For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

ing the problem. We’ll shave around it; maybe try to stopper
it with some sort of makeshift bung. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed
that the white hairs are spreading. I mean, there are more
white hairs in the vicinity of the hole now, spiralling out. And
the smell is worse than before. Meatier, I can taste it acrid
at the back of the throat; I daren’t taste the liquor, though it
looks salty somehow.
– Did you always have such a prominent cowlick?
And in the morning, there’s an object lying heavy
on the pillow beside your head. A black amber to the liquid’s
sap, it looks precious. Coated in some residual black amniotic
SLIP. It looks meteoric; something perverse delivered from a
vacuum by a blind midwife – birthed from a vast wet mouth
while attempting to describe a terrible fire. Coughed up inadvertently
on the table in the interview room (an audible *slap*
as it hits the veneer tabletop); a disgusted silence falls. A
pause – long enough to make the holding of a breath uncomfortable
– then, as the screen FADES TO BLACK, ‘Die Moritat
von Mackie-Messer’ FADES UP.
[And the shark, it has teeth,
And it wears them IN ITS FACE.]