I, Mercury

Kai sends me a new demo tape and follows up with a phone call asking me if I’ve heard from Damia. No, I tell him, she’s been quiet for a couple weeks. The phone rings out and she doesn’t reply to messages. And no, I haven’t called the police, coz I’m holding onto the last message she sent me. She’ll be away for a month, followed by an all caps, DO NOT WORRY. Which, inevitably, leaves me drowning in the stuff.

I tell him I’ve been coping by reading unsolicited phallic-phone-poetry pinged to me through dating apps. 

dip it low, 

lick, and 

suck my dick

Kai counts the syllables speculating it’s a haiku. It reminds me of a pearl, I say, grit jabbing into the soft flesh of my thumb wanting to become a pretty, gleaming bead.

Damia, Earth

Fuck it, Damia wasn’t going to pay the bank. She was going to do a runner. She swiped clothes and toiletries at random into her pink camouflage backpack and chucked it into the car along with pillows and a duvet. Some tins of food and a torch followed, the later giving her chaotic exit a semblance of forethought.

It didn’t take long before she was out of the city and the darkness became woollier, tightly packed around the beams of her car headlights. The rain was hard, lit up into broken white lines extending out in radial formation from the top right of the windscreen. It reminded her of Star Wars graphics used to denote accelerated time travel. In this elemental relativity her escape felt sluggish and painfully earthbound.

The wheels droned on through the unrelenting rain. The digital clock display told her she had been at this for three and a half hours. It was time to turn off the main road, move deeper into the shadows of the barely silhouetted mountains. The dirt track was framed by glistening grey grass and just ahead, a grouping of deer looked back lazily at her. Six glowing yellow planets orbiting around an unseen star. Swiftly eclipsed by a turn of heads and breezy hop across the road.

Inching along in search for a place to park overnight, she found campers took up most spots. They had surged through the pandemic and the resulting holiday flight cancellations. Her headlights at last shone unimpeded into a free lay-by surrounded by beech trees. She switched off the car engine, fading into momentary silence before the shimmering chorus of the beech gathered volume in the wind. The logic of capital had flexed and shifted — money did grow on trees in a crisis — but only to keep credit card bills going. The old-normal’s burning pit of debt, glowing warmly into the future.