I am about 16 years old and have a younger brother and sister, both under ten. We are homeless, I think, or without a place to stay permanently in an odd sort of IT-type large-town/not-city precinct that is all blue-green plate glass and chrome fixtures, spindly newly planted trees and fresh tarmac. It is an indifferent rather than hostile environment and we wander through the largely deserted facilities without hindrance. Except there are floating, translucent orbs, usually three at a time, following us at a height of about four metres. They look like some sort of semi-organic thing, luminous ghostly silver-green, humming like a cycling appliance and occasionally arcing out loops of phosphorescent light like fuzzy tentacles. They seem at least partially sentient, and intent on locating and following us, which I don't enjoy.
We can lose them by going into buildings as that seems to confuse their idea of where we are and where we're headed. Once inside a long glassy gallery-like library that grades into some sort of retail environment, I stop and watch one of the orbs trying to squeeze through a minute gap in the plate glass frontage panels, sizzling and emitting neon green light but finding itself unable to perform the manoeuvre. Then I know we are safe for the night, more or less, and make my younger brother go to bed on a mattress covered with strange layers of fancy, brand new quilts, duvets and large-scale flower print linen. The younger sister is nowhere to be seen and I seem to have forgotten about her anyway. An uneasy sort of calm or stasis descends; everything is dark and silent and suspended.
R E M A R K S: No idea where the floating orbs came from but their colours are lifted from the graphic I put together for an instalment of the book. The dream siblings looked sort of 'stock' and not physically related to me, and I felt no real attachment to them. By far the most striking image was the floating orb trying to squeeze between the glass panels toward us; the process completey negated both physical laws and the impersonal nature of the entity itself, giving it a strange and unwelcome impetus. I suppose there is a vague theme of harassment or persecution but it lacked both urgency and specific, identifiable agency, so I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to where that's coming from.
Stupid oblique references!
We can lose them by going into buildings as that seems to confuse their idea of where we are and where we're headed. Once inside a long glassy gallery-like library that grades into some sort of retail environment, I stop and watch one of the orbs trying to squeeze through a minute gap in the plate glass frontage panels, sizzling and emitting neon green light but finding itself unable to perform the manoeuvre. Then I know we are safe for the night, more or less, and make my younger brother go to bed on a mattress covered with strange layers of fancy, brand new quilts, duvets and large-scale flower print linen. The younger sister is nowhere to be seen and I seem to have forgotten about her anyway. An uneasy sort of calm or stasis descends; everything is dark and silent and suspended.
R E M A R K S: No idea where the floating orbs came from but their colours are lifted from the graphic I put together for an instalment of the book. The dream siblings looked sort of 'stock' and not physically related to me, and I felt no real attachment to them. By far the most striking image was the floating orb trying to squeeze between the glass panels toward us; the process completey negated both physical laws and the impersonal nature of the entity itself, giving it a strange and unwelcome impetus. I suppose there is a vague theme of harassment or persecution but it lacked both urgency and specific, identifiable agency, so I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to where that's coming from.
Stupid oblique references!
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