Three

Death dreams of flying. He is impossibly

standing on a ridge at the top of a mountain.

He looks below and sees a sheer drop. The

surface of the rock is flat, impossibly

flat, and the scale is somehow wrong. But this

is a dream, and dreams are the only things

Death has. There is an end to this sheer drop

but Death cannot see it for a layer

of mist; it does not have substance enough

to be a cloud. In his dream, Death thinks that

jumping off his mountain ridge – where the scale

is wrong, and the mountain face too flat, and

the cloud is not yet a cloud – jumping,

he feels, would be a solution. But

he dismisses this idea. There

is no way down from this mountain ridge.

Death sees that there is no way up.

    Death’s dream takes him elsewhere. He is in a

forest now and is too cold. Death walks

and the leaves change colour. Death likes the

changing of the colours but he does not

appreciate their beauty, he simply

knows that whenever he arrives in a

forest, the trees greet him with a change of

colour. Death does only three things: waiting

to arrive and arriving and dreaming.

Death has dreams and dreams and dreams. Death is

always dreaming. Death and his endless dreams.

    Death is about to dream of flying again.

He is not on the impossible mountain

ridge any longer; he is in a

back garden, standing in a child’s plastic

aeroplane. He flaps his arms and this time

he actually flies. He has no need of

the child’s plastic plane, and as he ascends,

he waves goodbye to his wife and his child,

for Death dreams of many things which he cannot

have. He flies above clouds, well-formed cloud-shaped

clouds, not ethereal, amorphous mist.

Amorphous, ethereal mist is one

thing, but these clouds are satisfying clouds;

proper clouds; white fluffy clouds. The white

fluffy clouds change colour as Death flies past

them, like leaves changing colours, but these

are different colours; vast swirls of metallic

pink and indigo and the colours in between.

Animals recline on some of the clouds.

Death comes within striking distance of a

leopard with impossibly sharp, menacing

teeth, but Death does not fear the impossible

leopard. In Death’s dream, a red biplane

manoeuvres a loop, and Death starts to soar,

and completes his own impossible

manoeuvres. He would feel freedom, but Death

is already free. Forever released;

forever on the way to arriving;

forever arriving; and always in a dream.

   Death admires the beauty in the ugliness

of the motorway which cuts across the

countryside, although he does not feel this.

The trees change colour, the clouds change colour,

and the landscape changes from green to grey.

    Death dreams of a yellow room. Outside there

is sunshine and the sound of summer and

the sound of traffic and the illusion of

life. But Death retreats from the yellow room

and the sunshine and the sounds of summer

and traffic. He chooses to be elsewhere;

to be in a place of isolation

and darkness and the possibility

of menace. Death is comfortable in this

place, this place of absence. Death questions his

choice to be here. He starts to run through

the darkness, a light in his hand. The light

does not illuminate for there is nothing

for it to reflect off, except the ghosts

which Death does not fear; the ghosts which scare others.

    Death dreams of being younger. He is surprised

at how different he looks, how much bigger

he has become in the intervening

aeons. It must be the burden of all

the souls of all the things from all places

and from all times: the stars, the planets, the

gas clouds, the comets, the meteors, the dreams.

    Death dreams of the impossible wave which

is impossibly large; its surface

irregularly tessellated

metallic-looking hexagons, the light

refracting off them in the many colours

invisible to the eye, like the colours

of the clouds he once flew above. The wave

recedes and as it does it evaporates

to reveal a vast canyon. He looks down

into its impossible depths, as

impossible as the mountain or

the leopard’s sharp teeth. He finds himself in

the ancient underground place with its

impossibly high sides. He looks up these sides,

these walls, and reads the story of their

geological timescale. He pulls the

string on the wall and everything collapses.

    The dream is the birthplace of all of Death’s thoughts.

He thinks of how strange it is, and yet how

simple, that people inherit their parents’

shadows, stretching back and back and further back.