Under cover of the arches of what appears to be a large shopping complex a musician is blowing his trumpet unmusically and another performer, a dancer, is limbering up for his performance. The dancer looks over at me and nods in a way that makes me think it is a signal of some sort. When his performance begins, he grabs me and lulls me into a kind of sleepy relaxation so that I lie down right there in front of everyone. I close my eyes and I wonder for a moment whether he is going to help me up or I am just going to fall asleep right there on the ground. When I open my eyes, however, the sky above me is dark and I am cold and wet, lying in the middle of a field. As I stand up I notice a man, dressed in a rubber wet suit, crawling up out of a hole in the ground, and breathing apparatus and oxygen tank still attached to his head and back. A woman is lying, drenched, on the ground a few metres away from me. The frogman hands me an envelope that has money in it—a couple of hundred dollars—which seems to be payment for the inconvenience of having been disappeared against my will. I look back across the field towards the shopping complex and notice that there is a fountain underneath the arches. The woman and I have somehow been lowered into the fountain and dragged underwater by a frogman for more than a hundred metres through an underground lake. We wander off, going in separate directions. I come to a road. There is a commotion ahead. Council workers are struggling with a giant creature, like an eel but sixty or more feet in length, which has a head with whiskers like a catfish. It snarls and gulps for air, flaps about like a fish out of water, which it is, while the council workers inject it with poison.
writing + art
Stephen J. Williams 