Awarded Highly Commended in the Southern Cross Literary Competition, 2001; and published in anthology Sub-Plots, 2001.

The Resurrection Shuffle

by Barbara Welton

Don't do anything but breathe

That's how easy it was at first. I was happy breathing. I was happy with darkness. I wasn't aware anything was wrong. It was only when shapes and colours and, worse than that, people, started evolving out of the comforting blackness that I began to scream and swear and rip the flesh of my hands open on my surroundings.

I was in the ground. At least, that's where I thought I was. There was no reason for me to think otherwise. Everything was black as pitch; there were no sounds other than those I made myself - my breath, my voice, my boots kicking against what they could, my fingernails scraping and splintering over the surface of whatever it was that encased me. The world I was contained in smelt like earth, like a garden shed closed up too long over winter.

If I pressed upwards too hard, might six feet of soil descend upon me? Had I been buried? I shouted as loud as I could, my voice bouncing back at me far too quickly and loudly, making it clear the "ceiling" of my world was mere inches from my nose. No sound came back to me after the ring of my shout died out.

They could've told I wasn't dead, couldn't they? Surely mistakes like that aren't made in this day and age? I tried to remember how I might've come to be here in the darkness. Tried to recall if I'd been ill or involved in some horrific transport accident. Nothing. I couldn't think.

Hang on. Don't do anything but breathe. Stop your brain a few moments and enjoy the comfort of blackness.

Okay.

How long had I been here? I didn't feel hungry - that gave me some indication, surely? I tried to remember how long I could normally go before my stomach began its most demanding rumbles. Cool, I couldn't have been here any longer than six hours, then. I managed a smile at the dark.

A short quiz focussed my thoughts and gave me my bearings. Name? Dan Chiswick. Age? Almost twenty. Occupation? Disappointment to my parents. Address? Friends' couches. Height? Six feet, three inches. Weight? No idea, but every mother I've ever met has expressed a wish to feed me up. Hair? Dark brown and probably in desperate need of a wash. Do I smoke? Yes. Do I drink? And how! Do I use drugs? Yes, but I've never paid for any. Do I have a car? No, man, I have THE car. Can I sing? According to the last girl I had a shower with, I can. Am I straight? Not entirely. Education? Disappointment to my parents. Age I lost my virginity? Seventeen and a half. Favourite drink? Dark beer. Favourite food? Green curry. Favourite book? Wuthering Heights (disappointment to my father).

I dozed for an untold period of time, lulled to sleep by the mundanities of my own personal inventory. I awoke with a rock hard cock in my pants but couldn't remember what I'd been dreaming about. I ran my hands down my body and enjoyed the feel of the bulge in my jeans. Hey! Jeans? If I'd been buried, wouldn't they have pummelled and bullied me into a suit? My hands grabbed hastily at the rest of my garments. I was wearing a t-shirt and my leather jacket! My favourite belt buckle was secure on my studded belt, and my heavy combat boots were what I had been kicking at my surrounds with earlier. My parents would have touched their toes for the Pope rather than see me buried in clothes I actually liked.

So this wasn't my coffin. I hadn't been interred after a service I couldn't have cared less about and would have declared a steaming pile of hypocritical crap if I'd actually been there to witness it. There wouldn't have been tears shed for me. This wasn't my grave.

Blow a little kiss to the woman next door

How do I tell, as I lie here, the difference between wakefulness and sleep? Being awake's the worst, 'cos it takes effort to entertain myself. When I'm asleep, my subconscious slips right into powerdrive and does it all for me - memories, stories, visitations, bizarre revelations. But when awake, I have to make all that happen by the force of my will. A memory turns into a dream turns into a story turns into a movie turns into a memory. If I want to remember the words to a certain song, I have to put effort into doing so. But asleep, it all just washes over me without me having to lift a neuron.

There's an Emily Dickinson poem about dead people in a cemetery whispering to each other through their coffin walls and the layers of earth that separate them. Am I as alone here as I feel myself to be? Is there another person a few feet away, their parched lips murmuring into the darkness in a vain attempt for me to hear them and let them know I'm here?

A sudden explosion of fireworks. Like I said, I've never actually paid for drugs... but I know an exhaustion-induced flashback when I have one. Stars flare and burn at the periphery of my vision. And a beautiful but ageing woman stands in a doorway with her arms out-stretched, beckoning me into her embrace.

'It's okay,' she says, 'He's gone. You can come in.'

I slide my arm around her trim waist and we go into the house. I see myself in a mirror and realise I'm seventeen again. I'm carrying a copy of Wuthering Heights and there's an annoying zit on my forehead.

