The moustaches of the the three man white mariachi band vibrate in the wind, and in a rousing chorus they continue to boom:

 ‘WE’RE ALL OUT OF PLACE IN THE HUMAN RACE
AND WE’LL ALL GO MARCHING INTO HELL’

They sort of sound like the Red Army choir but played from a phonograph inside a large chest freezer. All of us are here together in this canyon. Well, it feels canyonesque to me, surrounded by dust and yellows. The mariachis all glare at me with bruised eyes and sing from black holes on their chins. Cosmic eating holes that belt the refrain from deep in the back of my head—and as it comes, it layers down over everything. 

Blackmail my spirit
Deserts miss rain
Gut the rain
The shit and piss flow all around the roofs 
In pipes like novelty straws.
Fibre optic drinking apparatus
While we all make our way inside streaming. 

HE FELL out of sleep sometime in the last two seconds. The chorus quickly retreated back into the Mariachi throats with only one final echo making its way through to his full consciousness. He had a go at trying to fully recall but the whole scene was gone. It had withdrawn back into the silver skin folds and sinew that made up the damp electric meat of his mind. All that was left in his head was Ten Thousand Hours. He looked at the lamp that was still on at the other end of the room. It projected a large round glow that covered most of the wall. There was a real big boy who lived in the room below him. Every night he snored like a giant on its back after shooting an asphyxiated load on five thousand milligrams of valium. This was the only ever cause of his arousal. He hoped that this would be the night that the big boy finally died. Since moving in he had come to understand that it only took a few sleepless nights for the cracks to really get a good grip on your humanity. He stretched out and tried to form some lullaby from the giant but the rhythm was too irregular and the sounds far too guttural to force a melody. He wanted to get back to the peace of the canyons and to the hellish song that was there. There had been a strange feeling since he woke up that he had not fully noticed until he tried to empty his head. The bed seemed to be gently shaking. There were tiny but unmistakably present vibrations that now harassed him like a chart hit in a supermarket. There had to be some machine downstairs causing the little bed quakes. A sleep apnea machine? Was that what was keeping the big bastard alive? But there wasn’t any noise—only the little vibrations. It dawned on him that it wasn’t the bed but his skin that was trembling. This was a new one: He was losing his mind. Every crevice of his pink sheet was folding in on itself like tectonic plates. Thousands of little tremors over thousands of millimetres of skin. His bacteria must have thought it was the end times. Millions of civilisations of blobs watching their sky falling. They would hold their dear ones tightly and tell each other the things they should have said aloud every day but were too busy doing god knows what.

‘Henry Maguire is a South East London based short story writer. His first chapbook ‘Zest On A Government Claim was released in 2021. It will be followed by ‘Dross Hostage’ in 2023.’