I’m linking up with Denise at Girlie On The Edge Blog, where she hosts Six Sentence Stories and everyone is invited to write a story or poem constructed of six sentences based on a cue word given.

This week’s cue word is Menu

The Persistence of Memory by Dali. Image: Wikipedia

Sent to Bridges 

And to think it all began with a meadow and a songbird and a clear blue sky on a September morning as bright as a memory tacked to a wall… when the disc arrived hidden under my doormat in a brown envelope, and when I inserted it into my device and was presented with a menu overlayed on a poorly pixelated image of Dali’s The Persistence Of Memory, and a voice in my head saying: Man, you been doing this shit since 1929?

• Option A: DREAM
• Option B: DREAM WITHIN A DREAM
• Option C: DREAM OF A DREAM

The risks were great: virtually entering a world such as I was about to but with both feet still planted in the real world of a surveillant society cracking down on coveted subscriptions to the principles of joy, pleasure and pain – subject to beatings, fines, imprisonment or simply becoming ‘vanished away’ based on the seriousness of classification (and sometimes whims) of an out-of-control government eating itself from within.

ZAP CLICK FLICKER as I pressed Option A, and all at once I saw myself at my desk staring into my device, and I was turned inside out and upside down, my guts and organs pulsating in the sac of my skin upon which hung the frame of my dithering skeleton, and I wished to scream in agony but no words parted the grim and deep orifice of my mouth, and I could only despair at the foolishness of what I had done as my finger bones pressed urgently at Option B.

ZAP CLICK FLICKER and I was transported to a winter forest and was set upon by all the dogs of the world: guard dogs, police dogs, army dogs, rescue dogs, sniffer dogs, the yapping and annoying little inbred dogs, the vicious cannonballs of raging Pit Bulls, Dobermans and Rottweilers and Blood Hounds, and the dogs that shit on your doorstep, and the dogs that piss up your car, and the dogs which we eat and the dogs that we dress in clown costumes and hats, and the dogs for the blind, and the dogs rabid and foaming with every madness known to humankind, and the devil dogs of Satan himself digging up graves in the non-stop search for bones, and the dogs dogs dogs coming at me just coming at me straight at me at me at me… oh… I hadn’t gone to the dogs… the dogs had gone to me.

ZAP CLICK FLICKER as my finger hammered at Option C and I was out of the forest and back at my desk, the right way round and the right way up, the dogs long gone, and I was no more the fool, and I thought I was safe, until, ah, BANG BANG BANG  and I could hear the cops breaking down my door with steel rams and decorated shoulders and an appetite for blood, and how well I could anticipate the hornet sting of their tasers, their boots at my ribs, their sticks in my face, a cold van, a cold cell, a cold sentence, cold, cold, cold… quick… ZAP CLICK FLICKER and my finger once more tapped Option A in that never ending search for my meadow and songbird and a clear blue sky on a September morning as bright as a memory tacked to a wall.

***

Words by Ford Waight

Song: Sent to Bridges written and performed by FLAW5 (Ford Waight)

Video edit by FLAW5 (Ford Waight)