At first we ran. Then we walked. Some of us crawled. Some had stopped: too tired, too weak, injured. Infected.
We few stumbled onto the wet sand, our feet sinking deep and wet into its cloying embrace. We hadn’t heard the beasts for days. Not since Adam, the guy with the two kids had fallen behind one evening. We did start to go back for him, but by the time we realised he hadn’t made it out of the woods… Well. The howls started up, hoots and screams carried by the wind. And in them all that hatred, all that vicious, incomprehensible envy for the blood in our veins.
We didn’t go back for him. Or his children. We just kept going. Over the hills and far away. To the beach. Where else was there to go? That’s where it ends. We have could have gone inland, to the heart of them. We’d have been surrounded; consumed. Here we could see freedom. The waves thundered with hope. None of us noticed the tide was coming in, that the waves were against us, keeping us there.
They let us touch the water at least. They gave us that. But no mercy. The beasts rose out of the sand, it fell away from them as they stretched, soaked, waiting for us. I can’t imagine how long they must have been there. How patient hatred can be.
I was lucky. They fell upon us, tooth and claw ripping and clutching at men and women. Blood spattered the sand, tears fell like rain. I fell backwards into the sea. Arms reached up, closed around me and bore me down under the waves.
She stood at the top of the stairs, tall and glamorous. Her fur coat snapped and howled at the light fittings, her long blonde hair danced in the breeze from the open window.
Then the drug took effect. The air shimmered about her like a haze of heat rising from the sultry street. The foxes snaked around her, their heads diving through and out again like worms through an apple. Her already long fingers lengthened, the nails twitching into talons.
The light bulbs exploded, showering her in a fine glass rain. Out of the fresh darkness came a deep moan, and a growl. Her paws descended the staircase with a soft step and click of claw.
I stepped back behind the curtain and activated the twilight-sight. The gloom became a blue efflorescence as the device drew on the magical energy in the room and gave me a clear view of my love.
Magnificent. Nine feet at the shoulder, her fine features drawn into a toothy snarl, the fur coat’s animals a Medusa swirl of sinous foxy tentacles.
She click-clacked across the foyer and nosed open the front door of our home. The hunt was on.
Cat-calls and whistles rang out from the foredeck as Sharon danced and wheeled. Dark though the night was, we’d fought it back with gaily coloured lanterns and affixed candles to our clothes such as those flingin’ wax from Sharon’s shimmies. Every crewman was on deck, save for a sole lookout in the crow’s nest, his peepers peeled for trouble. For tonight was a time of celebration.
Gaargh, me betrothal to me beloved Roberta Clementine had been a stressful and dangerous time. Her brother’s me arch-nemesis y’see- the indefatigable bastard Admiral Kneehorn. I’d bested him in cunning on many occasions and seen me men busted in irons. Just the presence of Roberta Clementine on board The Grim Bastard placed us all in terrible danger. Know ye that the heart of a pirate cannot be quenched with the bowel-watery fear of steel, additionally ye have to prioritise in this job. Lovely she were, laden with white silks, plundered jewels and gold. Men would happily die just to get a glimpse of her winking charm.
Ne’er before has me chest swelled with such pride as I stepped onto deck, me unicorn of the sea peg leg and black velvet night-smiting suit cutting an equally fine figure. Oh, certainly the narwhal’s face spike gouged horrible holes in the deck, as tis mainly for harming the ships of others’ on special occasions.
Proudly I took her arm and led her twixt a corridor of mooning pirates to the forecastle where we’d installed our captive priesty-man. Quellglum, or Reverend Quellglum as he insisted, we’d lately acquired from a missionary vessel which had willingly spread her legs for us. Reading us the ceremony his delivery was marred only a little by the tics and stammer that afflicted the shy clergical. Signalling to Gashin’ Alan to draw off his blade from the vicar’s throat seemed to aid his wordery.
The ceremony was lovely: No Hands Mick gave a rousin’ shanty and the cabin lads’d sought out some moving verse to enchant and inspire the night. Under the glow of our lanterns and grins of me men I took Roberta Clementine’s hand and placed a ring upon it, for she was a thing I liked. Virginal she seemed, and though twas laughably untrue for either of us, we were reborn in our vows.
We kissed and the wedding entertainment unfolded. Exceeding fully me expectations (these being the lads who’d inflated squid for strewing about the Christmas tree) we had bunting o’ stolen lace, music, dancing and an ominous soliloquy. Ye tone was odd but Gashin’ Alan had had an awful lot of rum so we cheered him regardless. Zealously he concluded his solo by hurling himself from the ship. After fishing him out we further rummed ourselves and danced the night away.
Bright was our future, so bright that it blinded me to the unmanned crow’s nest and that the Reverend Quellglum was signalling with a lamp into the night…
She fell upwards through the blinding darkness. Black night erupted around her. Consciousness hit her like a bus, the shock kick-starting her heart. A whirl of stars as her eyes tracked helplessly in spirals. Focus. Got to breathe. Remember how to breathe. Fresh wet lungs regretfully inflate with the fear of dying so soon. A shuddering gasp; barely remembering what to do. With air the sensations become overwhelming – inside matching the outside. Coldness invades her, at odds with the fever burn of raging senses. Focus, draw it in. Hot. No, cold. Colours; the body cycling through them a painful kaleidoscope. The whorls on her fingertips are huge, overlapping with the revolving star-scape above. The spiky wet green below comes overhead and the dark is behind her again.
Sound penetrates her. It judders up from the earth before the air insinuates it into her mind. She’s preoccupied by the awful whole body retching for a while and doesn’t notice that her vision has stopped slip-sliding around. She only notices that when the hands reach down out of the blue and turn her over so she’s vomiting safely on her side. Through tear-stained eyes an assemblage of white and brown shapes descends on her and moves rhythmically. The noise is concurrent with the motion but is meaningless. Belatedly she realises it’s a human face talking. Pressure on her hair – which she has – pressing the follicles down on her scalp. It tingles violently but the nausea retreats. The velvet dark takes her away again.
The light is fainter here. Dimmer? Less harsh. She’s lying down, warm and dry. She can identify the sensations. Her breathing feels regular, if not yet natural. There’s some weird sensory feedback going on – touching of touching. Oh yeah, fingers. Right. Fingers, knees and toes. That’s not right. Fingers – hands. Arms shoulders body legs feet. Toes. Head on top. Okay, this is normal. Gender-appropriate. Good. Apart from the corporeality. Suddenly there’s a roar and whistling and a terrible rocking of the world that she remembers from a different time. Different place. Different body. A man rushes in (the one from outside?). His face is contorted with emotion, and disfigured with blood. She giggles: blood should be inside, not outside. “You’re feeling better then? Good. We have to go, now.” He hauls her to her feet, making the room spin as her own blood sways inside her. Ah, empathy.
Now she’s upright the dismal dimensions of the room are evident – it’s a small square room, made of concrete and dust. The dust is falling from the ceiling, following each booming crack above. The next roar throws them both into the door frame, his weight pushing her hard into the edge of the door. She cries out at the new pain but adds it to the set of feelings she recognises. Her motor response is working better than she thought too – they get up together and stumble into the corridor.
There’s smoke which bites at the throat and eyes, adding tears to its own misty blur. The frequency of strikes increases into a steady rain of blows to the corridor they half run half walk down. His clothes are rough, torn and patched. A soldier’s garb, but probably not his own. Her own feet are not bare, she realises but in light boots. Someone dressed her. She turns to ask the man who smells of sweat, dust and blood if it was him.
There’s no answer. Not in the vastness of noise which explodes around them. There is no longer a roof. Through a halo of fire and smoke the sky is etched with contrails and explosions. She’s on the ground again, thick with plaster and brick. The man lies over her. Still. More hands tear him away from her and pull her out to the now distant background of screaming and detonations. The man doesn’t join them. With the help of the new hands she’s pushed up the wall and into the open air.
A scream of strangled metal whips her attention to the left – a four wheeled vehicle rotates through the air above her, landing with a crash amidst a group of armed men and women. It explodes. More screams. But… that was only an effect so she re-traces its arc. The cause is a shocking assemblage of metal and fury, snarling and loosing death into scattering soldiers. It lunges towards her, its car-sized feet gouging the earth. The thing’s nightmare Cubist face angles towards her and its hulking girder arms extend vicious grasping claws. She’s overwhelmed, terrified.
The hands that forced her up and out of the tunnels’ safety hold weapons. The closer the giant’s fingers reach the greater the intensity of fire. It flinches away as the steady stream splashes over its face. Then it makes a concerted movement, stepping forward huge and imposing, claws reaching down at them. There’s a brief, shrill squeal. A gout of fire nearby. The giant’s angular face comes apart suddenly. The tangram panels of its head bouncing around them. The headless monster reels drunkenly, trips in the trench it uncovered and collapses, an arm still swinging wildly, beating down into the ground.
