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 | thirtyfive

‘…realityytilaer

hisfingerssregnifsih…’

Melting into the wall, the white wall rippled, a stone flicking across a pond. Plink, plink, plink. His arm vanished in front of his eyes, sucked into the white wall, melting, dissolving, vanishing. Un-being. Words flickered in his mind, un-flickered, flickered again, brighter, coalesced, flared, bloomed and dissipated, words incoherent, yet full of meaning. Words he knew, word he had heard.

Before.

Her voice, fading, swirling, water flowing in antipodean swirls down a white drain. Swirling, straining, becoming. Nothing.

His arm had gone. The white wall approached his shoulder.  Enveloped his shoulder. Engulfed him. He felt older. Colder. The white wall took his head. He stopped thinking.

He was not older. Younger. Bolder. Smoulder.

He was now all white. Like the room, the wall, the whole world. The world as it seemed to him. White, not right, no, so so not right. He could not write. He had to be right to write, right?

No longer observing the world. He was, the world. White rippling waves coursed through him. Unfolding, spreading, tightening. Not frightening. Pulsating, enfolding, enclosing.

Memories of the black plastic mask hovering above his face, the tube in his throat. They thought he was out. They thought he was all white.

All around him, white.

And then. And then, the voice.

Her voice again. He closed his eyes, but it made no difference, all was white. There was no dark. No light. No wrong, no right. Only the white.

The pain in his arm, that familiar pain, flared and snaked through his incorporeal body.

‘Close the pod doors Hal’.

White, all around him, white.

Memories of films and books and plays and poems. All white. Words blurred into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into books, books into lives. Lives into whiteness. Always the whiteness. Nowhere else. All was white.

Reality.

Was no more.

There was only the path through the white place.

And the cloying sweet smell, of the black mask.

Hovering.

Waiting.

He wanted the button, the sweet promise of being able to push the button. To unleash relief. To let all that whiteness suffuse him. Push the button.

He drifted away, through the whiteness. White walls, imperceptible, white walls closing in on him, taking his breath. Making him want, the black mask.

The man in black, lost in the white, wanted and needed the black mask. Needed to draw deep on the sweet dark promise of the mask. Needed to suck on the dark life inside, needed the dark infusion to balance the white confusion that suffocated and took him deeper, away, out, from all he knew.

Inside the white, a part of him, buried deep, knew he was losing his mind. Knew that the white illusion, that was growing inside, was no more than that, an illusion.

Like her.

Why, did it all come back to her. Why did she fill his mind. Obscure his thoughts.

He was the man in black. He feared nothing.

Only the white.

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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.

thirtyfive | fiftytwo