door by i am the mackerel

I saw the lights flicker once, then again, and then it was gone. Whatever had been there was gone, and I was awake. I'd been asleep?

The fan didn't move. A far away sound, like a mourning horn, somewhere outside. The same cold air that had been here for what felt like years. The longest winter. I was awake, and there'd been something, some visitor, at the foot of the bed, by the door, just before I knew what was going on. I sat up. It was the kind of thing that might've frightened me in some other time, some earlier version of some waking from a dream, but this time I felt it as a loss, an emptiness, a corner so full of dust that I must've been ignoring it for ages. How could I miss something so badly if I didn't know what it was?

A loss is not the absence of a thing, but is the thing itself. A loss can intrude, make itself known like a hunger that contains within it no indication of what it would take to be satiated. It requires a kind of faith to continue on in the world in the presence of such a loss, some belief, or at the very least some hope, that the thing to fill that void will eventually appear without warning just as had the emptiness.

I stepped out of bed and grabbed the book from the bedside table. Mr. Stevens would be impatient for me to get started.

I am the Mackerel is a loosely affiliated cult-of-one, consisting of members of Halaka, Allele Cog Experiment, [redacted], Dead Children's Brigade, HOZ, [redacted], The Orchestra of the Blow of the Hand, and others. It was the main project through which Kingo Sleemer released 88 albums in 2025.