She puts on a record. I kick off my shoes, roll up my sleeves. I have a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on my left forearm. And we start to dance...

We're twirling around and around, the room a blur behind her head as I spin her this way and then that. Laughing and short of breath, we crash into a wall and I hold her there. She brings one leg up around me, winds her arms around my neck and we're suddenly rutting. Her voice is harsh and rasping at my ear, punctuated by sharp nibbles she makes to my earlobe.

'All this time we've lived next door,' she hisses, 'And my husband and I have resisted you all along...'

It's then I realise that her husband isn't gone afterall. He's watching us from an armchair near the window. Smiling at me - the kid from next door - while I grind against his wife. Fear and embarrassment might have felled me right then, if only my dick hadn't have taken over thinking for me. 'This feels too fucking good!' it tells me. 'Don't you dare stop now!'

Her fingernails are digging into my arse as my body explodes. I'm too messed up to do anything other than put my dick away, straighten my clothes and get the hell out of there. Two days later, my father storms into my bedroom with my copy of Wuthering Heights.

'Nextdoor just brought this over!' he splutters at me, face puce with rage. 'He says you left it behind after fucking his wife!' Then he belts me across the face with it. Twice. And it was a hardback, too.

'You filthy, dirty, disgusting little fucker!'

I cover my face with my arms, crying out unintelligible syllables. My mother comes running and tries to haul my father off me but he pushes her away and keeps right on pounding me. I see Mum's head bounce off the opposite wall from the force of his push and my Berserker Gland kicks in. One punch, that's all it took. Which is just as well, really, as I wouldn't have got the chance of a second. One punch, one flail of my seventeen-year-old fist and my father was sprawled across my bedroom floor. I knocked my own father out cold.

It's a horrible realisation of adulthood - realising you've grown bigger and stronger and quicker than the man who made you.

I saw my mother's eyes flare wide as she saw what I'd done, and then she looked up at me. She looked scared and impressed and excited and grateful and wary, all at the same time. I suddenly thought of her being fucked by a young man my age and I saw me as she was seeing me. I wasn't her little boy anymore. I was a man all of a sudden. A strong, virile man standing there in her house, having just knocked out her husband. My stomach jolted and I ran from the room, furious tears bolting down my cheeks, gorge rising in my gullet so quickly that I couldn't make it outside quick enough. I vomited in the hallway, then again on the porch steps, and again in the driveway, leaving a slip-slide trail of bile in my wake. I wiped my mouth and started running. There was a light on in the house next door and I could hear the woman and her husband laughing loudly about something. I ran and ran and ran.

I don't have a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on my forearm.

Christ. Where do the visions stop and the memories start? And where do the dreams ingress and egress?

I'm starting to feel hungry now. I guess I've been here longer than six hours now.

Brow beaten, heavy leather

Tomas collects leather jackets. He has a whole wardrobe full. Biker jackets. Some padded, some thigh-length, some full of zippers, black ones mainly, a couple of red ones, some modelled on the original WW1 German pilot jackets, most modelled after Marlon Brando in The Wild One, some with badges and stick pins all over them, some with intricate artworks painted on the back. Each jacket is unique; there aren't two the same. But they all have one thing in common -

Tomas only buys jackets that have been in accidents. He buys them directly from their previous owners. He trawls the daily newspapers for reports of motorbike accidents and tracks down those involved. He subscribes to biker magazines and has a standard ad that he runs in the 'Wanted To Buy' columns. He visits bikers and their passengers in hospitals where their bodies lie in trusses and casts, limbs tied to ceilings, bowels in colostomy bags. He talks with them softly and calmly. He lays his hands over their broken forms and tells them they'll be fine. They know their bodies will heal because they feel the warmth and tingle beneath Tomas' splayed-wide hands when he touches them. They sell him their leather jackets.

'Broken in,' Tomas describes his jacket collection, and broken they certainly are. He never mends a single slash or rip; never washes off a speck of dirt or spray of blood. He takes them home, removes his clothes and puts the leathers on. I've seen him do this...

'Oh, man...' He threw his head back, gasping. 'Christ... feel that!' His neck was long, pale, stretched back so that his dark, near-black hair brushed over the shoulders of the jacket, touching the epaulettes. He hugged the jacket around himself, pulled the lapels and collar up high and buried his face into the animal hide, filling his lungs with horrible breaths of dead animal and maimed human. I watched his cock swell and rise, the bevelled tip standing up to graze the bottom hem of the jacket and tremble.

