Free Songs From Spider Street by Mark Howard Jones

each other, struggling to re-form and create a meaning in
their moods, becoming grotesque.
    So good to be
among people again. She can feel the strength of their company, their lives,
flowing into her as she moves into the press of the crowd. A feeling very like
her memory of happiness begins to invade her marred soul. The crowd is a
comfort, a support, a touchstone of normality. A way back to who she was. A way
to be who she is.
    A familiar
face appears, bobbing among the crowd’s myriad mouths, eyes and noses. Dora.
She was one of the very few who visited her in hospital. One of the very few
that had stayed a friend to her. Think how this true friend would delight at
seeing her whole again, able to smile like everybody else. She presses further
into the crowd, shouting to her. Head turned away, Dora doesn’t hear but rushes
on, intent on her mundane errand.
    She must
speak to her. This would mean so much to both of them, another bond of lasting
friendship and another entrance to the world she had thought gone forever.
    There just
ahead, Dora crosses the road, waving to someone on the other side. She shouts
again, following her. Surely Dora is close enough to hear now. But her voice is
drowned by the screeching of a car’s tyres as it pulls up sharply.
    The heavy
machine barely touches her, merely knocking her leg. The man’s voice, ugly and
harsh, is more of a shock as she lurches slightly to one side.
    The mask,
jolted by her unsteadiness, slips from her face. She attempts to halt its
descent but its weight makes it too fast to catch. Striking the floor, the
marvel she had moulded shatters into smithereens, the tiny fragments lost
forever as they slide swiftly across the hard paving.
    Screams pour
from her endlessly as she stumbles forward. On her knees, she sifts through the
shattered shards of her face; a face she will never be able to rebuild. From
one silver sliver an eye, a bright blue perfect eye, returns her gaze, unaware
of its fate.
    Her sobs
choke her, lungs heaving painfully for a breath that will not come. Her friend
hears at last and turns to see her as she wants no-one to see her ever again.
    She lifts her
head and looks to the sky, the last light of the day fading swiftly from it.
She wishes more than anything that she could escape up into the air, be lifted
far above the winding pathways of her hell.
    The phantoms
called people, those who had plagued her all her life, boil at the edge of her vision
as her face and mind evaporate up into the high skies.

LOVE BOX
     
     
    Rie and I met at a social event organised by our company and we knew of
each other’s desire immediately.
    In our haste
to discover each other, we fled to the nearest place available to make love in
this overcrowded city. Hastily and, we thought at the time, unwisely, we found
ourselves in a nearby capsule hotel.
    The 5,000 Yen
cost of the room, and a sizeable bribe for the man behind the desk to forget he’d
seen Rie, proved to be a very small price to pay for entry to paradise.
    Both
wonderfully supple and eager, Rie proved to be the perfect companion for
lovemaking in such a small space.
    Our room –
barely three feet by three feet by six – seemed dauntingly cramped at first;
particularly as, unlike most hotels of this type, there was a small door rather
than just a curtain at the entrance of the room.
    But Rie’s
flexibility proved to be a revelation. The positions that we attained that
first night were both surprising and various. Our mutual joy arrived quickly
but our desire was not easily sated; we got very little sleep that night.
    We were
married within a few months but found our sexual congress in the marital bed
lacked flavour. We returned to our capsule hotel and rediscovered the heights
to which our passion could climb. After that, we returned to the hotel
regularly, often twice in a week.
    Our limbs
twisted into unorthodox positions that would daunt the fittest gymnast, but our
desire for each other seemed to put the