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Daydream / Violence
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Seven-twenty-four, Sunday. The waking sun zebra’d the bedroom with encouraging white light through the blinds. Outside the feathered quilt, my feet bathed in the warmth. Untampered comfort. My lover asleep beside me still, a calm expression set on his handsome face.
I got up off the bed, got showered and got dressed. I put on plain clothes. Laced shoes, twill trousers, a t-shirt tucked at the waist. Attire to make sure I wasn’t going to stand out.
Before I left, I kissed his neck, felt his chest with the palm of my hand.
Obliterated brown and green bottles were spread like bursts of unwound labels and seriously cutting confetti over the pavement, crackling under my shoes for the duration of my walk to Joseph’s Catholic Church. I snuck glances at the yawning drivers that stopped at crossings. Looked into the passing early morning public busses. Emptied. Unused. Sorry in service.
There were birds. Injured pigeons marching. Combative for the honour of kebab pitta. More delicate, smaller peckers landed on electric lines overhead and in between impaling iron skewers no barbed ledges.
My sunglasses turned the sky rose.
I waited, hidden, around the corner from Joseph’s. I entered four minutes before the modern glass entrance and the wooden doors a few metres further inside closed and the service started.
It was irregularly filled. There were attendees in every row. Mainly families. They kept their belongings very close. Their sagging handbags and totes rested on the benches next to where they fell taking up as much if not more room, so I was forced to perch three rows nearer than where I’d hoped to be audience at the very back.
A guest speaker. A middle-aged woman, blonde, olive sweater, spoke about her own indications and calling. A rags-to-ritual in two years anecdote, which felt seemingly prolonged.
The pastor followed. I’d heard his course untold times. So much so, my memory’s adopted recollection of dragged, bloodied, scabbed knees through streets as its own. Today was not another retelling. Instead, the pastor offered sentiment about violence. And with a stiffness to his gestures and his legs’ movements, he moved on to be suggestive about restrictions in sexuality. It would not have been direct if there were not children there to listen. He concluded the service with prophecy and cleverly circled back to keeping within the tried framework of the church’s wider tolerance.
It didn’t matter where I deviated. I was contently distracted from a future, the flames and the gasoline many’d liked to have drizzled over me. Evenings were scored with violins in earphones. A treadmill with a view of sky and a small pocket of often vacant woods. Walks with borrowed dogs. Handpicked, overjoyed small breeds. Rapid hounds. Time-consuming, baseless conversations. Laughter. Negligible frustration steadily soothed with alcohol by acquainted stone firepits on slatted decking. The scent of smoke. Smoke. Scent of wood. Scent of everything brand new. Clean. Washed. Trying on new trainers, choosing cleaner, trying books. Morning showers. A sustainable pattern of days working from home and on others, driving automatic for a straightforward commute. Evening baths, together. Much of all of it in fact, together.
Although I neglected fear, I was not naïve. Not about the world, I hoped. I followed the status of whatever was unveiled, communicated or strategically miscommunicated in the mainstream. I spoke to others, to friends, about the circumstances in their worlds. I leant about this country and others, and I chose to do so as a reserved spectator rather than a consequential example. I retained an indifference, and happened, yes, to be less worried because I was in love. Very much in love with this person.
But then the season was near changing, and happiness cannot be permanent.
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New Violence
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The UK’s always gotten darker toward the end of October. Though I mean that figuratively, in reference to the viral, airborne optimism of our population, of course objectively the days are shorter as well. Light abandons us by early evening. Making it worse, it’s cold.
October through to February, there was an inconstancy amongst our country’s residence. A new show of imbalance. A volatility in behaviour that caused a very noticeable reluctance in how suitable uniformed response was served. In defence of themselves, emergency services submitted various patches of data for the financial year republished by various news venders. The data evidenced a move from a consistently gradual incline in reports of sexual violence and crimes committed with knives to ascending Kilimanjaro. The numbers publicly disclosed shot vertically. On average, two-point-five times compared to the previous year. If you were to imagine the year as a human exchange… visualise yourself approaching another person. You’d ask politely if they would consider lowering their voice because of the baby asleep in your niece’s arms. They’d acknowledge your existence once you spoke. They’d then retract a knife regularly used to cut vegetables and stick it into your abdomen. Pull it out, put it back in. In and out, and in and out, doing that… for as long as you last on your feet. With that or a similar image rightfully imprinted into their heads, emergency services, and government, and support services feared upholding their responsibility to ask everyone to be a little quieter.
Cause for the crazy was partially repeated reasons, the same as always, further rise to the cost of staying alive, inevitable redundancies, alcohol reliance, threat of homelessness, embedded terrorism. But the sudden spike, which was irregular, was anxious response to initially leaked broadcast of an epidemic in Kazakhstan. Rumoured to have formed in Oskemen, a viral infection similar to influenza, spread out from the largest city in the east of Kazakhstan. The death toll was above forty thousand. Consider that Kazakhstan, although it is huge, has a population of twenty-two million people. For comparrison, the UK’s population is seventy-two million and the UK’s death toll for Covid in its first year was seventy-one thousand. Kazakhstan contained most of the virus. Still, for the concentrated duration of five months it was relentlessly storied in European media. We were frightened more than anything that it would reach our cities and countrysides, causing another nationwide quarantine. Never mind death. We were terrified we would be forcefully restricted again to limited interiors. Inside. Inside homes shamelessly reduced in size. Inside our own insecure minds.
So, the response was for us all again to behave as if it were our last days alive.
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Out of love
Introducing melancholy. At the start of August, my effective neglection of concern came to a close. My partner of five months, who for the past three months had lived in my apartment, ended our relationship. When I asked for the reason, he was honest. He’d ‘wanted’ for others. And when I’d asked, “What the fuck specifically does ‘wanted’ mean?”
He answered, “I’ve liked other people.”
“I like other people,” I retorted.
He, by ‘like’ meant ‘wanted to feel them’. Feel their attentions, eyes, and their flirtation. Wanted to fuck them. And even more than that. He spoke about three other men. And his feelings toward them which were concurrent for almost start to end of the five months we were together. That hurt. That was nauseating to listen to. It caused an unpleasurable knot inside my already disordered stomach.
These three men disclosed were unlike each other. In appearances and qualities and character. How did I know? Well, I knew because strangers they were not. I knew all three of the men. They were friends. One was a relative. And not one was similar in either appearance or quality to me either. Not even the relative. Which I didn’t infer to be even partially complimentary.
I traded sleep for foggy playthroughs of how and when I might’ve first inspired his realisation and what I might have done that confirmed that, on second thought, I was not the person he wanted to be with for any longer. I watched myself in mirrors. I overthought my behaviours, the ways I reacted to music, how I asked to hold his hand.
“I haven’t been unfaithful to you,” he said. But it was. It was unfaithful. And then he said, “It feels unfaithful how I’ve felt.” He spoke about denying himself curiosity. Rejecting adventure. Feeling terrified what he would sacrifice for commitment. “I honestly don’t like what we’re doing.” Fitting into a bath together. Walking the accessory dogs of “richer people too busy and too fucking lazy to walk their own pets. Behaving like we’re white, fine, we are white, but like we’re straight, too,” married, “and tame, Harry.”
When I took my turn, spoke about how I had felt in relation to the relationship, I was not destructive. I said less. I just said, “I don’t have anything,” and shrugged. No true feelings were hiding. Things unsaid, yes, but not unexpected. I did not cry. That was what was I held back. That was what was hidden here. I was polite to him, not so insulting. I was understanding. “I wish you had been honest with me sooner.” You must’ve been tired, I thought. Tired from pretending.
The past was the past. It was immovable. I’d tried to reserve pleasurable memory to lessen the damage inflicted.
My experience, this had been love. It had acceptance. I had been excited for the ongoing dedication, conceptualising futures while we laid undressed with each other only to talk about excursions.
