There rises a rallying cry of mutual recognition. This is a celebration! Each piece of internal armor on each individual is so thick with shine that even light from the recent past and the future finds a way to burst forth, shattering across shattering glass, covering all in a blinding healing bleeding screaming LIGHT because that’s what LIFE is, you assholes! That’s what it means to be alive!

The crazed pitch of ‘Date Night’ is probably unsustainable beyond its three pages. A couple go on a date where their heightened anxieties ripple out and affect their view of the other diners – or is everyone in a mass hallucination? ‘A wild look enters all eyes’, ‘Another man flicks open his button fly. His pubic hair scatters like dandelion florets. The man howls and a woman rips his dick off and drops it into a bowl of soup. What’s the deal with soup!’ Is the hysterical narrator in the throes of a utopian vision where everyone is exposed at once and no one has anything to hide? Where people will no longer say inane things like ‘What’s the deal with soup!’ to end conversations? Is it utopian or a vision of hell? I don’t know, but you should read this story here and everything else ever written by Amelia Gray!

First published in Bomb Magazine, March 2012 and available to read online here. Collected in Gutshot, Fsg Originals, 2015