The Drift

 

     There comes a moment in the long theatre of madness where the curtains no longer twitch with fear, where the old ghosts grow tired of rattling their chains in the attic of the mind.

 The screams are still there, somewhere  above the surface, but they begin to sound distant now, as though heard through miles of seawater and deep sleep.

For years this world had been constructed from long darkened corridors and burnt-out bulbs.

Every doorway led to another interrogation room. Every smiling face concealed sharpened teeth and evil intentions. 

Every kindness carried the smell of betrayal hidden somewhere beneath it, like damp seeping slowly through wallpaper.

But lately, something has shifted in the architecture of the night.

Not dramatically.

Not all at once.

Just enough for the darkness to loosen its grip.

Twilight arrives differently now. Softer. 

The sky no longer resembles a bruise but the healing of one. Violet blue into amber. The sea lapping quietly against the shore as if exhausted from centuries of witnessing human cruelty.

And in those hours, when the world becomes half-dream and half-memory, she sleeps beside an open window while moonlight pours itself across the bed in silver ribbons.

There is glitter upon her skin.

Not literal perhaps, though who can truly say anymore. Stardust. Ashes of old universes. Tiny luminous fragments from dreams too fragile to survive daylight. They shimmer across her cheekbones while invisible hands move gently through her hair with the tenderness the living so rarely offer each other.

No violence here.

No shouting.

No accusations hurled like bricks through glass.

Only stillness.

Only breath.

Only the soft electric hum of survival.

And somewhere deep within the machinery of sleep, she sees him again.

Her father.

Standing alone in pale fog at the edge of some impossible shoreline where empty boats wait for tides that never arrive.

He says nothing.

The dead rarely do.

Words become useless after a certain threshold of suffering. Explanations don't carry weight. Defences rot away. What remains are the unbearable silences between two souls who once belonged to each other.

She walks toward him slowly.

No fear now.

No rage either.

Only grief stripped bare of its theatrical, flimsy costume.

When she reaches him, she touches his arm and feels the collapse of years of doubt and uncertainty.  The old wounds are still there, but they no longer bleed with the same violence. His shoulders tremble quietly. Tears fall soundlessly.

Not forgiveness entirely.

Not yet.

But perhaps the beginning of it.

A bridge suspended between worlds.

A baptism made not from holy water but regret.

And when she wakes, she does not wake into panic.

She wakes into light.

The sea calls to her and she follows it instinctively, diving beneath the surface where the world above finally loses its voice.

 Down through clear blue water she descends, deeper into the breathing cathedral beneath the rocks where sunlight fractures through ancient stone.

The ocean accepts her without questions.

Without history.

Without judgement.

Clownfish flicker around her like living lights, brushing against her arms with tiny curious mouths as though attempting to communicate some forgotten language. The cave glows turquoise around her body while streams of sunlight spill through cracks overhead, illuminating her face in a warm liquid fire.

Above the surface, humanity continues its endless performance of madness.

The viciousness of people's hands.

The lies.

The manipulations.

The ugly machinery of cruelty disguised as normality.

But here beneath the water, all of it dissolves.

The noise cannot survive this depth.

Floating there, suspended between sea and light, she begins to understand something that once felt impossible:

The truth does not remain buried forever.

No matter how violently people try to silence it.

No matter how many locked doors, forged smiles, or carefully constructed illusions are built around it.

Truth is luminous by nature.

It rises.

Slowly perhaps.

Painfully.

But inevitably.

And somewhere inside herself she begins building a map toward another life. A place she cannot yet name. A shore unseen. A future untouched by the architecture of fear.

Perhaps there will be another country.

Another house.

Another pair of eyes waiting somewhere beneath a gentler sky.

Perhaps there will simply be peace.

And perhaps peace is enough.

The darkness still exists, of course. It always will. There are still nights where the walls whisper old names and the past claws at the windows demanding re-entry. But the difference now is this:

The darkness no longer feels eternal.

There is light entering the room.

Thin at first.

Then golden.

Then unstoppable.

And somewhere far beyond the noise of this collapsing world, morning approaches quietly over the horizon like forgiveness itself.

Everything will be alright.

Not because the world suddenly became kind.

But because the truth shall soon be known.

