Glitches Read online

  Most of the time, the demands of daily life were enough to keep such thoughts at bay, but the sleeping mind is less distracted. She began to have nightmares. She was staring at the skies again.

  At first, she would be walking across a field somewhere, surrounded by beautiful countryside, her children and husband with her. The sun would be at her back. The grass so vivid, she could make out fine vestiges of spider web, the last dwindling drops of dew. Her children ran out across the field, around each other, around her and her husband, laughing. Their hair bouncing with the rhythm of their joyful steps. She would reach out and take her husband’s hand and breath came free and easy in her chest like a smile that stretched the width of her body.

  Then came the clouds. At the initial darkening it felt as if the sun would reappear, the cloud merely passing, as clouds do. Even so the children’s laughter was diminished. They would pant back the breath lost in their game. Kate’s hand fell to her side and above them came the terrible sound of tearing, of ripping, but of something so large, every tiny tear was magnified into a scream of sound. The whole of the heavens were torn apart, the sky broken with a jagged gash.

  Kate would look down, desperate to pull her children towards her. She would grasp them tight in her arms, the smell of their hair, the sweetness of their sweat, so precious. But the sky was not done. The gash was growing. Her arms tightened around the girls, but suddenly they were not there. Her arms would fall in upon themselves, passing through stuttered projections of light that had no substance and then blinked out. Gone. Her husband too, gone. And the sound of the tearing sky would fill her whole body as the world around her emptied of anything known and there was nothing but a howl of loneliness. The ark of all her imaginings, of all the stories promising a wholeness of repeated experience, was broken open, was nothing, nothing more than hot air.

  Once this dream began, glitches found their way into everything. Always, there it was, the thing that didn’t fit: the delicate leer of fingers rasping the pocket of her jeans as an old man squeezed behind her in the supermarket queue; the spark of recognition when seeing another only to draw closer and see no corresponding light; the drone of airplanes in empty skies; pianos abandoned on side streets; items of shopping bleeping across the scanner bearing no resemblance to those she put in her trolley; cars screeching to a halt as she walked across clear streets; the fear of those limp arms reaching into her days and brushing careless fingers through her children’s hair.

  She began to forget things. The floor became sticky, overrun with the slimy dartings of silverfish. Clothes were washed but dried unhung in bundles, her whole family walking in crinkled, mildewed cloth. Things ran out. There was no toothpaste but endless tins of tuna. No bread, but several pats of butter whose edges were fast thickening with the yellow of age.

  Her children hugged her more, as she sat twitching, staring off out of the window at the sky, waiting for the last story she had any faith in to come true.

  So Kate’s children grew, and they and her husband left her, but still she waits, looking out of the window like the figures she imagined so long ago staring out of the abandoned hospital. A glitch in the story of her own life, she no longer fits anywhere but amongst others for whom our collective truth is revealed as nothing more than a bedtime story told to keep out the darkness of chaos. She is a glitch, medicated into silence; a head in the clouds.

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