One suck, one suction from a far off mouth, had pulled the universe back in, like the sound of couples kissing in packed commuter circles, expansion had turned to contraction. One sound, a split second, and it all retracted, inverted to a lush stream of glossy black fluid. Buildings folded and fell throught themselves, screaming and coughing dust as they disappeared down their own anuses. What could be seen was not the whole picture, not an overview, but tiny parts through the clay air. So deep in the world, so encompassed by the city, so blinded by sight that only fragments could be percieved.

A car concertinas and shrinks, blinks in post coital metallic agony, excited by its coming alive and at the same time astonished at what it means. A car is just another car until you see it come alive, no longer a dead extension of a human, but conscious, excited, aware. It then realises its fate, quivers and quickly devours itself.

Humans ceremoniously kneel behind objects for protection, cars and post boxes, windows, doors, under tables and yet one suck, one pushy diaphragm and a uni-directional equilibrium begins. Staying close to the ground gives a close perspective on things. dirt, dust, cigarette butts and chewing gum are all in detailed focus and even these partake in the enama of unforseen grace. Chewing gum, like a tribute to the human jaw, a reminder of what things where like before the suck. It seems so alien that five minutes ago people would have cared about chewing gum. Instead, fear fills the mind like an airbag in a bad accident, it leaves no room for gum and swells to fill the entire psychic space of every human alive. What is fear to take over, are we not in control? It comes like an uneccessary screen wash and only subsides when the lights slide, well greased , from red through amber to green and an unwanted situation has no choice but to retract in fear to the central reservation and the flowers tied to lamp posts. In fear of getting flattened by a well oiled engine.

Currently the traffic lights are off, they’ve gone clammy and they blink like a child with sand in its eyes, continuously blinking in a jittery confusion.

Why are we so scared when we have the ability to turn it all off. It takes only one small muscles to shut your eyelid and it would all be gone. But this weapon is usless when coupled with the naïve belief that stuff actually still happens around us when we shut our eyes, that the sensations are not just a placebo. When you succumb to curiosity and open your eyes to discover from behind a bin that everything is still happening, you wish you could just become the bin.

The bin then turns, its colour whitening like stretched polyurethane, it grows tits and a pussy, winks and then exits vertically, imploding as it goes up to join the bitumen river forming in the sky.

Kids in art class mixing all the colours together, don’t know that once they have seen the hue of tar, they will never see anything else ever again. Tube trains begin to slide out of broken underground tunnels, like tape worm coming up for air and breaking the flesh. They squint at the daylight, breathing heavily, their eyes like stab wounds, oozing bitumen. They don’t last long, even they crumple and recoil like a broken slinky. Spluttering their dying declaration of electronics and wheels whilst biting the metal tracks to try and hold on to being alive. Kicking up like a cobra only to flop and bubble into oblivion filling another gap in the ever increasing bitumen sky, with black fluid. With abnormal events come abnormal reactions. People begin to stand up in brief moments of calm, beleiving it must be over, before they retract back to the safety of objects as soon as the tapeworm tube or an anus bound building return.

In the suburbs, family houses are eaten alive by bigger ones, crunched and crushed in the jaws of mansions. All their homliness disappears, their projected value and sentimentality dies a horrible death, being dismembered; phot frame to fridge, toys to Grandpa’s old piano. All succumb to the tar, all collude with life and betray their loving owners. The biggest house eats all the others, then in a vulgar bout of flatulence, releases their gases, filling the atmosphere with the foul stench of a million loving homes. Now it consumes in a schizophrenic fit, defecating its own fixtures and fittings, coating itself in its own gut flora, before imploding into and insignificant drop of the glossy black stuff. Inside halls and theatres people madly and incessantly blow into musical instruments, whole orchestras desperately try to bring to life the oboes and the trumpets, the flutes and the tubas. Trying to make them say something. Blowing like a lifeguard into an already dead victim of the waves. All that occurs is a forced sound, like trying to orate something quite profound through a drinking straw.

It used to work but today the suck happened.

Instruments, drip black fluid, like a runny nose, they squelch and try to breath only to choke on their own vomit. Whole orchestras are inverted, whole opera houses are turned inside out. Trumpet players inhale their instruments, sing the most beautiful song and immediately sink into a bitumen stream. Theatre entrances are now at the centre of theatres hidden from sight, the seats which once served the viewer inside so well are now on the outside, like a skinned rabbit. These mutating objects are coming alive, existing like so for a number of seconds before violently twisting skywards and out of sight.

Buildings slowly shook and fell aside slowly as the horizon was becoming much less broken by civilisation and more visible, so that the slight cambre of the earth could be taken in. It was, for a moment, breath-taking to be able to see some hard proof of Galileo’s theory, which is, after all, still just a theory four hundred years later. The sight of the arching horizon did not last more than a few minutes before it too was obscured by the bitumen, slowly filling the peripheral vision and looming to fill the rest of the two hundred and seventy degrees of human sight. Closer in, the footprints of dead buildings were becoming visible. The streets looked like archeological digs that had unearthed buildings from the future.

Pavements rear their ugly heads, shed their coating of cigarette butts, litter, the homeless, soggy newspapers (proclaiming a now meaningless scandel) and the double yellow lines so carelessly scolded onto their backs.

Slowly a cummunal realisation is beginning, but still, individuals wonder if this is happening to anyone else and paranoia that it is not, sets in. By now, all objects, like Pinocchio had come alive and then died, their carcasses filling the space with bitumen. No ground, no sky, no air, no space and no distinction exists anymore, everything is black and dark.

Without usual points of reference it is impossible it is impossible to tell if it is a dream or whether you have died or indeed if this is happening to anyone else. There are no conversations, no relationships of any kind between anything, just a black state.

The objects came alive, did the thing human beings have been unwittingly willing them to do since the beginning. They have proven their existence, proven their mortality and taken their revenge.