www.morpheustales.com A Worrying of Sheep Annie arrives unnoticed by night in a caul of reeking excreta. She lies unconscious at the foot of the trembling escape tower left by Gloom. The lid of your eye, a fine fold of coral flesh as delicate as tissue paper, does not open and your attention remains elsewhere. The rains of yesterday have recalled a memory that surely cannot be yours, of preparing for battle as red raindrops as big as rose petals fall upon the lines, and of a fellow Achaean who turns to you and speaks of Zeus, the bloodless god, with a sense of dread that is almost palpable. Later, as dull red light, like the stuttering glow of a dying ember, trickles through the hole in the roof, you see the construction that Gloom had used to climb free of The Function Room quiver as if with excitement. The whole place seems askew, like a wrongly buttoned shirt. Somewhere a fibular spindle strains against a patellar cog caked in wet grime, groaning like a heavy table being dragged across the floor. Awakening slowly, your pupil contracts and dilates in time with the slow throb of his ferly campanile of bone and cartilage bound in brittle tendons, trembling in reeking air. A woodlouse scurries over your eye, and through the segmented darkness of The Function Room she comes into focus, the new Controller, supine upon the filthy floor, her hair coiled in clotted tendrils like intestines tumbling from a split gut. You watch her eyes flicker rapidly, mimicking the wings of the blue bottle flies that buzz around her like errant apostrophes. Raindrops fall from the perforated ceiling and splash upon her face, leaving pale lines like war paint in the crusted filth. Steaming shit encircles her prostrate and dreaming form like a grimy collar as her ripened reveries open themselves to you like the thighs of a barren nymph, and like a maggot in a windfall apple, you burrow in. In your dream you see a murky pond. A boy named Spine washes his hands in the water, breaking its filmy surface to sift cold tadpole jelly through his fingers.
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