There Are No Strings The bleakness I saw swirling madly about in the smooth glass of its eye, squeezed at my chest, disrupting the natural rhythm of my inhalations. The sensation was not wholly debilitating; that is to say that it was not consistent but persistent. In a few moments, with no small amount of incanting of long held understandings, my frame began to relinquish to me some rudimentary control of my limbs. In order to minimise any further symptoms caused by my proximity, I set myself in motion around the room. Unfortunately, all attempts to discerp the ocular connection between it and I were in vain. Irrespective of each newly attained position within the room, I was disquieted to discover the viewing relationship was still more than adequate to permit the churning chaos of those smooth glass eyes to fall upon me. The gaze of its chiselled and blandly degenerated countenance suffocated me. A contorted mocking effigy made in my own image or, more accurately, our own image. The spidery scrawl of the morning sun, threw every contour of its degenerate face into hideous relief. Conversely, the rest of the room with its washed out hues had acquired a dreamlike quality that only seemed to compound the hollow of my stomach and the tightness of my chest; instead of alleviating it, as you would imagine that any hope or delusion that it may be mere phantasm, infections of a fevered mind and not the horror so subtly woven into the banal drudgery of waking #life. That mocking, degenerate effigy made in our own image may, with skilful manipulations display to you all necessary illusions for classification as automata. Nevertheless, illusions they are, for all puppets have masters, however covertly concealed. Whether behind curtains or the bland diversions of a mind desperate not to devour itself, or maybe even the walls of drab little houses where, in the early hours you may be confronted by a degenerated mocking effigy with phosphorus smooth glass eyes. Given my evident inability to evade a confrontation, I resolved to put that mocking effigy out of existence, and thus out of the belly of my mind. Determined to capitalize upon my newfound conviction, I pushed forward and extended my arm. Midway through executing this unusually arduous, peculiarly elaborate action, it had come to my attention that the pivot of my arm seemed not anchored to my shoulder, as is its proper place but rather appeared now located at the elbow. This resulted in a jittered and unpredictable movement of spastic beauty and grace. My reflection, as perceived in the hopeless nullity of its smooth glass eye seemed to be reconfiguring, a slackening of joints, as the ceiling appeared to be retreating, or maybe the floor anxiously stumbling, came to meet me. All this seems inconsequential now, now that I see how misguided and inept my initial conclusions were. How the plicae of that absolute bleakness caress me, diverting me. I have no strings, I am no degenerate effigy, I have no smooth glass eyes, and there are no strings. There is nothing mocking me, I hear no degenerate jeering voices in the belly of my mind, for I have no strings. There is no curtain-shrouded manipulator, I am not pulled, I do not dance. I do not hear those mocking voices in the belly of my mind and feel no pulling at my strings. I am not a degenerated effigy made in their own image, and no one perceives there similitude, writhen and dancing, in the smooth glass of my eyes.