Synaesthesia Magazine Seven Deadly Sins | Page 53

Recipe for Wrath

1.Look at the world around you. Look at

the litter and the concrete and the

greed.

2.Become claustrophobic until your

bones sweat.

3.Look inside yourself at your failings,

insecurities and shame.

4.Become neurotic until a bitterness

taints everything you taste.

5.Record your nightmares: teeth, and

people bigger than you.

6.Become a doormat for a decade.

Remember every footprint.

7.Collect things that make you sad and

store them with points 1-6.

8.Age.

9.Wake up one morning when it’s too

hot and too bright. Lose your temper before getting out of bed.

10.Spend days brooding over everything

that’s wrong: corruption, waste, hate.

11.Repeat point 10 until the sound of a

synapse in your brain exploding screams in your ears and turns your jaw to stone.

12.Slice responses at everyone.

13.Look in the mirror. Trace the

contracted muscles in your brow until you find the pit within you.

14.Descend.

15.Sit in your darkness and listen to the

stalactites dripping, growing.

16.Snap a thin crystal from the cavern.

Capture its echo.

17.Lay the reverberations of your rage on

the floor, smoothing out the hesitations.

18.Take a deep breath of hydrogen

sulphide to clear your head.

19.Dip the crystal into a pool of milky

water.

20.Burn the words into the page. Write.

Sam Russell is a fragmented writer, dividing his time between short fiction, photography and his first novel. Whichever arena he walks into, he does so alone, using themes of isolation and difference to make the darkness we all face beautiful and fascinating. He holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from the University of Kent at Canterbury and has recently been published in this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology "Scraps".