When People Are Silhouettes

The anus of hell will hold no fire, no rocks, no prodding forks, no cowed dogs, or dogged cows. There’ll be no potholed roads, or bristled fences, or billboards with ads for latex scrolled upon them. There’ll be no council houses, or discarded beer cans, or crashed cars, or road-kill, or bins turned over. There’ll be no polluted oceans, or chewed up pavements, or untended gardens, or piss behind bins. There’ll be nothing, nothing but silhouettes of people.

Hell will be filled to the tits with silhouettes and felled anticipation. Every day will start with White Stripes, Strongbow and Marquez. And each day will end, just as you’re getting to the part where he plays chess masterfully, with some silhouetted twat asking for directions to their own pitted hell. That’ll be someone’s duty, some nice chap who’d finally snapped and murdered someone at the age of 59. He’ll be the silhouetted twat who has to disturb people in Hell when they’re settling down to a good book.

Hell is no place to concentrate, either, so by the time this guy toodles off with a, ‘tally-ho’ you’ll have forgotten which end of the book is the beginning and all that’ll be left is this guy saying tally-ho infinitely, while he smiles and wishes you a good day. This image is all you’ll remember for the rest of the day and you’ll get madder and madder and madder. You’ll go to your hell bed of silhouettes madder than a boxed beaver and see tally-ho flashing over silhouettes, and grinning men with bald heads and puppy dog eyes branding, ‘tally-ho,’ on grinning men with bald heads and puppy dog eyes.

The next day you’ll be a little fatigued, but quite well rested and optimistic about the day ahead. And then a massive shadow trundles over and emulsifies your shoes with anecdotes about his shoes and your face and his face and your hair and his hair and your mother and his father and how everything and everyone is empathetic and entwined in something of tryst upon which all of humanity sits and all of humanity shall always sit so long as there’s common ground upon which it can pontificate. Of course, he’ll leave just before you leave, and of course you’ll try and get back down to Marquez and of course you’ll have forgotten everything but the bitter silhouetted taste of a plodding silhouette dripping into your subconscious.

Life is a temple, a huge monument to these frustrations but, above all, life is a challenge. It’s a constant gardener battle between what you want and what other people want you to want. The trick is to pretend that every situation involves a girl from your past adamant that she’s about to leave. She doesn’t want to leave and you don’t want her to leave. But she’ll leave and you’ll feel hollow, and so will she, and you’ll take comfort in her hollowness…and then her strength. You’ll lap up every word these strangers say. They’ll no longer be silhouettes trampling over your good time. They’ll be people you love and want to see again and again. That’s my kind of hell.