Harbour Lights

 The ferry terminal smelled of diesel, saltwater and stale cigarettes, the kind of smell that settles into your lungs and waits there like an unpaid debt. 

The ceiling fans turned lazily overhead, pushing the heat around without ever removing it. Somewhere beyond the grimy windows, chains clanged against steel masts in the harbour darkness.

“So your Rorschach test. You scored what? Ten out of ten?”

She laughed into her paper cup, though there was nothing funny in her eyes anymore.

“No. I scored shit. I was disappointed. Thought I had failed it. How many did you score, Frenchy?”

“Same.”

“They told me to stop and say what I saw. Said I wasn’t doing it right.”

“Well?”

“I said I am telling you what I see. An inky blotch. I couldn’t see shit.”

“Me neither.”

A pause.

“Oh no, wait. I saw a bat.”

“Yeah,” Frenchy muttered, staring out toward the black sea. “I saw the bat.”

The loudspeaker crackled overhead in some half-dead language nobody understood anymore. The sound echoed through the empty terminal like a priest mumbling last rites over a drowned congregation.

“So we can’t get back to the farm?”

“Nope.”

“Alright then.

 Nope. We is sane.”

“Well,” Frenchy shrugged, “as far as they’re concerned.”

A grin crawled slowly across his face. “But we know different depending on how many Margaritas go down that day.”

“Sublimely put, monsieur.”

Outside, the tide slapped against the rotting pilings beneath the dock. Thick black water. Oil-black. Grave-black. The kind of water that remembers bodies. Then quickly forgets.

“Now what?”

“We go back to the port and wait for the boat.”

“It’s an early sail. We may or may not get dropped at our desired destination.”

“Which is as yet unknown.”

“Maybe take the ferry.”

Neither of them moved.

Because deep down they already knew there was no ferry anymore. No destination. No return journey. People like them only travelled in circles, tighter and tighter spirals around the drain.

“Look,” Tiny fair, he  whispered. “Look down into the abyss. That’s where the nightwork goes to sleep.”

She glanced over the railing reluctantly.

Darkness moved beneath them.

Not water.

Something else.

Something patient. And then she saw him, his tortured, twisted expression..

“You ever speak of our guest,” the voice said softly, “and you’ll go down there to tuck her in.”

The harbour wind suddenly carried music from somewhere impossible. Tinny. Distorted. Like an old gramophone playing underwater.

“Sing,” he smiled. “Go on. Sing. Make her feel right at home.”

And then, absurdly, horribly,  shebegan singing into the night.

“Consider yourself… one of the family…”

The words drifted across the bay toward the anchored boats and the sleeping houses beyond the cliffs.

The woman,

“He is a man hunted by a writ of execution,” Frenchy murmured, “but tonight he is the hunter.”

Nobody spoke after that.

Because everyone understood the same terrible thing.

Predators only become gentle when they are exhausted.

And exhaustion never lasts.

The migraine arrived without warning.

The room tilted.

The harbour lights stretched into long wet smears across her vision.

“Oh, the sickness…” she whispered. “The head-spinning…”

“Another aura?”

“Yes… it’s going… but he’s still here…”

Frenchy immediately held her shoulders.

“Okay, okay, stay with me. I’m here. Stay in the present. Here. Don’t cry. Don’t be frightened…”

Her breathing quickened.

“He is not here,” Frenchy insisted. “He can’t hurt you anymore. "

But her eyes were fixed on something behind him.

Something standing near the harbour wall where the light couldn’t quite reach.

A silhouette.

Tall.

Motionless.

Watching.

“Did you see the woman this time?” Frenchy asked carefully. “Is it the same one? The one in the bay?”

She shook her head slowly.

“No…”

The word barely escaped her lips.

“It’s a different one.”

The fans overhead creaked.

The music stopped.

Even the sea seemed to hold its breath.

“The lady that was in the house,” she whispered.

Frenchy felt coldness spread through his stomach.

“The one who disappeared.”

The silhouette near the harbour wall seemed closer now.

Still watching.

Still unmoving.

Then came the final sentence, fragile as splintered glass.

“The missing woman, she was in the house (. .. )She is the one I heard screaming.”

The Blueprint of Silence

      The man in the garden arrived without footsteps.

That was the first thing she remembered years later, when memory became less like a photograph and more like a disease. 