Aside from the still-thrashing windmill all is calm. Screams mute to sobs and moans and the staccato gunshot retreats into their barrels. Another man helps her to her feet (again- must re-learn balance), she can tell them apart now. He’s sooty and bloodied too; so is she.
“I’m John,” looking at her expectantly, gently releasing her hand.
I should have one of those she thinks, a name. What’s in a name?
“What’s your name?” again an expectance in his voice, heavy on the pronouns.
It takes a moment, but she can feel it rising within her. A coiling around her mind, squeezing it, re-framing her world:
“Marielle” she blurts, ” OverTwelve: Marielle.” She can feel that she looks surprised.
“Good, welcome back Marielle”.
It did seem familiar being here, back in the world.
While Marielle rediscovers her name, John continues, though not to her. The soldiers have gathered round. Guns point out from their perimeter.
“She’ll get it all back eventually. Primed with key word question and answer responses. We’ve just got to ask the right questions.”
The camp disintegrates around him. Half the soldiers vanish across the fields, leaving the torn earth and the foundered machine behind. Only John and three others remain. John is tall and thin, dressed in the same third-hand uniform as the others.
“This is Jules”, he distinguishes her with a casual wave. A short woman toting a massive weapon across her back and shoulders. The sides of her face and hair are red and scuffed from the barrels of her gun. She smiles encouragingly.
“Jules finished off the Testament.” Marielle stares at them both. Jules smirks; turns away and starts packing a series of cases.
“Sergeant Mastiff,” he says nodding at the man tending to her own shoulder. Cleaning and wrapping the long gash she’d received when the ceiling was torn away. His hands are gentle. His face a mess of scars and missing shapes. He brushes her hair out of a cut above her left eye. The cuts are strange, they feel… strong. “They’ll hurt for a bit” Mastiff says. That’s the word: hurt. The other side of sensation. Pain. Now she knows it her shoulder aches terribly. He stands. Slowly. Stiffly. Only one of his legs bends. “She’ll be fine”.
There’s just one of the party left, a smooth-faced man who wears the uniform like it belongs to him. He can’t take his eyes off her. “Wh- why did you. Why are you here?” she’s talking to John but looking at the man by his side. The other man exchanges a look with John that Marielle cannot understand.
“We saw you. You won’t remember, but we saw you. Coming down in a pillar of fire. From up there.” But she does remember, her memory unlocking to that time before she had memories. Remembers shedding her skin.
“You came down, coming back to us.” John continued, “we saw where you’d be and reckoned we’d get to you first, though not by much”.
The clarity, blackness in the distance, everything pin sharp wherever she looked. Then the fall, burning through the atmosphere. The inside of her twisted, reforming, sucking at the substance of her strength. Plates, parts ablating away, ripped off by the speed of descent. A sudden shift of self and then that hard contact of mind.
“She’s doing better than you did.”
“It hasn’t been as long. She’s slept too.”
They’re still talking as is she isn’t there. Maybe she isn’t, not really, not yet.
“This is Michael.”
Michael looks at her intently. “You don’t remember me do you?”
“I- I don’t know. I don’t. I remember falling.”
“Yes. It’s a long way back down isn’t it?” he sighs. “I’m Michael. Michael OverEleven.” Her face crawls between blankness, confusion and recognition.
“How long has it been?” she manages.
Michael nods to John. “We think- we know- we looked you up once we found you, before the Testament came. It’s been seventy-two years Mariella. Seventy-two years since they took you.”
“She doesn’t get it.” says Jules, “we have to go. The others are away but we have to go now.” She stuffs a case into each soldier’s arms and stalks away across the field.
“Come on Marielle. We’ll talk more when we get there.” Michael slings the case onto his back. Glances warily around. Takes Marielle by the elbow. His grip is tight. Warm. Marielle goes with him.
The Testament brokenly slumps alone in the mud. Its pounding fist slowly beats a pit into the earth as Sergeant Mastiff limps about the battlefield. He kneels by each dead soldier for a moment and steps away. When the metal fist finally halts, hanging twice the height of a man from the ground, the bodies are burning in tight fierce blazes and Mastiff has gone.
This is a backdated post, so apologies for the lack of ordering. To be fair (to myself) that’s much like the inside of my head so I guess it’s appropriate. What follows is straight from my hand-written diary of brain thoughts, and led directly to setting up this blog anyway. This is me just starting a course of cognitive behavioural therapy for wellbeing and sleep disorder.
18/04/12 – the night before a therapy session.
So I’m doing this therapy tyhing – a referral from my doctor, ostensibly for sleep disordery things, but increasingly it’s making me think about depression and anxiety. I guess those are underlying or related issues. I know I’m going to end up having to talk about things I don’t want to – I have already hinted at them, so I’m kind of committing. Honesty’s a bitch. I don’t want to lie to this ‘brain lady’ who I’ve told that I want to help me, so I guess… I won’t? I’m both nervous about it all and relieved. I know we’re going to talk about self-harm, which will eventually wind its way back to abuse and all godknowswhat.
There’s a plan though – come off the amitriptyline (can only spell that with the aid of the internet) and get a proper sleep pattern. Whatever else comes up – fine. Get it out, right? Am I to return to my teen years of endless self-indulgent self-analysis? Or was it? Was it actually much-needed introspection that kept me alive? Maybe. If so, it’s just stupid to ignore it and deny the validity or utility of the process, just because I can’t quite recall feeling that way. I do have all the notebooks still, of course. Would re-reading them (if they’re legible) be like feeling it all again? I just don’t know if I actually am that emotionally cut off from myself and others.
I feel better for having someone to talk to but I’m also fascinated to know what the brain lady thinks of me! Massive egotism, narcissism, but also I can talk of myself and that’s great, but don’t the opinions of others matter? I think that’s how we evaluate ourselves- against or at least to the extent that we agree with someone else’s ideas or model of ourselves. Ah I don’t know. Really I’d like another whiskey – squash some of this down and just get drowsy. I am unlikely to be a good patient – endless second guessing, enjoying the ‘game’ of it all – the attention and the opportunity to indulge myself.
Maybe those are things that I or anyone else needs. And I’ve denied myself that opportunity until now because I’ve felt it too difficult or unhelpful. At the weekend I need to go through some of those notebooks and get a sense of what the fuck I was thinking when I was 17 and 20-something. To night no? Yay.
Gaargh, I’m back on ye Flash Cast! Tis just a short warning on this occasion and I am but a week late in the posting of it!
Listen to it now:
The wondrous folk of Flash Pulp have once more been content to add one of me gentle tales of oceanic erotica to their splendid pulp magazine show. Aye that’s right, me party favourite The Mermaid’s Tale can be in your ears in moments:
Again, another that I wrote before I’d started committing to the whole bloggy thing. And it feels to me like I need to include these things because this is for me an account of understanding myself, partly through the agency of therapy but also the conscious decision to lay out (if not confront) some aspects of my life. So this is from 01/05/12 following a therapy session which I found really difficult.
Why do I start to crash emotionally when I have nothing in particular to do? Is it because I’m well aware of what happens when I’m unoccupied: my thoughts wind back to unhappy memories and invent ways in which I can be unhappy – so I’m trying to avoid them. Is that self-help therapy? Quite annoyed with myself that I’m, on the verge of talking about the underlying shit from my past but not quite going there when talking to my Brain Lady. It’s frustrating to not know whether she’s got it in mind to explore more deeply than just the sleep and relationship habits – whether I’ve evaded or hinted at things. Do I want to talk about them? I don’t know. And yet, if, underneath these problems are the causes (however displaced) of my proper habits and states then this is the time to discuss them. Or is it? Do we really have the time or objective of getting into the heart of things? Or am I now minimising and diverting attention from myself? For pity’s sake. But if this new routine does fix my sleep… why get into the past at all?
I feel sick. Whether it’s the prospect of enduring the coming team meeting and presentation or from the last hour of discussion about myself I can’t tell. It’s the getting near to these thoughts and feelings that is perversely making me feel worse and more nervous; perhaps because I’m allowing myself / being allowed to avoid it all. Do I just need to confess that in addition to the dead feelings, relationship equality worries and sleep fucktedness there’s this history of being abused in my teens and the self-harm that resulted from it as well as the years of failing to resolve that?
I’ve kind of put much of this into abeyance through time and other activities and now I feel like it’s all back – and although I do feel differently about it all, the chance of bringing it up and discussing it again – for the first time, given my penchant for written emoting – this is making me unwell. I do feel sick and somewhat faint at the prospect of talking anyone through what happened to me just so that they can maybe help me.
How to communicate something I’ve repeatedly failed to communicate about? Just say it. Write is as the opening gambit and then start the therapy session with it? Hardcore. Or write it and somehow get it to my Brain Lady – to do what with? Read it and ask me questions? This feels fucking childish. Is this just outside the remit of these sessions? Circular: don’t want to talk about and can’t talk about it so don’t need to talk about it because that’s not the purpose of these sessions. So…. nowhere then.
