Author: Robert Walker

Unmended

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

Each night the house smooths its skin.

Cracked plaster seals, paint blushes fresh,

floorboards remember how not to groan.

 

In the kitchen, tiles reattach themselves,

grout knitting seamless as if no pan

was ever thrown, no water ever spilled.

 

The window we shattered at dinner

glimmers whole by dawn,

its glass cold as a withheld word.

 

Upstairs, the mirror forgets

the arguments it has reflected.

But your eyes do not.

 

My joints ache in a language

the house does not speak.

Your hands tremble, unplastered, unpainted.

 

By morning, the house is immaculate,

a museum of absence.

We move through it

like old ghosts,

unmended.

Song version:

A Candle for the Unnamed

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

To the house with the yellow door
we never lived in,
the city I passed by,
the stranger I almost loved.

To the painting left in my head,
streaked with colours no hand
ever mixed,
the call I never made,
the song I hummed once,
then forgot.

To the child I never named.

There is a cemetery
not marked on any map,
where all the unlived lives lie:
the apology unsaid,
the poem unwritten,
the “yes” I swallowed,
the “no” I let rot on my tongue.

I light a candle tonight
for the almosts,
for the flicker before the flame,
for the ghosts
with no names to answer to.

Somewhere, they bloom—
delicate as breath,
wide as regret.

The Lit Fuse

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

Across the street, she’s talking to a friend on her phone, sunlight threading gold through her hair.

It’s her. Always her.

In Rome, she was Lucia—plague took her. In Warsaw, Anka—a soldier’s bullet. In Kyoto, Mai—his jealous rival’s knife. This life, she’s Davina. And he remembers.

The memory came back two days ago after he fell down the stairs: a rush, a drowning, all the lives folding into one sharp point. Names, faces, the taste of their last kiss, the weight of their last breath. And the terrible certainty: his love is the fuse.

He watches her laugh, the corner of her mouth lifting just so. His body aches to go to her. But the pattern’s clear now, unmistakable. Loving her means losing her.

She glances across—catches his gaze. Something flickers across her face. Recognition? No. Just polite curiosity. Not yet.

He tells himself to look away.

He does.

He convinces himself to take a breath, to turn, to walk.

But then—

She’s in the road, fumbling with her bag, phone slipping from her hand. A car barrels down the lane, too fast, too close.

He’s running before he knows.

The air smashes from her lungs as he yanks her back, arms tight around her waist, the car blaring past in a blur of metal and hot wind. She falls into him, breathless, eyes wide, face inches from his.

“Thank you,” she gasps, dazed. “I… I didn’t see…”

He lets go. He should step back. Should vanish into the crowd, slip free before the knot tightens.

But it’s too late. She’s looking at him now, really looking, brow furrowed—like she’s searching some half-remembered name, some shape in a dream.

And just like that, the fuse is lit.

Twelve Minutes

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

He stood before the machine, hands in his coat pockets, eyes fixed on the brass slot. Above it, instructions glowed in soft blue light:

INSERT GRIEF ITEM. PROCESSING TIME: 12 MINUTES. YOU WILL FEEL LESS.

His fingers closed around the ring in his pocket. A slim gold band, worn thin on one side. He had kept it for three years now, turning it over like a prayer stone, sometimes pressing it to his lips when no one was looking.

Twelve minutes.

Around him, the hall was quiet but not empty. A woman sat on a bench, blank-eyed, a crumpled sock in her lap. A teenager leaned against the far wall, a cracked phone case in hand. Neither looked at him.

He pulled the ring out and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. In the machine’s polished surface, his reflection wavered—a man, growing older with grief like a weight stitched under his skin.

Twelve minutes.

His hand hovered. If he let it take the ring, would it take the smell of her hair, the memory of her laugh as they painted the bedroom, the way she whispered his name when half-asleep? Or only the ache—the sharp, sudden stabs, the hollow mornings, the dreams that dissolved into salt on waking?

The woman at the bench rose. She walked past—her eyes watery, glazed with traces of red. She dropped the sock into the machine, paused briefly, then walked away.

His fingers closed. Slowly, deliberately, he put the ring back in his pocket.

The machine waited.