No footsteps. No crashing window. No splintered lock. Just the sudden presence of a shape beyond the curtains, standing inside the dark geometry of coral pink hibiscus and overgrown hedges, watching the house with a stillness of something that already belonged there.

She was a child, barely 8 years old.

Children know when danger is real. Adults spend their entire lives trying to forget that instinct, sanding it down with alcohol, church, medication, routine, television, lies. 

But children still possess the ancient animal machinery of fear. They know when the air changes. They know when silence means danger.

And she knew the man in the garden was real.

She saw the floral white shirt first. Unkempt clothing. Dirt on the sleeves. A darkened face beneath the brim of a straw hat. He stood there too long, not moving, not hiding, not behaving like a burglar at all. More like a man rehearsing a role.

Her heart fell to her stomach. 

She ran barefoot across the Oak floors  as he climbed over the bottom half of the stable type door, the top part had been left wide open, she was alone in the house. The Westminster clocked chimed midnight in.

The house eas awake in fragments. A light upstairs. Her mother nowhere to be seen, father either, they in the background like distant weather. They would be drinking and arguing at the social club. They would come back late, and continue the drinking and arguing. 

She retreated back into the kitchen,  crying, afraid.. And then the car headlights ... They were home.

Him.  Her father.  Calm. Too calm. Walking into the room not like a frightened father but like a director arriving on set after an actor has forgotten their lines. Annoyed.. Irritated.. 

The police came eventually, uniforms damp with island heat, notebooks already half-open before they crossed the threshold. The little girl pointed toward the garden again and again, voice trembling so violently the words collided with each other.

There was a man.

A man outside.

A man came into the house.

Her father smiled.

That smile.

Not warm. Not reassuring. The smile of someone who already understood the outcome before the conversation had begun.

"She's imaginative," he told them softly.

A sentence so simple, so lethal.

The beginning of madness is not violence. It is the deliberate replacement of reality. Gaslighting is often described as manipulation, but that word is too gentle. Too civilized. Real gaslighting is psychic butchery. 

It is the slow murder of another person's confidence in their own eyes and ears.

A child says:

I saw someone.

The predator says:

No you didn't.

And if he is convincing enough, eventually the child begins to ask permission to believe herself.

That was the true crime taking place in that house.

Not burglary.

Not missing property.

Not vanished passports. Money. Jewelry. 

Reality itself was being dismembered in the living room while policemen stood nearby adjusting their pens. 

Her Father redirected the entire scene with frightening precision. Within minutes, the intruder no longer mattered. He no longer existed. The focus shifted onto the girl herself. Her emotions. Her supposed sensitivity. Her alleged dishonesty.

The 8 year old child became the suspect.

The officers were told she had hidden the passports because she "didn't want to return to her old, cold home, she wanted to remain in the sun. 

" Such an absurdly adult motive, stitched crudely into the mouth of a frightened child who probably barely understood what passports even were. But adults prefer coherent lies to incoherent truth. It comforts them. Makes the paperwork easier.

And so the machinery turned.

The police stopped searching the garden and began studying the daughter.

Exactly as intended.

Because a real burglary investigation is dangerous when you have secrets fermenting beneath the floorboards. Real investigations involve fingerprints. Fibers. Entry points. Questions asked twice. Officers wandering too far into the wrong rooms.

What if they looked too closely?

What if they found blood beneath a carpet edge?

What if they discovered the wrong coat hanging  in a closet?

What if the missing property was sat inside that car,  the supposedly missing car - which was something far more catastrophic than lipstick jewelry and passports?

No, not everything had been burned yet,  and maybe she knew more than he realized, she could hear, she could see, she was too curious for her own good..

No. Better to contaminate the only witness.

Destroy the credibility of the child before she ever grows old enough to describe what she truly saw.

This could be dangerous. And furthermore..

This was his parenting.

This was his usual forensic countermeasure disguised as fatherhood.

And perhaps that is the most terrifying aspect of all. The composure. The ability to stand in front of authority figures while a terrified little girl trembled nearby and calmly redirect suspicion onto her. Some men commit violence impulsively. Others commit it surgically.

This Daddy belonged to the second category...

Predators of the body leave bruises.

Predators of the mind leave confusion.

Years later the daughter would remain silent, and outsiders would ask why. Why didn't she speak? Why didn't she report anything? Why didn't she run?