Start a brutally honest blog about it all and see how it feels? What’s making this hard and all backwards is that at the moment I feel fine – because I’m doing all this self-work and so I feel I don’t need to do this. Which is false. Because I feeel fine-ish during this period of prescription and extra care I’m ignoring how I may feel when left to my own devices once more. And that’s just stupid. This is an opportunity for me. It’s not about my Brain Lady. It’s about me and I can get from this as much as I want to. So I guess I need to make some decisions. Or just act – and see what results from that. Follow an improv principle – commit and react. Terrifying.
I have the answers and most of the questions but if they remain unspoken how can they be used?
Later:
Okay so I’ve successfully spent the rest of the day in self-induced rage and tension. Well done. Have failed to be able to talk to M about it. I’m going to have to do something about this blog idea, because this is getting silly. I’m angry with myself for putting me in this situation. My problem (or one of them) is that I really want to do a cry for help, but I’m never loud or clear enough when I do – so I’ve rarely been noticed in my various attempts over the years. Perhaps it’s because I think it is terribly crass or something to demand help, but less so if someone else offers it to me – with the degree of forecefulness I require to engage.
My fingers were clenched tight and the bony ridge cut into my fingers. I could feel my blood pulsing past the nicks and gashes in the dismembered skeleton I hid behind, as if they were my bones and it was my blood the floor was awash with. I was giddy with the scent of that coppery tang overlaying the reek of old blood, rotting and soaked into the floorboards.
The night bled around me and I hugged myself tighter to the empty body which scarcely concealed me. I had been warned about the cellar. But I still allowed myself to be drawn here by the soft music and the eager chatter of my friends. Perhaps this was one of them. We’d been joined as we walked down the long corridor by men and women whom I had seen when I was with my parents. I think they knew them, but my parents had steered us away when we met in the caverns. Time and time again we are told not to go off alone, especially at night, and especially to these places. I feel stupid now.
The thought of my parents distracted me from the awful sounds which came from the self-imposed darkness. I didn’t need to see anything to know that I shouldn’t have come. I knew no one would be coming for us. No one goes out on winter’s eve. If only I’d said no to my friends. If only I hadn’t argued with my mother and sneaked between the peals of the night time bells. If only I’d stayed at home.
The gnawing and ripping continued but my eyes were squeezed shut so tight I could see the angels in stark white relief dancing past me, grinning and offering their hands. I knew at least not to let go, no matter how close the snarls and meaty slaps became. I was safe as long as I was blind.
Perhaps I slept. I couldn’t have stayed silent and unseeing for so long. The idea that I might have dozed off scared me almost as much as what I had slept through. It was quiet now. There was no feel of blood lapping at my thighs as I knelt there, alone in the dark. It felt much later, perhaps it was morning now. My eyes ached with the fear that had kept them closed. My hands were sore, but clutched only each other now. I summoned my courage – I had to escape. The way we had come in would surely be open now, even if I would be leaving alone.
Tentatively I opened my eyes, hardly daring to relax my eyelids for fear of what I might see. I was right to be fearful. It was still night. Silent and staring one of the angels crouched before me. I knew it was too late, but I closed my eyes again because I did not want to see what would happen next.
The box rocked violently between the two books which held it neatly in place; at one end a large hardback collection of artistic cat prints, opposing it an equally large dictionary. Both looked rather worse for wear, broken bindings, loose threads and gold type wearing thin. By marked contrast the box between them appeared brand new, or at least one presumed it was brand new: it had no scratches, no markings, no chipped corners or any of the usual injuries sustained either before or during arrival here. Instead it had a peculiarly smooth finish, which made it glisten in the dim, mote-filled light. When touched however, it felt neither smooth nor wet. But then again, it didn’t feel rough or dry. Really it felt of nothing at all. Those same fingertips could only sense that the muscles were being prevented from contracting further- no sensory information was available. Even the hairline crack running precisely between the halves of the box was too fine, the parts too perfectly flush, for the primitive agency of touch.
The box was naturally something of a curiosity, less that people would come to see such a curious object, rather that should someone classify it, it would certainly be as a curious curio from unknown parts of unknown parts. This though a classifier, when in fact none existed nor had one done so for a long time. Books aged and withered, creaking and cracking until the binding snapped, emptying volumes of paper flakes upon the shelves and floor. The books surrounding the box had not yet reached this stage of decay; a trifle worn they possessed sufficient weight to pin the curio down.
The rocking subsided once more, as it always did, apparently having rid itself of dead pages and dust. The glistening box grew darker, murkier in colour, slowly sinking through the spectrum of night until its intactile sheen was now complemented by its total lack of reflectivity. The box was to all intents and purposes invisible. But what were its intents, its purposes?
Content, as all immobile objects appear to be, simply to wait, unaffected by the continual erosion of the material beyond it. It was an age since anyone had even seen the box, let alone moved it from between the guarding tomes. The guards, however slowly were also decaying, it was but a matter of time before one or the other gave way and slowly collapsed into debris.
As the dust continued to pile up the box gave the distinct impression of impatience; shaking itself more furiously and more frequently to prevent itself from being buried. At last only the top of the box could be seen, or rather unseen, since it left only a disc of darkness nestled in the greying crater. Flecks of dust settled lightly on the exposure, plotting the box’s curve. Still the box remained. Finally, with agonising slowness the outside cover of the dictionary pulled itself free from the terribly worn and abused binding which split, threads splaying forwards and downwards. An avalanche of slow motion paper fell next, crumbling from the top of the dictionary, pulling more flecks free until whole pages disintegrated, heaping onto the shelf.
As it wasted away, there was only ‘A’ and the cover left, by a heap of decaying paper. The bulk of the fine book of artistic cat prints, no longer counter-weighted by the lexicon, fell hard onto the box. Its descent was somewhat slowed by the great dust drifts between them; but when forced down they burst out outwards like the exhaust from some terrific engine. The standing dictionary cover toppled, and tumbled off the shelf. The moment the obstruction was gone the grinning face of a cat slapped down upon the box, propelling it swiftly across the shelf on a platform of dust which it dragged behind, arcing into a shaft of thick sunlight; the box an impenetrable hole in the light.
Entering the shadows the box did not vanish as might be supposed, the box as it flew began to glimmer again, as if the moments of frantic activity had energised it, and its speed did not diminish but increase. The flawless and now luminescent box displayed an infinitely thin glowing yellow line about its perimeter as the box made first contact with a wall of brick and wood and passed through it without even a whisper, leaving a perfectly smooth and featureless hole behind it. The box stopped in mid-air, and could now be seen oscillating so rapidly that were it not for the slight distortion effected upon the yellow line it should have been perceived motionless.
As it hung there the yellow light distorted more wildly, weaving an erratic web around the box. The oscillation continued until the entire box gave out a uniform yellow light, easily discernible in the shadows next to the wall it had so neatly punctured. Cautiously the luminous box sank toward the ground, folding down long blades of grass. As it neared the ground the shaking lessened and the yellow light drew back into its minute groove. The light cast a neat halo upon the bare earth a few inches beyond the box, and the box’s colours began to run, from the top downwards; a slow running and dripping. The darkness of the box spread onto the ground, pouring like black coffee into the halo’s confines; once the area was filled, the halo vanished, leaving a disc of darkness on the ground. The rest of the box was now a brilliant white, the base pearlescent in its own shade.
It was a quiet day, a light breeze made the sharp blades of grass rasp against one another, and when that sound died there was the industrious racket of insect hordes determinedly approaching the interloper. The first was a beetle, with its shiny black oil-slick shell, marching over the uneven ground on six delicately articulated legs, its antenna waving in the air as it neared the disc of blackness. Abruptly the beetle turned and proceeded to tour the perimeter of the box. Soon the beetle arrived back where it began, having described a perfect circle. It settled down on the ground, squarely facing the box as if resigned to a long wait; the twitching of its feelers the only animation. Other insects also approached, ants- travelling in a solid file surrounded the box briefly before concluding that the dark halo was entirely unknown and thoroughly impregnable. The ants retreated in confusion, lacking the coherence with which they arrived in a rambling, rushing flood of armour. Other insects came and went with varying reactions: flying insects were unable to land on the box and buzzed ineffectually about it; gastropods found they could get no grip with their powerful feet and got no further.
Eventually all the insects left, except for that first beetle to come on the scene. Hours had passed and all manner of creeping, crawling insectile life had been unable to so much as lay a feeler upon the black disc or the white block on it. The beetle’s feelers waved feebly and it reared up on its hindmost legs, gesticulating in the air, weaving a complex of patterns with its segmented limbs, spread wide in appeal and calm, encouraging gestures. The beetle’s wings unfolded and re-folded producing a rasping rhythm to accompany its dance. Finished, the beetle hesitated briefly as it regained its footing and then shook its heavy carapace from side to side; the beetle rocked more and more violently, until it overcame its own sense of balance and toppled, rolling helpless onto its back.