I recognised there were problems that were not getting easier, such as I had often felt an unequal part. He was the receiver of a more apparent dedication. I could not kiss him outside, call him anything other than his first name in front of his parents. Could not talk. Did not bare much emotion. I would either shorten or entirely curtain my want for and relief from expression. I withheld. My frustrations were mostly kept to myself. The routine annoyances with colour, unmatching graphics, colleague’s contributions, with other drivers, and my grandmother. The question ‘how are you?’ was never posed. There was no caring provocation to encourage me. I asked, ‘are you okay?’, and when I asked, I then stayed silent and listened. Ensured to hear his every feeling. The deflated, repetitive updates, administrative woes, the insecurities caused that were by hook or crook his older, straighter brother’s fault. And affection… he was not shy. Shyness was not an excuse. I was a servant to a more one-sided affection, too. One which was sexual and was a repeated reinvention to satisfy one uneven half of the whole.
All this said, I adored him beyond this shit. Couldn’t change that. Much as I begged to.
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injury
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Forcefully removed from relationship, I woke up alone.
The sun coming in through the blinds was altered. It wasn’t glorious any longer. The apparent space next to me felt unreal.
When I woke up alone again, the same feeling remained. And again, and again… and it got sadder. I grieved the loss of my easiness. My own playfulness. More than no longer laughing, I couldn’t picture laughing, couldn’t hear what it would’ve sounded like if it were possible. I could not rekindle my own smiles. Not in imagination, nor in reflections. I couldn’t draft a hypothetical conversation about food, or social media, or the unexpected changes to forecast, or font. Wreckage of happiness lived only through vague recounts of time spent with him. Seeing him entertained. Opening jewel cases, loading three albums into the sound system bought from the music shop Dandelion. Cooking with the music he chose in my kitchen. Seeing the indents in his collarbone. The smaller indents in his grin. His expansive and distinguishably set back eyes. Unintentionally, I had deduced myself. I’d pushed myself out of every picture and only held to thought of him, making my part in these memories inexistent. When he smiled inside my thoughts, or spoke, he was smiling or speaking to himself. Not to me.
Distracted by a loud altercation happening at a distance, I missed my step. There were people ahead on the station’s high escalator, but momentum took me past them. Somewhere between the point of misstep and laid out on the tiled stone at the bottom, my foot broke.
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Fang
A week in in the black cast, I was tentatively attending a date with a web designer/videographer.
“I left Nanjing in China when I was sixteen and have lived here since,” she answered when I asked, “Where are you originally from?”
We were introduced eight days earlier at a get together organised to celebrate and see off a mutual friend who ventured east internationally, leaving one declining society to attend to another. Agreeing with the rules of an icebreaker, we traded shirts with each other. Shouting above the nondescript music and doing our best to read each other’s lips, we chatted graphic design, user interface, polish pastries, houses in the lake district. We sat crookedly, with our legs numb, crushed under a revived dining table pushed out of the way, up against a winding pattern wallpapered back wall. It was all at once attractive and aggravating how much better she suited my shirt. Her shirt only fit me unbuttoned. I was worried I’d ruined the shoulders.
On the date, we wore our own clothes. But we happened to match, both wearing eighty percent black.
The hour of dining, the following two hours of cocktail inhalation were enjoyed. We agreed it, however, wasn’t romantic. We openly debated sexuality, and we kissed. The kiss was affectionate, but we both said we were not any different in our underwear because of it.
She asked, “Do you believe in God?”, sniffed, “Are you religious?” Her attention while, was on the silhouetted image of a figure hung on a cross on my inner forearm.
“I am. I believe in a God.”
“‘A god’?” she caught, then chose to hold my hand in hers on the table without wishing to draw attention to it.
“The God. Though maybe I hope he would practice enough mercy not to set me alight before trial.”
“You would hope.”
“Because of what I am.”
“I understood, Harry.” Her thumb stroked my wrist. “For the same reason, that’s why I also can’t agree with belief. But I think that- I do think that it’s uplifting. That you can be who you are and believe in the something bigger separated from the unacceptance based around it.”
Fang listened. Showed interest in the clues about myself I’d offered.
Before desert, I asked her, “What do you keep looking at?” because she seemed to have a fixation with the street immediately outside of the restaurant. Every fifteen or so seconds, she looked. She followed every slowing car and stopping pedestrian.
“I’m sorry,” she apologised. “This is my first date since some shit happened. I went on another date about a month ago. It was another guy, he was thirty-nine, too.” She scraped the cheese off the cake’s base and took small bites in between sentences. “It started off good. It was a good date, I felt like I had control... I was worried I wouldn’t before, because in the first forty-eight hours of messaging he’d sent photos of his dick. When I didn’t reply, he deleted the photos, and we pretended I never saw them. Or, that it never happened. I liked the person opposite me. The person he was on the date. But then three police officers in full uniform came into the restaurant. They made their way over to our table and they took him. One of the officers stayed for a few minutes longer. He was kind. He gave me cash to cover the bill and then I was left all by myself to finish the food.”
Fang went on to say she crashed when she’d left the restaurant and got back to where she lived with her mother. She said she was then woken up at one am when her date sent her a message. She showed me the message…
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​Hi. I’m SO sorry. That was awful and I understand if this is the last message I get to send. I wasn’t arrested. I haven’t done ANYTHING. I use multiple dating servers. there is one that is for not love and for fetishes. I met another man on this server and we met twice in person before I cut communication with him and reported his behaviour on the server. He is a Copyist if you know what this is. He is a small actor whose attraction is pretend. Tonight he got fucked himself up. He broke his own nose and reported it as an assault and gave my name to police. I have been let go now. If you will talk to me, I would like to try again.
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Fang said she’d read the message before cutting communication, reporting his behaviour and going back to sleep.
I did not know what a Copyist was.
I was more curious about the server referred to in the message.​
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Crawlspace (I)
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The link was shared by user SOFIA0 in a long thread about access to the server. I installed the programme onto a cleared hard drive, feeling it was important to be kept at certain distance from my work.
The installation took four minutes. I used that short period to remove the loose picture of my ex from the top drawer of my desk.
It took a little more time to move the files onto my phone and to find instructions on how to prevent a crash when the server started up.
The first thing you saw was
0.
then
not love
in a small, gradient font. Which was only on the screen for a few seconds before the screen turned from black to a bright blue taken from the gradient. A very deep blue.
Crawlspace
was centre. Or, in fact, it was slightly off centred. There were buttons below, for
Login
Register
The server required first and last names, gender, and a date of birth. It encouraged I
select a minimum of one want.
Suggestions were
men asian verbal abuse women transgender black asphyxiation bondage pain roleplay paint domination
I selected ‘men’, ‘women’, and ‘paint’, ‘roleplay’ to start. Uploaded two photos of myself as well.
A photo of a photo. The photo taken with my phone’s camera of a photo from a disposable camera. In the photo, I’m sitting under lamplight, at my home desk, wearing the same shirt Fang happened to borrow. I can just see I am working on the final touches of promotional graphics for a four lettered brand that sells squash rackets. The other photo was captured in Aveiro, Portugal. Horizontally, a third of me’s in shade. I’m wearing white trainers, shorts, no shirt. I’m topless as I wandered the narrow street. There was no curb or front gardens separating the unmarked road and the residences. Beige stone, tile walls, indented doors, shuttered windows. The slanted clay roofs were as low as what would be first floors. A telephone line was planted midground, between my white skin and the cloudless sky.
Account Created.
Crawlspace
re.occurrence
Copyright © 2025 by Leo Mara.
All rights reserved.
outoflove
fang
Verbal abuse (I)
“You are a piece of shit.” You are not loved. “You are not loved. You need to wash.
“Shower. Wash your fucking clothes. Are you crying? Are you crying, you fucking arsehole?”
He sat on the carpet, upright, limbs sagged, hands flopped and, on the floor, as well. At his request, I’d pulled down his trousers to below the elastic cuffs of his long black socks. His legs were apart and like I said, sagged in front of his flat stomach. He stayed there, this late-forty-year-old man. Sunken. Keeping to the floor of his own semi-detached house’s bedroom for the duration of my insults.
