by Haydn Wilks
Down at heel, down on luck, done, you meander through the streets, afternoon becoming early evening, depression washing over you completely, as you meander aimlessly through Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge, past all the glamour and riches of the elite your life will never in any way affect, that even your darkest actions will do nothing to distract from their lives of unimaginable luxury, and evening becomes night as you head through St. James Park, past Buckingham Palace, along the Thames, past the Houses of Parliament, along the South Bank, beneath the London Eye, this succession of landmarks having no more bearing on your own sordid story than on a “the gang go to London” special episode of some shitty American sitcom.
Night ebbs on as you sit upon the South Bank, staring out across the Thames. Midnight comes, and a single snowflake falls from the sky, and gently crystallises upon a tear you didn’t even notice slipped out from the corner of your eye socket to your cheek.
“It’s snowing,” you whisper to yourself, looking up at the great half-dark of the city’s sky, as a succession of white flakes fall from it.
A Christmas miracle.
Maybe this story doesn’t need to go any deeper, or any darker. Maybe you’ve already gone too far down a path that never needed be ventured upon. Maybe it’s not too late to make up for your misdeeds. Maybe this Christmas, you can do something to make it all right again.
Turn yourself in, your mind suggests to itself. Accept the blame for what you’ve done, accept the punishment. Show real contrition. Spent the rest of your life in prison, making up for all you’ve done wrong.
Then your mind flits ahead, to HM Wakefield, Monster’s Mansion, at the revulsion your dietary habits will have in the general prison population, at the immense likelihood of having your guts cut up from the inside as the other inmates grind glass into your food.
No.
That wouldn’t help anyone.
Then what then?
Leave.
Take the Eurostar to Paris.
Head to Heathrow, get the next flight out of here.
Leave Britain behind you, begin anew.
But you’ve not bought your passport, and you’re no doubt wanted by now for all the havoc you’ve wreaked back in Cardiff…
No.
So what then?
What?
What possible satisfying conclusion can this sordid descent ever have?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Haydn Wilks was born in Caerphilly, Wales in 1987. After graduating from King’s College London, he spent a year flitting between call centre firings before heading to Seoul, South Korea. Four years later, he headed to Groningen in the Netherlands to do an MA, and is now residing in Tokyo. His writing mixes the local and the global, throwing together a wide range of characters from across the inter-connected modern world. It features moments of comedy, often dark, alongside sudden violent outbursts.
Influences include Tarantino movies, Twin Town, Chuck Palahiniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Murakami (both of them), Kerouac, Bukowski, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Conrad & Joyce. Music features heavily in his work, from Manic Street Preachers, Exit International & the explosive Welsh underground scene, to northern indie like The Smiths, Joy Division & Arctic Monkeys, along with hip-hop, house, dubstep, ’80s pop, K-pop, vaporwave, etc., etc.
‘The Death of Danny Daggers’, his debut novel, throws these influences into a cocktail with a high alcohol content, a few spoonfuls of ketamine & M-kat, and a big dollop of good old-fashioned ultraviolence.
‘Americosis’ is a genre-blending mash-up of sci-fi, horror, thriller & dark comedy. It might all be madness. It might be the apocalypse.