The legs did not waggle frantically as might be expected; rather the legs extended fully and bent in half, bringing the sharp points of six feet to rest along the centre of the beetle’s abdomen. Those feet dug down, hard and swift into the beetle and the abdomen split, smoothly and cleanly with no outpouring of fluids. The two halves rolled back into the shell and the head flipped back as if hinged, leaving a gaping opening into the body of the bug. Its interior was faintly lighted, and became brighter, casting a tiny silhouette out over the beetle’s upside-down head. That shadow vanished, to be replaced by a powerful beam of light which passed over the black disc and onto the white box, not merely reaching, but piercing the smooth finish; ripples formed as the beam struck, suggesting motion. Simultaneously, the beetle rose into the air and towards the box. It passed the darkness and followed the beam of light into the whiteness: the beetle was smoothly enveloped as if sunk gently in a mildly viscous pool.
Still once more, all ripples caused by that beam of light now spent, the box gave no hint that the beetle had entered it. The black halo began to fall back, slickly running up over the white box, consuming it in blackness again, but this time broken by tiny, distant-star-like points, slowly moving in spirals about the box, rising ever upwards. As the spirals continued to rise, they coiled, their multicoloured specks fusing together, coating the box in vivid iridescent rainbows until the whole box was one spectral mass, the previous luminescence now rich and oily again. The box rose slowly into the air, grass beneath it straightening themselves and creaking with the effort, up and up it rose, above the holed wall, high into the air still visible as a dark, shining speck hurtling upwards past the limits of vision, and on.
I’ve just told my Brain Lady that I was abused as a teenager. That’s true. I don’t think i’ve ever been able to just say it to someone like that before. So I feel kind of shocked.
At the last session I’d managed to say that there were more things than the sleep disorder and depression that I wanted to get help with. I knew that at some point I’d have to elaborate on the intricate obfuscation I’d woven and say something more. For some reason – probably the usual mental tricks
of deflection – I hadn’t clicked that it would be soon. So when my Brain Lady asked me about it today I was a bit flustered. I have thought about it a lot – but about going forwards and doing a thing, not about why I needed to go forwards. Dumbass.
I don’t think I could have prepared for it though. And it’s weird writing it again here – i’ve confessed the things that have happened to me on paper, and shared that with some of my loved ones, but to say them out loud… It took a lot. But once i’d said “i was abused as a teenager” I found I could talk about it a little. Knowing that we weren’t about to launch into details helped. Obviously it’s the missing link when I think about self-harm and depression and so talking about it makes more of my life make sense – even to me, who knows that already. The things we hide from ourselves.
I did feel obliged, as I always do, to state that it wasn’t awful – I wasn’t abducted or anything and millions have suffered far worse. But it happened to me and that is significant enough for me. The scale I always imagine is, I guess, a way of normalising, gaining perspective on my experience. But however minor it may have been compared to someone’s else’s experience doesn’t really matter. It’s a kind of self-denial – minimising the value and worth of how I feel.
Writing like this helps me to explore how I feel, and I get to see it. And look at it, as I would any other piece of writing and criticise it. (I’m not checking for spelling and grammar – sorry.) And as I write I’m starting to find the answers to questions I asked my Brain Lady and myself about the purpose of pursuing treatment for something that happened so long ago which I survived. The mere fact that i’m writing about it at all, and worse, scarcely managing to even fucking say makes it pitifully obvious why I need to take action. That is scares me, freezes my silver tongue, turns me instinctively – these are such clear indications to me.
I’ve hidden from myself for too long. I’m not sure I like it out here yet. I’ll allow myself a shudder of tears. I realise this is a big deal and has not been easy and i’m torn in my chest and I don’t know what this is going to be like.
The gnarl-tongued lizard man coiled itself for another strike. I slapped it firmly about the scaly chops and earned a moment of respite. My incarceration in the Halls of the Soulless Ones had been alternately tedious and freighted with menace. Worse still I had long exhausted my supplies of travelling brandy and caravan opiates. It was doing my nerves no favours at all.
The nameless horrors grew more horrible and nameless by the hour. A fearful dread struck me whenever they laid their cold unidentifiably alien minds upon me. The chill terror they wrought in me I diffused by allocating them disparaging nicknames. ‘Old Cock Stalk Eyes’ was unamused when I named him so and through my hysterical laughter I stepped back from the brink of madness.
They tormented my frail humanity in that weird place between the stars and moon. Only my environment seemed fixed while time ran amok like an epileptic lady-gibbon: the hours raced by or dilated for seeming days. The hands of my watch disported themselves energetically which helped not at all. I sprawled, bored and confused upon a slab of stone so unusual in hue that I hesitate to grant it colour at all – perhaps its colour was in my mind only and there are not words to represent it. Walls of stone rose high above me. I imagined that they met in a vast arch in the sky – if sky there was. The vault was filled with windows subtly aglow with a gross tantric haze and behind them a darkness that grew blacker the longer I looked, as if I were being drawn into a bleak pupil of my own death. Gloomy.
I contented myself with staring at the floor, for the windows were too terrible to contemplate. Through the floor I grew dimmingly aware of another man such as myself, leaning against a similar slab of prisonhood. I attempted a tapping Morse upon the stone, with hopes of conveying a greeting through its resonant essence. He stirred not, though the sound was returned to me thrice-fold and punchy to my ears. As I watched (in a manner unlike voyeurism, for I was lonely in this space with only the grimming faces of ‘Old Gashey Face Spume’ and ‘Lady Horn Buttocks’ to oppress me) the man started in alarm and cowered by the slab.
My heart leapt into my mouth and I was obliged to swallow it lest my fevered pulse choke me. Approaching him clawfully was a vile nightmare brute: half fish-scaled goat and half horse-lobster, its head a single hugely glistening eyeball rimed with bloody sleep. The poor fellow fled, but the eerie chimera was before him at every turn. My unique eyrie gave me an unrivalled view, though I’d have traded it for a blinding. The ocular beast held the man down, and its dire pupil widened as if plunged into night. A chitinous nether spout unfurled from the gaping orb and jerked ominously before loosing a wetly spurting string of ichorous insectile oospore into the man’s terrified eyes. He screamed, which struck me as entirely reasonable, as the monster’s roe burrowed into his face.
The cackleberry-headed thing retreated, with its spiny recoiling pistil. I realised the rime was not bloody tears but the crusted rudiment of its own lost progeny. The man lay on the unhueable slab, hands over his eyes sobbing with horror. As the only other human present I felt I ought to pat him on the shoulder, or offer him a handkerchief. Some well-intentioned platitude or other in this dark and gruesome place. He was unreachable – as cut off from my cotton kerchief as man is from the mind of woman. He began to shudder and buck as if swiving a reluctant tiger. For the eggs were hatching. Those appalling nuclei of the Soulless Ones delivered by Captain Jism-Eye himself had completed their awful gestation in mere seconds, though to our time-shagged senses it might have been years.
The man threw back his head and his face was seamed with writhing ridges where those horrid oculist spawn roved. The spectral germs opened his mind like an origami crane handled by a child, rippingly and without grace. His inner eye floated free and was drawn into the future. I saw what he saw, a future rife with flames and misery: the Soulless Ones returned to our realm with their cold hatred of our life, a terrible insight into the future these creatures desired for us. It was as I shared in these visions that I had cause to wonder how it could be that I, pitying this fellow’s plight from above whose fate I envied not at all, could be twinned with him for this portentous glimpsing…
Aaagh! The worms wriggled under the flesh of my beautiful features – it was I, not he! For there was no he – only I suffered in that hellish Hall. It was my eyes into which that opthalmic bastard had spurted its embryonic eyeballs. I bellowed and raged, scratching at my face as I blundered about the hall cursing the Soulless Ones with all the names and mockery my gifted tongue could muster.
Apparently displeased by my description of its majesty as ‘Buttock-clad mal-faced leper-fist of faecal croco-chickens’ one of the ancient creatures stirred into motion. I named each one of those cruel and unfriendly gods and derided them loudly in their sacred space. With a victorious squeeze of my cheeks I exploded a gout of wriggling oculant horrors from my flesh. I took no little pleasure in stamping them to an ectoplasmic smear. It was perhaps this which roused their wrath for they all rose from their slumber; walking, dragging or even hopping dreams made flesh (albeit from half a hundred ill-chosen species, blended with the skill of a coprophilic artiste) hating at me with their emanations of terror.
I was beyond their reach, so agog with their seeding of my brow that my anger impelled my imprecative oratory to ever greater heights of insult. I realised I might have pushed the cockish jerk monkeys too far when I found myself standing in one of those bleak window arches, the darkness pulling at me- a mortuary ghost suckling on life. With wide, crazed eyes I stared defiant into their many, many eyes and found myself free. A roaring filled my ears and I fell backwards into the gloom.