The insults were not extremely personal. They were improvised. I spat them out as I thought them up in the moment. I knew almost nothing about this man. This was our first encounter in person. We had sat down first, dressed, tap water and a black coffee. He had a cigarette as he told me about his insecurities. He spoke with a composed formality. Spoke with a discomfort that appeared, though it also seemed wanted. Motivated. To feel even worse. This was his decision. It was his want. It wasn’t my want. He wanted to be open to then be victimised.
I took down my trousers. “You’re a fucking coward.”
​
He stayed on the floor still when I left the room. It only felt appropriate to pull the door to a crack before I slipped away downstairs and thought of vomiting in the kitchen.
Plotted between spider plants and cosmology textbooks and other prettier hardbacks on shelves and sets of drawers were framed photographs. Posed shots of the same three children as they’ve aged. The mother, the father, one or the other. Never in a photo together.
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Experiment / Theodore’s Scope
Mine may have denied me afterlife because of these explorations.
I believed he would. I believed he would peel off my white skin. Strip muscle with force in the most painful possible extraction. He wouldn’t touch me directly, too disgusted at the thought of having to touch me to make sure I felt agony and bled relentlessly. He was homophobic and was he wrong, he was God. I was wrong for my sexuality. I stained his structures, and I was a deviant and a fucking coward. You and dad and all the fathers, God, you all got it absolute. I was a fucking coward. The only hope I had, my skin eradicated, muscle grated, was he wouldn’t keep me alive too long suffering. He would want to rid the infection that I was from his Earth.
This deprecation kept me awake at night. What it didn’t do was keep me off Crawlspace.
I misunderstood my use, believing its purpose was to make me less mundane. It was okay inserting and pushing myself into situations which treaded through copious pools of nudity, and sweat, paint, anxiety, rope, rubber, because as well as consensual, it was different. And different was a desperate replacement for love.
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Instructions were direct.
Go through communal garden.
Code for entrance is 0879.
Go upstairs. Find number thirty-six far end on the second floor.
Speak to no one.
The entrance will be open.
Push the entrance and go inside.
Follow the hallway left.
DO NOT SPEAK.
The plant life plotted inside the courtyard was overgrown. There were suffering Gauras amongst shapeless shrubs in the dark, light denied by the structure’s enclosed design.
A green light with no sound appeared after the code. I moved inside the residence, held the cracked railing outlining the stairs, found Thirty-Six and pushed the door that was left sitting in its frame with a silver ring on the step to stop it from fully closing.
The interior was tidy. Clean. Polished appliances, wiped countertops, bowl, plates, cutlery lined the drying rack. Another person surprised me. A man. We crossed paths through the narrow hall of the apartment as he appeared to be leaving as I entered. ‘Do not speak’. Neither of us spoke. Throughout, the carpet was unstained, and the scent was calm and impersonal.
The person I’d come to meet was to the left down this hallway. He waited in the bedroom. Not on the bed which was perfectly made, pastel covers pulled tight and tucked into the bedframe. Instead, he stood, fully clothed, by a long and drawn curtain. He faced the window, unphased by my quiet advance and the, I suspect scheduled disappearance of the other person.
I stood beside him. Accompanied his spectating of the below street.
There was little movement on foot. Unintentionally, I counted the bodies. A middle-aged, straight couple, walked an old retriever, talking about work on Amy’s conservatory. A kid in a purposely shaken-to-be-scruffy school uniform. The collar of his white shirt was open, and the rest of the shirt falling out his V-neck sweater creased. Bobbing feet in strappy black shoes. Bobbing backpack that was too big for him. His arms straight at his short sides. There were more cars.
I stayed for forty minutes. Left when the music played out from his laptop concluded. We had, together in silence, listened to the notorious neo-classical album Scope by Agi Theodore. An album which is gorgeous but is also harrowing for unedited stretches. It is invoking. Of course, I was unsure what it was for him. Or what he was feeling.
When I left, it was raining. I passed another person on the stairs. They made equal effort not to acknowledge me. My assumption was they were next to go in.
Back inside my car, key in ignition, the wipers instantly came on. They cleared the theatre of transparent streams off the windscreen.
The radio was on. A host played a ten second clip of dialogue while a caller made attempts to name what film the audio was extracted from. I turned it off before the caller’s third and final guess.
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No Rest / Apocalianna’s Spiral
There was no rest for four hours. We drank straight tequila out of highball glasses and soon, direct from the bottle. She wanted to dance. She wanted to enthusiastically convulse and lift, throw and wave her slim though muscular and unevenly tattooed arms. We shouted lyrics at the walls and furniture and shook to the three different versions of Apocalianna’s EP ‘Spiral’ set on an endless loop. The three versions of the EP were only made up of altered versions of the same two songs which meant the repeat consisted of minimal variation and only a few lines of lyrics resourced in shallow waters.
She wanted to fuck. Really fuck. Fuck hard.
There were sporadic intervals in our violent dancing where we had intercourse. It was only missionary, yet the physical effort and the intensity was devastating. She demonstrated her athleticism. She would stop us- stop me… close to the ‘mark’ where she suddenly got up and pulled me up with her and we danced and shouted and drank again, chasing the same, constant pace.
The feeling wasn’t going to last. Despite her impressive becoming upsetting effort.
You can’t force it.
I couldn’t tell by her movements, but if she was not tiring herself, then guiding and supporting the dying weight of my exhausted body must have taken a toll on her energy. I felt like a wet sack. I couldn’t take any more of any of the grabbing at my jaw and my neck, shoulders, arms and genitals and the stopping and starting and getting up after merciless riding and falling. It was worsened by the accelerating amount of tears which rushed from her bloodshot eyes, blurring her eyeliner and wetting my sweating face even more.
She tried desperately to hide the whimpers under the music. And to pretend she wasn’t sobbing and convert the louder noises she made to laughter. I believe a smaller part of her was joyful. A part was having fun with me. But the rest of her was in emotional agony.
Two hours past, vomiting accompanied the punctured rotation of tequila, jumping, crying, and fucking. I was the first to spill out myself. I made it to the cramped bathroom’s lino where my body folded, and my head bowed into the toilet. I inhaled the chemical scent of the blue rim blocker. I concentrated my breathing. Deep breaths. In and out. In and out, in and out like the knife before. Like my thrusts. In and out. In and out, deep breaths to hopefully frighten off attempted flight. It didn’t work. The exercise was too much too intensely. I opened wide and vacated the vomit and with it, some of the emotion-provoking nausea. Deep breaths. In and out. Into the lungs. Into their bedroom, under the bed. Hide. Control my breathing.
​
To stop the spiralling, I finally grabbed her. I grabbed the half crying, attractive young woman by her biceps. I pulled her at me, into my own chest. My ribs were in agony. My lower stomach was falling out. I embraced her and I wished hard that the circumstances were not as they were. The circumstances being that our all, our arses, my dick and bollocks, and her well-groomed female equivalent peeped from under the waists of our t-shirts and rubbed uneasily as I tried to show her comfort.
Still, she sobbed.
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Jacob / Asphyxiation
Jacob’s was one of a few restaurants I frequently revisited. It was either a fifteen-minute drive, or a cobblestone and urban picturesque hour walk from my apartment. A Greek restaurant named after the name’s representation in the Bible. Son of Isaac, Jacob, Ya’akov in Hebrew, gripped his brother Esau’s heel in the womb. This first action foreshadowed the person Jacob would become. Beyond birth, he was a ‘heel-catcher’. A deceiver, who tricked Esau and fooled him to trade his inheritance as first son of Isaac for a bowl of stew.
The owner of Jacob’s told me once, that he thought his food was no heel-catch. His food was worth the birthright. We talked as well about the second meaning. Jacob the supplanter.
​
I arranged to meet Jacob at Jacob’s. I thought it may be significant, but more so entertaining. I supposed it an icebreaker.
