Yet another supremely important story for the instruction scientific, moral, and otherwise of the masses of Great Britain.

It’d been a miserable evening and a waste of money, and as they plopped out into the street, not particularly drunk, but enough to know that something was over, something, of some sort, at some point, or never at all, and they were both very angry. With as begrudging a pair of goodbyes as they could each afford, off they went in their respective ways, to do nothing, to resist sleep until they couldn’t. The rain began again.

But Paul’s walk home took longer than usual. He was crossing the field behind the church, packing himself near to its walls to avoid the rain, when he heard a voice just around the corner ahead, at the backside of the church. When he drew level, he saw something like a woman slouching to the ground in the black gloom of a doorway. The torso sulked from its waist, the abdomen dropping before the chest, the face planting against the wall. And the face dragged until it too dropped; and it swung about at the end of the neck a while until, at last, it brought down the rest of the body. All of it had collapsed onto the stone. For a moment, nothing; here and there, wretched things contracting and deflating, writhing along the stone. There was a wheezing sound, fleeting little points of light. A human eye birthed itself, probing the darkness. A head and stinking body followed it up from that orifice of hell. Spitting at the ground, the woman who’d emerged charged screaming at him, but he ducked out of the way and the body flew past him, scattering across the soil. Paul hurried out of the churchyard, looking only once behind himself; he couldn’t see anyone there anymore, but he could hear laughter.

To make matters worse, he found no key in his pocket when he reached his door. Nobody came when he rang the bell, but the entrance was hidden away in an alley behind a shut-down restaurant, so he was free to climb the low wall that took him up to his unlockable window without drawing any suspicion from passers-by. Not only was the lock broken, but the window couldn’t even fully close: his hand slid into the crack and pulled the thing open with ease. Inside his incommodious hovel of a bedroom he deposited himself into the bed. Only after some minutes did he kick off his shoes and accept the duvet’s protection from the cold winds entering through the window. The wind had been making its way into his trouser legs, which was an odd and unpleasant sensation.

On the floor by his bed was a bag of sweets he’d placed earlier, knowing he’d return hungry; he retrieved them from the darkness (the light was broken) by memory. Also beside his bed was, curiously, a sink, so he hadn’t an excuse not to brush his teeth once he’d seen to finishing the sweets.

Of course, Paul overslept. He’d managed to turn off all ten alarms and return to sleep without waking up enough to even remember doing so. He awoke with a mild headache just before nine, only roused from his sleep by the window clattering against its frame in the wind, and the clapping of a paper bag which that wind had pressed against the far wall. This afforded him around an hour to leave the flat.

Having forgotten to the night before, he brushed his teeth. Then he changed his underwear. Somehow he’d undressed himself in his sleep, so he’d just take the same clothes from where they lay by the bed, both too uninspired and too stressed by how little time he had to get ready to bother selecting others. The reader may wonder why he needed an hour to do this, and so did he; Paul couldn’t ever manage to leave on time, let alone early, for anything; the earlier he’d begin to get ready to leave, the faster time would pass. No matter what precautions he took, he’d always leave at least five minutes late. Once he had his underwear on, he checked the time and it was already five-past. Ten minutes had fled as he’d brushed his teeth and changed his pants.

But it was here that the nuisances began. For whatever reason, however he tried, by whichever method, he couldn’t quite manage to get into his trousers. Naturally, this at first confused him rather than stress him any further. He struggled a while to retrieve his calves from these trousers that’d fit him just fine only hours previously. Holding them out in front of himself, he convinced himself they hadn’t shrunk at all. Perhaps his legs had grown, he wondered, but extending then each of his legs before himself for inspection, he similarly couldn’t convince himself that either of these legs were any larger than they were yesterday. One more time, he examined the trousers before failing to enter them again. This was no time for such nonsense, however – already quarter past – so he bracketed this complication for later consideration and grabbed the next pair he found.

These were a pair of jeans strewn over the back of his desk-chair, whose denim still bore the wrinkles from his weight the previous afternoon. To his what really was now alarm, he discovered that he couldn’t get into these trousers, either. Throwing them aside, he fashioned himself into strange poses to examined again his calves before the mirror, but no matter how he looked at them, they seemed their ordinary size. He took a deep breath, and proceeded to attempt entries into his remaining two pairs of trousers, and then tried them all once again, but this proved an undivided failure. What was he going to do? He had only thirty-five minutes to leave. As he paced around his room in bare-legged fury (“How does this always happen to me”, he said to himself at one point) certain suspicions began to take hold of the chaos in his head. Yes, he knew very well what the cause of all of this nonsense was; Thomas had returned. Out of the room he marched.

