Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge?  Are you open to sharing your dark side?   Then read on.

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Do you have a dark side?

Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so,  join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.

Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday

Share your dark side?

I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.

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dark | side | thursday | thirtyone

He placed the painting face down on the desk. Slowly, and with care.

He could not bear to see that triangular face gazing back at him. Not any more. A child’s rough depiction of a demon, or worse, some desperate child’s scribbled self portrait, a glimpse into a reality he could not countenance.

Either way, it was too much. Now.

The pain in his arm was worse. Tendrils of fire snaking along the inside of his arm towards his shoulder. His head was pounding, his chest tight and aching.

He turned and stood, shards of the shattered glass, pointing to his earlier rage, sliced into the soft underside of his bare soles as he did so. Opened a cabinet, grabbed an open packet, pulled out one of the shiny foil trays inside and clumsily, his finger shaking, pushed out one of the small white tablets, dry gulped it down, his throat dilating in disgusted disapproval. He staggered to the sink, turned the tap, leaned over, his head beneath the spluttering siphon, and allowed the water, water he normally refused to drink, to drain into his throat. He squeezed out two more of the waiting white pills, swallowed both. Sat down at the desk, his clammy forehead hard pressed on the smooth laminated wooden surface.

His eyes closed. He felt his limbs begin to separate, finger tips and toes began to tingle, sensation fading, fast. A tightening tunnel threatened to envelop him, swallow him, digest, dismember, dissemble him. The antithesis of birth. Dark thoughts gurgled through his fragmenting mind.

He drifted. Into deepening darkness. The last sound he could hear, the insistent whirling of the fan inside his Mac. How pointless all that seemed now. Then the fan faded as the last lingering light abruptly left.

The strident screech of the ululating siren shattered his shutdown consciousness.

Cracks appearing on the surface of a long forsaken frozen lake.

As those cracks enlarged, forked and multiplied, so his mind grasped for the edge, anything on which to hold.

He was pinned down. He knew that. If little else. His mind was grisly grey swirling slurry, his limbs heavy and immobile, his mouth dry and foul tasting. He felt bitter bile rising in his throat. Panic. His head aching and burning. His lips spewing foam as his head shook from side to side.

The sirens continued to clear the road ahead. He was flat on his back. Blue and red spinning lights, flashed and flickered, insane, fake, circus lightning. He tried to lift his left arm, it was heavy, his fingers, dim, long forgotten, body parts he could barely feel, let alone move. No longer his. No longer his parts. His left arm locked down tight. His other arm, and his legs, the same.

As the red and blue lights continued to splat and sizzle, as the sirens soared and screamed, the fissure in his mind ruptured.

She placed her cool hand on his burning forehead.

Turning her head, she smiled, and laughed.

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The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.

thirtyone | fiftytwo