Release Date On Mars

I was in hospital about three years ago, my incarceration based on a fabrication about igniting gas canisters, stroking a skunk in pet therapy. The skunk looked like it had broken legs and clinical depression. Suddenly I had an idea concerning a tub of Quality Street chocolates. I would take the colourful foil wrappers and make some funky optic wear with a pair of old sunglasses. The procedure went to plan with some scissors and tape. I was soon due to be released with red vision shades which made everything look like the planet Mars.

They let me go the next day. It was unexpected. I had ordered a copy of James Herbert’s By Horror Haunted, but I would not be around to collect my copy. I must get around to reading it one time. I never shop online though. I require other people to order for me. The one time I tried entering my bank details into the PC to ask for a loan my account was docked 60 notes.

I left through the attached wing of the general hospital, exploring its long mazy corridors, in no rush to find the exit, thinking of how refreshing a cold beer would taste. There was something I can’t quite put my finger on about it: Children crying with doting mothers, disabled people in wheelchairs looking both glum and chirpy at the same time, hurried medics dashing from one situation to the next.

Hospitals are weird places. They always have been. Always will be.

I’d just been holed up for months with no leave, so exposure to a working hospital assailed the senses. It was the first time I had ever had a curious look around such an institution at leisure. When I found my way out I trekked up a hilly bus lane. I felt fresh and energetic and ecstatic to be out of that claustrophobic psych unit they’d held me in against my will for no legitimate reason. The outdoors was quiet and lonely in contradiction to the hospital. When I reached the summit the sun came out proper and flooded everything in a rich red dawn. For a moment you could have convinced me that I actually was a Martian.

A bus rolled up: I jumped on. I was slightly embarrassed about wearing Quality Street shades, but addicted to perceiving the world in a different colour, so I was unwilling to remove them just to appear normal. Next I was alighting in the town centre before I knew it. I bought a bottle of Jim Beam ASAP. Jim Beam was recommended to be by a famous chef, he said it illuminates your visual cortex up, that’s how it’s different to other spirits, so I naturally thought that I’ll be having a bit of that crap, if Stephen King has a movie camera in his mind (reportedly) then I want anything I can get to keep up competing with the dude, I know he’s streets ahead with umpteen hundred bestsellers and all but I have enormous faith in my own writing ability to rub elbows with the very best, and most especially when I’m throwing Jim Beam down my neck, which, as I’ve just stated on behalf of that celeb cook, dazzles up the brain like a millennium fireworks display. So, once again, I'll be having a bit of that crap.

Don’t mix it with ketamine or you’ll be taking photographs of your own face and telling people that you are The One.

This story, if you could call it that, melds into something far more interesting than simply leaving a psych ward wearing red glasses. It was the beginning of my search for a panther. A panther in England, ha, I know what you’re thinking, but there are stories of big cats being released into the green rolling hills of these isles when certain laws came into effect regarding circuses and zoos way back when. I for one believe the hype and the mythos. I can tell you right now for a fact, with no regard for spoiling the tale, that I have seen some very dodgy life forms in the woods which just might have been large game.

I attracted that panther into my consciousness. I was homeless. I had nothing else to live for. Just a lit-up brain and a quest for lyrical songlike legend. I had already sat and dined with the planet’s most successful rodent (that’s another story) and now I had the ultimate prize in mind, a sighting of that illusive giant black feline.

The search took me miles away from my home. Maybe I'll go into details another time. I felt I was surrounded by restless ghosts, leading my way, I was abstinent from narcotics yet still as high as a kite in psychosis. It was a very peculiar set of circumstances which turned me into a wildlife hunter, sleeping rough each night on gravestones and collecting bags of sentimental goods which I kept about my person.

I've seen an awful lot over the years, including lions in the park, dinosaurs on the roundabout, and wolves in the boiler room. Blame poor mental health if you want to, but I've had biological lifeforms living freely inside my own body, for crying out aloud, so anything is possible in the narrow band of light that constitutes the exterior realms. 

A tapeworm in the belly, and a rat in the bed. Now that's living!