Aisling – by Mark Sheridan, age 18

Half-lights move like spiders in the gunmetal morning, slinking silent streets and watching with starved eyes from doorways and alleys. Along the deserted parade, denizens stumble deaf and numb. The spire looms. All is cast in the diffuse light of streetlamps that glow the colour of radioactive piss.

Amadan hustles down the quays alongside the bald imp Pat Smart. Pat is the sharpest charlatan on the northside – if you ever need something or want someone he is the guy to ask. A small man with a big ideas, he's listed in the phonebook as a bridge salesman such are his slippery ways.

“I don’t mean to be rude Pat but how can you be sure these lads will even remember their own names, never mind a passing stranger’s?

“Nothing happens in the county without word passing through this place – it’s the medulla oblongata of the metropolis. Someone’s bound to remember something.”

“A junkie hideout is the medulla oblongata?”

“It’s called a horseshack, Dan. And these guys aren’t just wasters, they’re the eyes and ears of the sprawl. They’re the lads who were onto your mate or your granny about the latest slice of gossip, they’re the gum stuck to the sole of your shoe.”

They come upon a lonely insula moaning misery through its gaping eyes and ascend six soiled stairs. At the top level there’s a pair of pockmarked heavies in leather jackets guarding a door.

“It’s me, Pat Smart,” says the slimy swindler.

Behind the door there’s a crowded reception area that stinks of doom. Pat disappears into the bodies for a moment and returns with a man who’s barely there. Mickey Morsel’s the name, a cunning tradesman seeking to scuttle the city with cheaper gear and finer glass.

“I’m looking for this girl, Aisling is her name.”

Mickey hushes the jabbering junkies and asks if any of them have heard about a girl called Aisling. Fifty shoulders shrug and the jabbering resumes.

“Try the back room,” says Mickey, bending to be heard.

Dan goes fumbling in the faded backroom, a languid limbo miasmic with lost souls and ghosts wrecked on the world. He asks again and the silence is like radio static. But somewhere in the darkness he can hear a voice creaking.

There in the a corner, a sickly ghoul heaped in a damp chair, skin frayed and curling at the contours, hair thin and feathered, drooping along his splotched skull. He hears the crying behind his eyes and clings to the tangible earth.

“I can’t say I have,” he croaks.

*****

Hours gone and the leads grow cold, lost in the cacophony of a concrete jungle. Dan retires to the back of the early-morning bus. Fluorescents reflecting off the windows give the impression of a lurching hall of mirrors. A young man in a suit joins him on the starched seats.

“Good morning, I’m Kenneth.”

Dan stirs from his half-sleep, brow furrowed.

“I’m Dan.”

“Are you a student?”

“No.”

"Fresh off the boat from college myself – a business and a language. It's been a long time in the making but my turkey is cooked, as they say. I've got my ear to the ground and an express pass on the fast-track to the top of this town. It's been a winding path but as Jack Frost once said, 'If took the road less travelled', and I tell you Dan this road is paved with yellow bricks further down the line, you just can't see it because construction's still underway. Speaking of construction, I was working in Africa over the summer, built about a dozen huts from scratch. I tell you Dan, the heat down there is something else – and would you believe the Africans were sitting back taking it easy while we worked away! If you ask me we should be out there on the ground teaching those kids how to code and how to drive the future with their imagination. That's the problem these days Dan, people see that the Africans don't have any huts so they build them their huts but never think to take a step back and think about the real problem. These kids can't code and they've no marketable skills, we're not gonna get a black Steve Jobs from a crowd of dullards who can't tell their Python from their SQL.

“It’s a pity so many in this world wouldn’t know ambition if it came right up to them and kissed them on the mouth. Not me though, I read at least one book a day, Dan. I’m a career man, a leader, a creator, a storyteller – I’m a lion. What do you do? I’ve downloaded the wisdom of most of the world’s greatest minds. You wanna know one of the common denominators I’ve found? Life enhancers. I’ve been awake for the last forty-five hours, I’ve increased my productivity by six hundred per cent. All I do is I pop a few Adderall when I start reading a book, pop a few Adderall when I’m done, get a coffee and then pop a few Adderall when I get back. Some might call me a drug user, but I’d challenge them by asking just what’s wrong with that? Perspective, quantum reality, hyperdimensions, mind distortion – all things you won’t find in the lecture halls of closed-gate academia; all things you will find in substances we are told are illegal and dangerous. But hey, they also say you shouldn’t play ultimate frisbee in the road. Know what I say? Game on.

“Anyway I’ll be off now, Dan. I’ll see you on the other side. Bye bye-bye b-bye b-b-b-bye.” The businessman rises and charges down the central aisle, blinking hard and sniffing. The doors hiss open and he strides with purpose in no particular direction. Dan notices that his briefcase is still on the seat.

* * * * *

A serious house crumbling on the hill. Raindrop footsteps plashing on marble in the holy hall. A wooden compartment slouches against the wall like a glutton’s coffin stood upright.

Dan seats himself inside on the creaking upholstery and begins to talk to the dark.

“Father, I have a problem.”

“What a desperate sentence.”

“I don’t know where to go.”

“What are you looking for?”

“The most beautiful girl in the world.”

“What does she look like?”

“Well, the lights were low and my eyes wouldn’t focus but you’d know her to see.”

“Why do you assume you will see her any more clearly next time?”

“I’m going to get glasses.”

“You see this is the old folly, the assumption of perfect vision in a clouded world, the insistence that all will come clear once you finally catch your tail.

“Fixation on earthly objects is a fool’s pursuit, salvation cannot be wrought with mortal hands any more than a house can be built with broken tools. Perfection cannot be known in this lower kingdom, only aspired toward. So shed your basic skin, reach for higher virtue within. Only then might you know peace on earth.

“But rest assured that there is a land apart from this, where He reigns and truth abounds as the parts come to make a whole. You see Him in the gaps between the branches, the moments of splintered light, for now we see as through a glass darkly, but soon we will see face to face.”

Dan turns to the grille.

“So you haven’t seen her then?”

“Sure it’s pitch black in here.”

* * * * *

Cracked boardwalk and crooked promenade feed down into the wastes of the shore where the smithereens of civilisation come to rest along sharp grey sands. Amadan spits at the world and jettisons the fag butt between his fingers. He stoops to examine the ashen loam, letting it fall through his fingers in damp clumps, then crushing it in his fist.

Seagulls squawk somewhere in the murk. Vultures reel round candy-striped towers blinking in the bay. The blessed breath of the living Ocean speaks in the sand.

Put your ear to the Conch, take the hand of the Ocean Man. There he rides, cresting the surf, hoisted ashore by madcap dolphins dancing in the eaves of the shallow. He sings in saintly tones of celestial cities and ineffable wonders, crafting dreamscapes of lost nights long ago, nights of vivid indigo and lucid moons and trees waiting to be shaken to their roots, of eternal evenings where the sun is marooned in the west and the birdsong that bookends the day falls on the purple hills abiding and silver.

Columns domino along that transcendental horizon and the clouds peel back to lay bare winking tinctures on smoothest velvet and an eastern sky bursting orange as all dissolves to dawn.