Purity

Therese was clean on the inside, but her mud-slapped, filthy, stinking home – with its stacks of newspapers going back as far as she was born, spoons bent and burnt, food grown hard and crusty – kept her skin dirty.

from “Purity”, in The Gate Theory

This story first appeared the anthology Scenes from the Second Storey, edited by Amanda Pillar for Morrigan Books. It’s a gorgeous concept; each writer was asked to write a song inspired by the album of the same name by The God Machine. My story was Purity.

At the same time, I became fascinated with the sort of hysteria that leads whole towns to dance or laugh for days, sometimes to the point of death. What is it in us that causes us to follow blindly sometimes? When I saw an old man in a supermarket (I’m often inspired by the things I see in the supermarket queue!) who was dressed beautifully but was wearing a baseball cap that seemed to be leaking blood, I knew I had my cult leader.