Playback

You wake up in an avalanche.
You have thin, reedy red lines
across your back. You can feel them.
They are the seams in the floorboards
that betray a trapdoor.
You have insect bites on your backside.
They itch like stoplights.

You are going somewhere. You
are in such a rush that you pour
half your coffee down the sink
and you have odd socks on, and
you do not take your umbrella
even though it is raining.

You blunder into a photograph.
You know it is a photograph because
there is a man to your right who is trying
to pry his eye out of the camera lens.
His fingers are stuck cogs,
woodlice on their back.

To your left, everyone has stopped
dead. As if time depends
on the camera's machinery.

Each frame is the tooth of a ratchet.
Cricket. Tick. Of the cog-jaws meeting,
a key fitting, a wall socket switched 'on',
triggering an airgun that fires a dart
that passes through both of your cheeks
and into the photograph,
which deflates
as people escape through the puncture wound.

You speed up the recording. Everyone
is now ten years younger.
They get zoo-limber. A female barrister
giggles like a little girl. An unpleasant,
weak left ventricle of a man
manages a sentence

before the library door, as if slammed
by a ghost, pitches him down the steps.

Slapstick. Fast forward. Stop.

You are in a lift. Your
strap keeps
falling off your shoulder as you
try to find the handle that
collapses the false
wall.

Your watch has stopped.