Daytime is hell. The moonlight is mine. I could never sleep. Stood over my mother and father, as they slept. A knife in my hand, a tear on my cheek. I couldn’t do it. Along with the pain they caused, there was love. I knew they couldn’t help it. Dum and Mad.

I made friends with the shadows to stop the torment. Watched bubbles blow and flow on a breeze I controlled with my mind. I saw faces everywhere. Fiends. The creeps spoke to me.

I roamed streets. Walked down the middle on the lines and kicked over the lights on the islands. I kicked out the glass in a phone box. Pissed in the orange light of lamp post glow. Stole a BMX and rode round for two nights thieving all the door numbers. I spent an hour and a half trying to break into a chemist and gave up.

I lay in the park on my back, laughing at a dark sky. Stark visions. I staggered through an alley with grey trees reaching groaning claws. Writhing bodies of tormented creatures, like martyred monsters nailed to every fence post, moaning. Teeth. Teeth in a mouth without face, biting the cold, black night. Eyes. Eyes watching. The moon too. The moon saw it all. It watched me shine in obsidian park and I shone like crazy. Halo of light, ‘til sun came up. The night was always mine.

Rob True was born in London 1971.  He left school with no qualifications, got lost in an abyss and spent a decade on another planet.  He returned to earth just in time for the new millennium and married a beautiful, strange girl.  She taught him how to use paragraphs and punctuation and his writing has been a bit better ever since. Stories published in Burning House Press, Sick Lit Magazine, Open Pen Magazine and The Arsonist Magazine. @robjtrue