'GIR-y GIR-y Hallelujah' by Peter Simmonds

The voice appears again. It came to tell me that GIR created the world. I am not sure, but it tells me to look. Over the next few days I look, and I see it. I see it as the last shopping trolley of the day floats past me in the canal. I hear it in the weighty thud of the fly’s body hitting the window overlaid with the delicate sweet-wrapper crinkle of the wings and the legs. I sense it after walking home from that scary film, and the killer watches me as I buy my corner shop sausage roll. I see it when the nice man on YouTube tells me what chemicals he uses to clean his collection of glass eyes- all different sizes lined up from baby eyes to grown-up eyes all looking through the camera at me. I see it as the ant’s will gives way to the fungus that instructs it to die and in the termite cemeteries; the piles and piles of termites who else would teach a termite how to bury its dead? Did you know that in GIR’s world dogs drink backwards? Their tongues fold down at the end and they paddle the water in the other way like a desperate canoeist fleeing the mouth of a fanged cave. This kind of madness doesn’t just fall into place.

Copyright. Peter Simmonds.

Peter Simmonds is an aspiring novelist and reluctant poet. He is studying an MA in Creative Writing part-time in Birmingham alongside working at an independent book shop in Bournville, the home of Cadbury. When he is not writing he enjoys reading indiscriminately alongside a healthy dose of music, cartoons and horror films.