We started at the bar. I ordered his drink since I’d arrived first and was a third of the way into my first. He caught up, and finishing our initial drinks appeared a natural transition to move them back toward the bartender, tuck in our chairs and escort ourselves over to a table reserved.
Although we sat someways away from the entrance, I found myself imagining an incident imitating what Fang described. Through thought, I acted a handful of drafts out. Officers interrupting the scene, spotting Jacob as we ordered starters. Asking him to get up and come with them. Officers storming through the entrance, instead finding me while I tried to order. Ripping my grip from the drinks’ menu, breaking my arms to force them behind my back and slamming my chin downwards against the ivory tablecloth so I’d bite my tongue. Whispering, ‘We know all the dirty shit you’ve done, you fa-’ I bleed through my teeth, and they drag me out of Jacob’s, stand me up and push me into the road. Instead of a car, I’m hit by fists. I’m smashed into by force, by thrown bone. I’m beaten by men that stamp on my ankles to stop me escaping and pull me when I try to pick myself up, so my hands slide out and I land again on my chin, the blood spilling more. They turn me over. They get their fingernails inside my mouth and pry my teeth apart and stick their whole fingers into my throat-
“Not to come off as too forward…” Jacob asked, “…would you like to share a starter, Harry?”
“What would you like to share?”
​
“I’m a graphic design artist for Circumference.”
Jacob covered his chewing. I saw he’d swallowed his beer by the reload in his throat. “I really want to say that I know what Circumference is…” He put his drink down on a coaster. “I don’t. But please do tell me, Harry. What is it?”
The question was not sarcastic.
“What is Circumference?” I was surprised he’d asked. “It’s a careers platform. The largest we have in this country now as well, which operates primarily in physical space.”
“…in physical space?”
“As in it’s not largely online.”
“Like it doesn’t have a website?”
“No, it has a huge website. You know, like any brand you can register an account, like Crawl-… like the server, and you can look for career opportunities and employers. Or you can be an employer searching for employees. The main difference about Circumference is that it’s trying to conserve in-person interactions. They host enormous careers events, talks, and workshops.”
He smiled on one side, “I value that.”
I did, too. “Yeah, me too.”
“You said you’re their graphic designer?”
“Yes. One of. One of a few. I work specifically on graphics for their events. The promotional material. And the material that you’d see at the events as well.”
“I’d like to go. I’d like to see.”
“I don’t go to any of the events.”
“You don’t go? Even just to see your own work?”
“No.” I drank. “I’ve seen it enough by the time some of it’s at the event. It’s not of gallery quality- it’s not- fine art, painted masterpieces… it’s block colour.”
“I know. How is that not art?”
“It isn’t fine art.”
“No, I’d say it’s great art. If you wanted- If you wanted to go to see, could you get passes? Would you want to go see your art? If I came with you? Could we go? Would you want to go with me?”
​
“…part of a team. Bar me, it is all women. All very well suited for the job. The students are referred to us by parent or teacher, and we’re there to offer support for students with special educational needs.”
​
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I looked from the entrance of the restaurant back to Jacob. His detailed brown eyes were on me. They were fixed to mine. His low lips were held straight, and his elbows rested along the edge of the table. “Is something wrong? Do you want to leave-? Please- Please say, Harry, if you feel uncomfortable, please, I understand-”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t feel uncomfortable. I-” I sank a gold spoon into the mounted ball of vanilla ice cream and through the pudding beneath. “I keep expecting police to come into the restaurant.”
“Oh,” he said, unsure, “What for?”
“I was dining with a woman. She was wonderful. She was good company, and she- funny, she did what I’ve done, and I called her out on it all the same as you. She told me that she was looking at the door on our date because officers did intervene on another of her dates. They’d taken her date away and covered the bill.”
“Are you hoping to get out of paying half for what we’ve ordered?”
I huffed, wanting to smile.
“Did she find out what he was arrested for?”
I told Jacob the rest. The expositional message from Fang’s date. How I felt sorry for her date because of her absence of an understanding response. Fears of the intent of others on the server. Fears of how using the server could be judged, could be manipulated as cause for arrest.
“I was a police officer,” Jacob revealed. “For not very long at all. But what I learnt, is there’ll be illegal activity happening, setup and communicated through the server. No different to the thousands of other ways to communicate.”
It is not a blanket for all activity on Crawlspace, is what he next explained. “It’s upsetting to hide”. If it is consensual, then most of the activity which, publicly, would be ‘frowned upon’ is legal.
​
My fingers were firmly hooked around the north ridge of the steering wheel. I scratched down the license plate in pencil with my other hand on a page torn out of my sketchbook. Driving in our separate cars, Jacob led us to the hotel he’d booked for the evening.
Stopped at a red light, I saw him adjust his rear view to check I was still there.
​
The hotel was ‘Fifth Stay’. It was close to a concentration of high-rise offices and therefore, designed to accommodate men delivered in suits. Men who moan and who agree to leave their families and homesteads for two-to-three, three-to-five nights to attend meetings, pitches, and larger conferences. Who stay up late in nearby cocktail bars and lure lonely women twenty-years younger than their hard worked wives.
I swept my overnight duffel bag from the boot of my car, locked the car and checked to see I’d left nothing in view on the seats and tugged the handle to check again that it was locked. Jacob waited for me by his own silver five-door. He glanced about, at the trees whose roots bloated soil and rocked and shifted concrete curb and at the few stars bright and dotted beyond the short carpark’s streetlights.
​
At the front desk, they required forms of ID from us both. Jacob said that he’d checked in earlier, “around four o’clock”, and once they hung onto his passport for a minute, they handed it back and offered us a pleasant stay.
Taking the stairs, I slipped my driver’s license into a side pocket on my overnight bag which was slung over my shoulder.
Jacob turned the key, unlocked a room on the third floor and switched the lights on right away.
The double bed was made. The remote for the television which was mounted awkwardly in the opposite corner and a pair of clean socks balled were all that were left on the bed. The room smelt like the perfume Jacob wore. A white towel hung on the handle of the pulled bathroom door and there were prescription glasses, and sunglasses and an open zip bag placed on the desk. Beside the cheap plastic kettle was a stained mug and a used sachet of instant coffee.
“Would you like a drink? Tea? Coffee? Water?”
​
Once the plastic bag was over his head, he asked for the belt.
Starting to shake, I took the leather belt which I’d gripped the buckle of in my palm and had clothed taut my arm and wrist with, and I wrapped it around the opening of the colourless bag against his throat.
At first, Jacob held his breath as he laid back on the bed. He seemed to hold it for longer than a minute. The bag was still. The creases were uninterrupted. Until he let out. When he did, the plastic covering his face started to twitch. It gently fluttered like a light curtain close to a breeze.
Very soon, Jacob took a hard inhale, and the bag shot to his lips and stuck to his open mouth. Without folding his arms, he clawed at the covers either side of his legs and began to suffocate.
He had no air. He rattled. Shook like something held down while cast ironed. His chest twitched and compressed. His throat strained. His spine flexed. The noises were distressing, were weakening.
I tore the bag. I unravelled the belt, freed Jacob.
​
I sat in the single armchair in the room, rested a mug of coffee on my thigh. The heat was starting to transfer through the ceramic and the fabric of my trousers, causing feeling of a pinching hot ring on my skin. I envisioned it worse. As a scolding mark for shame. A punishment. A torturing reminder of what I deserved.
“You’re the first,” he answered, scratching the side of his long nose. “I have always managed this alone. Torn the bag myself. I only told one other person and they left. They left the room, and they’d not contacted me again after. Ever.
“The idea isn’t to die,” he told me. It wasn’t even to come close. It was distraction. To distract from crippling anxiety. Anxiety about the end of the world. The impendence of war, of famine, of infection.
The morning was different. The rising sun squeezed through the curtains and joined us on the bed. It blanketed my bare arms, kissed my forehead and warmed the tuffs through my hair.