In the adjacent room, Paul’s flatmate, Thomas, was fast asleep after returning the previous night from a several days visit to his girlfriend in a nearby city. And into that very same adjacent room barged an indecent amount of Paul, rudely awakening the inhabitants.

‘What have you done with my tr-’ but Paul fell quiet, staring dumbly at something behind Thomas.

‘What sort of occasion do you call this?’ Thomas asked, giggling at Paul stood there in his pants. Paul was now using the trousers he’d brought as evidence to cover up the gist of himself. ‘I don’t think that’s the most practical way of using those things, Paul,’ added Thomas.

‘Sorry, Freya,’ Paul mumbled, ignoring Thomas. Paul hadn’t expected Freya to be here. ‘… for interrupting your sleep like this. But I’ve reason to believe that…’ He hesitated a moment. ‘That Thomas has done something awful to my trousers!’

Thomas burst out laughing and Freya smacked him over the head as she could while keeping the duvet clutched tight at her collar.

‘What have you done to Paul’s trousers?’ Freya snapped at Thomas.

‘Nothing!’ Thomas turned back to Paul, grinning again. ‘I haven’t done anything awful to your trousers, Paul.’

‘Well then,’ Freya continued, turning now to Paul, ‘would you please fuck off and let me get back to sleep. Thomas here hasn’t done anything awful to your…’ She paused a moment, intensifying her look of disgust to its boiling point, and released her frustration once more onto Thomas’ skull with her fist. She turned to Paul again. ‘Would you fuck off, Paul!’

Paul closed the door and trudged over towards his other flatmate’s room, John’s room, not wanting to stick around and listen to the mean and horrible things Freya was saying about him. Freya had some sort of phobia of Paul; according to Thomas, she’d told him that Paul was a “bad influence” on him, and that he, Thomas, should stop giving such a useless person so much of his time. But despite the evil woman’s protests, Thomas and Paul were very happy together in their friendship.

As per usual, John was not in his room. John was in the toilet, as Paul could hear when he passed by the bathroom door.

‘What are you doing in thereagain, John?’

‘I’m watching a performance of King Lear on my laptop,’ returned a sulking, baritone voice from inside the toilet.

Paul thought concernedly a moment about his flatmate’s life choices, but quickly remembered the urgency of his situation.

‘Listen, John, you don’t happen to know if Theo’s done anything very bad to my trousers?’

But a response was not forthcoming, and Paul himself nearly fell distracted listening to the performance of King Lear. ‘Would you turn that bloody thing off for a moment, I’m in serious trouble here.’

‘Fine,’ grumbled the voice inside, and King Lear fell quiet. ‘What did you say you wanted? Trousers?’

‘Yes, all of my trousers. I can’t get into any of my trousers this morning, and you know how important today is for me. I’ve got about half an hour to leave. You don’t happen to know if Theo’s done anything? Did he say anything last night?’

‘What?’

‘So you don’t know anything about my trousers?’

‘I know nothing at all about your trousers, Paul, now would you leave me be?’

But Paul had already left John be. He went back to his room and once again failed to get himself into any of his trousers. Lying back in his bed, he considered whether John might lend him a pair, but he remembered, his mind in its state of distress unable to realise the obvious here, that John was a man of significant dimensions, and that he locked his room when he went to the toilet. He wondered about Thomas. Not wanting to cause any further outrage, he tried sending Thomas a text. This was to no immediate avail, but he’d wait a few minutes for a response, he decided, hoping they hadn’t gone back to sleep already. In any case, in the meantime, Paul looked at his emails and saw a certain parcel had arrived, so he took the opportunity to go downstairs and retrieve it.

Now the box on the wall into which parcels were delivered was just outside the door in the alley downstairs, meaning the parcels were as much theirs as any thieve’s, so it was a matter of necessity that Paul retrieved this parcel sooner rather than later; over the course of the year, several parcels had been stolen from this box; there was a CCTV camera overlooking it, but it was visibly broken (wires and various other components dangling out of it) and the landlord, whoever on earth the landlord was, whom they’d only ever communicated with by email, had gone from promising to fix it to lying that he had. To return to the matter at hand, however, the box where the parcels were delivered was just outside the door, but not so near, at least not near enough to reach without stepping someway outside, far enough that a great surge of wind was able to swoop around the corner and shut Paul out of his flat without a key and without a pair of trousers to cover his legs with. Nobody answered again when he rang the bell.