'It's the moment of impact,' he tried to explain. 'All that fear and adrenalin, it all ends up here...' he stroked the leather sleeves sensuously, 'Here in the hide. I can feel it. This jacket is broken in, a body was broken in this jacket. Oh, Christ...' And his cock spasmed, strings of semen dribbling down to the floor.

Tomas is the only man I know who can come without ever even touching his dick. It's quite the party trick. But I wasn't fortunate enough to be born an empath like Tom, so I don't get the same effect from the lines of leather jackets hanging silent in his cupboard. At his insistence, I've tried many of them on, but my lack of connection and empathy has, every time, left me a guy standing in the middle of the floor, naked except for a leather jacket that doesn't actually fit, sporting a limp dick and goosebumps.

We were in a pub once, Tomas and I, when a huge, bearded guy with a walking stick approached our table and shook Tom's hand with all the fervour of the saved.

'It's you, man! You visited me in hospital! You fuckin' saved me, man!'

Tomas smiled his gentle, knowing smile and sent some god-knows-what good feeling through his hand into the big guy's. 'Yes,' he said, 'It's good to see you walking again.'

The big guy obviously felt whatever Tom sent into his palm, for his eyes went soft and gooey, like a teenaged girl after her first kiss. 'I couldn't have done it without you. I felt like my bones actually crawled around inside me looking for each other after you put your hands over me. The doctors said they'd never seen shattered bone knit as quickly as mine did. You're a fuckin' saint, man. You're a miracle worker. Have you still got my jacket?'

'I cherish your jacket, my friend.' Tomas shook the guy's hand again and the dude hobbled away with an idiot grin on his face.

'I cherish his jacket alright,' Tom shivered over his beer, obviously recalling the intimacies he and the leather had shared. 'My knees just about buckled when I came. That jacket got dragged behind a station wagon for half a block.'

I first met Tomas at the funeral of a mutual friend. I was walking away from the graveside after the service, wiping the remains of a handful of disturbingly fertile earth from my hand. I'd never thrown dirt onto a coffin before, never heard the dull thud that the clods make as they hit the wood. It was such a sad sound, such a sad gesture, I had to walk away as soon as convention allowed the opportunity.

Tomas was kneeling in the mound of soil beside the grave, running his fingers joyously through the rich brown earth, a watery smile flitting over his Eastern European features. It didn't occur to me to wonder why this guy was Being At One with the ground the way he was. I knew the dearly departed in the grave had lots of weird friends - probably even counted me as one of them. As I walked by where he knelt, Tomas put one hand out and touched my leg.

'It's only a sad sound because you know they can't hear it,' he said.

He had the most beautiful brown eyes I had ever looked down into. I almost dropped to my knees then and there to join him in whatever the hell he was doing in the dirt.

'I think I should take you home and fill you with contraband.' He stood up and held his hand out to me. 'I am Tomas,' he introduced himself.

'Dan,' I nodded at him, the flesh of my hand tingling wherever our skin touched.

He took me back to his place, got me drunk and stoned and never laid a dirty thought on me. I'd thought he was at least going to try. It transpired though that Tom was not only heterosexual but curiously uninterested in sex in general, with anybody, of any gender. He said the full body contact of intercourse messed with his mind too much, he being an empath and all. I thought this was a pretty goddamn cool excuse and endeavoured to remember to use it next time I wanted to weasel my way out of any entanglements I tired of.

You've never been in love but you don't know why

'No, it's the truth, I tell you. Sheep have a second consciousness that is attuned to a universe parallel to this one.' Tomas leaned across the table earnestly as he tried to convince me of his sheep theory. He'd recently purchased a fleece-lined leather jacket the previous owner had fallen out of a train whilst wearing.

'Why else do you think they jump over things that we can't see? Or why they'll then turn around and run repeatedly into a fence as if they just can't see it? I tell you, it's because they can't see it. And they jump over things that they can see. It's all going on in that other place, Daniel. I swear it.'

'Have you ever been in love, Tom?'

He gazed at me a moment with those gorgeous brown eyes, then reached for my packet of rolling tobacco and set about building himself an amateurish smoke. 'Sheep live their lives in limbo between two universes, my friend, and yes, I have known love.'

I grinned at him and blew smoke in his face. He blew it back at me and smiled. 'Why do you ask?'

I shrugged. 'I don't think I ever have. I can't be sure. I thought I might have been once.'

'And how do you suppose you could have known for sure? Hm? If you thought you might have been, then I'd say it's entirely likely that you were.' He put his hand out and stroked my fingers with a light touch, nodding slowly. 'But why don't you think so?'

'Because I kept going afterwards. I didn't feel like I couldn't go on. I didn't feel broken.'