A billion stars rushed around me and were still. I lay in a rose bed, ringed by the concerned faces of my neighbours from Harleigh (a small town temporarily unstained by my reputation). They helped me to my feet and I was grateful for the warm crush of their hands. Laughingly, I attributed my battered state to a gardener’s combat with an aggressive weed. I fended off further aid by declaring that whiskey and a hot bath would doubtless set me aright.
It was as I lounged in my tub, steaming clean the stink of the ancients that I felt a popping by my ear and heard a splash. An undulant tremor of horror ran through my belly. A grub of optic flesh waggled through the water. I splashed it ineffectually in my panic before anger strengthened me. I leapt from the bath and seized a jar in which I trapped the disgusting parasite. I sloshed it full of with paraffin and grinningly set it ablaze. The worm thrashed and swelled alarmingly, growing to the size of a burning horse in mere moments. Resuming my panic, I hurled the remainder of the oil at its maddened head-orb. The explosion blew me into my drawing room where I dazedly seized the bare necessities of life and fled the house.
I squatted in a robe, sopping wet and drinking whiskey in the street, and watched the flames spread through the neighbourhood with dreary predictability. The ghastly optomobeast ululated its immolatory end in a slow death of taking its pyre to the rest of the town. At least I’d leave this place with my reputation intact, for it seemed there would be no survivors. Damn those Soulless Ones, I feared that their bitter reign already begun.
The bus lurched to a halt and vomited us onto the pavement. The main plaza was a sea of heavy clothes crested with people’s downcast faces. I allowed myself to join that miserable surf and was washed across the square. The damp concrete squelched under my shoes. It can’t have been that loud, but every step made me wince.
Head down; hat tipped forward. Not enough to look like I was hiding, but enough to shade my face. I’d be scanned, but the machines would process the clearest pictures first.
I casually approached my first stop; saw myself in the shop window and checked the time. I looked much calmer than I felt: the city’s equivocal scrutiny raised horripilations inside and out – look away from the glass. I opened the shop door and walked in.
The brassy ring hung in the air as the door closed. It was darker here, and the outside world seemed bright in spite of the drizzle. I shouldered through the racks of designer suits and dresses for hire, up the steps and swept aside the tatty curtain hiding the dressing room. I knelt and ripped away the wallet taped underneath the worn bench. I replaced the curtain and returned to the shop floor.
Alerted by the bell, the owner had appeared, a soft aging gentleman with thin hair and thick glasses. We nodded amiably and I murmured something about how nice the suits were and that I’d be back for a fitting. I smiled warmly at a woman (whom I presumed was his wife), then made the bell ring again.
The sky spat coldly at my feet, giving me a reason to hunch into my coat and tilt the brim again. I went against the flow back across the plaza, but joined a group of be-suited citizens marching with corporate urgency. I was glad of our uniformity, hiding me from the glass-eyed gargoyles clinging to every pole and rooftop.
While we cut through the masses I fished out the wallet. It didn’t feel like cowhide, probably some poor endangered brute worth more dead than alive; not unlike the wallet’s owner. I extracted the cash card and threw away its skin.
I left the business folk with a fraudulent wave and strode upright into the bank. Security stood at precise intervals along the walls, with their dutifully suspicious faces ogling us all. I brushed ostentatiously past one, causing him to apologise profusely. I ignored him and attended to the lonely automatic teller.
This might be trickier. The machine accepted the card and allowed me to enter the twenty-four digit pin number I’d memorised earlier, confirm the owner’s date of birth and then answer a host of security questions. That was the cost of a machine withdrawal and denoted my newfound status. His privacy premium should ensure my anonymity. Other customers sneered enviously from the winding queues. I selected a total withdrawal. Thankfully it was not unheard of for the wealthy to pimp their cash around the banking district for a higher interest rate. And with the market so buoyant it was a risk I could justify.
I tried to enjoy a complimentary coffee while the machine sucked on my card. Eventually the big glossy notes were shuffled and stacked, and began to clutter the table. There was so much that they piled up and some fell to the floor. I immediately leaned over to scoop it up, acutely conscious of their uniqueness: the thick notes gave the denomination next to a large photograph of the card’s owner and details. We wouldn’t even have passed for distant cousins.
But I was hasty and bumped into another customer. The man stepped away muttering to himself. I apologised and straightened his jacket, my back to the table. Out of the corner of my eye I could saw security guards whispering into their headsets. It was time to leave.
I packed the money into the complimentary valise and set off. I caught the eye of a man entering the bank and greeted him effusively. I grasped his arm with a large handshake, twisted and hurled him into the guards by the exit. It was a tiny delay, but all that I needed to dart out of the bank into the street. The rain had stopped.
The banks took pride in their account security and customer privacy, so my withdrawal would remain secret: a thief couldn’t spend their money as its theft would be so obvious at the point of sale. I had other financial plans. The scuffle however would have been noted by state security, and that alone prompt swift action. Abandoning my earlier caution, I ran.
The sun had dried up the square, so I could no longer merge with the crowd. I ducked under a café’s parasol and detached the lower half of my coat, tore off my trouser-bottoms and threw them, with my hat, on an empty chair. Leaving my cover I shook out my hair and forced my run into a saunter. Then I turned into the correct side alley and vanished from their oversight.
Behind me at the café would be a man in a standard grey coat and hat, examining my discarded clothing and demanding information. I didn’t have all day to get away. A few blocks away I picked up my pace and took advantage of another blind spot to slip into a narrow doorway. This was safe, for a moment. I had just enough time to reverse my jacket and add the cap and glasses from the shelf. I swapped the money to a bag on a hook and stuffed the freebie into a drawer, checked the time and left through the other side of the building.
I changed my walk and swaggered down the road. I passed at least two security agents but they showed no interest in me. That wasn’t necessarily encouraging, not if I was doing what they expected. I’d exhausted my disguises and had to be running out of luck. They would be listening for me now, tuning into my walking rhythms, having measured my height, weight and countless other features. It was only a matter of time before they caught up, or I escaped their electronic senses.
Two pairs of footsteps were suddenly loud at my heels. A glance into a window confirmed that I was being followed. But when I turned the next corner the footsteps died away. Had I lost them? Maybe they were toying with me. Maybe they weren’t following me at all. I couldn’t second-guess them and so had to stick to the plan. I had a destination, and a rapidly elapsing time frame. I jogged through a warehouse yard and into the utility landscape beyond.
A sound to my right nearly made me sick with panic. My heartbeat thundered in my ears – I was so close. A welcome shape emerged from a massive pipe and waved. We smiled grimly at one another and I followed her through the maze of machinery until we reached the railway line.
“That’s one more then,” she said.
“How much time do we have?”
“The train’ll be here in time,” she checked her watch, “- just. Get ready.”
We crouched, waiting, and as the train came past we grabbed the railing and pulled ourselves onto the last wagon. A gang of grey-coated men strode urgently towards the tracks we were leaving. The first man staggered, clutched at another before they all toppled to the ground and were still.
She raised an eyebrow at me and I smiled tightly, and raised my bag. In return she nodded and produced a tall glass container. The yellow biohazard sticker protested futilely against the broken seal. She tossed the empty vessel into the fresh rain. We clung to each other as the train sped up, taking us away from the cold, dark city.
We sat, huddled together against the weather and checked our funds. The currency would be bankable, no questions asked, for a day or two. It would fund the rest of our journey. My partner’s rucksack clinked with the train’s motion. Through the drawstring opening I counted our other supplies, their red warning lights jostling in lethal merriment. We would be in our second city by morning.
This week started pretty badly for me on the snooze front. I’m going to partly blame it on my other half, the Lady M (anonynymity in this blog is by my discretion and whim).
I should say first that we had a great weekend – we both performed in a fantastic show on Friday which was an immense high and a really good vibe emotionally for both of us. The Lady M’s been quite down about our shows recently – not feeling she was hitting the peaks and consequently mentally spiralling about participating at all.
The Big Show is one of the things that we do which I most enjoy – unfettered creation (and horror) with an audience, and for me, doing it is very much tied in with The Lady M. We’ve done this together (with others) for about the last ten years and the idea of not doing it together is actually nauseating. So to have a really strong show was very important for her wellbeing, and mine, and our joint wellbeing. Ace. A nice quiet dopey Saturday and slightly busier but good Sunday.
Good that was until I recalled and mentioned that I was planning to join a workmate after work on Monday (yesterday) for a drink to celebrate his birthday. That conflicted with another plan we’d discussed, of going to the cinema. Now I must confess that i’d been dreading mentioning that there was something else I wanted to do. Not that I was desperate to go out with workmates, but it seemed like a nice thing to do, and I turn down such offers very often. The thing is that The Lady M reacts terribly to interruptions to what I think she perceives as ‘our time’.
For me, the time in the evenings is ‘our time’, but it’s also ‘my time’ and ‘her time’. I work 9-5 so it’s the time for doing anything and everything which isn’t work. That’s not quite the same for The Lady M, who is self-employed and work-seeking, mainly from home. I love spending time together and I have lots of interests and activities which I want to, and do pursue.
