1.3


It didn’t take long to muster the necessary energy. In fact it was there all the time under the surface, like a pocket full of coal, carbonised since the dinosaur times. 
The waiting was not such a big thing.
I always waited, time was always be relative, it still is in fact.
I bemoaned my tiredness, drew strings over my eyes, lifted the lid off the day and wept goodbye to my dreams.

“Goodbye sweet dreams. I can’t remember you so well, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

I mused at the paradox and scratched my tired arse.

There’s no coffee, no awakening agent, just sunlight.

I had a mackerel, smoked and dipped in pepper, squashed onto a bit of brown toast. It worked a bit.
The news babbled on about Brexit. The day crept into me and I dragged my way to the great outside.

Systems engaged, I took a breath or two, they worked a bit. 
Bright light forcibly pressed into the retina, that worked a lot.

Roads to cross, trains to catch, crowds at Waterloo to dodge and rush. Not that I had anywhere to rush to. 
The day is long and the day is short, I mused across Waterloo Bridge.

The water lapped beneath my feet, somewhere down there beneath the concrete, beneath the silt water, lay Nazi bombs, statues from Roman times, and pennies wishing good luck to the long dead. It worked a bit.
A busy man passed me, over-taking on the right, and then a fox. It followed him close to heel and I could tell he didn't know. I didn’t say anything because he was off in a flash. 
I see things like this all the time.
People don’t like to be interrupted.

The sun shone, it was crisp with the cool morning wind. 
That worked a bit. Then the bridge abruptly stopped. 
Standing over an edge, the crowd thickened and looked at an empty void.
The pavement stopped, the road stopped, busses tipped over the edge in silence. It was so silent on the bridge. All of the buildings on the other side, the shops, the offices, the pedestrian crossings and the underground stations had all vanished. Everything on the North side of the river was replaced with a hollow curtain of black. It was like looking out into starless space. 

A fuzz of primeval static electricity formed a border between the morning sunshine and the void. 
People began to take photographs on their phones.

I saw the man with the fox snapping at his heels but he didn’t notice because he was gawping at the screen on his phone tapping and swiping like mad.

The crowd filled in behind me and as they pushed forward, the people at the edge began to drop off, one by one. Some turned with a scream to clutch at the lapels, the arms and the anything to save them, but they just turned their death into two, and then four, then sixteen. One by one the screams dropped off into nothing.

“There’s a fox following you.” I shouted. I thought I might as well, it was all going to end anyway.

As I moved forward I wished that the dream that niggled at the surface of my consciousness would reveal itself, just one last encore, some tiny epiphany just before the end. But as I searched the back of my mind I felt the last tendrils of the dream recede and then I toppled over and became weightless. 
The fuzz of living static turned to vacuum, bleating sunlight and a windless fall into nothing and forever.
Above I saw the tuft of light shrink and there it all was - every dream I’d ever dreamt.
Dreams from childhood, from tortured adolescence, dreams from forgotten enthusiasm and times unremembered. I delved into the abyss and spent days frolicking with a woman on a boat, looking out to sea, swimming in each other’s eyes. 

I was glad that I still had it in me.

It didn’t take me long to muster the necessary energy it was like a renewable resource, fuelled by awakening.
Dawn yawned, the clocks yawned and mumbled the time. 

I waited for the day to start again, to repeat like moons, to repeat like the valves of my heart with their perpetual round of applause.

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