Crawlspace (II) / mine
Around the time that I had met Jacob in September, Crawlspace entered the peripheral of mainstream. Registered accounts grew from five thousand to ninety thousand and the ‘available locations’ added Manchester, Bristol, Paris, Lyon, and Barcelona.
New ‘wants’.
outdoors blindfolded costumed food conversation
and several more.
The opening ‘0’ on the application became ‘00’ and the font for the following ‘not love’ was changed.
The server advertised vacancies for
Graphic Designer x3 full time x1 part time
I was intimidated by the growth. Stressfully resentful. Signs of acceptance are sore to trust when they are a product of sudden popularity. When they were a cause of long-term insecurity.
Still, I was not yet sufficiently seduced to leave.
​
When I met another man at Jacob’s, I broke my own rule of keeping home address a safe border apart from my exploration on Crawlspace.
He was unlike Jacob. So maybe they were cousins.
His eyes were not chestnut. They were blue and they were the only feature on his face un-attacked. The thinnest lines of blood framed his gums and his lips where they had split. His nose was yellowish and bruised. Faint patches of dirt glazed his cheeks, and his hair was swept with grease. His clothes were not dirty, nor did they have an unpleasant drift. Maybe not smart, but they were presentable.
We never ordered food. For the duration of the time that we were there, he kept his arms under the table, sipping at the froth on his pint.
He explained that he was without a home. He was with an older woman for seven years who he had fallen in love with after he first saw her play piano in the street. He guided me through scenes of their relationship. Romance. Flirting. Instantaneousness daytrips. Unconditional support after grief. The creeping irritations. The looming arguments. The violence... The first incident. She’d slapped him when he shouted. Once across the mouth. So, he tried to never shout again. He spoke quieter during fights. She was infuriated all the same. She slapped him again. On the temple, over the eyes, across the mouth. If he cried ‘stop’, if he asked her ‘please’, she pulled at his hair and yanked at his clothes and dragged him about and into furniture. He massaged the bruises after. He felt the pain more and said he muffled cries while on the toilet. When she held a knife to a side of his throat, he distraughtly accepted he could leave.
He went to a shelter for survivors, was pointed in the direction of another. One for male survivors. In this shelter he was given a bunk and was escorted by a safety officer working for the shelter to collect his belongings from his abuser’s property. After three months in the shelter, he was forcibly encouraged to move on. He used Crawlspace to find sofas and floors to sleep on and beds to sleep in, willing, in exchange, to satisfy trustworthy-enough hosts’ ‘wants’.
I let him stay at my apartment.
As he showered, I made up my bed with fresh sheets, took a bottle of water from the fridge and put the TV on. I slipped some of my less used pyjamas and clothes off hangers, folded them and laid them on the foot.
I sat and watched two popular athletes interviewed on a British talk show with him before I moved from where I was sat up against the headboard beside him on the bed and I kissed him good night. A kiss on his forehead.
When he said, “Thank you so much,” I lowered myself and brought our faces level.
I didn’t ask to. I just kissed him and held it for a moment.
I left the bedroom afterwards. I threw a throw over myself on the sofa and closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
My dreams were invasive. I dreamt I suffocated. I suffocated while the bag was not over my head, but instead over the head of a person I’d not recognised who vaguely resembled my ex. I forced myself on someone else. I kissed the man that I gave my bed to, my head forced against his, pushed painfully hard. He didn’t react to the pain, but his head was sinking into a pillow.
My head was throbbing when I awoke.
​
Jacob (II)
Jacob spoke more about his time as a police transit officer. He told me about the best and the worst encounters he had experienced and ended his selection of anecdotes with sharing the reason for his resignation.
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he remarked. I scratched my stubble, was half turned toward him as we lied shirtless and next to each other in bed. A bed in another room in Fifth Stay Jacob insisted again to pay for. “It was autocratic. Given it was some years ago that I was there… it was less accepting of who I am.”
Jacob was not punished. He was not pinned. He resigned because it was what he wanted to do.
​
We spoke about Crawlspace. About the added categories and the changes to its design. How if I were hired what I would do different, to align the design of all the server’s interfaces.
We spoke about the enormous increase in users. How the server’s minority sexualities were becoming trampled by the queues of straight men and women signing up. Men looking to fuck more. To fuck unfiltered. Unrestrained. Fuck anything that might be defined as ‘irregular’. Looking to fuck someone heavier than the stick figures they’ve grinded in blue-cloaked clubs. For a hand job in a cab or on a public bus, or intercourse in an indoor pool or on the backseats of their failing car. For circumstances to allow tying up someone emotionally vulnerable. Zip tie their wrists and ankles and get dangerously close to acting on their private appetite for rape. To fuck with presumption. The presumption they have consent to be violent because of the server’s reputation. Straight women foolishly looking for actual love, ignoring the ‘not love’ in the opening credits. Thinking of the server as a communal lounge for the lesser, the sufferers. Believing this was as stable as they could capture. That this was all they deserved. And they crossed their fingers and hoped that they wouldn’t be beaten. Chose long sleeves to hide bruised arms and blame falling over for bent and broken noses and blackened sockets. Women looking for fast agreements to film and to sell the amateur porn to ad-funded websites to afford their existence and poorly fight off child services.
I pictured a literal pit during the conversation. A fuck en masse. Shoving queues down dark, graffitied hallways to a sudden drop. To fall onto piling bodies. Naked arses and elbows. I am close to the floor. I’m there, and so is Jacob. He’s there, with me, but we can’t reach each other as we’re pinned under the other bodies. The weight was suffocating and somehow while I breathed unaffected as though I’m not breathing at all, Jacob suffocated. The colour drained from his expression. Then another body fell on top. The pyramid of bones, muscle, and naked skin collapsed a little more and ogre foot to his face, knee to his shoulder, Jacob’s throat snapped.
It was going to all go wrong if we didn’t remove ourselves.
Jacob shared a friend of a friend’s supposed experience, who was hospitalised when he was locked inside a date’s apartment and beaten up by a ‘Cape’. A Cape was what a user was called, who used the server to hunt or bait, and threaten and assault gay men.
“We’re done with it.”
“With Crawlspace?” Jacob asked, looking at me direct.
“If that’s what you want as well.”
He did. He said it was. He said he felt that his search was over. He found me, and he wanted us. He emphasised the meaning of our conversations, our interest, our attraction. He said he thought maybe it was love between us when the asphyxiation was a blemish that I didn’t look to immediately repair, or runaway from or get off on.
This was the start of our relationship. Unspoken, but mutually understood that we would be faithful to one another. Look to each other for fulfilment.
This was committed.
We kissed.
Neck turned, he bowed and rested his forehead on my shoulder and kissed my skin again.
​​
​​
tied
​
Her clothes were a dark denim puddle at the end of the thick, cloud-stained mattress on the wooden panelled floor. Her head was forward. Her long blonde and washed blue hair was tide tightly back, away from her pretty eyed and lipped, numerously pierced face. The woman kept her thighs together, not that it hid her bare arsehole, as she waited in a cat’s pose while the other man went to find scissors to cut the cable tie around the new DIY shop bought rope. This other man having left the second bedroom left she and I waiting together. She stayed where she was, pretending she wasn’t uncomfortable in the exposing position, and twice glanced in my direction and smiled stubbornly like we’d clocked each other in public.
Instead, the man came back into the room with a knife.
He tore apart the tie and unravelled the rope. To the relief of my past-referring mind and abdomen, he removed the knife from being anywhere close to his assertion of dominance and her physical self. He tied her fresh shaved ankles together and threaded the rope through and up to her torso, letting her lower onto her breasts as he directed her arms behind her back and tied her wrists together as well.
I fell into a stare before he was finished bounding her. My thoughts weren’t in the scene.
When I stepped back out of my thoughts, he was inside of her. Using the knots for good grip, it was what felt like a very long half hour of intercourse to observe. I stayed in my clothes. Belt unbuckled, my left hand was down my trousers, but I did nothing. I felt indifferent to what I saw.