Outside is no place to loiter in one’s underwear, so as soon as he’d regainined an outer semblance of composure, Paul made his usual journey up over the low wall to enter his bedroom by the window. Now, above this low wall, and after a further, smaller climb, Paul was now stood on a part of the roof of the closed-down restaurant below: a grey region, with a large, metal fan-box at its centre. And this fan-box was a difficult object to manoeuvre oneself around. He began on his way towards his window, which was at the far end, pivoting himself around the fan-box. Only, when he turned his head as he did this, he found himself staring directly into Thomas’ window; both inhabitants were staring back at him from the bed, in bewilderment and revulsion respectively; they must have been woken up again by the noise Paul was making climbing up onto the roof. Paul tried to gesture to Freya why he was standing there now staring through their window in his pants, but apparently Paul’s demonstration was misinterpreted by her, for she made a terrible gesture back at him with her hand and slammed shut the blinds. ‘At least Thomas is awake now’, Paul thought, as he hobbled over to his own window pouting. He climbed back inside.

Some ferocious manner of argument had ensued in the next room from the moment the blinds had been shut, which continued out into the hall, Paul could hear. Paul peeked through his keyhole to have a look when it sounded as though it was reaching the top of the stairs leading down to the front door, and to his surprise he saw John then emerging from the toilet, presenting himself to the two combatants at the head of the stairs. They broke off their argument and both turned to look upon John in awe.

‘Who the fuck is that man!’ yelled Freya, suddenly.

Thomas tried to explain that it was John, but before he could finish, Freya had already left, refusing to listen to anymore of Thomas’ rubbish. The front door was heard to slam, and Thomas turned around to face John. They didn’t exchange any words, and John returned into the bathroom. Paul withdrew from the keyhole when he saw Thomas approaching and pretended to be at once both trying to get on his trousers and opening the parcel he’d just retrieved.

‘Oh, hello, Thomas,’ he said as Thomas barged in in his pyjamas.

‘Oh hello, indeed. What are you doing, you idiot?’

‘Well, I thought you might’ve been behind this mess I’ve found myself in this morning, but on further consideration, what seems to have happened is much to extravagant for you to have pulled it off overnight, and not to have woken me up.’

‘And what mess have you found yourself in?’ Thomas’ pretence of anger was beginning to drop: he kept having to stop himself from grinning. ‘What’s wrong with your trousers?’

‘Well, when I look at them from afar, nothing at all. They look just like the trousers that fit me yesterday. But I try to put them on now, and I can barely get them past my ankles.’

Thomas now looked merely confused.

‘Look,’ Paul went on, and demonstrated his inability to enter two pairs of trousers. Halfway through this, they paused to listen as they heard John leaving the toilet and going into his room. ‘It’s like that with the others, too,’ Paul said when he was done, having just torn the leg off the last pair of trousers as they’d both tried to cram him in, but then he froze up suddenly, and scrambled over to the bed. Thomas asked what was wrong.

‘Balls! Twenty minutes. I’ve got twenty minutes before I need to leave.’

‘Where?’

‘What do you mean, where? You know how important today is for me!’

Thomas thought a moment before he realised. A look of alarm now came over him, too.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Let me have a go with your trousers. Maybe they’ll fit.’

They both hurried back to Thomas’ room. Five minutes later, they were both collapsed on the floor in absolute horror. Thomas, whose legs, as any good pair of eyes would agree, were certainly larger than Paul’s in all relevant measurements, had entered just fine into these larger trousers. But when Paul had attempted to replicate his friend’s success, all five times he failed. Sat there on the floor, every now and then, one of them would raise their head as if about to speak, and the other would look to them in anticipation, but they wouldn’t find the words, and both would look back down at the pile of trousers between them. What about John, you may be wondering. Well, they’d heard John leave the flat as they’d been trying to get Paul into Thomas’ trousers, and Thomas had run over to see if John’s door was left unlocked, but Thomas had returned disappointed.

‘Where do you think John’s gone?’ Paul asked, at last.

