Madness lurks unseen and unbidden behind everything we do, its surreal and myriad worlds veiled only by the thinnest of lines, as thin as death, as loss, as loneliness can make them. These are stories where the lines are blurred, and crossed, and what emerges from the transgression is something we may not even recognize as human.
Brand New Day |
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| She wakes up slow, opens her dull eyes expecting the new day to glow in, but no. It’s still night. She blinks, yawns into her pillow, stretches beneath the duvet. It’s the pig bedspread, the one her mother made. Her dozy palms bobble over the linen pigs stitched onto the cotton, sleep-weakened fingers catching in the felt swirls of their curly pink tails. She pulls one out gently, lets it tug back into place, and smiles.
In the distance, muted by the thick velvet curtains swaddling her second floor window, there’s the sound of drunken students calling out on the spine. Back from the Carleton probably, she muses, fresh off the Uni bus and trying their hardest to act like louts. 3, 4 in the morning perhaps. She rolls over, arches her back, sighs dreamily. Nudges a foot out from under the duvet, snuggles a hand underneath her double pillows, and slowly drifts back to sleep, only vaguely wondering why she woke at all. Image from here. |
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Sir Clowdishley and the Sea |
Two Hearts |
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| His name was Sir Clowdishley. He was once a royalty man, an astronomer to the king. He surveyed great kingdoms of heaven and charted the progress of the stars. He named whole galaxies after his two children and wife, but his family were now all dead, outlived by their celestial counterparts, lost to the sea.
He stalked the ocean, walking the shores of England’s beaches, from Land’s End in the north to John O’Groats in the south. He lived off tubers and seaweed, jellyfish he found rotting on the sand, husks of old cod half-desiccated in the salty winds. He was emaciated, where once stood a proud and hefty figure. He slumped along the coastline, ragged and draggle-haired, hefting his hundredweight chain like a penance behind him, picking his next sortie with the utmost care. Sir Clowdishley warred with the sea. He battered it with his chain. He lashed it endlessly, striking foam from its ragged edge and beating the surging tides with all his strength. Image by Caspar David Friedrich. |
He held the FridgePak plastic bag close up to his eyes, but he couldn’t see anything special. He saw no spark of life, no memory of love, nor any trace of meaning. He just saw the pulp of a heart. Liquidized. Red and purple, twisted through with fragments of yellow fat, white sinew, the strings and cords that held the organ together. Floating in the melted mushy blur.
He squeezed the bag. He felt the texture of ground meat, some gristly chunks remaining. He felt the fluid rush of blood, filling the bag’s vacuum, the indentations of his fingers, his fingerprints transferring to the plastic. He wanted to smile but he couldn’t. He placed the bag into his briefcase, closed it and locked the number dials, then got into his Mercedes and drove off. Image from David Ehlen. |
Isidro’s Furnace |
Bathsheba |
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| Isidro’s furnace demanded FBI agents, but he only fed it limestone and coke, sometimes Rice Crispies if it was good. In return, it fed his insanity. Neither got exactly what they wanted, but it was a happy enough arrangement for the both of them.
“FBI agents!” it would roar down the phone at Isidro, who often held a towel to his other ear to keep the noise in. “Out there, in the lawn, take your blunderbuss to the cheeky lot of them!” Isidro would look out at the lawn, see only squirrels. “They look more like squirrels,” he would say, but that would only provoke the furnace’s wrath. “They’re in disguise!” the furnace would roar. “Blunderbuss those sneaky squirrel-costume-wearing FBI agents!” Image from here. |
Mad Noah can’t give me what I want.No. Mad Noah stands in his tent and shouts at me in the doorway- “Incubus of Satan! If you had SEEN the holy holy holy as I have, if you had SEEN!” And I leave.
Mad Noah comes to me at night and between his whisperings of a world gone mad he slips his fingers between my thighs, and while he tells the story of the one eyed fox that learnt to fly above the second flood, he strokes me, and I do what? This proud woman, tall, strong, I do what to this little man above me? I do nothing to stop him at all. Image from here. |
Stormwatcher |
Leanna Drew the Moon
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| The storm-post was made of crumbling old red brick. Ragged weeds grew up its chipped and tattered sides, through its paving stones and round the observation platform binoculars on its roof. The grindstone railings that once prevented tourists from falling over the edge had collapsed inwards in a landslide a long time ago.
Once it had been a place filled with people, tourists come to see the volcano spume and smoke, then the storms came, the avalanches began, and the people left. There were still cars in the parking lot, their black tires faded and deflated, their metal rusting slowly under the weight of time and ice. It was a dead place. A place of cold, and wind, and long-forgotten memories. And the Storm-watcher.Image from here. |
Leanna knew she was a special little girl because the moon spoke to her. She knew that it shouldn’t, and that she shouldn’t listen, but none of that stopped it from happening. She drew pictures at school of her talking to a big moon face and the moon saying things like “try eating those soap suds, Leanna,” or “that dog wants a bite of clay, go on,” and in the pictures she would go ahead and do it. The moon, after all, was her friend.
But it wasn’t always so nice. She was 5 when it told her to kill her little brother. Her little brother was 6 months old. He lay in a cot and gurgled all day, while her parents fussed over him like he was a box of chocolates or something. |
Waterfall |
One Eighty
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| I cut open his brain because he needed help.”Help me,” he’d whispered, banging at my fly screen in the middle of the night, his wet shirtsleeves slapping against the cracked glass of my back-porch slide door. “I need help.”
So I’d let him in. Set him down. Listened to him talk. “There’s a waterfall,” he’d said, lying there in the dark kitchen slumped across my table. “I see it when I dream. And the dark creatures. There are dark creatures in the waterfall. Slithering in the cold, behind the falls.” |
It`s not what he expects. His room is in disarray, futon lying disheveled with the covers beneath it, bookshelf standing on its head and tilted into the corner, full-length mirror fallen flat and smashed to pieces.But that isn`t everything. The main thing is the light bulb by his feet. He takes a deep breath, and looks out the window.
“What the,” he breathes. The world is upside down. Image from here. |
The People in the Walls |
Caterpillar Man |
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| The people in the walls are an infestation.They crowd around the living room in their inch-thin insulation space and watch me while I go about my life.
Some of them have drilled peep-holes. I cover the holes with paintings I paint myself, and vases full of flowers which they sometimes steal and eat.I paint paintings of the people in the walls. I suppose they look a little bit like aliens. They have big and flat grey heads an inch thick. They look a lot like stick men. They are normally smiling stick-thin smiles, which creeps me out. Image from here. |
I fell in the hole on a Tuesday. The hole is a hole in the road. Maybe 50 people walk by a day. I fell in by accident and now I can’t get out.
The sides are steep, and there’s nothing down here for me to eat but this damn banana tree and rat bones.There’s a lot of dry and desiccated rats down here.It doesn’t make any sense to me. But, I have to eat, so I crack the bones and slurp down the dry marrow.It’s like molasses, but not as sweet. |
Stick Man |
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| Dray is slumped at the edge of his desk, doodling. It`s Saturday again. Another business studies class. Four low level Japanese students talking about their companies in broken English. No matter what he does, it`s always boring.
You`d think, you`re the teacher of a class, it`s going to be interesting. You`d think, you`re the teacher, you shouldn`t be the one falling asleep. But it happens. He spends longer every time, planning, brings in CDs, newspapers, games, but somehow it always comes down to this. Just, dull. |
on Ruin of a Japanese WWII Shipyard on Writing Blog #8 tapestry narratives on Writing Blog #7 the engine of fiction
