The Vorrh

existence into permanent sadness. She was strong because she was quiet. Not silent, but still. Hers was a beauty of listening and a strength of giving; there was knowing, more than understanding, in the smoulder of her gaze. She saw and felt it all, she gave more love than she received, more than she was ever paid for. It kept some of her friends alive, especially those who were born with half their souls in limbo: the frozen ones who wandered helplessly, in poverty or wealth, towards destruction. She was drawn to them, to add light to their irredeemable journey. They could never admit to vampiring her calm and continuity, could never show her the ache they had for her. But they were, in their own way, forever thankful, even faithful, particularly when they died on the other side of their anger and despair. They sent their ghost tongues back, deep ocean fish, transparent and luminous, to whisper gratitudes often, in her long-deaf and then-dead ears.
    * * *

    Muybridge hated fiction. He saw no point in it, when fact was so powerful and strange. He especially hated fiction about science or discovery. He normally avoided such works of ‘literature’ but, for some reason, people would continually bestow copies of their ridiculous efforts in that field on his ungrateful person. They seemed to imagine that there was some similarity between these scribbled daydreams and his life’s work of precision and ingenious invention, which only fuelled his disdain. Most of the writing came from France, another good reason to distrust it. Jules Verne had been the first to annoy him, and other imitators had followed fast. He had been forced to become an expert in the trivial nonsense, to make sure that none of it ever rubbed off onto his reputation.
    On his return home, H. G. Wells was littering England with stories of time travel, invisible men and genetic mutation. Such tales were only bearable because they were swift and slight, and written like children’s stories. The year before he died, he saw
A Trip To The Moon
. He watched George Méliès’ film corrupt and condemn the moving image to a future of lies, saw his own techniques extended beyond his perceptions.
    It was the ease and the conceit of telling lies that he found so indolent in these men of letters, men who did not know one end of a screwdriver from the other. They described things which could never exist, and were applauded for their imagination. The painstaking beauty of his images, with all their care, organisation and science, could have been trampled into insignificance by their kind of reckless fiction.
    His new machines would set the mockery right; projecting spinning, tinctured light directly into a spectator’s mind would cleanse them of an addiction to lies and replace the easy stain of fiction with the real burn of art, in all of its unmistakable clarity. The machine was locked in a room on the other side of London; he planned to rescue it and bring it back to Kingston-upon-Thames, but the truth was that the thought of using it again terrified him, even as his understanding of its potential and its purpose had grown. So he had delayed in taking action, again and again. His hands were too old and shaky to remake it, and he had more sense than to trust another and watch them steal it from him. That, on top of the ghosted memory of that woman and the outrage she had perpetrated on him, stilted every plan he had to move towards its waiting mechanism.
    * * *

    Sweet pushing inside her pushing pumping the bitch clasped hard by me pushing over and over again held to the ground smelling open pushing sweet the pump of my heart pulsing she tries to move but I hold her fast pumping bending in the middle we turn in the scented dust my teeth on her spine my spine heart-pumping sweet she skidding me going deeper locked inside pushing she flinches against me spins I turn leg slips we spill rolling pushing touching the ground its smell twisted backwards my cock facing out she the other side of me now tail to tail pumping sweet spinning locked snapping Then the cuts the stones the kids throwing stones double-ended so we can’t fight back they know it we circle still sweet pumping locked twisted the stink of kids the hurt snapping pulled both ways fuck bite fuck bite blood from stones my eye pushing spinning stones she yelps I snarl pumping now water over us others touching pulling us apart she runs away full of my spunk I can’t stand still bending uncontrollable