Because the conditioning had already begun in childhood. The blueprint had been installed early and carefully:

The men are rational.

The women are hysterical.

The children lie.

The father decides what reality is.

The men decide what every reality inside that house is.

Once that architecture is built inside a family, madness becomes hereditary.

And then it came.

The bloody, tearful gasping, the incoherent leakage.  The transfer of guilt, the panic, because, unlike his father, he could not maintain the performance forever. Dr Jimmy. He would continue his father's legacy. 

Violence had survived into the next generation, but the mask had cracked. The father's greatest talent was never just brutality, although it co-existed.. It was emotional refrigeration. The terrifying ability to look directly at fear and narrate it into nonexistence.

A little girl sees a predator in the garden.

The father smiles at police.

And suddenly the child becomes the problem.

That is how lunacy survives inside respectable houses.

Not through screaming.

Through calm voices.

Through soft smiles.

Through fathers who know exactly when to lie.

The body floating in the bay, the woman buried beneath soft sand as yet undiscovered..

Yes, this father could have written the rule book for lying.

Because he could lie like a cheap watch.

The Happiest Day(When the Storm Forgot Your Name)

     They said it would come quietly.

Not with trumpets. Not with forgiveness. Not with answers neatly folded into the corners of your life.

Just a thinning of the noise.

The storms didn’t end all at once.

They receded. Like something embarrassed to have been seen.

The sea was breathing again—slow, deliberate, ancient.

Each wave touched the shore as if it had something to confess, then thought better of it.

You stood there, not triumphant, not healed, just… still.

It was almost silent.

The kind of silence that makes you aware of your own edges.

The kind that asks: what are you, now that everything has been taken or left behind?

You thought about walking into the water.

Not dramatically. Not as an ending.

Just… slipping in. Letting the cold take the heat from your thoughts.

Swimming toward that dull, sinking sun like it might explain something.

But something inside you, older than your grief said no.

Not yet.

Keep going.

The best is still waiting 

And for once, you listened.

Your father is dead. 

Oh. 

It sits there, blunt, immovable. No poetry in it.

Your mother is somewhere, nowhere, dissolved absent..

A ghost without a haunting.

The children are gone. Not lost, not taken, jusy gone forward.

They’ve outgrown the gravity of you.

And him..

Ravaged by the crab.

That quiet, devouring thing that eats from the inside and leaves behind a stranger wearing unfamiliar skin.

Where he is now, no one says.

Maybe no one knows.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.

You push yourself up from the sand.

It clings to you, fine, invasive—sticking to the salt-dried tracks on your face.

Tears have their own residue. 

You brush yourself off, but not completely.

Some of it stays. It always does.

The walk back feels longer than it should.

Or maybe you’re just noticing it now.

The house waits like it always has.

Unimpressed. Unchanged. Watching.

Something moves.

Not physically. Not visibly.

But you feel it.

A shift.

A breeze that doesn’t belong to the open doors or the sea air.

It passes through you, not around you.

You stop.

Because you know.

Not logically. Not provably.

But with the same certainty that told you not to walk into the water.

This is it.

The wind of change doesn’t ask permission.

It doesn’t explain itself.

It just arrives.

And then..

Sleep.

Deep. Undisturbed. The kind you haven’t known in years. No dreams. Or maybe too many to remember. The doors are open. The sea breathes into the room.

You don’t care.

For the first time, you don’t guard yourself.

He finds you like that.

Of course he does.

Not through the door. Not like a man should.

He’s just… there.

Solid, but not right.

Familiar, but fractured.

He laughs, raw like no time has passed.

Like nothing ever broke.

“Hey you,” he says, slipping into your space, into your body’s memory, an arm around your neck, playful, careless, claiming something that doesn’t belong to him anymore.

“I didn’t see you for ages. Come, come with me. I want to show you my paintings.”

And you go.

Because part of you always goes.

The paintings are wrong.

Not amateur. Not meaningless.

Worse than that.

They mean too much.

Figures split open from the inside.

Faces layered over faces, screaming without mouths.

Limbs where limbs shouldn’t be.

Eyes that follow, not with intention, but with accusation.

It’s the kind of work that doesn’t ask to be understood.

It infects.

Belle Vue. The farm. 