I woke up from the conversation, back to the darkness. No way to tell how long I'd been asleep, what time it might possibly be. Nothing changed where I lay. Tom's smile still floated in my mind's eye, his curiously misshapen rollie wavering at one corner of his delectable mouth.

Maybe I had been in love, afterall. But if I had ever truly loved anybody, it could only have been Tomas.

'Tell me what semen tastes like, Daniel,' he asked one morning, soon after we'd first met.

'You've never tried it?' I peered at him over the top of my sunglasses, hoping I'd achieved my best movie star eyebrow-raise.

'I told you, being physically intimate plays too harshly on my mind.'

'Yeah, but it doesn't have to necessarily be someone else's come, right? I mean... haven't you tried your own?' Oh god, I wasn't some sort of pervert, was I? Other guys did that, didn't they?

Tomas leaned back in his chair, perching his left ankle on top of his right knee. His gaze was steady and confronting as he looked me square in the eye and shook his dark head. 'Why would I taste my own body?' he asked. 'I only want to taste those I desire. And I don't desire myself.'

God, that's right. I was talking to a guy who didn't even touch himself when he masturbated. And I was worried I might be a pervert simply because I'd tasted my own come?

'Why are you smirking, Daniel?'

'Nothing,' I lied, smirking wider. I, too, leaned back in my chair, replicating Tom's posture before I'd even realised I'd done so. I turned my face up to the sky, closing my eyes against the sun's glare. 'Well,' I returned to his first question, 'Semen really doesn't taste as awful as people always make out it does. Personally, I think it's more the texture and consistency, rather than the taste, that makes you feel like gagging. Why do you want to know?' I smirked again. 'Not curious, are you?'

Oh, hell. The memory retreated from my mind, the remembered conversation frozen as one horrible physical need suddenly presented itself to me in the blackness.

My bladder is full.

No. No, just let me while away my time with my memories and fantasies - just don't let the terrors of my physical situation encroach here. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to deal with this. Fuck. Oh, god. Oh, no. No. Don't make me do this. Don't reduce me to this.

For the first time since I first awoke to the darkness, I felt the scrape and drag of fear, of true terror. I was in this place, this tiny, tiny space, and there was nowhere to go and no way to get out and no one could hear me there and I was alone as I had ever been - ever - and now I needed to pee and my self respect was wailing at me not to and my body was eventually going to snap into survival mode and just do it in order to save me from death by bladder explosion and OH GOD I don't want this!

I started crying. Moans and sobs poured out of me. If the world had ever needed a personification of the word "wretched", here I was, giving it out for free. My hands flailed against the walls and ceiling of my encasement. My voice buffeted around the claustrophobic space. I broke out in a sweat of horror, the stink of fear soon filling the air I had to gulp down. And all the while, my bladder nagged at me.

'Fuck you!' I snarled at my surrounds, my tears so cold they burnt my cheeks.

Warmth between my legs. Relief mixed with outraged fury and disgust. I cursed being human. I cursed being alive and needing to do this. I managed to turn a little to the side, hoping for some drainage, but I ended up soaked in my own piss anyhow. The stench of it nauseated me. Why bother having a mind and an intellect when our bodies still have to do this? It didn't matter who or what I was, or what I had or hadn't managed to do with my life, I was still a urine machine. First and foremost, that's all humans are - producers of vile substances.

I didn't dare think about what I'd be forced to do if I was here long enough, and conscious long enough, to have my bowel begin demanding my attentions. I shoved the thought from my head and tried willing myself to sleep. Things were better there. I didn't need to pee in my dreams.

Stick on the gas

'I don't want to stay here anymore.'

I woke up in a hotel room. Tomas was standing over me, holding a frying pan and a box of barroom matches. He looked spooked and vulnerable, his eyes a little too wide, his mouth a little too tight. I got out of the lumpy rented bed straight away and put my arms around him. Tingles. I always tingled whenever we made contact.

'What's wrong? What's happened?' I let go of him and stood back, flesh zinging.

'Someone died while I was making breakfast.' He motioned with the frying pan toward the tiny kitchenette of the hotel room. I almost expected to see a burglar's slumped form across the breakfast bar, my imagination taking Tom's words and conjuring visions of my friend surprising some intruder going through our holiday stuff and soundly thonking him on the head with the breakfast tools. There was nothing there.

'Huh?' I scratched my chest absent-mindedly as I padded around the room in my boxer shorts, looking for dead people. 'Whaddya mean someone died while you were making breakfast?' This was supposed to be our holiday, goddammit. Our Withnail And I break out of the city. Six days in a run-down motel in an out-of-season holiday town up the coast. Here we were, waking up to day number two and my companion suddenly can't get through breakfast without visitations from The Other Side. 'There's nobody there, man.'