So – Sunday night. I knew The Lady M was annoyed, and i’d known she would be. The clash of events was not insurmountable, but that’s not the problem. So there was some stomping around, angry hurt brow and silence. I know these things. They are painful to me. And because I know they’ll come up – almost regardless of the event (invited out for a drink, family visit, a night out for open mic or a show, see some friends), I spin up an awesome weight of anxiety about telling her. Frequently I just turn people down, or choose not to even mention something, or try to slowly and distantly introduce the thing. It’s horrible. I get stressed, don’t get what I want, The Lady M gets angry and upset and it’s all kinds of fucked up.
So on Sunday I pressed the issue. Good idea? Maybe. We went to bed and she was clearly still furious. I’m quite good at ignoring these mood swings when I need to, but if it’s at bedtime it kills my chill. So I asked why she was so upset (bear in mind that this is strictly my account and recollection – bias!) and it all went to fuck.
The Lady M threw at me that we’d prearranged going to the cinema, that i’d previously dedicated Monday nights to her and the cat-beast. Now I don’t want this to sound silly or trivial – stuff does when it’s written down, but this isn’t silly or trivial when it’s about how we feel. I finally managed to snap, and get out how I am in fear of her reactions. It was difficult and it upset her.
We had a very long talk in which The Lady M said some terrible things about hating herself, all the time, and not being able to control how she feels. We’ve been together for a long time – nearly 14 years and we’ve both been up and down emotionally. But what The Lady M was saying horrified me – that she thought I loved her, but didn’t like her – couldn’t like her. I don’t think she’d realised how her reactions made me feel. It’s easy not to – we’re all focussed on ourselves. I know how The Lady M will react, but I didn’t necessarily know why. I can take guesses, but she confirmed many of them.
When your self-esteem and self-worth is at rock bottom, or lower it’s impossible to balance information with feelings, or to control how you feel, or even figure out that what you’re feeling is maybe a bit askew.
These were some of the things we talked about. We could have split up, but that would have been awful. It’s an easy way out, and would just throw two slightly broken parts away, whereas in fact we fit together pretty well. And what can you say when presented with despair and self-hatred? I have no idea. All I ever feel I can do is be there. I know i’m strong emotionally, incredibly resilient and what I can do for My Lady M is to just be here.
I don’t know if that’s enough, and I fear that it won’t be. But she knows she’s not in the right place in her mind. She knows she needs help, and if I can help for that to happen then I will.
I do love My Lady M, and I do like her. I don’t always like the things she does, but then I don’t like everything I do. I’m here to stay.
Something else she brought up was that she didn’t think I was attracted to her. I confess that’s a tricky one for me to answer at the moment. I don’t really know how I feel sexually at present, and my libido has dragged behind for several years. I don’t think i’m strongly attracted to anything. I’ve kind of fallen into an amiable companionship without ever intending to. I suspect in part it’s the fallout of very stressful emotional periods for both of us which turned us away from sex and each other, which have in turn confirmed and complemented each other in very negative ways. I would like to change that. Again, right now I don’t know how, but I know I want to stay with My Lady M and we can find each other again.
To be flippant – all of this is a terrible way to get to sleep. But it was for both of us and hard and painful way to be very honest with each other. And that can only be a good thing – we have a better sense of who we are and how we’re treating each other. But it did make for a bad night’s sleep. The consolation was that we went to sleep together, together in mind and together by our hands. I woke up tired but much happier, and My Lady M seems better too.
I’ve just finished the first period of therapy I’ve had in my life. Its purpose, on referral from my GP was to address sleeping problems. My sleep had gotten so irregular, and so bad that it was affecting many aspects of my life and I finally conceded (with incredible and typical reluctance) to proceed with the wacky notion that talking to someone might help.
And it’s been quite remarkable. Transformative even. I’m not fixed, but it’s been very useful. I was challenged and encouraged to define objectives I wanted to achieve – my objective was to consistently get 7.5 hours sleep per night. Well i’ve pretty much got that.
I also have a morning and evening routine which ensure I do more of things I enjoy. And that’s another thing – this process has reawakened a self-reflective insight which i’d largely shut down. I’ve been helped to figure out what it is I enjoy doing and why. I’ve managed this fairly quickly, perhaps because despite my initial cynicism I do like to talk about myself – I’d just forgotten how. It’s helped me to realise just how closed off from myself I have been, which suggests i’ve been terribly shut off from others too.
The therapy process did get thrown from its original object, sleep, because it is impossible to talk about yourself without admitting all of yourself into the discussion as exhibits and evidence. I knew this was likely to happen and had to battle with myself to bring up the subject of sexual abuse. It was horrible. But in doing so I can move on from this awesomely useful process and refer myself to another organisation who can help me figure more of this abuse crap out. I feel nervous, and worried, but I also feel more powerful than I have in a long time. As my Brain Lady said – anger is a good thing, it means you’re not directing it inwards. I like anger – it’s clear cut blazing black and white with none of the numb grey in between. I can do angry. And I can talk about myself. I didn’t think i’d be able to do that.
Moving forwards: I have to maintain my routine – i’m off the sleeping tablets, i’m more prolific, i’m happier, my skillz are sharper and better. I need to find some system for checking up on myself – here perhaps. I need to refer myself on to a sexual abuse counselling service. It’s going to hurt and be stressful, but I think I can, and I want to do it. I need to repair and improve the relationships I have damaged and continue to damage while I am Slightly Broken. I get to return to my Brain Lady in a few months for a review, and I want to be able to report progress.
Ah Summer, a time of sweating heat and the IQs dropping as the mercury rises. I find it harder to care with the endless greenhouse that is work – we’re now hitting 30 degrees most days. It’s horrible. I’m pretty sure if I bathed in the blood of strangers I’d feel much cooler.
Anyway, this seemed an excellent point to perspire some bile. Hope you like them. You can follow @shankanalia on Twitter too. You can also listen to one lot of shanking verse: Shankanolalia The Sensation of Being Verse Shanked. I’ll pop some more up this weekend.
Ergonomic Fuckstick
Forwards
Backwards
Fuckwit up
Fuckwit down
Random ambling
Circular reasoning
Meandering wimble
What the fuck do you mean
Want
Think?
Twat. All The Snakes Are Gone
Swarming faux-Irish fucktits
Drunken blunder
Obsessed with an unimpressive ale.
Slow to thought,
Quick to bellow,
Big hatted adverts for idiots.
Blemish
Something on your face
In your face
Skull puncture
No time to suture
Hole in the back
To match the front
Gashed
Smashed
Give me back my axe.
These Am The Alphabet
I’m sorry but you don’t make sense
That’s not a word you see.
Yes, you used letters.
Well done.
But they have to be in order
To be a word.
Tool.
Mind Tosser
Something slipping
Tripping
Slip-sliding
In your mind:
Marbles circling the drain
Tossed out by a child’s shake.
Fragile dreamer.
No one knows.
Private Language
You’re a madman
Loose-tongued,
Raving pidgin
Squawks of language;
Private jibber-jabber.
No I don’t know what you mean,
We lack common reference.
Gaargh, wrapped in the octopus’ coils I blundered around the deck as if blinded and lost in a convent with a taste for penguin. The suckery bugger foisted its beaky smooches on me despite me fervent protestations. Aye, “say hello to Polly” indeed. As ye might have gathered, the noble crew of the Grim Bastard was suffering once more under a siege of maddened sea beasties.
The cause were nearly none of our making, or at least the cause of but one of us – so the average fault per crewman was less even than that. However, sticky and suspicious footprints lead to the door and the piggy reek of Spam-Faced Franco.
Now, tis rare that I’ll permit a Spaniard aboard but Franco had been the victim of Captain Aaarsbeard’s grab for power on the island of Por Bombardo. The spamminess of his face was attributed to the burns caused when two ships full of porcine cargo were detonated in the harbour. Gaargh, twas tragic but stank of breakfast marvels. Me tongue moistens at the memory. In misguided charity we took his flame-grilled face on to do shiply things.
Franco had a saucy nature that even the bacon burns’d not diminished. Perhaps the mask with which he clothed the uglier half of his face bolstered his confidence, else it was the inhuman volumes of gin he imbibed before commencing his crude courting. Tis of note that donning a pair of gin-monocles may impair ye judgement. And so it did for Spam-Faced Franco.
We’d moored a good way off from the shallow isle of Webbyre, a habit we’d adopted after the were-bears incident. So me first inkling of Franco’s misbehaviour came with the thunking of a rowboat to larboard. Twas just a portly gentleman staring nine pistols in the eye. He protested that he was the town’s mayor, though he heard none of our threats till he tugged the waxen lodes from his ears. With much indignation he relayed to us a tale of musical malady, from which I pieced together me own truths.
