Your mission should it choose to accept you, and it did, is to turn yourself inside out. There may or may not be a relationship between this mission, and your recent phone call to an airline requesting that they delay an unchangeable flight for a week ( which they did ), given that you were vomiting blood ( which wasn’t entirely true*).
You are at a deluxe 5 star hotel, in a large conference room, hustling yourself across a maze of tables ever more urgently. Finally, you reach the hall, take a sharp left and head for the bathroom, picking up the pace. The first stomach lunge hits and you hold it in, rushing past the tuxedo’d gents exiting the bathroom. Many lunges follow.
You are back in the conference hall, no-one the wiser. Time passes, and given how much you had emptied before, you presume it is all over. Not quite. You are quicker to spot the build-up this time however, and make a hasty effort to reach your destination in time, which you unfortunately don’t quite manage. Beside what looks the most expensive shoes you have ever seen ( sequins or diamond studded?), more of today’s lunch splashes vigorously against the floor. The three or four women you are hunched over between, squeal and scatter, but you are already rinsing your face in the bathroom. A man with a Swedish accent helpfully points out the exact location of the motion sensor for the tap, which makes the rinsing much more effective. Thankfully, this is the last time you will visit this bathroom.
Next up, the conference room maze is avoided with a quick dart into the hotel kitchen behind the stage. Dodging dozens of waiters carrying trays of what looks like exquisite chocolate mousse, a quick analysis of the environment reveals a black plastic bin as the preferred location for repeatedly heaving further contents of your stomach into. The sheer volume hurled by now, is dizzying.
It is as though you have more than one stomach, you are channelling the stomachs of entire families. You have grown extra stomachs, some kind of rapid-fire evolution/devolution. You are possibly a cow. Anything seems more plausible than that much food fitting inside your body. Still hunched over, watery-eyed, you notice David Lynch is sitting in the corner of the kitchen. Meditating. 10 inches from the ground. Simultaneously, the sounds of hurrying waiters get softer and David’s breathing rises up in volume, eventually becoming the only thing you can hear. Subconsciously perhaps, your rapid stomach flutters grow less violent and slow to the pace of the soft, deep breaths.
You are floating in space. Or rather, your stomach is. You are your stomach. It twists and turns, clenches and releases, ebbs and flows. It is dark, but a darkness teased by flickering sparkles of light. Relentlessly your stomach toils on, turning over everything to find and expel that one last molecule of disagreeable foreign matter. Out of the darkness you make out a spiral staircase, and drift in a daze downwards. The staircase seems to sway from side to side, faster the further down you go. Doors open and a blast of cold air greets you. You are shuffled into the back of a black hearse-like vehicle. Told to lie down. Hold onto these flowers. It’s for the best. We’ll open the lid when we get there.
You cannot find your pistol. You do however, seem to have been successfully transferred to another hotel. The bathroom floor is different here, as is the sink, the bedroom floor, and the stairway. Foetal curled in bed, your vision catches briefly a neon-like light. You close your eyes, then open again. You can’t quite figure out whether the neon-like writing is happening when your eyes are open or closed. You lie there flickering. Eventually it dawns that it is the act of opening and closing your eyes that triggers the lights, as thought the writing utilises the motion and energy of opening your eyes to display the messages. You close and open at a slower rate, and eventually are able to make out two words: ‘Mission completed’
*at all.
I want to respond in someway. I can’t see what’s happening behind me, probably nothing, I mean nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that wouldn’t ordinarily be happening behind me…the door is right behind me, I just checked, it’s still closed, was always closed while I was writing the above and I don’t think it has been affected by any light, imperceptible movement of air. I can only guess that if it were affected by air movement then the affect was imperceptible, audibly at least, because I have not been watching or more importantly, measuring any movement in relation to the door.
sounds like thats two of us in the clear now tremoure…