it felt like rape and vivisection. Hideous semifrozen yelpings of a lab-animal…and it’s you. Hypnoregressed memory burns out into the black-helicopter throb of paranoid schizophrenia….

Once you know they’re after you, they can let you go.…