‘He probably needs to eat again.’

‘Ah.’

But before Paul could sink back into total despondence, Thomas came up with a good idea.

‘You’ve twenty minutes. That’s long enough.’

‘For what?’

‘I can run to the shops and buy you a massive pair of trousers!’

Thomas felt hopeful once more and hurried to gather what he needed from around the room. Paul, however, could not force himself to feel optimistic, and uttered a meagre ‘I suppose.’

‘Come on Paul, you’re not going to be late on your big day! I won’t let it happen!’ With that, Thomas rushed out, leaving Paul to sulk on the floor.

Five minutes passed, and Paul stood up again, and had a fish through his friend’s wardrobe. There were no more pairs of trousers, but he did find a very long jumper. That was of course no solution, however. But he did wonder for a moment why Thomas might own such an excessively long jumper. Maybe Thomas had a bathrobe, he wondered, but his search revealed no jumper. He checked the time and ten minutes had passed now. Returning to his own room, he sent Thomas a text, asking if he’d return soon. Paul went to the kitchen next, to make himself a coffee when no reply came quickly. And when returned with his coffee, there was still no response. Perhaps he’d send another text, just to be sure, he decided, and composed it on his way back to the kitchen where he’d perhaps find a few slices of bread to eat. However, just at the text was sent, he heard a ping in Thomas’ room. ‘He’d better be here soon, I’ve got five minutes now,’ Paul said aloud.

But those five minutes passed without Thomas returning, and now Paul was pacing all around the flat in a frenzy. Another five minutes passed before the door opened, but it was John who appeared at the top of the stairs. John seemed to take no note of Paul and walked past him into the kitchen. John slammed the block of meat he’d just bought onto the counter and set about bashing various cupboard doors and stamping on the floor as he gathered what he needed. Eventually, Paul persuaded him over the noise he was making to let him try on pairs of his trousers. John hadn’t put anything in the pan yet, so he wasn’t entirely discommoded by the request.

‘Wait here,’ John grumbled, and stomped off to his room to retrieve a pair of trousers.

‘Get a few pairs.’

John looked back at Paul confusedly, then set off again the way he was going.

I’ll summarise since you can probably imagine what happened next. When Paul couldn’t fit into the first pair of trousers, John merely looked unimpressed, and told him to try again, but by the fifth and final pair, for the first time in years Paul was able to see an emotion besides irritation in John’s expression. It’s worth reminding the reader that John was indeed a very large man; where there might have been a shred of conceivability in Paul not fitting into Thomas’ trousers, it was an outright phenomenon that he couldn’t fit into John’s. Also, Thomas hadn’t returned and Paul was now twelve minutes late.

‘But…’ John had to reign himself in a little here, showing more excitement than was appropriate for his character. ‘But,’ he began again, ‘will they let you be late?’

‘Maybe if I left now, I might make it. Thomas has gone to buy me a massive pair of trousers, but he’s left his phone and he’s been gone for over half an hour. I-’ Paul collapsed onto the old sofa, whose fabric he sank into continuously for around fifteen seconds until his bottom met what felt like concrete. The trousers remained reticent, wouldn’t yield their mystery to the intensity of the frown with which John stared at them for so long; he gave up and got back to cooking. ‘You should call them,’ he stated between two noises of explosive volume that he’d somehow and for no very obvious reason produced with a pot and the cutlery drawer.

‘And say what exactly? That I’ve woken up unable to wear trousers?’ He pressed his hands against his face is frustration. ‘Look, since Thomas seems to have been raptured, you wouldn’t mind going yourself to find me a massive pair of trousers? I’ll transfer you the money, of course. I guess I’ll call them now, in any case.’

John begrudgingly accepted, and, having still not put anything into the pan, set off out of the flat. In the meantime, Paul looked for a number to call. He checked for the email he’d been sent with the details, but it wasn’t there in his inbox. Perhaps he’d accidentally swiped on it and sent it into the junk folder, he considered, but when he looked there, it was again nowhere to be found among the various promotional offers and the updates from a Facebook account he hadn’t logged into since the age of twelve. This was very odd. He went back to his main inbox to look for earlier emails, but there were too many other emails for this to be of any success, so he had to search for the email account. But before he did that he checked the spam folder; it must’ve been moved there for some reason. Of course, it wasn’t in the spam folder. He went back to his regular inbox and scrolled until, he realised, he was looking at emails from six months ago, and that it was now thirty-five past ten. It had already begun. And where was John? The shop was only around the corner. He texted John, and of course no response came. What was holding them up? What was going on? Why was it happening? What sense could be made of any of this?