I was busy, disgusted with myself.
You piece of shit.
Verbal Abuse (II)
She scratched the back of her head and picked up her wine. She drank, licked her lips, explained the specific situation she wished to perform on this occasion, with me.
“We were together. I slept with one of your friends,” she spoke with her attention on the part folded-down table which was between us. To the coaster, wet under her glass. “I told you a week after it happened, and then I told you I didn’t want to see you anymore.” She then looked up, and looked to my eyes, “And we haven’t seen each other now for a month. You’re here, though. I let you in because you won’t leave me alone. You begged and you’re angry and you’re insulting me, but you are at the same time desperate to have sex with me again. I’m saying no. And maybe you don’t want to be with me either. You act like you despise me, like I’m shit on your shoe, but I can’t be anyone else’s. You won’t let that happen/ You want to own me. You think you are the only person allowed to look at me.” Her eyes go back to the table, “Do you understand? I want you to talk to me like shit, make me feel small and be big. Be cruel. And you’re going to beg me to sleep with you. Beg me to bed me. If you’re good at this, maybe I’ll fold.”
It was much harder to make myself demoralise and act forceful toward women than it was other men.
She disguised her face in the mess of bedding and jerked often as she used my fingers. I stretched my voice, pleaded, and enthusiastically pretended that I’d yell louder, punch holes in the walls and threaten her. I said that I’d eventually separate into atoms just if I couldn’t have sex with her.
“Fuck you,” I said, teeth grit, burying my skull. With more aggression than I knew I could exert.
To which she answered, arching and on her back, “You fucking want to,” and moaned. “You’re going to do what I fucking tell you- what I fucking let you do.”
“I-”
“And you’re going to be grateful!”
“I hate you, you weak cunt,” I insulted. “I’ll make you fucking beg. You’ll come to me because no one else will want you. No one else wants you. No one is going to love you, you cowardly prick.”
Her phone vibrated on the bed.
She stopped abruptly. “Hold on.”
Cape
The number of junctions reduced. We were driving out of the area made up of bars, restaurants, and arcades, and heading towards less lighting. Family houses along winding streets and in between dog-walked woods, children’s playgrounds, basketball courts, and tree-rich parks.
I followed behind in my car as he led in his. It occurred to me to copy his license plate down, but instead I concentrated on the road then leaning down and looking for the rung pages scribbled all over with vague structure. The letters and numbers of tens of cars’ license plates. The meaningless of it if ever something was to happen. I wouldn’t be here any longer. It would never be found. Disposed of before a search along with my unsymbolic remains. And that would be what I deserved. A God dispatched service, carried out. Clean.
​
He drove cautious around the roundabout and took the third exit which led onto a road lined with narrow pavement and wide trees on both sides. He continued to drive slowly and indicated for the next right turn.
The right turn was stumped. It just fit the length of both our cars before the road changed to dirt. I saw that he’d turned the engine off as the misted red bloom of his rear lights went. He stayed inside his car. I got out first, read the big sign to our left. Printed in ugly writing, it read, ‘Secondhand Market every Sunday. 7:30 – 1:00pm’-
He got out of his car.
I wasn’t certain of the minutiae of his want. The want being ‘outdoors’. If, to him, in his car was considered ‘outdoors’. Or rather, was he wanting us to venture onto the field, into complete darkness and reach out to find each other and hope we didn’t roll over into fox shit.
“Turn around,” he spoke. And stood there, his expression monotonous.
I turned around, inadvertently read the board again. ‘…every Sunday’.
One arm came around my throat. He squeezed immediately. Holding onto his other arm, he squeezed so hard that I thought my neck would break before I could’ve accepted my demise. Surrender to suffocation. Blood rushed to my head. My periphery blurred. I felt unusual pins and needles in my fingers. I felt my lips pulsating, and I felt nothing in the centre of my palms. My palms were numb as I grabbed at his pressing arms and attempted desperately to excuse myself from the attack.
I let go.
My body physically withdrew. My arms moved down, and the tide of my consciousness headed out.
It felt like I blacked out before I was hit by a second rush. I gripped his arm again and launched my full body into the effort. As I did, his hold slipped and in a blur of violent flinching and shoves, I’d freed myself. Suddenly, I faced him again and immediately, he charged and tried grabbing me again around the throat. It was less successful front on. As he grappled me, I grappled him, too. The struggle forced us into an unloving cuddle. The top set of my teeth pried into his clothes and bashed against zip outlining his collar. As we knocked temples, he attempted to throw me down to the dirt, the force enough to unsteady me. I fell to a knee and palm and then he threw a punch. He caught me on the cheek with knuckles, rings on at least two fingers. And another punch. Into my ear which expectedly rattled my hearing.
“You infectious faggot-”
I propelled back to my feet and threw my own weight back at him which seemingly took him by surprise. I drove my head into his chin, and I returned a punch before he stumbled, slipped and fell.
I considered to keep going, but I fled. I rushed back the few metres to my car, locked myself in and started the engine.
He stood in front of the headlights. He spat at the windshield, shouted, “Fucking desperate! Lining yourselves up-!”
I reversed out of the stump.
“Making it fucking easy for us to exterminate you.”
I stopped the car.
He stood on the spot, and before he shouted anything else, I pulled up the handbrake, got out again and left the door open.
On my way over to him, he pushed out his chest, clenched his knuckles. We both swung indignantly. And were both soon bleeding from cuts under our eyes and throbbing noses. He landed an especially forceful hit to my forehead. Again, I almost lost consciousness and floated in a place which felt weightless. He took the opportunity of my lowered defences for another attempt at suffocation, grabbing me by the throat and immediately squeezing. Before he could use both hands, I resisted. I knocked him back with more punches and struggled back to my car.
This time I got in, and I didn’t get out again.
Crawlspace
re.occurrence
Copyright © 2025 by Leo Mara.
All rights reserved.
norest
jacob(II)
bath
I rested for two days inside my home.
The first thing I did when I escaped the scene of the assault, was take a bath. Rather than shower to clean the blood away, cry, sob, blame myself, I ran a bath and stripped down. I soaked in the steaming water. Let the slight burn distract from the cuts and probable fractures. I was afraid to sink my face under the surface. Instead, I brought handfuls of water to my face, wetted the blood and let the taste sit on my teeth-marked tongue.
Eventually, I’d passed out. My body resisted no longer.
When I regained consciousness hours after, for a moment I’d forgotten what had happened. I was confused why I was sat in cold, pinkish water, face hurting, the sun beginning to rise.
After two days of long baths, minimal food, of sitting at the table in my kitchen in the chair that I usually reserve for guests, and thoughts around versions where the Cape ended my life, I left. I carried myself to a walk-in centre. I swore I’d register for a general practitioner and wrote down a fake name and address. The first that I could come up with. The swelling, and the cuts and bruises would heal. They were healing in as short as these two days. I needed medication for my head. I needed something because I had an insufferable headache. A constant pain so awful I questioned whether a lobotomy was reasonable comparison.
The doctor who prescribed pain killers, asked that I wait inside the centre and speak with a police officer about the assault my injuries heavily implied happened.
I agreed to wait. I sat on a foldout chair in a separate, quieter space away from the waiting room for two minutes before I snuck away.
​
​
​
Paint
Her stance was un-majestic. She stood over me, her bare feet planted either side of my thighs. With her head back, she poured the seven-hundred-and-fifty millilitre pot of interior wall paint down onto her throat. The stream of dense white paint flowed over her fine necklace and down her bone-showing chest, into and over her bra. It continued down her stomach and slowed pace at the ridge of her straight-legged jeans where it splintered into smaller floods and drips, drowning seams, spilling into her pockets. It spattered her feet, decorated my legs and otherwise pooled on the large square of card and the plastic sheet set down under us to protect the fake wood floors.
Letting go of the tin, she brought her legs together and unbuttoned her jeans, rolled them down to her ankles and stepped out of their denim sleeves.
In her underwear, she descended over me. She took off her pants and mine.
