g o i n g    u n d e r

​

As the screen disappeared, the saleswoman’s voice became clearer, more voice-like than before ... Xin7 is the only quantic simularium in production…  except before she’d finished I’d already started to become aware of thoughts. It was as if my eyes had rotated round to stare back into the synapses connecting them with my dreams. Instead of a physical world impulses emerged from out of the darkness like tentacles uncoiling from the ocean floor. They were hungry, is all I knew, they wanted sensation; then, slowly, in the heartbeat of all this silence, a series of intricate sounds trickling into the space; sounds so pure I could touch them, could touch flesh. An enormous foot, the contours of its prints rippling like the surface of a lake. I listen to its metatarsals sluicing through the blood and muscle, the silky roll of an ankle joint; behind a wall of spongy tissue, cells coalescing around an enormous lump of bone. And it was here the inversion began to stop. The lump of bone turning inside-out, detaching from the foot, a sound like rain tearing through the canopy of a forest — your bunion has been removed — then murmurings, as if they knew I couldn’t hear them; the prick of something spiteful in my arm.