Dear friends,

I awoke today to a bowl of porridge!

Let me catch you up.

So I was on that desert planet, wherever that was, gathering all the moisture I could onto my desperate, thirsty tongue when at once a troop of the small, boobacious spidery variety came upon me, grabbed me like a group of ants grabbing a grape, a huge grape, mind you. Which brings to mind my piles, but that’s another gripe for another time.

Their strength must be mighty to grab a grown man like me, though admittedly, I am smaller than average. Still, my smallness has always made my appendage appear huge, so there has always been that advantage, forgive me, I digress, where was I?

Oh, right, yes, so they grabbed me as one entity and wove me up into the silk of the skies, and I had a bird’s eye view of the ground below, and I saw the mannequins still lying upon their backs. The phallic-like pillar jutting out of the sand from the male mannequin gave the impression of some Greek ruin.

They then proceeded to caccoon me in layer upon layer of silk and try as I might to fight it, somehow they could keep me subdued. And so, although the fright had my heart beating hard against my chest, I could not respond with anything, not even to shape my countenance with a grimace.

I was wrapped so thoroughly in this silky substance, I panicked, suffocation came to mind, and my heart beat itself into a frenzied dance with which flashed images upon images superimposed behind my retinas. The blood of my ancestors, all time stretched out from the past and the future with me in the middle to the beat of a drum. My heart was the drum and the dancer trapped inside my chest.

I asked myself if I was human or dancer, my heart clapped back that I was surely both, with a frenzied salsa.  

I could feel myself being moved through a throng of spidery legs until I was rolled and bundled into a ball and placed inside something dark. The dark space I inhabited moved with a jolt that matched the spasmic quakes of my heart beating at pace.

‘You are the fly.’ A voice spoke aloud to me.

Shit! I’m a fly! I screamed inside my head. I was a fly with no wings to hum my misfortunes into a buzzing scream!

I started to wonder if I was in the belly of one of those spidery beings, if I had actually been eaten.

I could feel movement and hear hushed sounds akin to the white noise of a hospital back on earth, but with the screams only internal.

And then…

Well, that is the weird thing, then nothing much.

I found myself left alone (as far as I could tell), with an opening revealing a harsh white light. My body shook involuntarily, and the silk started to shed away before I peeked out of the little opening, now that my body could move.

Peering out, I could see nothing but a clinical white floor.

‘You’re in a mental hospital.’ A voice said to me, my own voice.

I poked my head further out, sniffed the air, but it didn’t smell like a hospital. I looked around with hesitation, jerking my head left and right with slow jerks of the head. When I spotted someone of human form, I shrieked back into the container and skittered as far into the darkest corners as I could.

Then an eye peeped through the opening, looking at me, ‘Holden!’ A voice said from the eye.

It took me a moment to remember that was my name.

‘Holden! It is I! Spoon!’

The corner held me, cradled me, ‘Spoon.’ I muttered to myself softly, not wanting to be heard but needing to get the word out of my breast.

‘Remember?’ The eye spoke again. ‘Come out, you’re home’ The eye beamed.

‘Home?’ I frowned into the dark corner and muddled through this. ‘Earth?’ I mumbled to myself.

After he attempted to coax me out, he left me for a while, and I eventually scuttled back to the opening, peeping out again, till I saw the top of that same human form above a platoform that my brain soon reemembered was a kitchen worktop. I slithered out of the container and, much to my surprise, when I was fully out of the thing, I realised I’d been inside a huge bag!

‘Holden!’ Spoon beamed, though he remained where he stood.

‘S..Spoon’, I stuttered and looked around me.

The tank was as it had always been, one of the mammarrians (the big boss ones) was standing outside the tank looking in with a queer expression on it’s face which I think may have been an alien expresson of Curiousity. Another one, even bigger than the one with the queer expression ambled by with a rumble and appeared to communicate something with the other before looking in the tank too.

‘You’re a fish out of water!’ Spoon said.

I looked at him blankly, remembering the desert planet, my skin burning.

‘A fish for sore eyes, too!’ Spoon scowled and came over to me, ‘I’ll get some ointment.’

‘Where in the hell have I been?’

Spoon turned to look over his shoulder as he rummaged for the ointment, ‘The tank needed cleaning.’

‘What?’ I looked at him dumbfounded.

‘The tank,’ Spoon said, ‘It needed cleaning.’

I put a hand to my face and grazed the skin with my fingertips, feeling like my face would melt away at my touch.

My skin has since started to heal, though it is scarred. Spoon and I have been living a life of domestic bliss, at least in terms of what bliss can be found while living in a fish tank.

‘Where was that?’ This morning, I asked him over my porridge, ‘Where I went, when they were cleaning the tank?’ I’d only just managed to muster the wherewithal of asking again.

‘The Sands.’ He answered matter-of-factly.

‘The Sands?’

‘Yes. One of the many Deserts of Mammaroon.’  

‘And why, did they put me in the middle of a desert while they cleaned my tank?’

‘Curiosity.’

I spat my orange juice (I called it orange juice because it was the colour orange, not because it tasted like orange), ‘Curiousity? Good god! Jesus Christ! Fuck me sideways and hold my groin!’

‘I would, if I could.’ Spoon replied.

I blinked at him, forgetting my previous words. ‘Are they trying to breed me?’

Now it was Spoon’s turn to blink, ‘What?’

‘Breed. Are they trying to breed from me?’

‘Why’d you ask that?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

Spoon sighed. It sounded much too human-like to be real from an android! ‘Your planet…’

I stopped him short with a jutt of my hand, palm up, ‘No. No. I don’t wanna hear it. Never mind.’

Honestly, that’s all I have left of ink. While there is probably much more I should say, I shall end this letter here.

Yours faithfully,

Holden McGroin.