Raising their snouts up, them with their bushy tails snarl and scream as I surf their golden wave. Them with their sharp white teeth covering the ground like a blanket as more and more of their whiskered kin appear from the undergrowth. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of them now, and as the clouds part to reveal a slither of pink moon, the noise they unleash gives me a nosebleed that won’t stop. The moon is the camera lens of God, or that’s what I’ve been led to believe, and as I clutch the tails of two wily foxes, I bare my blood-stained teeth and show him what I am. And what is that exactly? A man? A wild animal? Or a dreamer who after years of drifting has drifted inside the dream and can’t find a way out? But what if the dream has become more real than reality? What if fantasy is the realm where souls such as mine dance free of scorn and constraint? Eyes fixed on that pink moon, I become motionless. For several seconds I will the man above to show me the way forward. To give me a sign that my madness has meaning, and that this journey I find myself on is not just the final descent of a man losing his mind. For those several seconds that seem as long as hours, the foxes fall silent, or at least I fail to hear them. The glow of the moon seems to reach down to me. It touches my face. So cold against my skin, I feel as tiny as a piece of dust, more worthless than a broken promise, and yet in the same breath, I feel in my veins the birth of galaxies. Behind my ribcage, a basket of stars that outnumber each and every grain of sand upon all of Earth’s beaches. I am nothing, and yet I am everything. A child born of flesh now a man born of visions. By the time the thought takes hold, the moon disappears, and the rabid cries of the foxes fill my ears louder than war. The trees in one instant grow thicker and seem to block the way, but then my fox points his tail in a new direction, and just like that, those that carry me follow suit and all at once the trees part like a curtain, and what lies beyond is a clearing. A clearing where the sky is revealed in its entirety, and as the foxes look upon the moon again as the clouds dissolve like painkillers in a paper cup, they hush their cries as I crawl on my hands and knees before rising to my feet in the centre point where the gaze of their dilated pupils meet.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US