Part Four: The Herd

The House That Shadows Built

It was the great chasm that motivated me. The unassailable gap between the bombed out villages and thriving city centres. That abscess of white noise and polished floors between the churchyards and dirty backrooms, spaces with no greater purpose than to provide a spot in which to try and meet oblivion at a low price. Everything was set up to sparkle and catch our eye. We were magpies and vultures, scared by the shadows - the great fucking ‘what if?’ of death and pain.
My whole idea was to abolish the chasm, destroy the dam and let shopping centres be washed in blood. To break one hallucination and replace it with another. Reconfigure our brains to at least see where the two worlds crossed over; to see the overlaps between comfy Sunday afternoons, hot soup and suburban fences and the spontaneous suicides of smartphone assembly line workers and office block cleaners, tumbling through the air from the great physical heights that they had looked down on their own lives from every day.
Skyscrapers and immense factories; great manifestations of the mythical career ladder, the falling figures rushing towards null, on their way to become one with the cracks in the pavement, the cracks that children hop-scotched over playing their imaginative games and which the grazing homeless scanned for dropped coins and cigarette butts...
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