The fumes were intoxicating.
​
Light (II)
The white daylight watched us through the barely effective curtains. It exposed the detached hairs, the dead skin and pale dirt and the coverings and constellations of unpreventable dust that hung in the air any time he crossed or uncrossed his trousered legs, or I sneezed, or he scratched his cheek or nose. It laid on the glass surface, the dust. The surface of the coffee table as well as the high arms of our chairs.
Conversation kept us in the room with a TV. A room downstairs, away from the narrow and steep stairs leading to where I suspected a prepared bedroom awaited.
We stayed in the chairs I pointed to in his house when he asked if and then where I’d wished to sit. This was where we spent hours. Long past sunset and past the regular window of opportunity I have to consume dinner before it’s certain it will upset my stomach.
We spoke as though the server was not our broker. Not as if it was shameful, but rather like it wasn’t the truth. I understood that he pretended our meeting was happenstance. Birthed from coincidence and attended within an existence of not questioning the context, nor the objective. His character was unflinching. The only instance of fracture was his sudden investigation into my experience of the server when, in character, I’d not made any mention of interaction with it. He pushed for anecdotes. He appeared eager to hear about any unconventional meetings I’d comfortably disclose the details of. No meeting on the server was conventional.
“Do you usually do this in a uniform?” I asked, before I went any further than few tales of similarly odd conversations and roleplay. My impression was that this man might have been an investigator of some kind. A pretender. Under the guise of a reserved participant in the server’s stripped royale of allure, fake lore and foolish attempts at love. Was he looking to expose illegal ongoings? To prevent violence? Seek the Capes. Arrest the extremists.
“What sort of uniform?” he replied.
I steered course, “What do you want to know?”, and in that moment, felt unnerved, but all the same prepared to confess what I’d witnessed and what I’d been a part of.
“Do you think I’m looking for something specific?”
It was an elusive back and forth of unanswered inquiries.
“Would you tell me the truth. If you wanted some certain admission, or to know if I’ve been part or a witness to anything that isn’t-”
I’d reconsidered the purpose of his seeming investigation.
Maybe it wasn’t on the sunshining side of law. Maybe his intension instead, was self-fuelled.
How best to describe what happened.
When the conversation slowed, the ‘mood’ changed. It changed fast.
We arrived at the house at three in the afternoon, spoke for hours, spoke in the chairs as I remembered until the time on my watch was past seven. I don’t recall any closer to the exact time when senses deteriorated. When I met the terrifying physical and psychological state that I’ve not ever experienced again in my life. Not before and been sure not to again after.
I was discomforted by the sudden and noticeable deterioration in both logic and memory inside my own process of thoughts. I did what’s common. I ignored the first symptoms because this was uncharted.
A little lightheaded, I leant gradually forward in my chair. When I did, there were sudden fast, small pains all through my abdominals. I became nauseous. I thought about what I’d consumed. But the usually straightforward ability to think was intermittent. My glass was left on the glass table. Two cubes of ice and the smallest puddle of alcohol left in the bottom. I felt an imbalance in temperature. Cold and nauseous to then feel heat come over me and cause sweats. The symptoms worsened at an emergency pace. The pains in the muscles in my lower torso were searing. It all hurt so much that I forgot how to breathe rhythmically. I was panicking before I realised. And before I realised, he had disappeared from the opposing chair. Left in front of me, and somehow without my acknowledgement. It’d felt as though his evacuation wasn’t for any good reason like he’d gone to get water or to the landline to call nine-nine-nine.
The pain became unbearable. I tried to control my breathing while I soiled myself.
Eventually, I needed to close my eyes, and I collapsed…
​
In the dream, I walked. I moved, without motion in my legs. Where I couldn’t feel the movement or the motivation. My own body escorted me through the scene. It brought me through a meadow. Through white flowers. Hordes of petals felt like water against me. Wet.
The place felt hostile.
​
Regaining consciousness, the pain started over.
I saw rope on the floor. Then the bindings and knots loosely tied to hold me to the chair arms to chair arms, legs to chair legs. back to backrest.
Not far from the ‘original’ scar, another knife was stuck in me. A steak knife, inserted into my abdomen during the unconscious distraction of flowers.
I wiggled right away. Moved in cautious, combatant, drained movements to attempt to free my limbs before I was no longer left alone. As I wormed out of the rope, blood gooped. Thick spillage leaked from under the knife like syrup.
I prepared to make a choice. Did I attempt to minimise blood loss and find a landline, hopefully close. Or try to exit the house and get as far as possible.
​
​
Crawlspace (III)
In December, there was another redesign. ‘00’ was changed back to ‘0’. The ‘not love’ was unchanged. ‘Crawlspace’, placement, font, colour, was unchanged. The page after ‘register’ and ‘login’ were now backgrounded with a polished brochure of moving images. A few without obvious interpretation. A shirtless, cream trousered black man sprinting through Vienna streets in the rain. Upside down and in reverse, hot tea flowing from stone teacup into teapot delicately held by a waistcoated server. On colourless sand, a tortoise dragged itself toward another, smaller tortoise.
Further categories were added.
masochism abrasion claustrophobia partialism (limbs) katoptronophilia (mirrors) pteronphilia (feathers) acrotomophilia (amputations) age play edging
And removed.
humiliation asphyxiation
The number of ‘pools’ multiplied. In one month, five cities (pools) increased to sixteen. The servers’ seven-hundred thousand new users buried their hearts, practiced out fantasies and pretended to be okay in Manchester, Bristol, Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Barcelona, Valencia, Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Moscow, Istanbul, Minsk, Sofia, Voronezh and Cologne.
​
It was rumoured pop artist House of Anna in her song ‘Heartf*ck’, with the lines ‘You couldn’t get further. I’ll tie you up, keep you close, watch you through the server’ specifically referenced Crawlspace. She was said to have registered under the name ‘Heart Fluck’ and have attended in person experiences in minimal disguise and put on character.
This has not been confirmed. After theory circulated, server users took to forums, desperately scripting supposed encounters. They swore to have been dominated by and have fucked a brunette-wigged Anna Gagne of House of Anna.
​
The server no longer catered for a minority only.
Acceptance led a march. Less shame, less need for seclusion circled ‘wants’. Still my feelings were the individual was swallowed, drowned, bled out, buried and overgrown with plainer flowers.
Through communication, curiosity became trend. It became far less uncommon and so, came a further unusual discolour. The small pockets who came to this ‘bar’ not for popularity, could have maybe looked over, looked across the taps and have seen someone who’d suffered the same. Who would be there to ask similar questions and bravely willing to try with them together. Unfortunately, this was no longer a likelihood. How could they have seen each other? Crowds were between them. Crowds up at the bar, the same five haircuts, shoving, cuckolding, ordering Mai Tais and sanctioned spankings.
Jacob (III)
Without the draw-around curtain on rail, I couldn’t have been in a bed further from the satisfactory view of the loaded carpark and across it, the neighbouring and conjoined burger house and Italian restaurant. With the curtain across, Jacob and I had a teaspoon of privacy. He put a few books and a bouquet of white flowers on the gathered covers at the end of my bed, accepting there was nowhere else for them. The nurse declined to be of more support. They explained there were no vases or pint glasses of origin unknown for the flowers and Jacob would need to acquire his own if he wanted to keep them by my bedside ‘in better health than the patients in this hospital’.
Before we moved beyond small talk, Jacob looked again at my sorry state. The sulking bag of water on a hook. The connected tube injected into a prominent vein in my wrist which aided in the booting of the severe poisoning from my system. The almost-vanished yellowing bruises and light scabs across my cheeks, slowly healing from my scrap with the Cape a few weeks earlier. And the cloudy, brown, purple bruising, depiction of an awful storm around the stitching which closed the second uninvited entry made to my abdomen with a knife.
With wet eyes that he wouldn’t look directly at me with, Jacob said, “This is going to be the last time I see you,” by which he meant - we were over.