Last night Franco had skipped ship to soil himself with gin. Once tipsy he’d fallen out of a tavern and followed the curious strains that pierced Webbyre’s night air. They led him to an abandoned house on a hill where he discovered a wench fingering a demon-stoked instrument of magic and fear. Clearly the wench had hopes he was there to strum her twattling-strings, but twas the Wurlitzer Organ of Painful Jollity that seized him by his ginny throat. The poor lass he bound and stuffed beneath the instrument.
All night he tormented the town with lascivious lullabies and forced cheer till the locals grew maddened and battered down the door. By then he was far gone and had shrouded himself in a cape and he cackled wildly at the intruders. With neither thought nor wit he hurled himself out of the window. Twas but a single storey drop and most of his bones were undamaged. He swam back to the ship and curled in his bunk. Now all this would have been well save for the poor wench who’d suffered the vile hammer blows of the organ. The music had possessed her and she took up where Franco left off.
I knew none of this save that his bacon-scent had been absent for from our distant anchorage twas merely a faint tinkling of fairground noise. But the mayor was sweatily desperate for our aid, he wept tellin’ how his wife had been driven mad by three hours of “Bugger Me For A Farthing” without respite and the townsfolk were bleeding from their wisdom bags.
We woke Franco with a bucket of crabs and a good booting of the spammy Spaniard for as we drew nearer shore the relentlessly upbeat tones of “Me Other Horn’s A Rhino” did indeed grate upon us. Glad I was that we’d not been nearer for the locals ran frothily mad in the street, capering idiotically and howling the words to the hurdy-gurdy’s haphazard harmonies of humpery. Even the animals were jigging as best as their anatomy would allow.
Well done Franco indeed. I thought him chastened by me boot, but he sprang up the mast in his damned cape and crouched on a spar hissing like an oedipal snake. He was quite crazed. The bewitching music was beginning to tear at our sense-strings: the mayor was loudly humming “A Finger Of Fudge” and me own peg leg tapped a frantic beat. I summoned forth the mast smashers – a fearsome pair of cannonballs chained together with which I hoped to eliminate the source of the festering jingles.
The lads’ aim was precise, despite ’em having to stuff a finger in other’s ear to soften the madness. The chain shot ripped through the house’s ground floor. The next storey crashed down and yet the demon’s fandango played on. Worse, the house began to slip down the hillside, the music comically accompanying the bumps and people-crushing as she picked up speed.
Our rate of fire could not match the sliding chateau and we merely wrecked the town. The house skipped twice off the end of the pier and sank. We cheered, but briefly for with a low giggle Franco tossed himself from the mast into the sea where he swam just like the lunatic he was. On reaching the site of the sinking show tunes he leered at us beneath his mask and dove underwater.
Soon enough what we hoped was the last of the breathable air escaping the wreck popped, releasing their bubbly devil tones of “Frig Me With A Basket Of Chicken”. The sea began to foam in distress. First a school of porpoises humped themselves up the beach to attack the fishermen with their blowholes flaring. Starfish crawled from the harbour, their twitching nobular arms seeking faces to smother. Whelks and lobsters pelted The Grim Bastard. I knew we had to end this and soon, before the whole ocean grew too mental to swim.
The tune was barely identifiable as we sailed in nearer, but as our shadow fell over the house of nightmare notes it became a dirge-like “Two Sheep And A Duck With A Bag Of Keys, That’s What My Lover’s Like For Me”. That was when the octopus struck. Gaargh, I clawed at my mollusc-mask while I strove to loosen the anchor chain. This I accomplished by headbutting the lever through the octopus’ face.
The chain rattled as the anchor plummeted into the deeps. We felt it crunch through the house, and Mick spun the wheel. The wind lifted our sails and the squid clinging to them. Our anchor ripped and hauled the submarine house across the sea floor until the melodious bubbles rose no more and the sea creatures grew confused and limped off the ship, or were popped in a pot.
When we wound in the anchor it brought up a tangle of strings and hammers and a burp of Franco’s gammony musk. A moment later his mask floated up to bob on the waves. Without thinking I shot it till it sank again. Gaargh, I’d miss his breakfast bouquet.
My world spun and shook, the horizon flipping over endlessly. Everything had gone wrong: we’d hit the atmosphere alright, but had immediately detected a huge shape beneath us. The impact was hard. It must have been one of those vast sky animals that graze at the edge of space. No more. We tore through it and began this hideous tumble.
My hands shook as I tried to hold onto the controls, somehow pull us out of the spin. The ship screamed at me to let go and relax back into the cushioning gel that encased the rest of my body. I felt like a bottle half full of water, its contents dashing from one end to the next. Eventually I couldn’t hold on any longer and let go, but not before one more shake of the vessel smashed the controls into my hands sending a juddery agony through them. I let the gel seal my trembling limbs and I closed my eyes.
A painful whine resonated through my skull. The ship was no longer shaking but my head was thick with condensed inertia. I fell forwards into the crust of orange gel that had been protecting me but was now lumped across the buckled floor before me. It hurt. As I struggled to my knees I was aware of a voice whispering to me. I shook my head to clear it; another mistake. Dimly I remembered the voice and its endless imperation from the fall. Now it said only “getout”. I realised why the floor looked strange- it was the ceiling.
I crawled towards the door, over the recessed lamps which threw gouts of nauseating light into my eyes. The whine in my head and the ship’s voice were not helping. I found the exit and stroked it feebly with my less painful hand. It tried to be obliging and creaked, shuddered, cracked and swung open from its ruined casing.
I fell out of the ship, curling to land on something that wasn’t already bruised, to no avail. The sunlight was a faint green. The ground was sticky. We’d come down with the creature wrapped around us and now I was lying on its shattered remains. Its was smeared over everything I could see. I pulled myself to my feet, vomited, sat down again. This was going to take a while.
So – a week out of therapeutic support now. And how am I doing? Pretty well I think. I’ve had quite a lot on, several shows and opportunities for showing off and distraction – those are always good things. I’m a busy-minded person and need to keep myself fairly busy too. The routine I imposed on myself through the sleep disorder therapy is working well. I’m not sure if I’ve explained how it works, so here goes.
My routine:
get up at 7.30 (I know, that ain’t exactly early, but I don’t need to be at work until 9.30 and I am very far from being a morning person)
breakfast till 8.00. This is reading and staring blankly at things time
8-8.30 Writing time. Initially I was alternating half an hour of exercise or half an hour of writing each day, but I found the exercise frustrating and tedious. I need to enjoy something to actually do it.
8.30-9.00 Shower, get my act together and leave the house.
Work takes over for the rest of the day.
Once home I’m trying to focus on activities I know that I enjoy and that I get the sense of satisfaction from.
10.00 Electronic media curfew. TV, laptop, phone, tablet – all off. Sad face.
10-11.00 Time for reading, editing a story, having a whiskey and some peace and quiet. I seem to be incapable of doing nothing at all. I get very irritable and it’s also when negative introspection seems to kick in.
11.30 bed time
And that’s my routine. It’s very simple. Depressingly so, since I needed someone else to help make it happen. My other half, The Lady M is very supportive of it although her evening work cycle doesn’t necessarily fit that well with it. She gets up later than I do, so we’re somewhat out of sync. For her, there’s no point going to bed at 11.30 if she’s not tired. I completely understand that.
In general that reliance on getting up at the same time during the week seems to have improved my sleep and wakefulness habits – even though I don’t always get to bed on time, especially because of some evening social activities just rising at the same hour really helps.
I struggle at weekends, but I don’t think that matters as much, as long as I do impose the evening routine on Sundays. I definitely need to kill the TV away before going to bed though – but then I have to do that without interfering with the plans of my other half. People make life tricky.
The hardest time to maintain it is proving to be time off work. While I could just lie in all day and go to bed at 3 like I usually would, it doesn’t feel like a good idea. So I’ve bumped my schedule back by an hour. I get the feeling of staying up later (which even at my age still feels like a treat!) and a tiny lie in.
So that’s the sleep thing. I feel better and more alert. I’ve been pleasingly prolific in my writing too which makes me feel great.
This is the tale of how I came to meet a man so ill-starred that the very Fates giggle when he steps out of doors – tis the finding of Luckless Larry.
“Holá, my name is Jésus, and you are arrived in time for the festival!” Gaargh, the man’s jolly temperament was a vexment I was ill prepared for. Meself and three of me strongest, yet least entertaining seamen had dragged a treasure chest of mysterious content and punishing weight through ten leagues of sweaty, line-dancing-filled jungle and we were in powerful need of drink and intimate massage.
I was about to make me displeasure known by way of punching but me effort was spared by a man who fell from above, squashing Jésus to a moanin’ pancake. The tumbled lad was under me feet so I booted him till he mastered his own. He was profuse in his apologies – he’d been disturbed mid-tup and tipped through the pane by the disgruntled cuckold. Fearful of further retribution he begged for our aid. Some of the jungle mire must have distorted his view of us for tis a small point of pride that even charity muggers give us a wide berth. But I knew well the sharpness of a cuckold’s horns so me pity-gland was full and I allowed him to take my place in the carriage of our chest.
