D. F. Lewis

I intend to recount a dream from last night that was so vivid I wonder if I’m now dreaming about it. I was the protagonist of the dream. Most dreamers are, I guess. But I wonder if we take this too much for granted. The expression that kept coming to my mind during the dream was ‘spiritually empty’. The buildings in the dream’s city – i.e. a city, now, in hindsight – were grey and drained. I walked inside a church and the walls were covered in purple hangings, grey purple, so grey hardly purple at all, as if a black and white film had been mixed then stained rather than tinted. The aura of sanctity seemed off-putting as I wondered who were in the confessionals. I cannot recall any pews. I then left the church and squeezed down the end...

Brandishing Knives It all started when Steve walked along the sea front. The sparse but geometrically lined-up township of wind turbines four miles off-shore slowly twirled ... “as if the sea were brandishing knives,” he thought. Not that he dreamed up such trenchantly poetic turns of phrase every day of his life. But today’s theme was indeed poetic verse, it seemed. He bought a birthday card for a loved one in a shop, a very expensive card with the usual embossed flowery front and, yes, at a cursory glance, the expected floridly sentimental verse inside upon stiff expensive paper. He took the card to the counter and winced when he heard the price. He felt surprised by the price, but he shouldn’t have been - judging by the number of...

There were grins at dawn. But not pure grins. The sun was frequently an open orange mouth as it emerged from the sea’s rim of night, at first revealing a downturned grin, but then as the whole mouth inched into view, its otherwise pure upturned grin became the bottom of the whole mouth, perhaps not a grin at all. Of course, continued to think the man in the boat, the sun itself was not quite as pure as an orange mouth during previous dawns he had experienced at sea. Often, clouds curdled it and made it appear full of something it was regurgitating from earth’s belly. Sometimes, it was barely visible at all but veiled in a mist that made it seem a ghost of itself. Tomorrow, it may be completely invisible given a thick fog or a failure...

THE EXQUISITION First published 'Ocular' 1996 My name is Phillips and I have a journey to share. I intended to tell stories of the strange zones that inhabit the Elder Zodiac. But, once told, I've decided they're not stories at all. They merely employ my words from convenience. This means, in hindsight, they must be subject to the laws of the Outer Gods ... and you must travel them all over again until you are convinced of this fact or at least until you shuffle off this mortal coil, shed this earthly raiment and become a God yourself. As you enter the first Sign, you notice the guards, in ramshead helmets, their stares being harder to by-pass than the sparkle-topped spears which they wield. They do not move to stop you but, all...

The Water Boatman Much cold water has flowed under the bridge since I last saw Alec. He was once important in my life – first encountered as the ice cream salesman who ever seemed to park his open-sided van outside my house with the ding dong tune relentlessly driving out the sound of my daytime TV. If no other customer came out to purchase his speciality Melon Mivvi, I would venture out simply to buy a Melon Mivvi to encourage his departure – him and his damned ding dong. But, eventually, we got talking and later I actually looked forward to his van’s arrival by switching off my daytime TV so that I could hear its distant ding dong echoing more and more loudly around each corner of the streets. One day, Alec said he was...

Thanks to Phill (GSC) for the suggested title a very short time ago here: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=39085#post39085 ================================================= Lewicidal Tendencies "It is with some pride that, today, I announce my untimely death. Untimely, because, given my non-intervention, I’d probably live till I was 100. Inflammation of the iris was not a killer disease. The worst that could happen was blindness...." The speaker - upon the makeshift stage he had built - seemed well past half-way to such a century of years. Piratical, with his eye-patch. I laughed at his mock-Shakesperean dramaticks. “Which the ventriloquist and which the dummy?” he continued, with hand gestures and head gestures like frowns...

It was Candlemass. Today. A flickering February Second 2010, a day after Imbolc, a day after a dubious palindrome, now supposedly an occasion when Fredrik could enjoy, without conscience, all the waxlit shimmering. It was this effulgent shimmering that he allowed himself every day of the year, but, only upon Candlemass, did he remain free from those frissons of guilt that false religions could induce more easily on other celebratory occasions. Frederik smiled. It was his day. The gorgeousness, the luxuriance, of a suburban, yet golden, ceiling shifting in and out of smoky focus. The room's curtains were only partly pulled so that any passing strangers on the pavement outside could share in the transcendent glimmer as it became...

