We all have darkness within us, don’t we? That dark, dark darkness. That dark old darkness. We won’t talk about that though. Not today we won’t. Today is a day to talk about happy things, right? Talk about the happy things. Yes, yes, yes – the happy things. It’s time to talk about the happy things. The happy things are so very happy, aren’t they? They are so very happy. It makes me cry when I think about them because they are so happy. There are tears of joy streaming down my face.
Only not really, of course. I’m stuck down here in one of the grey hell realms and the mud fish are busy biting small holes in my flesh; they will lay their eggs in these holes and after a brief incubation period the eggs will hatch out as sub-dermal parasites. They run around my body at will, staking their territory as they go. They will control my mind and make me behave in certain ways. I will become a corrupted shadow-dweller along with all the others. There are very many of them. Very many of us. We will vote for fascist politicians and roar in the streets. We will roar and roar until our faces go as red as beetroots. We will roar about the bad people and how something has to be done about them.
We all have parasitic life-forms within us, don’t we? Of course we do, of course we do. We don’t like to think about it but we do. We are riddled with them and they control our minds it will, making us perform certain behaviours. The parasites make us buy the products. ‘Buy the products’, the parasites tell us, ‘buy the products.’ Yes, yes, is yes – buy the products. The parasites always tell us to buy the products and we always buy them. Parasites make us watch Love Island. Only not really of course – we make ourselves watch Love Island. The parasites have better taste than that. In their own way, the sub-dermal parasites are poets.
The Skin Fish are running about my body – I can see them running here and there as little shadows. Little shadows that move with great rapidity under my skin. ‘Look at them go,’ I said to myself, ‘just look at them go…’ They are creatures of great elegance and beauty and I admire them immensely for that. Their intelligence far outstrips my own, of that I have no doubt. I might have doubted that once, but not any longer. At times I can hear them communicating with each other in their singsong little voices. Their mode of communication is almost entirely telepathic, as far as I can tell, although I suspect that they also communicate via transmittable chemicals to some extent, just as the social insects like termites and bees do.
Every now and again the Skin Fish colony inside me communicates with me, their host. It’s more like education than anything else – it’s like going back to college. Better really, from the educational point of view, since when I was at college I was always too out of my head on whatever drugs I could get my hands on to learn anything. Or even care about learning anything, for that matter. That’s how it is when you’re young, isn’t it? It’s how you are when you’re old too, in my case. The Skin Fish colony communicates with me via what I like to think of as educational pictograms, which are like multidimensional ‘mind images’ that are infinitely dense in information.
Sometimes they talk to me in a regular type of way too. A regular telepathic type of way. One of the most important things they told me was that everything is an expression of the Incomprehensible Perfection. There is no good and no bad, no ‘lesser beings’ or ‘higher beings’, the Skin Fish explained to me, only the various expressions of the Incomprehensible Perfection. This is how I knew that they were more intelligent than human beings. Human beings never say this, to my knowledge. They never, ever say that. Human beings are always going on about lower beings and higher beings and suchlike hierarchies. Human beings are innately fascist in my view; they just aren’t interested in learning that everything which happens is an expression of the Incomprehensible Perfection.