'No. But she was here.' Tomas pointed one long, slender finger at the gas stove. 'She booked herself into this room for a weekend, turned on the oven and knelt there with her head inside it. I felt her when I touched it... when I tried lighting it...' He indicated the matches and frying pan he still held.

Shit. Poor Tom. Was he hounded by these impressions of previous people every time he touched anything at all? Every time he touched an escalator in a shopping mall? Whenever he borrowed a library book or sat on a public toilet? How could he manage to remain so calm all the time when his head must've been so crowded by the voices and lives of people he had nothing to do with, people who couldn't just fuck off and leave him alone, people who prattled on at him out of the loneliness of their histories, choosing him for their assault merely because he was one of the few who could actually sense them? I suddenly didn't envy my friend his empathy and sensitivity any longer. At least being the selfish bastard I was meant I was capable of preparing breakfast.

'She was pregnant,' he told me over the fried eggs and toast I whipped up. 'She was all alone. The man had left her. She booked herself in here and never booked out again.' He sighed. 'Such sad lives people have, Daniel.' I stared down at my broken yoke and nodded. We ate the rest of our meal in silence.

Make a peace sign and throw back your hair

'My mother wrote a great Polish novel when she was pregnant with me.'

I think I was remembering Tomas' voice with a much thicker accent than the one he actually spoke with.

'A novel of intrigue and passion, a story that spoke to my homeland as no story by a woman had ever done before. It touched the hearts and minds of everyone. It captured an entire country's imagination, echoed hopes...'

We were lying on our backs on the soft, fragrant grass at the back of Tom's house, staring up into a palatial night sky. Earlier in the evening, Tom had posed for me in his newest leather acquisition while I photographed him with a Polaroid camera. My own dick had pained me inside my tight black jeans as he had stood unself-consciously before me, his large circumcised penis glistening in the candlelight by which we had pretentiously attempted to be geniuses.

'I've read articles about my mother when she was writing, when she was carrying me. They say she was driven to deliver us both into the world - her book and her son. We occupied her every thought for nine months. We both made her uncomfortable, both made her want to be rid of us, though she held us inside her and nurtured us both. The book was my twin, you see. We were to be born within hours of each other - the book my literary big brother, as she delivered him to the world first.'

I wanted to touch him. Wanted to roll over onto him, stroke his perfect European skin, hold his arms above his head and kiss his Hapsburgh lip. I wanted to unclothe him slowly, achingly slowly, peeling open the loose black army pants he always wore.

'I grew up with the knowledge of My Brother Book constantly with me. My earliest memory is being patted on the head in a street café by a large man in workman's clothes. I am nearly four. He wears a black cap and has a kerchief knotted about his thick neck. He leans down and kisses my forehead and though I don't like the smell of cigars and crude liquor on his breath, I know he is an important man and I mustn't be rude by recoiling. He is a member of the Communist Party and he tells me My Brother Book is the pillow the entire country wants to sleep peacefully with its head resting on. He goes on to say that I am the personification of My Brother Book, that I am Poland's hopes and dreams for the future. He kisses my mother's hand respectfully and all the grown ups look sadly at one another.'

Touching Tomas is out of the question, however. Though he's my very best friend and our friendship is a loving one, I know that the physicality - and its resultant mind fuck - is beyond my friend's considerable mental endurance. The all-over flesh crawl of touching him would be too much for me, too. So I have to placate my hormones with listening to his voice, with drinking in his Old World beauty, with basking in his gentleness and erudition. It's a sad friendship, when all's said and done.

'My mother died just as I became a teenager. The country mourned her passing, and my grandparents and I left Poland behind to make a new start as immigrants here. I'd never spent much time with them prior to my mother's death. They had always seemed very sombre, disappointed people. I had thought it was merely the sadness of their hard life bearing down on their shoulders. But then, when I was fifteen, my grandfather explained to me how my mother had lied to Poland, lied to the literary world, lied to me all my life. She had only given birth to one of us.'

'Your mum didn't really write this great book?'

'She wrote the book, yes. But she was never pregnant with me. I was the bastard child of a young cousin - too young. The family had hidden her in the country while she carried me. And when I was born, I was handed over to my mother who, as an older, educated woman, it was felt I would bring less shame upon.'

'Fuuuuck...' I turned my head on the grass and looked at him. 'Shit, Tom, that's horrible!'