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

There used to be an expression used by exasperated parents in my younger days to their obstreperous children: “Don’t give me any of that old nonsense!” Whether that was a condemnation of ‘nonsense’ generally, or an implicit desire for ‘new nonsense’, I was never sure. But I decided the latter was more appropriate to me. This snowy day, I’m trying to remember the old nonsense of snowy days when I was just a small toddler who couldn’t even attempt to climb the tall ancient body that is me today, assuming that he and him, me and I, ever could meet across time as well as across the static white-out that buries the empty signal lands between us. Snow today is a new nonsense that comes in many shapes and sizes. Powdery and thick...

There was a sinking feeling among those who had exercised their typing-fingers in tune with the sentences they were hoping to produce that all they would end up with were different sentences. You could watch them sitting in their rows of desks, waggling their hands for several minutes in the air above each typewriter. Suddenly, seemingly without premeditation, all the hands lowered to the keys and clattered out identical sentences, only one of which is reproduced below. “If you think that crime doesn’t pay, then try stealing expensive old nonsense after replacing it with cheap new nonsense giving the end result of nobody noticing the difference or suspecting any crime whatsoever.” The leader of the typing-pool stood at the front...

When you have a lot of worries, a useful piece of advice is to take one day at a time. I often think about this and do my best to take into account the implications of taking one day at a time. You see, I have a lot of worries and countless people who worry me with their own worries and sometimes a stray worry floats by and my brain picks the worry from the air like a magnet and makes it my own worry – a worry escaped from a stranger’s brain or a previously ownerless worry or a worry that is not a worry at all but something disguised as a worry. On bad days, worries swarm en masse rather than separately: not a spattering but a blizzard: the worries not only of people who are still alive but also the residual worries of those who have...

BODY TROUBLE It was as if you had problems with your own middle-aged body, but you knew it wasn’t you who could control it any longer. A strange feeling, as if you automatically knew you were looking at the old studio photograph in your mother’s photo album from the Decade of the Fifties, a neat, slightly bashful boy of ten, with red tie and blazer, one who wasn’t the earlier you at all. Then, searching behind the mild boyish eyes, you sense a different being, the same being who is, today, putting your body in all sorts of dangerous situations. And you, today, when scrutinising that same photograph, are not the same you into which that boy once developed. So who was recognising whom? And those mild, bashful eyes stare back at you from...

Shall I sleep with one eye open? I have heard so many tales of chimneys that contain noises. And there is a chimney in the room where they’ve put me. I’ve already tried to stuff its flue with most of my own clothes – leaving me to sit on the bare bed, shivering in just my ancient underwear. And, even so, I can never be sure that stuffing the chimney in this way will keep anything at bay. I slumped sideways on to the bed, sleep almost superseding any fears that I might have had. But the cold alone kept the sleep away ... merely allowing me to glimpse the edge of darkness as it crept back and forth towards me in the shape of the deep slumber I so yearned. I abruptly realise I have awoken. So, in those earlier interminable hours, I...

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (InkerMen Press)

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

(written today and first published here) The Brahms Sonata for Cello and Piano was playing unnoticed in the foreground. I knew its notes by heart so, even though the deliciously poignant music was ‘in my face’ as it were, I allowed it to seep towards the back of the head where memory and mind usually dissolve. Despite much music being second nature to me, I had never been able to play it myself. Indeed, this specific music was so familiar, it felt part of me. Each performance I heard was merely a new fiction about the same reality, often with its special spacing or muscularity of sound dramatising the identity of self as clown or tragedian, hero or villain, sportsman or drudge, paper prince or proper pauper. This Sonata’s...

First published 'Dreams & Nightmares' 1996 "It's easy to imagine the subject of this painting being alive. Merely look at the face, the brown eyes shining through near tears, a hint of blusher on petal cheeks, shapely lips on the point of moving in speech..." The guide indicated a large oil painting in a gold-studded frame, mixed sprays of flowers subtly overlapping the abstract margins. "The girl it depicts, as you can see, has been wonderfully caught, no older than it takes to have the beginnings of womanhood in the lines of her dress. And, indeed, the dress is a work of art in itself: drapes of creamy silk edged with the frailest lace that paint has, in my view, ever conveyed, and a bodice of finely embroidered tulips. See the...

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)