Once he’d made his decision, it was already ten minutes to the hour. He’d reached such a state of stress and confusion, muttering all sorts of rubbish to himself. ‘They’re gone, they’re gone,’ he’d say over and over. At one point he’d stood up to move the cushion on the other chair, but couldn’t bring himself to touch it, remained there suspended in a look of dread for a while, his fingers only inches from the cushion; he tossed his head away, returning to the sofa to sit down, but instead grunting and falling the floor. ‘That’s it,’ he said at last.

Suffice to say that the conversation being had by the two shop assistants broke off rather suddenly when they saw Paul entering the shop. An old woman who’d been looking at hats gasped and bustled her granddaughter out into the street. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself! Exposing yourself like this to the general public and its children!’ she stammered as she left.    

‘Excuse me sir,’ called out one of the shop assistants to Paul who had arrived at the trousers, ‘I’m sorry but we’re going to have to ask you to leave. You can’t be in here without clothes on, sir.’

Paul didn’t pay attention, still rifling through the trousers for the largest pair they had.

‘I’m sorry sir, but you need to leave. Are you listening to me?’

Paul snapped.

‘Why! I need to put on clothes, do I? Then obviously I’m in the right place. I’ve come to buy the largest pair of trousers you have. What are your largest trousers. Yes, I need them to be as large as can be. You see I woke up this morning and…’

‘Sir, please step away from us. You’re coming too close.’

Paul found that he was now leaning over the till. He stepped back, but in a burst of fury slammed his fists onto the counter.

‘I need some fucking trousers!’ And he ran back across the shop, knocking over a rack of t-shirts on his way, to the trousers section. ‘Big and tall! Big and tall!’ he chanted, darting his head around, his arms flailing, but seeing no such section. He tried entering various trousers going up a size with each attempt from a forty-two inches (yesterday he had been a thirty-four, only) and these attempts, like those he’d made at home, were likewise an undivided failure: he even tore through two of the trousers in the shop.

The second assistant, meanwhile, had reappeared from a room in the back, poking her head out from between the curtains and gesturing to the other girl to follow her in. It took her a moment to pull herself away from what she was seeing, but once she got herself moving, she was running. Every now and again, Paul would see the curtains behind the till pull apart upon an eye; he’d snarl and punch at the floor to make it go away, which it would, if only for a short while before returning and making him even angrier.

Some macho bastard who’d spotted this scene of general disarray through the shop-window entered at some point to thwart Paul’s purpose. He loomed over Paul a moment, hoping this would prove sufficient to abort the lesser man from the shop, but Paul told him to fire a gun up his arse and continued struggling into a pair of size fifty trousers.

‘Woah, mate, no need for that attitude.’ One of the girls had reappeared from behind the curtain. ‘Do you want me to remove him from the store?’ The girl nodded.

He tried to seize hold of Paul and force him out into the street, but Paul ducked out of the way and climbed inside the trouser rack, yanking down the trousers from their pegs to bury himself with. The man raised the circular rack off the ground and moved it aside; he seized Paul by the leg and began dragging him out of the shop. But Paul managed to kick himself free and scrambled out into the street.

He tried to seize hold of Paul and force him out into the street, but Paul ducked out of the way and climbed inside the trouser rack, yanking down the remaining trousers from their pegs to bury himself with. The man raised the circular rack off the ground and tossed it aside; he seized Paul by the leg which stuck out from the pile of trousers and dragged him towards the door. Paul managed to kick himself free and scrambled up to his feet. He let out a screech at the man and rushed past him out onto the street.

He had to leave that place. He ran across the road, towards an alleyway, to hide. At the end of the alley was a fence. After five minutes he was in a carpark. He was lost. At the other end of a garden he’d entered somehow the door was open. He went in. It was someone’s kitchen. He wasn’t there for long. They were talking in the other room. He had to hide. He was tired. Hours had passed. Days? Time. He lay on the ground with his head beneath the table. He was exhausted. Or was he in a different room of the house? He was in the bedroom. And where he lay, was his head was someway under the desk? He thought it was a desk. The table made up the upper third of his sight, and no more, and at regular intervals during this activity some breeze would animate the leaf of a plastic plant, and it would bow to him over the table’s edge, pause there a moment, survey him with an expression not entirely dissimilar to his own, and, then, it would twist both ways in disapproval, and, then, it would retreat out of sight. He was just about to give into his own disapproval and get up when something else happened. What else was happening now?