He shifted his shoulders in a lying-down shrugging motion. 'They did what they thought best. They protected the young girl's honour and still allowed me to grow up surrounded by my own flesh and blood. I fared better than a lot of other bastards. After they broke this news to me, they presented me with a coat that had belonged to my real mother, an old army coat. The girl had worn it all through the harsh Polish winter that she carried me. When I put it on, I experienced her pain and her shock and her fear. It was the very first time I had experienced the reality of my sensitive gift. I could feel the baby moving inside my belly - the baby that was me. I felt my internal organs being squashed and pressed upon by the growing child. I felt the first searing pain of a labour contraction. My body was experiencing the pain of my own birth! I threw the coat off in terror, sweating and sobbing, wanting to vomit, and I have not attempted to wear it since. It hangs in my wardrobe, though, amongst my beautiful, damaged leathers, and I treasure it.'

He turned his head and looked soulfully into my eyes. 'I would like you to wear it when we go out sometimes. If you would honour me so, Daniel.'

'The honour would be all mine,' I assured him. 'All mine.'

Shit, were we stoned when we had that conversation? Or am I just remembering our words far more formally than we would have actually spoken them? Then again, Tomas does tend to speak in that manner a fair bit. Comes from learning formal English as a second language, I guess. I smile into the blackness, thinking about him. I miss him. And I have to face the possibility that I might not see him again if I can't get out of this darkness.

Tears again. Not wailing, savage tears like before. Slow, warm tears that struggle to be dignified as they gather together at the edges of my eyes and make the steady descent down the curve of my cheeks. Like a battalion of bested soldiers, still proud and defiant, even in their defeat, standing to attention as a body of men one last time before marching into certain death.

Man, I can't be stoned now, can I?

Think about nothing now you're nice and high

I crashed my car. My Car. The Car. A 1963 Holden Special with sparkling chrome work, a deep burgundy metallic paint finish, a fully steel chassis and fins sharp enough to shave on. The Car. Its well-stuffed, red leather interior had welcomed me and numerous lovers in all manner of locations, all manner of cramped positions, at all hours of the day and night. The glove box was full of cassette tapes, condoms, lubricating jelly and bags of barley sugars. The street directory under the front seat had a wobbly black tick scratched over the top of every licensed venue of the inner city area. On the back window was a solitary sticker; the words "Yes, please, Miss Moneypenny" in bold, brothel-red lettering. The steering wheel was covered in fake fur. A black crucifix with "The silver non-nippled naked guy", as Tomas called Christ, hung from the rear-vision mirror. My Car. The Car.

'Pull over,' she said to me in her huskiest voice. Her. I didn't want to remember her name. It still hurt me when I thought of it.

So I pulled the car over, parked under some ancient giants of the tree world, turned the headlights off and looked sideways at her in the dim green glow of the dashboard radio. She smiled wickedly. The expanse of red leather that separated our bodies diminished as she slid closer to me. Fingers stalked down my chest, my left nipple was pinched, and then she put her face down into my lap.

'I think I'm orally fixated,' I would tell Tomas over tiny cups of Turkish coffee one morning, only to have him spurt his beverage over the morning paper at me with his raucous laughter. I meant it though. I was serious. I meant it in an earnest, psychoanalytical way, not just as a euphemism for "I love oral sex" (afterall, who doesn't?).

Oral sex isn't merely mouth-to-genital contact. At least, it shouldn't be merely that. When I declare myself orally fixated, I'm not talking about simply giving or receiving head. It's all the other things as well; all the sexual and non-sexual things, all the sensual things, all the possibilities of things that can be done with mouths, that I lust for. I love kissing and being kissed. I love the feel of fingers sliding over my tongue, of closing my lips around another's appendages. I love licking and sucking and simply pressing my mouth up against things, people. I kiss my friends, my books, my records, I sometimes lick tiled walls. I once took the entirety of a bronze trophy statuette I had won fully into my mouth and throat just to prove to myself that I could. I love eating. I sing heartily, I laugh a lot, I have what is known as "a ready smile". I love the feeling of warm or cool liquids in my mouth. Sucking on an icecube gets me horny. I dribble when I sleep. I make noise during sex because the vibrations feel right coming out of my mouth, being shaped by my lips, propelled by my tongue. And I reckon I have, by now, kissed or even briefly licked every panel and non-engine fixture and fitting of my car. My Car. The Car.

I remember stretching my neck back, resting my head on the red leather behind me, looking down at her strawberry blonde hair as my cock butted the back of her throat. She was lovely, quite lovely. She was the one with whom I had almost believed myself in love. I closed my eyes and lost myself in the feel of her mouth, in her lavishness, her lasciviousness, her loveliness.

