Here is the complete Mon tweet series, so far.

It is suddenly very cold.

Mon opens his eye. He sees little: fog, the ground. A skeletal tree.

Where am I? he thinks.

Mon listens. He can hear distant noises through the fog: laughter, gunshots, cars, birdsong.

So I am in the world, he thinks.

Mon shivers. He’s naked. The need to warm himself is sudden, imperious.

His body’s other demands soon follow. He’s hungry, thirsty, horny.

With a lurching motion, shivering violently, Mon propels himself through the fog.

Sloping ground gives way and he finds himself on a road.

The fog is thinner here. The road is empty.

The distant sounds seem fainter.

Mon curls up against the cold, foetus-like, on his side.

Despite feeling painfully cold, Mon wants desperately to get up and hunt for food. His stomach moans mournfully.

He also has an erection.

He feels like a marionette, pulled one way then another by his bodily needs.

So this is life, he thinks.

Mon falls asleep.

When he wakes he’s so cold he can’t move.

Is it possible to be alive and have rigor mortis? he wonders.

A rat crawls onto Mon, taking him for a corpse.

Mon waits until it is near his face, then opens his mouth. A slow, painful operation!

The rat is curious. It peers into Mon’s maw.

Mon waits until the head is in his mouth, then bites it clean off.

Nutrition at last!

Mon has eaten his fill. This gives him the strength to straighten out from his agonised coil. He stands, walks.

Rat is tasty, he thinks.

Further along, the road is overrun by vegetation. Mon collapses onto his belly and starts slithering through. He’s aware of movement.

Insects are at war. They seethe, scurry, make bristling formations. Mon sees heads, abdomens, legs, thoraxes, severed, crushed.

To make matters worse, his prostrate progress is impeded by the aggressive erection whose pangs continue to torment him.

Maybe life would be better if I were a girl, Mon ponders.

Around him, creation quakes, agitates, cries, eats itself.

Fog, wracked undergrowth, insects, the slaughterhouse of nature.

Mon closes his eye in horror.

But what he imagines is worse still.

Mon sees towers of blood.

He sees lakes awash with the dead.

He sees spiny forms in a dark womb.

He sees a head on the end of a bayonet.

He sees a screaming mouth.

He sees eyes squinting from a white blast.

He sees the King of Bones.

He sees the moon being torn like paper.

He sees smashed TVs.

He sees men whispering in a locked room.

He sees bodies falling through space.

He sees an iron pyramid, neon-lit.

Mon opens his eye and weeps.

Mon wonders what he is. He looks down at his body, taking in every sorry detail.

He concludes that he must still be in his larval phase.

Mon continues along the road. The fog is at its thickest here and he can’t see his feet.

No sounds now.

He keeps walking.

Something is becoming visible in the grey haze: rounded, fleshy forms, vaguely coalescing. Mon goes nearer. It is a woman. He stares at her.

The woman moans, weeps, grizzles. When Mon is within her reach she gathers him in. Her teeth are little stars, her hair wickerwork.

Her tears splash Mon’s forehead. She smells of burnt wood. He’s suffocating.

He tries to speak, for the first time. His mouth twists.

A word, barely a word, a syllable, repeated, a non-word dragged up from his blind, inarticulate core:

“Mama.”

Again.

“Mama.”

Gaining confidence, he says it over and over.

“Mama, mama, mama, mama.”

It accelerates, becomes a mad burble.

For the first time: joy.

The woman slams an oily hand over his mouth, so he stops talking. He scrutinises her inscrutable face.

Then the fog erases her.

The fog places Mon back on the ground, tenderly. No sign of the woman. The road presents itself again.

Mon is overcome by a sense of loss.

The road, always the road, this road, no other. No junctions, no end. And this fog, faintly luminous, a hazy halo around everything.

Mon wonders if anything else exists, beside this road, this fog.

He remembers noises, a woman, a rat.

But maybe he was dreaming.

Mon stops. It would appear that there is an object on the road: something round, a ball, perhaps.

He moves closer.

Not a ball. A head.

It’s a man’s head. Strong features, deep-set eyes, balding. A markedly asymmetrical lower jaw. The eyes stare at Mon. The head looks alive.

The head’s lips are moving. Is it talking to me? wonders Mon.

He doesn’t consider the head a “he”. How can a bodiless head be a person?

Closer still. The head is whispering, eyes still fixed on Mon.

Mon stoops, brings his ear near the mouth. He hears a word, repeating.

“nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing”

As Mon straightens up the head stops talking and the eyes close. He is bemused. What did the head mean by saying “nothing” over and over?

He looks down at the head. Its nose resembles a beak and the few hairs on its crown are short, spiny, black.

An unpleasant sight.

Mon is overwhelmed by revulsion. He kicks the head and it rolls down the road, a trail of black blood leaking from its neck.

As the rolling head slows to a stop, a black cloud of birds appears around him, squawking, shrieking, clawing, biting.

Mon tries to protect himself from cutlass claws and bayonet beaks, but his feeble arms are little use and cannot shield him.

A wing knocks Mon to the ground and he rolls onto his side, coiling into himself.

He closes his eye and waits for the attack to end.

***

Mon is back on the road again, the same road, the same insanely sane straight road with its lack of deviations, its foggy logical linearity.

He can no longer remember how or where the road began. Impossible to imagine its end.

Suddenly, at the roadside: a building. A crazy formation of pock-marked stone, metal window frames, ladders, buttresses, gargoyles, doors.

Mon is curious so he opens the nearest door and goes inside.

A man made of bicycles, snow and offal operates a roaring machine.

Mon moves on to the next room, in which twin salamanders in pink petticoats play a deadly game of chess.

Mon does not watch. He continues.

Room 3: Mon is horrified to find himself submerged in a glutinous red substance. Prawn-boys and shrimp-girls twirl and whirl on long cords.

In room 4 Mon is arrested on suspicion of burglary, arson, perjury, fraud, assault, bigotry, penury, lunacy, masturbation and mediocrity.

Room 5 is a mild interlude of dissonant orchestral music, badger abuse and hepatitis.

Mon quite enjoys room 6, its collapsing walls, its evil stench, its inflatable furniture strewn with listless Eng Lit students.

In room 7 Mon solves a jigsaw puzzle in which all of the pieces are painted human hands.

Room 8 contains numerous household objects which, though innocuous in themselves, make for a nightmarish combination. Mon leaves quickly.

In room 9 Mon finds a torn curtain, an empty throne, a blue rose.

As he enters room 10, Mon’s erection returns, strong, feral, insistent.

How can I get rid of this autonomous appendage? he ponders.

He explores the room, hoping to find something that may be used to relieve him of the dolorously engorged organ. But there is no light.

Room 10 seems to go on forever. Mon gets lost in a maze of soft objects he can’t see. Some are furry, some warm and smooth.

The darkness & clutter of yielding shapes only exacerbate the painful rigidity of Mon’s member.

He laments what he is, what he’s made of.

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