You think of it without wanting to.

Those corridors. That quiet institutional rot.

The minds that didn’t break cleanly.

“How?” you ask, though maybe not out loud.

“How did you get this far like this?”

He shrugs. Or smiles. Or glitches between the two.

“How did no one see it?” you press.

But you already know the answer.

They did.

They always do.

They just name it something softer. Something manageable. Something polite.

Your brother, but...

Locked away.

Categorised.

Contained.

A problem with a file.

And you?

You hover just outside the lines.

Functional enough to pass.

Fractured enough to recognise what you’re seeing.

“I know,” you say.

Or think.

Or feel.

And he looks at you, not surprised, not offended.

Just… equal. Just knowing. 

Because here..

On this thin layer between sleep and whatever comes after..

There are no diagnoses.

No histories.

No roles to perform.

Only this:

You.

Him.

All of it, stripped down to its raw, unlabelled state.

And somewhere, faint but persistent, in the distance..

That same voice.

The one from the shoreline.

The one that told you to keep going.

You’ll be alright.

Not because anything has been fixed.

Not because anyone has been found.

Not because the past has released you.

But because something in you has stopped waiting for permission to exist beyond it.

Tiny Fair—

You feel it too, don’t you?

On the Astral plane,

we are all equal.

The Weight of Sunlight

 

     They didn’t walk him out with dignity. There was no ceremony to it, no quiet closing of a chapter. Jimmy Senior was pulled forward by his wrists, the metal biting deeper each time he stumbled. The officers—silent, indifferent—held him not as a man, but as a thing that needed moving.

The sunlight hit him like punishment.

It wasn’t warmth. It was exposure. It was accusation.

He squinted, sweat forming instantly along his brow as the heat wrapped around him, thick and suffocating. The island had once felt like paradise—soft winds, endless blue—but now it pressed in on him, watching, remembering.

The van waited.

Rust clung to its edges like disease. The doors opened with a tired groan, and he was shoved forward, his footing gone, his body folding awkwardly as he hit the wooden bench inside. His skull cracked against the metal siding with a dull, hollow sound. No one reacted.

Three men already sat there. They didn’t look at him.

They didn’t need to.

The doors slammed. Darkness swallowed them.

Then motion.

The van lurched forward like it resented the effort. Every pothole, every jagged rise in the broken road translated directly into bone and nerve. Jimmy’s wrists screamed against the chain above him, his arms dragged upward, his shoulders burning as he fought the instinct to collapse.

The others swayed with the rhythm of it, practiced, resigned.

Jimmy was not.

Each impact snapped his head sideways. Each jolt rattled something loose inside him—not guilt, not regret… something closer to irritation. Discomfort. Inconvenience.

Eighteen months, he reminded himself.

Just eighteen months.

The prison rose out of the heat like something already dead.

Stone crumbled from its edges. The walls sweated. It had not been built for this—he could feel it immediately. A place repurposed, not reformed. A military skeleton forced to house rot.

Inside, the noise never stopped.

Men shouted, screamed, muttered. Some laughed in ways that didn’t belong to laughter. Others cried openly, their voices thin and worn, as if they had been crying long before they arrived.

The smell—

It hit harder than the heat.

Human waste. Rotting food. Damp stone. Unwashed bodies pressed too close for too long. It clung to the throat, coated the tongue. Even breathing felt like participation in something degrading.

His cell was waiting.

Four men. Four mats. Metal frames so old they groaned under even the suggestion of weight. A wooden bucket in the corner, already half-full, already alive with flies.

Jimmy paused only briefly before stepping inside.

It could be worse.

He let that thought settle. Let it anchor him.

Because it could.

There were men here who would never leave. Men whose names had already dissolved into the walls. Men who had been swallowed whole by this place and digested slowly, over years.

He wasn’t one of them.

Eighteen months.

He sat, the frame bending beneath him, and let his mind drift—not to the present, not to the heat or the noise or the stench—but back.

To the bay.

To the quiet.

To her.

Pauline had looked different in the moonlight. Softer. The sharpness of her edges blurred by silver light and shadow. She had smiled easily that night, her voice playful, her movements careless.

An invitation, he had thought.

Or something close enough.

The road had been empty. The sea patient. The world paused just long enough for something to happen.