The sun was appearing through the window. It made its loud, whirring sound as it entered, and the walls and the ceiling were altogether now scattered with so many small, orange and red and yellow points of light. The sun came to a stop most of the way over the desk’s edge, just enough for him to see most of it, and there and then it began with its rotations. The little, colourful lights circulated around the room in too many bands to count, each band moving in the opposite direction to those immediately adjacent, all at different, changing speeds, and, then, with a great clunking noise and a little squeal, the sun stopped, and, then, the sun began to rotate again, with the same pair of sounds, except backwards, and now there were no bands, the lights all moved in arbitrary directions all around the room, the sun thrusting forth and back now just above the edge of the desk, in, and out of the room. The leaf reappeared, pausing then twisting, retreating back over the desk as the sun went faster and faster, in, and out of the room. Great fat plumes of steam began issuing from the sun’s eight, equidistant funnels, sparks racketing between its components, and with a cough the sun burst aflame.

To preserve himself from the fire, he rolled out of the way and retrieved himself from under the desk. But when he stood up, the door beside him started to rattle.

‘Hello?’ came a troubled voice.

‘Hello?’ echoed the man.

‘Who are you? Are you in there? Where are you?’ The doorknob rattled again; one of the burning components fell from the sun onto the carpet and the man rushed over to put it out. ‘Hello?’ the voice asked again, as the man squatted down to extend his leg and scoop away what had fallen to the carpet.

‘But what do you mean? What sorts of questions are those to ask me?’

‘How do I open this bloody door!’ The voice had shouted the word door and began pounding against its referent in frustration.

‘With the handle,’ the man inside said, blinking, although, unconscious of his fear, backing away towards the wall.

‘There is no handle!’

‘There is in here.’

‘What good is it in there? Open this door!’

The banging resumed. Occasionally the voice would shout other things, mostly as confusing as the foregoing.

‘And how do I stop the fire?’ asked the man at last, putting out another fallen component.

‘By opening the door!’

But when the man opened the door, he found himself before something so unsettling and deformed that all animation failed him. Only when it was right up in front of him, reaching out to him, just as it was about to touch him, did he recoil and slam shut the door on the egregious figure.

‘What are you doing, idiot!’ it shouted, banging again at the door. ‘What are you trying to do to me!’

The man paced around in search of an escape, but there was only the window, and that, of course, was inaccessible, the great, burning object just in front of it. He was warm, very warm, he had to get out of that place. The plastic plant had caught fire now. He swiped it from the desk to extinguish it, but just then the other door opened. He darted his head back to the first door. Where had the second door been? The banging and shouting hadn’t stopped. He turned to the second door. Entering the room was the very same figure.

The man whimpered and retired to a corner, curling up into a ball, and as the figure approached, the first door came bursting out of its latch, the first figure, identical to the second, entered through a cloud of sawdust. They both stood over him now, and then more began to enter through the two doorways.

About two dozen of these figures were crowded into the room, and they were all now standing around the sun, whose flame had somewhat lessened. The figures all had bright red skin, with heads upwardly tapering, and they were dressed in long brown fabrics. In the centres of their faces were crude approximations of noses; if a nose could be the same in every direction, and still have nostrils at its edges, and not in the middle like a snout, then, and only then, would these be noses; like starfish, the ends of whose tentacles entered seamlessly into the red skin of the figures’ faces, the tentacle-pits forming five nostrils. They and the sun all disappeared.

He sprang to his feet and tried the doors. They wouldn’t open. He tried the window. It wouldn’t open. And he realised he couldn’t see anything out of it. It must’ve been evening, all he saw was a deep, reddish orange colour; but somehow it calmed him to look upon the colour. With his elbows now placed on the desk he supported his head to stare for some time at the colour. He’d been staring for so long that he didn’t even realise it was beginning to change. Two white orbs began to impress themselves into the red. They were growing, and further shapes and arrangements began to appear within them, at first unrelated and abstract polygonal forms, but then more complex structures, the same in each, a grid of rectangles. They came more clearly into view; he was moving his head to make the shapes change.