He turned and left.

The Man and His Moon

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

There was a young man in a hat,

Who fell quite in love with the Moon;

He courted her nightly with howls in the night,

And serenades played on a horn.

 

He sang, “Oh my lunar delight!

Oh roundest, resplendent balloon!

Come down from the sky, and we’ll merrily tie

A knot by the end of the June!”

 

So he built a vast ladder of cheese,

(With the help of a wayward baboon),

And up he did climb through the highest of clouds,

To wed his bewildering Moon.

 

But alas! when he reached for her hand,

His fingers met nothing but glow—

For the Moon, though she gleams, is made wholly of beams,

And cannot be met far below.

 

Now he floats in a coat through the sky,

With a pocket of onions and rye;

And the people below shake their heads as they go,

At the man who made love to the sky.

Return to Us

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

We borrowed the stars—
calcium for our teeth,
iron for our blood,
carbon laced in each breath we press against the dark.

We walk, brittle and shining,
wearing the debris of old collisions,
the soft ash of suns
that burned themselves out long “before”
the word meant anything at all.

In the marrow, in the nailbed,
in the white gleam of an eye catching light—
the stars pulse their call:
Return to us.

We are brief trustees of brilliance,
temporary vessels of a flame
we did not strike,
cannot keep.

One day,
when the chest quiets,
we will give back each atom,
scatter them to dark soil, to sky,
to dust adrift through things unnamed.

And somewhere,
in the cold ache of a young galaxy,
the raw gold of our bones
will vibrate into shape again.

Dominion Point

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

No planes fly over Dominion Point anymore. Not after the last one vanished from radar at 60,000 feet and reappeared empty, three weeks later in a rice field in Mozambique—fuselage intact, every seat belt neatly fastened, every passenger gone.

The DP had once been a logistics hub. When Sable Dynamics towed their first modules into international waters—a floating research array powered by autonomous reactors and patrolled by drones—they called it supply chain decentralisation.

Now it is a vertical reef of steel and ceramic, rising fifteen-hundred storeys above the waterline, though no official map shows it, and satellite feeds “glitch” whenever focused on that quadrant of the ocean.

No one is sure what happens inside. But everyone knows who sits at the centre: Victor Sable.

The AI brain wasn’t his idea. He didn’t even understand how it worked. It had been built in secret by the company’s elite Zurich tech lab—a neural nexus meant to analyse markets, predict unrest, flag leverage points in global infrastructure.

One day, it started making suggestions. Two weeks later, it started making decisions.

Victor didn’t stop it. He listened. It told him which ports to buy. Which pipelines to rupture. When to crash the euro. When to secure Argentina’s clean water. When to trigger drought in Yemen using patent-locked climate tech.

And it was always right. Not sentient. Not alive. Just ruthlessly accurate—a blind god of pure correlation.

Dominion Point grew in secret, stitched together from repurposed tankers, 3D-printed shells, and scavenged orbital tech. By the time the world noticed, it was already too late.

Every attempt to intervene—cyberwarfare, drones, a secret airstrike—was effortlessly defeated. Instantly dismantled by AI-designed picobots, mass-produced in cavernous factories beneath the seabed to swarm unseen around Dominion Point at the level of an atom.

Victor’s feed broadcasts endlessly from a minimalist throne room, lit by a synthetic dawn. He is always there, gaze vacant, as the AI presents him with decisions.

His voice is never raised. When the World Bank collapsed, no facial muscle responded. When Brazil split into corporate zones, he hardly moved. When eight million were displaced by water wars after “unforeseen disruptions” to dam networks in Central Asia, he smiled faintly. Then his head turned slowly to the camera and said:

“This is not coercion. It’s freedom at scale.”

Now, borders are meaningless. And CEOs kneel where diplomats once stood—while the AI continues its computations.

The Hours

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

I said I would buy the flowers myself—
Step into the morning, become someone else.
The day is a ribbon, the sky’s like a bell,
And the hours chime softly, though no one can tell.
I pass through the sunlight, all lilac and glass,
But I’m always becoming the girl I once was.

Who am I now, in this glitter of air?
The city forgets me—yet I’m still there.
Not quite the hostess, nor quite the wife—
Just a breath between moments, the shape of a life.