He remembered the cigarettes. The way the smoke curled upward between them, slow and deliberate. The way she had turned to leave without hesitation.

That was the moment.

Not the rock. Not the blood.

The refusal.

Everything after that had been correction.

The sound of it—the first strike—had surprised even him. Not loud, not dramatic. Just a dull, final kind of impact. But she didn’t stop. Not immediately.

So he continued. Without hesitation.  

He rifled her handbag tipping out the contents onto the long dried grass, just a few dollar bills, some change and a lipstick, the photo caught his eye (...) Oh yes, she'd mentioned leaving her two year old daughter with her mother that evening. How pretty she was, just like her mother..

He had no choice but to silence her, if he were to be uncovered for what he really was, his life would be over.

He had to finish it.

Because you had to, once you started.

Now, sitting in the suffocating heat of the cell, he could still see it clearly. The stillness afterward. The way the water accepted her without question. The way the stars reflected around her as if nothing had changed.

He exhaled slowly.

No panic. No remorse.

Only memory.

And beneath it—

Relief.

Eighteen months.

He smiled faintly to himself, ignoring the man muttering in the corner, ignoring the drip of something unseen running down the wall.

When it was over, he would leave this place behind. The island. The prison. All of it. He would return home, step back into a life that still had space for him.

His wife would listen.

They always did.

Outside, somewhere deep within the prison walls, a man began to scream. Not loudly, not wildly—but steadily. A continuous, breaking sound, like something being worn down rather than torn apart.

Jimmy lay back on the thin mattress, staring up at the stained ceiling.

The scream didn’t stop.

It simply became part of the air.

And eventually—

He stopped hearing it.

Only You

 The Mask Wouldn’t Come Off

That was horrible. Completely, utterly horrible.

I told you I was going to the town hall—to pay the bills, to keep something ordinary intact—but even then there was a fracture, a hairline crack running through everything we said. You told me you’d meet me after. You always said you would meet me after. As if after was a place we could still reach.

I was with him—the man in the marine officer’s uniform. You never liked that. Or maybe you imagined it into something else. I asked him to leave the house. I did. Because I could already feel it then, the way you were slipping away from me—not physically, but inwardly, retreating behind something harder, colder. There were jealousies where there didn’t need to be. Doubts that grew teeth. Mistrust that fed on nothing at all.

It wasn’t necessary.

My heart hadn’t changed. That’s the part that won’t settle in me. It stayed the same while everything else twisted out of shape.

You put on that mask—the impenetrable one. Iron. Not metaphorically. Not figuratively. It was iron. I could feel it when I tried to reach you, cold and unyielding, bolted into place. There was no seam, no weakness, no way in.

But we tried.

God, we tried.

He cried incessantly, a sound that didn’t belong to any one person, just grief made audible. And you—you were screaming, not words, just noise, raw and tearing at the air. Between the crying and the screaming, I thought something might give. That the pressure would crack the mask, that the locks would loosen.

But they didn’t.

We couldn’t remove it. Not the iron. Not the locks. Not the distance.

So I left.

I walked down the hill under a sky that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be—heavy, grey, unmoving. The wind cut through me, sharp and indifferent, and I remember thinking I should have worn something else. Something warmer. Something wiser. But I was only seventeen, and at seventeen you dress for the moment, not the aftermath.

I didn’t know any better.

I needed someone to care for me. That much I understood, even then. A need so simple it should have been easy to answer. But it couldn’t be you anymore. Not with the mask. Not with the screaming. Not with everything you refused to take off, to lay down, to let go.

So it had to be him.

But he wouldn’t stop crying.

And then you came back into it—like a storm that refuses to pass. You spoiled it all. You ruined everything, not with violence, not even with anger, but with that quiet, unapologetic certainty.

You said you loved me.

And I couldn’t allow that.

Because love, from you, didn’t come without the mask. It didn’t come without the locks. It didn’t come without suffocation.

So I returned to the house.

Or what was left of it.

The walls had fallen down—not broken, not shattered, just… gone, as if they’d given up holding anything together. There were no lights. No shadows even, just absence. The people had left, their voices still echoing faintly, like something remembered badly. The music had stopped mid-note, leaving a silence that felt staged, deliberate.

And the party—

the party was over.

Not gradually. Not gently.

Over.