Un-indulgingly, Jacob reminded me of his greatest weakness. He could not trust another person. Causing events were devastating and he understood his healing was far from finished. With me, “you, Harry,” he believed I was finally the person to help him, “save me”, show him that trust could be worth its admission. He didn’t need to be alone. He trusted that when I encouraged that together we abandon Crawlspace I meant my every word. And too, that this enthusiastically communicated decision of mine was other words to say that we needed only each other going forward.
He thought right, that was what I’d intended. Unfortunately, I did not disconnect myself from the server. I was what I still hoped not to be.
​
Jacob said his final goodbye, ruined. He fled from my hospital bedside to return to cover and to the repeatedly verified anxiety and suspicions that there was not another person sure to be faithful.
I’d not shed a single tear for Jacob. I’d never see Jacob again. I felt that. It hurt. But for whatever reason, I was stuck on the ex before Crawlspace.
over
Three months after discharge, my body functioned entirely again. Entirely except if I’d needed to bend over or lean down and pick anything up off the floor. The compression was too difficult and the muscles in my stomach stiffened, and I’d be in gastric purgatory until I next slept.
My consumption of alcohol was little to none, drugs none, and whether it was whiskey, tea, coffee, water or apple juice, I turned down any offer of a beverage from other customers and bar persons alike. I replaced alcohol with exercise again. I trusted it was effective because I’d committed to this same proactive transition years ago after the first time I was stabbed and subsequently, nearly murdered. The sprints on an indoor track, the bike riding, and intense sets of push ups, squats, and sits up replaced several compulsions and most wants.
Most.
I’ll be in the bathroom.
his final message to me on the server read.
​
When he requested my home address, I instead offered a ‘pick up’ location for where I would collect whatever he’d hoped to send to me via a postal service.
I stood near to the shop’s shortening stretch of birthday cards that competed with an increasing number of ‘get well soon’ and ‘condolences’. I opened the white envelope addressed to me. Inside was a short key and a postcard. One side of the postcard was an image of the two tortoises on sand, and on the other a QR code, hyperlink and in its copyrighted font, ‘Crawlspace’. And below that, in scruffy handwriting, written over,
25 Town-Drape Apartments
Mille Close
Then the same message repeated…
I’ll be in the bathroom.
Curious, I tried the door to Number 25 inside Town-Drape Apartments first without the key. As presumed, the front door was locked. This user was less daring than countless others on the server I’d encountered.
The key fit, and once inside, I didn’t need to hunt for long to find the bedroom with a made bed and along the hall, the bathroom.
At the back of the bathroom, was the in-one shower and bath. The shower curtain, which was patterned and monotone, was drawn. The bath was full, but the water was perfectly still and daringly close to spilling from the edges. I saw the envelope left behind the tap before I knew what I’d discovered.
It felt too late, but I tried.
He laid entirely submerged. I rushed across the room, pulled first at his wrists to try to pull him out. It didn’t work, so I put my body, my head and my whole chest deep enough down. I wrapped myself around his chest and reached my fingers together underneath him and got him out of the bath, only to flop and to fall together onto the tiles. My foot was fractured again in the process. Ignoring the throbbing pain, I stared at him. His fully clothed and soaked self. On his back. Colourless. Unresponsive.
I called nine-nine-nine and begged that they tell me what to do.
After minutes of CPR, I needed to stop before I passed out. When I stopped, I breathed heavy. I felt his chest with my hand still. Felt his heart. I hoped to give comfort. Prayed that he could feel me there whatever he was then. Could translate that I cared.
I sobbed beside him.
​
my mum and dad.
Know that they always did everything they could and this is not their fault.
What I took will make sure that I leave quietly and the relief of knowing there is no changing my mind is a greater feeling than any other that I have felt in a very long time.
I look now instead for belonging in the next life.
I’m sorry it was you who found me.
Crawlspace (IIII) / Tragedy
Shortly after I deleted my account and scrubbed any trace of Crawlspace from my phone, computer and mind, the server was erased entirely. Its sudden descent was broadcast internationally.
While investigating officers did pose as users and attempt to answer aging accusations of suspicious individuals on the server, there were concurrent new incidences. Like the reports before about fear in the face of epidemic, there was a version, a similar document for the server, which was then extracted from, informalised and spread across mainstream social media.
…Since 01 of January –
- 05 reports of users invited into residential properties to find suicides. (Ropes, cuts, and drugs.) 03 of 05 included note. Reason involved ‘being alone’.-More than 30-35 reports of sexual assault and abuse. (Non-consensual continuation, choking, punching, belts, pillows, even waterboarding.)
- Another 40+ reports of harassment. (Incessant messaging. Indecent photos. Locating physical address. Following. Contacting family members.)
- Confirmed 12 ‘Capes’. Violent homo and transphobic behaviour. Repeated targeted attacks. Demonstrations of extremist views.
- 112 conversations/communications networking methamphetamine.
- 2 homicides. (Stabbings.)
Please. Contact someone. You’re not alone. There is support for you.
Behind the small procession of black suits and black dresses, I entered Joseph’s Catholic Church. I sat along the back bench, spaced from his cousins and nephews, coworkers and shaking ex-partner. The pastor, a replacement for the one who’d served for as long as I’d visited the church, younger, kinder, gestured to the parents. Mum and dad whose fault it was not, together, stood tall at the altar. They spoke about their son. They focused on his childhood and held up old photos of when he was six, eight, eleven, smiling at the flash, wielding a branch, on a cheap swing set, in a football kit.
The father held his wife and pressed his fingers to his son’s coffin before leaving the church. I stayed inside after the arrangement. I stayed alone and where I was in the back row. I prayed. I spoke direct to God and confessed my hope that he knew he wasn’t alone. That I followed his letter and knew if he was alive, I would’ve liked to have gotten acquainted.
I stayed alone in the church for some time. Thought about the people I met because of Crawlspace and what their existences were outside the server. Before and after.
The doors opened over my shoulder. Light shone halfway up the aisle, and another person came into the church. They passed me, looked at me I believe as I held my head down and felt afraid it was someone from the funeral wanting to question my attendance.
As they continued and took a seat close to the front, I recognised the person. That person who now prayed, smiled to the pastor, was the Cape I fought. The Cape who beat me.
Was there remorse?
​
​
​
Light (III)
Bloom.
White flowers.
From all the not love, loneliness, shame, suffocation
shots at adoration
Fang is here.
Crawlspace
re.occurrence
Copyright © 2025 by Leo Mara.
All rights reserved.
Light (II)
over
LOVE AND LONELINESS
<know more about .crawlspace>
post epidemic
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm not sure, but my observation is that attractions, connections, and general behaviour were all changed by the year in isolation. Reaching the faint light at the end of the quarantine tunnel, lots of people stepped out with new, misdirected confidence, and look to have loss empathy for others. And all those who didn't, instead seem a little less together. Having faced a more prevalent existentialism unfortunately alone in odd socks and pyjamas, they reflected on what they could get from life. What interested them, and what they desired.
confimation bias
I deserve this. That's how Harry feels. At least on a level nearer his surface. It's been (literally) beaten into him to believe that anything but heterosexuality is inhuman. There is evidence and there are thousands of voices to combat this ill lesson, but the breaks and bruises and scars haven't healed and so, instead the support there is is diminished or twisted or reimagined to fit Harry's pre-existing narrative.
​​
Harry is unbearably self-destructive. Love, to him, is more frightening than anything else. He has been conditioned to believe every person serves their self or is out to hurt him.The thought that anyone could care about him is still incomputable and so signs of genuine love have to be trojan horse for violence or deeper hurt. Look at everything Harry does to hurt himself, to try to continue to believe he's a piece of shit. He lies and he cheats. He repeatedly puts himself in harm's way. He chooses a god that is homophobic and a torturer.
​
Harry, at the moment I write this, may be the character I've thought the most about before and after the stories written. He was an attempt to really try to understand one's reckless decisions and see the loneliness and the desperation behind the curtain.
love and loneliness