And the hours—they slip,
Like rain from the wrist.
Like parties and petals,
Like kisses half-missed.
Was I ever a self?
Was I only the light
That danced on the wall
Then vanished from sight?

There’s something in June that is just like a wound—
All beauty and sorrow, entangled, attuned.
Peter once loved me—his knife of a gaze—
But I chose the safe harbour, not passion’s blaze.
Yet even now, as the bell strikes the day,
I wonder what girl he saw walk away.

I gather my guests, I smile and I stir—
But who is this woman they take me for?
A thread through a drawing room, always composed,
Yet aching with silence where nothing is closed.

I think of the boy who jumped to the air,
Fell through the sun like a prayer unanswered.
Septimus, stranger—your shadow is mine,
Both of us slipping the ropes of time.
The soul is a secret, it does not grow old—
It burns and it flickers, it never is told.

And the hours—they pass,
But leave no trace.
I gather them all
In silence and grace.
The self is a mirror,
The self is a sound—
The toll of Big Ben
And the hush underground.

Mayor Biscuit

by Robert Walker, posted in Stories

Nobody quite remembers who wrote Biscuit the Labrador on the ballot. It might have been Daisy from the bakery, or old Stan who thinks politics peaked in 1972. Either way, the dog got seventy-three votes. Enough to win.

The incumbent, Councillor Dobbins, demanded a recount. The ballot officer, who had already started on her lunch, refused. “It’s done, Geoff,” she said, biting into a cheese and cucumber sandwich. “The dog won. Try dignity, for once.”

Biscuit, unaware of his victory, celebrated by rolling in something unspeakable behind the co-op. The local paper ran the headline:

BISCUIT ELECTED IN SHOCK LANDSLIDE. VOTERS ‘HAD NO WORSE OPTIONS’.

At the first council meeting, things were tense. Dobbins refused to vacate the mayoral chair, so Biscuit peed on it. No one argued after that. The chair was bleached. Biscuit got a tartan cushion.

Oddly, the meetings improved. Biscuit sat quietly, tail thumping occasionally, eyes wide with mute optimism. When discussions grew heated, he’d let out a soft, judicial woof, and everyone would shut up.

Minutes were quicker. Budgets were passed. People stopped yelling about bins.

His approval ratings soared—82% by mid-year. Villagers said things like “He’s got presence” and “Finally, a politician who isn’t all talk.” Even the dissenters struggled. “Yes, but he’s just a dog,” said Dobbins bitterly on local radio. “A very good dog,” countered the host.

Biscuit was eventually awarded the ceremonial chain, specially adapted into a collar. He chewed it once, then wore it proudly.

A journalist from the national press came to write a piece. “It’s performance politics,” she sniffed. “Pure pageantry.” She then watched Biscuit chase off a developer trying to bulldoze the cricket pitch. The story ran under the headline:

BARKING MAD OR BRILLIANT?

By Christmas, Biscuit had won Parish Leader of the Year, and the council had received two grant offers to study “non-verbal governance models.”

He celebrated with a new squeaky toy and a sausage from Daisy, who confided, “You’re better than all of ‘em.”

No one ever replaced him.

He served three terms. Then, upon his peaceful passing, the council held a ten-minute silence—broken only by the squeak of his favourite toy, gently pressed by the village clerk.

Dobbins ran again. But lost to a goat.

Random Thoughts

by Robert Walker, posted in Random Thoughts, Theme

I’m a night owl, an early bird, and a ghost haunting the hours in between.

My dark night of the soul has been lodging with me for years now. To be fair, it does the washing up sometimes, but it really ought to start looking for somewhere else.

Consciousness is the relation between inner and outer, observer and observed. It’s not just the result of matter interacting; it is the loop where the distinction between subject and object folds in on itself.

Meaning arises because the universe, through us, temporarily has a mirror. That mirror gives rise to art, ethics, despair, beauty, absurdity—all the phenomena that define human experience.

The fact that we seek meaning—and can construct it—suggests our role is not passive. We’re feedback. And perhaps, just perhaps, that feedback is what allows reality to mean at all.