My Prose: The Sun also falls on Shale.

The Sun also falls on Shale.

The sun cast fragments of light through the heavily clouded sky as he stepped from the building. The pale faces of the Shalites looked down, focusing on the pavements where the streets were littered with golden, rotting leaves and shards of hope. Broken hope was the only currency here.

The frightening reality of Shale had fell like a blow to the head. The anonymous stranger’s cheap shoes clunked along the corridor in a slow death march to the manager’s office. In studied theatrics learnt from the revolution that led Marie Antoinette to the guillotine - let the managers of the world eat cock. The chop was swift and the passage from Churque to Shale seamless. The shabby stranger’s vision narrowed and his head swirled like he was falling down a helter skelter whilst high on ephedrine. The colour drained from his lightly tanned skin and the whispered platitudes of the reptile eyed drones fell like bricks around his feet.

He was stuck in some form of parallel world. In Shale, time was no longer measured by Big Ben but the rising and falling of the sun. Hunger indicates dinner-time. The metaphorical whistle that sees thousands of souls in Churque, cloaked in white coats or work soiled overalls, stopping at their allotted time for half-hour, thirty minutes, 1800 seconds; like cattle herding around the fence, the stench of shit and moral depression floating across the break-room on the merest of breezes or on the rotten breath of “colleagues”.

In this parallel world the alarm clock is retired and the day is stagnant. The dream of the weekend lingers long into Wednesday, as Thursday becomes Friday and Monday just another Sunday.

In Shale red apples are left scattered on green blades of grass, their sour, rotten flesh repugnant and devoid of attraction to those wandering the offices and halls of the proxy fatherland Churque. The sun also falls here, but it also rises on naked fruit trees and the streets are paved with ghostly bodies floating around in the ether of unemployment. Even the serpent pets of Lucifer, huddled together around their supermarket name badges, are staying clear of the palling aura of the Shalites.

We are the lost souls left with the receipt with no way of paying the price for our parents lust for the original sin, until just the sight of stacked shelves in pound shops cause the fires of hades to rise and ignite blunted emotional outbursts: fantasies of kicking small animals, dreams of sewing up the mouths of the Job Seeker representatives, imaginations of hanging the smiling few, who tread the unholy pavements, with their own intestines.

Here, there is no tomorrow and no yesterday. In Shale time is remorseless, the dull tick of the second hand taps out incoherent songs which echo, but never find rhyme nor reason. Here music is too powerful to hear without the buffer of booze or self-medication.

Today the sun rose on Churque and fell on Shale.