We were both preoccupied, naturally. She - too focussed on the job at hand. I - too ecstatic and brain-fucked to realise that anything else in the world existed other than my dick and her mouth. Neither of us noticed we were moving. What did ever happen to that goddamn parking brake? Was it knocked? Had I even put it on properly to begin with? Was something amiss mechanically and it just kinda slipped out of its own accord? Whatever. We were moving.

It doesn't take much to mess up a cherished car. A car whose owner doesn't care much can go through all sorts of shit, sustain all sorts of dents and scratches and bangs and miscellaneous damage; the car isn't cherished so the owner doesn't see these things as anything to get upset about. But a cherished car... My Car... THE Car... a bird crapping on my car can ruin my whole day. A dent or a scratch is gonna fuck the whole month.

We came to rest with the passenger side door buckled inwards by one of those ancient giants of the tree world that had looked so benevolent and protecting higher up on the embankment where I'd parked. The paintwork all along that side was scraped and scratched from lower branches. One headlight had a sharp triangle of thick 1960's green glass missing from it. She bumped her head on the bottom of the steering wheel. My dick was sore for more than a week from her jaw's reflex clenching action on impact. I guess I should've felt lucky that she hadn't bit it off, but all I could think about was The Car.

A couple of weeks later she told me goodbye; took that lovely strawberry blonde hair and that luscious, lascivious mouth and walked them out of my life for good. The fact I'd been more concerned about my car's paint job than my own dick had concerned her somewhat, apparently. She called me reckless. Said I had shown I had little regard for my own safety and preservation, and therefore couldn't be trusted.

Well, it all sounded like it made sense at the time. Seemed understandable, almost justifiable. I slept in my car three nights in a row and cried myself to sleep every one of them.

Little regard for my own safety and preservation, hey? Huh. She should see me now. My own safety is playing pretty heavy on my mind right now. About as heavy as however many tonnes of whatever it is that surrounds me, I reckon.

You don't have to think you don't have to move a muscle

I was asking Tomas what his favourite song was. 'Bryan Ferry,' he replied. 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.'

'That was actually written by Bob Dylan,' I pointed out.

'Yes, but he never sang it with Bryan Ferry's voice.'

I couldn't argue with that. We were sitting on the end of the rickettiest pier I'd ever nervously walked out to sea on. We were both holding sticks with a length of fishing line and a sinker attached, but with no hooks nor bait. We didn't want to kill or torture anything. We just wanted an excuse to sit on a pier all day, doing squat.

'Fishing's the weirdest thing...' Tomas had pondered the day before as we'd passed a row of silent and earnest anglers on the bigger, sturdier jetty further up the beach. 'You can sit there all day, every day, just staring out to sea, alone with your thoughts, just thinking and looking. And does anyone try to tell you that you've wasted a day doing nothing? Fuck no! They congratulate you on having done something with your time! Even if you haven't caught anything - you've still spent the day fishing. If you just sat there and stared out to sea all day and enjoyed being alone with your thoughts but you didn't have a fishing rod, someone would say something like "What are you doing, man? You haven't done anything all day! You could've been fishing!" I believe you could get away with sitting by the sea for the rest of your days, just as long as you had that blessed rod in your hands. No one would say boo.'

So it was that we were testing his theory. No hooks, no bait, just a stick and the sea and the sky.

'And what's your favourite song, Daniel?'

I stared out at the ocean for a while as I pondered this deep question. Life On Mars by David Bowie? Don't Go To Sydney by The Zimmermen? Hold On I'm Coming by Sam and Dave? Venus In Furs by The Velvet Underground? Lithium by Nirvana? Elvis' Edge Of Reality?

'The Resurrection Shuffle,' I finally responded. 'I don't have a single friggin' clue what it's about... it might be a dance or something... or it might be about deciding not to give a shit anymore, to say "sod it all" and just groove around like a maniac... a happy maniac... but in doing just that, merely that, you're taking control over some part of your life... I dunno... it's probably just a dance thing... but I can't help thinking it's deeper... like that poem "Jabberwocky" from Alice In Wonderland. It seems like a nonsense verse - just a bunch of silly, meaningless words thrown together, but it's really all about fighting your inner daemons, about taking up your very own vorpel blade and going snicker-snack at whatever Jabberwockies you have burbling after you. That's what The Resurrection Shuffle reminds me of. I dunno... it's probably just a dance thing... But I love it. That's my favourite song.'

'You're weird, my beamish boy.' Tom monotoned.

