This Darkness Mine by G.R. Yeates

It sits and rots and, as it does, it thinks. Fibrous, cold cobwebs of synapse flicker with old flame. The only outward sign of life is a vague twitching of the gristled nuggets that were once its eyes. It thinks for a time that is immeasurable to Man.
    Then, it raises one peeling hand, beckoning, and the door opens.
    I come in.
     
    I’m awake. I’m out of bed and getting dressed to go into the office. The taste of last night’s dream is on my brain and the memory’s flavour goes something like this. How much of our lives do we live? How many minutes, hours and days are spent not as we would wish them to be? Where does that wasted time go to? The stress. The strains. The stupid worries. The many minutes in needless pain become weeks, then months, years and then decades. Titanic spans of plague-ridden time, all lost, all gone, to some abstract sphere.
    This city is a house of flies and I’m sure yours is much the same. You can taste the death in the air. Carbon grains sit on skin, darkening everything, flavouring the rationed food. The economy is crumbling along with the buildings. Trains of people tumbling through the city’s cracked concrete arteries under ashen skies. Everything rattling and shaking to pieces. 
    Deal, compromise, trade-off, back-down. Time to downsize. Sell-off. Buy-up. Give a little. Take a lot. Shop the bastards. Suck in your stomach-beast. Hunt the resources. Filch the markets. Get predatory. Time to get something slain. Hands clean in the washroom mirror. Face as lined as lined can be. Dark and hungry. In need of a billion more. Another thirty-forty cars. A line of coke down the arsehole of an underpaid carpetbag whore. Compassionless, feelingless, insatiable.
    Appetites for destruction. 
    It sets my teeth on edge, watching the masses go by, hiding their hate-scarred faces under the tattered veils of shadow cast by broken buildings. Paint smears, make-up over old open wounds. Torn tongues fluttering, mouths spitting poison as soon as certain backs are turned. Yes, this is humanity and their pain was palpable. Their years of toil and self-destruction, scalding from shared memories of it. Dead-white hands draw down a set of blinds and someone licks their lips, wondering what to do to the people next. He runs a cool hand across the soft-skinned boy-offering adorning his desk, making it squirm and squeal, then he bends down to feed on a barely legal cock with white teeth and slick-snake tongue.
    Something sick is here, at work under the surface, but we, the commuters, know not what because we know it’s better to know not what as we travel into work. Black things stir in the earth, spilling rivers of dead, grey maggots from sphinctoral orifices that cluster in buds across acres of graveyard-silvered flesh. They shuffle blindly in our noxious tunnels, seeking the light and the day, dragging their gastropod bulks through the congealing muck of the underground. The many openings in their bodies are ripe and sour. They are the haunters at the threshold of dreams, waiting for safe passage through.
    I see the dried blood and desolation of a passing platform as my train chunters by and I wonder at it. Deaths from a number of pandemics break out before my eyes across the newspaper page lying open in my hands. The dreary patchwork faces of politicians, unflinching, their eyes never fail to send a thrill of disquiet through my soul; the most powerful beings on the planet and with not one ounce of humanity to share between them.
    I can feel Work drawing near, making my heart clench and deny, trying to push it away. The rhythm and strike on steel of the train punctuates the decreasing distance, withering away whatever unique stuff makes me up, making me shrink in on myself. The train thunks to a halt. The carriage doors whine-slide open. Pawing sleep from my eyes, I’m on my feet and out of the doors, not thinking where I am going to, just knowing, borne along by the multitude, lost in the masses and the