Gary J. Shipley’s “Dreams of Amputation” is now available.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

The station is full of copies, thought-structures all breathing the same boxed air as him, screwed down into new estates, their borrowed movements vapour trails of the imperceptible multitudes that precede them, his forced embodiment a shriek he cannot hear, its explicit exclusion of human context conveyed in a series of smirks and titters causing him to wake repeatedly inside glimpses of himself, a reluctant conduit to spasms outside the insulation of a body, some dead agent without a face and him mad yellow escaping his dismembered endurance, expanding into nothing in the artificial disfigurement of their smiles until he finds an unsecured staircase, and unaware of any alien intent they carry it up after him, hands formed like mouths barking, their dreams of souls all shrunken cages in its swarm of dead beginnings, their every defect growing into holes, and up into the street and they disperse around him their brains once again made of the digitalised ooze of money and fucking and blood, his own voice coming back removed as if from a TV in another room, his limbs appendixes to an earthquake camouflaged by some Sadean baptism of puke and shit, and nothing and no sound, its hold fixed on the ends of unpronounced words, agitating images of string, an animated ossuary squeezed with rainless faces shining like simulated sick…

and

For a second or two there is the man, on his feet reaching for the back of his chair with his right hand, and then the dance of the vanishing begins: the flailing honeycombed limbs, naked bone glinting through a blood fog, burrowed organs hovering in the air like bloated dust particles, and so it goes until worm-holed meat and bone give way to empty space and the closing disinterment of faecal matter; eaten free of its fleshy coat it drops to the floor – a signature.

Whirling letters of code, RNA, DNA, phosphate bases, enzyme spatters, chromosomes, proteins, sequences, striped rods of mitochondria, the jig of genetic disclosure, cytoplasm, hormones, membranes, starburst nerve impulses, the fluid capering of cells, neurones, synapses, myelin sheaths, serotonin crystals, glucose sprays, the airborne foxtrot of fibres, dendrites, axons, thermoreceptors, nebulized nerve dots, spinal fluid secretions, Ranvier nodes… The fuzz of atoms, ions and isotopes, protons, neutrons, electron clouds, nuclei, photons, baryons, mesons, quarks… The mists of consciousness failing their abstract integer…
Screen down: show over.

The only faces he sees are of the dead and the soon to be dead. He’s forgotten what a genuine smile looks like. If he was to approximate one from memory, he’d be forced to construct it in his head out of the grimaces of the perishing, and the curling pink brume of floating blood.

Gary J. Shipley’s “Dreams of Amputation” is now available.

Gary J. Shipley’s “Dreams of Amputation” is now available.