text: It began with an old friend. A message on social media out of the blue, then a meet up. He seemed well. A good job and girlfriend; a house just outside the city in a new housing development aimed at solving the housing crisis. Can’t recall its name. I remember however that as soon as he mentioned it, I could picture it in my head. Well-tended gardens and uniform white houses. A blue sky up above, always blue. At the time this meant nothing. He invited me over, I accepted. We met at the train station in town, travelled there together. Lots of catching up on the train, old in-jokes and mannerisms manifesting once again. He was reserved, and I was always the first to fill the silence, and so I steered the conversation towards his life. My existence is not particularly eventful, and though I am not embarrassed by this I did not really want to talk about it. We spent the day sitting in his kitchen, a spacious and sparsely decorated room looking out into a well-tended garden. He insisted on keeping the lights off and the curtains drawn, and though the room was a little dark I didn’t complain. At one point his girlfriend appeared, but he barely registered her presence. I could not help but notice that she seemed scared. Of him, perhaps, or of something else. She did her best to avoid him and was soon gone. When the day came to an end, he walked me back to the station. Little was said on that walk back, though I am mainly at fault for that. As we walked through the development, submerged in the deep shadows of that autumn evening, he became more cheerful and talkative than earlier, while the sun was still up. He tried his best to elicit conversation, but I was tired; quickly losing interested in what I saw as a strained relationship. Childhood friendship doesn’t necessarily carry over into adulthood. We waited quietly at the train station. We smoked. When the train arrived, I was somewhat glad to be gone, and quickly made my way to the closest carriage. As I stepped onto the train, I had the sudden urge to turn and look back at him. He was standing there alone on the platform, looking directly at me, and his eyes bore into me like black suns. He said something then, but as the train doors were closing, I struggled to hear them. My work requires a lot of travel, lots of driving across bland countryside. In and out of identical cities, past fields of crops or livestock. I tend to zone out, to run on autopilot across those long empty hours. The whole world bleeds into one long road, deserted apart from me, with no destination. I find comfort in this. It was some weeks after my visit that I found out that my old friend and his girlfriend had died. Murder-suicide. Shot her and then himself; neighbours heard the noise. His death, coupled with resurfaced memories of that development, awoke something in me. A strange alertness, an inability to simply shut off. I began to leave the light off all day, inexplicably comforted by shadow. I avoided going outside when I could, for it was a warm spring, and the clear cloudless sky unnerved me. Sleep became a struggle, and in my dreams, I saw rows and rows of a white houses, freshly mown lawns, and a big blue sky. Yet, I still had to travel. Work seemed to take the edge off, to distract me what I can only call my everyday horror. However, the restless nights took their toll, and more and more often I needed to stop and nap. Coffee would not help, and soon my tired mind began to wonder from the road in front of me and towards those final unheard words my friend has spoken that night, standing alone on the platform. I could not help but feel they were significant, somehow related to his suicide. Was he warning me of something? Is this what happened to him? I began to see them just off the motorway. Empty countryside sprung up with new developments, malign uniformity manifested as if directly from my dreams. Possessed with a desire I could not define, I sometimes stopped to look. One I found had no road leading into it, and once I broke through by foot, I found it consisted of endless cul-de-sacs. Colourful cars and friendly faces ensnared in a maze-like nightmare. Days later, a mile on from the maze of cul-de-sacs, I found a development that seemed indistinct and however much I looked at it from the hard shoulder of the motorway, I could not focus on it. I tried getting to it, and I must have walked for hours but I never came close to that hazy line of houses stamped upon the horizon. Yet another appeared completely populated with marionettes; marionettes sitting in front of televisions. Marionettes watering well-tended plants, standing on freshly mown lawns. Forever trapped in this oneiric motion, their strings stretching up into the clear blue sky. One morning, after yet another night of fitful sleep, I awoke to rain and a cloudy sky. My relief was palpable, and I positively rushed to my car to return to the featureless comfort of before. The motorways were quiet, the fields empty of life. On my return, however, I noticed something. Just off the hard shoulder to my left was a field much like the rest, but though the tall unkempt grass and weeds that swayed in the faint wind were odd shapes. I pulled over, and after vaulting the barrier rushed into the field. What I found before me, framed by the tall grass, was a small clearing that consisted of card-board cut outs. Cut outs of houses, of lawns, of cars and people. All were roughly coloured in as though borne from the hands and mind of a child. Above them all, held up by rickety stilts, was a light blue cardboard sky devoid of clouds. I simply stared at the scene before me. Who had done this, I wondered? Did they know something? But I think I knew the answer already, must have already suspected. I did not notice the clouds dissipate, and barely felt the sharp rays of the sun upon my pallid skin, for I could only watch in stunned silence as the truth unfolded before me The card-board cut outs began to swell, to grow into definition. The faint blotches of white became windows glinting with the glare of the sun. The tendrils of green became lawns. The stickmen became marionettes, going about their days in a somnambulistic stiffness. The light blue card-board sky stretched out above me, worming its way into the clouds and dissolving them until nothing was left but that uniform blue. I turned and fled - and it was only later, as the familiar hum of the motorway once again rushed over me, that I understood that it all transpired in complete silence. I drove home, oblivious to the world around me. Now the echo of those soundless words reverberates through my mind, my friend’s final words, and I know their meaning. I look through the drawn curtains from my dark room upon the marionettes whose strings glisten in the summer sun. I shirk away from the glare of that star, from its cloak of malevolent blue, and know that the earth will never wake up from this dream, and that whatever is left will consist of rows of white houses, of well-tended lawns, and of a wide clear cardboard sky.