Thing no.9: Red Mole

2006

There is a strange, red mole on my left shoulder. My mother drives me from the village to the Royal Berks hospital. We walk down an endless corridor, at times we seem to be deep inside a building, at others the corridor becomes a translucent, scratched tube crossing open space. Always we are walking in a straight line. Ahead of us, fast walking nurses appear and disappear out of the vanishing point in the distance.

The laser makes a strange noise and the doctor tells me not to look but it is the smell that makes me turn my head. Where the red blob had been bulging outwards there is now an equally deep hole. The thing that fixes me though is the wisps of curling smoke – what was me in now drifting weightlessly through the air.