I nodded at a pelican careening overhead. 'Look who's talking.'

A sound came to me through the blackness. Dull, faraway. I mistook it for a tummy grumble at first, but it replicated itself too perfectly to be the unique sounds of one's stomach churning. I tried lying as still as possible, holding my breath so as not to make any noise whatsoever. Was it something coming to get me? They have giant earthworms in some parts of the world. If I was buried alive... well, it only made sense that something should come for me sooner or later. It's just that I'd kinda hoped I'd be dead by the time the Something got to me. Holding my breath made me pass out. At least I'd be quiet that way.

Now you feel free ya gotta lose control

A single shaft of light. Do you have any idea what a goddamn beautiful sight a single shaft of light can be? Just a little one, mind you. If it had been a huge, glaring one like a spotlight being shone on me as I was waking up in the middle of the night, I don't think I would've been so pleased to see it. It probably would have hurt my eyes. They'd gotten almost used to seeing nothing but blackness, afterall.

But this wasn't a spotlight. It was a single shaft of light. Sunlight. It appeared about halfway down my body. A hole appeared in the ceiling of my enclosure, and this single shaft of sunlight filled that hole, stabbing into my darkness and landing a tiny circle of anti-blackness onto my left thigh. It was the most stunning, most perfect thing I could imagine at that exact moment.

I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was in shock and exhausted. I had been forced to relieve my bladder on myself and still lay in the evidence of this. I feared running out of air. I couldn't tell anymore when I was hallucinating or when I was sleeping or when I was awake or when I was reminiscing. I couldn't even have been sure, up until the moment that shaft of sunlight landed on my leg, that I was Dan Chiswick and I was encased in darkness. I might have just been a thought passing through the dreams of a disturbed sheep in a parallel universe, for all I knew.

I watched the shaft of light for a few moments. Mites of dust were floating in it. It was so god-fucking pretty. My dry lips stretched back from my teeth and I laughed an arid laugh and coughed. That dull sound came to me again, though not so faraway this time. If the Something had indeed come for me, it was going to find me this time. A pink worm appeared in the hole the shaft of light had made and wriggled at me, as if trying to get in. So the Something was a giant worm afterall.

I gathered up my aching lungs and screamed into the remaining blackness. One long, atonal, guttural sound that would hopefully use up the rest of the air and leave me dead before the worms began their dinner banquet.

'Daniel?! Daniel, can you hear me?!'

My scream kept going. The worm hooked itself around the edge of the hole the light had made and pulled itself upwards. I was blinded. And my scream still kept going.

The Something had hundreds of arms and tentacles, several of them grabbing for me as I tried to shield my eyes from the blindness that had just been visited on me.

'Daniel!! It's me! You're alive! You're alive! You're going to be just fine!'

And my body starts to tingle. Oh... god... my skin, my organs, my brain... all of me. A wondrous feeling zings and leaps from one synapse to the next, climbing up the threads of neurons deep inside me, using my vertebrae as ladder rungs. My scream dies down. My flesh crawls.

I am cradled in Tomas' arms. It must be him. It can only be him. His are the only arms that can send this ocean of electricity surging over me. His Hapsburgh lip presses against my face and I descend into darkness and oblivion.

A little bit of soul

I hate hospitals. I've never been in one before (other than to be born, of course), but I can tell I hate it already. My feet are cold. There's something sticking up my nose. My veins are full of substances that aren't much fun at all. And there's a cop standing by my bed trying to explain something about faulty mains gas in a run-down motel in an out-of-season holiday town up the coast. A major gas leak. Some explosion or other. And the house-of-cards building comes tumbling down.

Do I look like I care, mate? Why the hell is he bothering me with all this shit anyway? Can't he tell I'm not a well man?

I make some tired sounds at him and he flips his notebook shut and leaves. A tingle on my right arm turns my attention to another figure in the room, one I'm far more pleased to see.

'Tomas...'

'Daniel. My friend. I knew you were down there. But I knew you would be alright. You have a couple of fractures which I shall fix for you in no time. You are still suffering from shock and exposure. But apart from that...' he smiles down at me indulgently, lovingly. He looks like he can't think of anything he'd rather be gazing upon, and my lungs and heart swell with what I guess must be the feeling of being in love. Whaddya know? Seems I know what it feels like to be in love, afterall. 'Apart from that,' his voice cracks a little, and I can see his eyes filling with tears. 'You've done remarkably well for a man who's just spent thirty-seven hours buried alive.' He sighs at me and shakes his head, his delectable European mouth breaking into a wide, wide smile.

'Will you let me buy the leather jacket you were wearing?'

the end.