Skip to content

Dread

by Rictor Jomes

My desk is the place where I sit and dread. I dread it all, I am a dreading machine: I can feel the parts of myself churning like gears and pistons made of dirty steel. The gears drip soil and oil. It’s bigger than a room, that machine, bigger than a factory. How did I get that big, how can I fit so much dread? I am a vasty space, filled with parts that churn and clatter.

Through my window I can see a telephone wire that the ice storm last February slackened. It hangs like a belly. While I watch, a robin perches on it, but the robin is a sick thing, pale red and draggled, a harbinger of something slow and dark that is moving towards me, not spring at all.

My dread is bigger now: I’ve forgotten the difference between myself and the world, so that the bird isn’t an omen at all any more, but just a small player in the play of myself, and of course he would look like that. The neighbor’s cat slinks across the lawn like a guilty thought, because he is my guilty thought; there is after all no cat

because I am the world. And there is no world.

 


[UPDATE: You can now hear grubby’s interview with Rictor JomesĀ here]

Tags:

3 thoughts on “Dread”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *