Aut: переводы

→Speaker Bug

→Speaker Bug

→Only the gap remains. Only the empty space where the word used to be.

→Crystal and Dominic have gone to bed. The living room is still in disarray: silent, cast in black and white, with no feeling of any other presence. No mist, no shadow. She goes into her own bedroom and opens a drawer and takes out a photograph: her mother and father on holiday, when young, from before Janine was born. A handsome couple, well dressed, smiling broadly into the camera. Janine turns the photograph over and looks at the back. Her father's name is there, Arnold, as expected, and the date, but her mother's name is missing.

→She walks up the stairs, into the flat.

→Secret mixtures. The residue of artificial dreams, weeping from the skull.

→And whatever it is that falls from Janine's eyes tastes not of rainwater, and not of salt, but of other, stranger chemicals.

→Only darkness. A smudge of grey, a blind spot.

→And then it comes to her, the trouble: she can't remember her mother's name. She just can't, no matter how she tries, how she concentrates. But it doesn't feel like a missing memory. Rather, there's no actual object to be forgotten.

→An end to such visions.

→The burial. Six days later. Clumps of earth on the coffin lid.

→Janine makes her way back towards the flat, and suddenly thinks, for no discernible reason, of the day her mother died. Lying in a hospital bed, talking of another land waiting for her, an avenue of light. And how Janine had wondered then, and yearned inside, that she might replace some of her mother's blood with her own, to stop the dark chamber of the heart from closing.

→A game.

→Showing off. Nothing more.

→She watches a group of people walk along, just a few feet away, but they do not see her there, hidden amongst the branches. They have stripes of luminous gold painted on their faces. The latest fashion: fake ritual markings, saying, I will travel far into the dreamworld, I am a rebel, I will surely walk the golden feather pathways.

→There's no other explanation.

→If it’s not been taken from the room, from my belongings, it must have been taken from me, from inside me . . .

→A cloud veils the moon.

→Vehicles pass by along the road; one of them a van with the Vurt symbol on the side. Another delivery of feathers, from factory to shop to purchaser, to the hand, to the mouth, from tip of tongue to back of brain and on, deeper. Dream triggers. So many possibilities ...

→I can feel the darkness, the emptiness where that thing used to be, but I can’t make out the form of it. 1 can't perceive it. 1 can’t reach out and shape it with my fingers; it cannot be realized.