On we went, meself greatly relieved of the burden. The lad’s name was Lawrence Shamespittle. A handsome lad, he’d no particular trade save wooin’ which he pursued with an enthusiasm that belied his success. For twas his ill fortune to always suffer the return of a lady’s husband at indelicate moments which had left him terribly frustrated in the britches. All of this and much more embarrassing detail he panted out to me from his corner of our trunk. I’d relate to ye further squeamly tales of masculine virtue derailed and declined, but me twin swords of rum and disinterest have mown ‘em from me memory.
The man we sought – known as Tooth-Eyed Gill – dwelled in a cabin far from the maddening crowd of carnivalling halfwits. To discover the chest’s contents we’d have to pass through the mass of lollygagging landlubbers. The path we hewed with our cargo was lined with curses, limping and corpses.
Such gashing progress led us at last to the doorway behind which Tooth-Eyed Gill would make us rich men. It had an evil reek which I attributed to the array of gutted sea-fauna adorning the shack. The breeze produced an array of toots and farts reminiscent of the for’ard hold at night; twas oddly reassuring.
Gill himself greeted us at gunpoint. Tis his way and we took no offence, loudly and very clearly reminding him of our affairs. He was not easily convinced and insisted on shooting poor Lawrence in the shoulder. His cry of pain and the bleeding convinced Gill we were real. Gaargh, had I not mentioned his paranoid delusions? Me apologies. A smuggler and hawker o’ misappropriated items, his skills were in great demand but his hair-trigger tendencies had made him even more enemies than he imagined he had.
Friends once more, he ushered us within and let off a few shots in the direction we’d come, one of which raised a justifyin’ scream. The trunk was laid down, as was Lawrence; bandages applied to the latter and a key to the former.
A warm golden glow lit the hovel. Our faces basked in its precious goodness. But before we could conclude our trade burly and roughened men burst through the rotting walls and laid down a volley of fire. Cannon-Fodder Colin was down and Expendable Alex had expended his last breath. Lawrence took the shot meant for me (bless his misfortune) as I sheltered behind him.
Tooth-Eyed Gill was in his element. His terrifying dentrified eyes snapping with rage he fired, tossed and snatched up fresh pistols from secret spots as he crab-walked about the room. He felled a pair of the interlopers but we were still outnumbered.
I locked eyes with Gill and realised we should leave before he lost all sense of friend and foe. He flung up a floorboard and tossed a flame into the shallow pit filled with a snaking nest of fuses. I dived for the door as our assailants pressed their advantage. Lawrence staggered beside me. Sadly me last crewman Beige Keith was trapped by gunfire. Still, tis no matter – I’ve not a thing to relate about him.
The cabin exploded as me face ground into the ground. Planking, arms, decorative octopi and a fine rain of sand and teeth pattered and thumped about us. Gaargh, as the smoke cleared I saw that the rancid hut was but a scorched pit, comically strewn with the bodies of our enemies.
Lawrence lay beside me, stunned by a flying fist to the face. I let him sleep and stumbled towards the blackened hole. Clearly the madman Gill had booby-trapped his hovel in case of such assault, but of the man himself there was no sign save a warning shot that missed me but thumped into Lawrence’s leg, cruelly waking the lad.
Of the treasure chest we’d drawn through the jungle and whose contents we’d so keenly anticipated there was naught, naught but a deep regret in me soul. I balanced its loss with relief for me life and the trading of three cumbersome crew for one luckless lead-soaker. Gaargh, I’ve had worse days.
With my first experience of cognitive behavioural therapy behind me I do need to think about what I want to do next. My big struggle was to find a way to say something more about myself, to push beyond the outward purpose and need that I had commenced therapy with. It took me a few weeks to make myself say that I had been abused as a teenager, and once I had I experienced that curious relief which confiding in others brings.
My first internal question is – do I believe that sense of relief will persist with the more people I tell? If so, I guess I should just do some painfully honest solo improv show and reveal all in a pleasingly theatrical way. That might be a kind of fun. But it might also be completely humiliating. Which brings round why I don’t tell people about these things – is it shame? I don’t think so. I’m not sure either. I don’t feel that I’m or was the one at fault. I was a young kid – to pretend that I might have been in a position of power where I was the agent of my own choices is clearly false. I was vulnerable, and exploited. Some embarrassment is entirely reasonable, but I suspect it masks a self-hatred, an anger for permitting (or thinking I permitted, again making the naive assumption that I really had any control) someone to use me. We like to believe we’re in control – I certainly do.
As an adult aware of many contexts and the subtext of societal encounters it’s very clear that is mostly an illusion; sometimes it comforts, other times is does not. But it’s really important to grasp the degree of agency we truly have, or at the very least to maintain a healthy scepticism about it. I consider myself to be rational, I am more readily persuaded by a sane argument than a passionate one. It is a challenge to be balanced and rational when bad things happen. It’s also incredibly important. To attribute events to fate or the gods or randomness are all wrong. They either give you a false sense of hope or deceive you about other people and the world around you. There is a reason – it may not be a reason you like.
In my case the reason I was abused is because a sick, fucked up self-interested bastard concluded that his needs were greater than those of a young teen, found a way into the circle of trust within our family, befriended me (a sensitive, thoughtful and quite lonely boy) and ruthlessly exploited me and our family. I did not do anything wrong, this wasn’t my fault. I accepted the friendship of someone who seemed interesting, trusted and interested in my opinion and ideas. What’s not to like?
I’m okay with the idea that I was almost powerless, the fear of discovery and the shame that abuse causes are effective insulators for the perpetrators. You don’t tell because to tell seems worse than it continuing. And that’s a failure of perspective. I was worried about what my parents would think, how it would affect their relationship and how this fucker fit into our family and social events. Because I didn’t grasp the bigger picture of much of a betrayal of my Dad’s trust this was, how predatory this behaviour was. I was just too young and inexperienced in how awful people can be to imagine that this was anything other than my problem. That maybe this is just how friendships work. I can see and understand much of the manipulation now – I get it.
The sharing of interests – simply taking an interest… it works wonders for getting what you want.
Possibly one of the worst things about this kind of abuse of trust is that it involves the use of social tools and norms for these people to get what they want. And that can make life very confusing for the abused. In my case it was the normal social aspects of friendship, physical and emotional intimacy, the sharing of thoughts and ideas. After I’d managed to sever my ties and get at least physical distance I was left in horrible pain. Things had gone further than I’d feared they might, and I had no idea how to react. I didn’t know if what had happened was wrong, was my fault or what should happen next. I went with how it made me feel – horrible. That was enough to know that it should’t ever happen again and that I never wanted to see the guy again.
But I didn’t know how to separate out what had happened to me from what happens in normal friendships. And how could I, at the time? The whole lot was jumbled together. I’m pretty clear on the separation now, I think. I think I know, or am satisfied with my understanding about what behaviours belong in which relationships.
There are still some things I can’t disentangle though – I have an aversion to massage; I don’t like to be touched when I can’t see who’s touching me, otherwise my mind darts off to that dark place and I don’t see or feel the person who is touching me. That’s not great as I do get tense easily, mainly from being over-excitable and involved in activities, and being able to relax into massage would be helpful. I’m getting better though, in the right state of mind I can accept and enjoy a shoulder massage from The Lady M but I do struggle with anything more. The idea of being massaged by a stranger is horrific to me. I’m confused about sexuality too, but I think I’ll consider that more fully another time.
I guess my point, the point I was trying to make to myself is that perspective and the simple passage of the years (plus a decade or so of tears, drinking, drugs, depression and fucked up frustration) has enabled me to better grasp what happened, in a saner, less emotive way. Perspective matters – it’s all about me, but if I don’t understand the context that surrounds me then it’s about a screwed-up incomplete me.
Though I was finally free from many of life’s worries I found the shame of feeling so pierced my high spirits. My heart burdened with the weight of an uncommon liberty; this freedom granted me by death. So distracted was I that much of my day was spent mooching from room to room, idly tugging a volume free from a shelf or inverting some curio that had come from who knows where. As I spent more time in my grandfather’s house I found that a hyperactive nausea began to lie thickly upon my soul.
Late in the evening my fingers quavered with inactivity, for I could not bring myself to settle and achieve any one thing. At length my feet took me to the bedroom at the rear of the house. My grandfather had filled the room with dark wooden furniture which hemmed me into a leathered chair in the corner opposite the bed, worn through years of use. A glass sat on a round table at my right; on a bureau sat a silver tray with a decanter of some amber liquid. I found it to be a whiskey. Maybe it would soothe me.
As the drink passed my lips I began to relax. The window gave me a narrow sliver of the night sky, the moon swollen and part-shrouded in mauve clouds. The silvery light cast curious shadows from the figurines which stood guard at the window sill. The house was full of such artifacts and I should make some inventory of them, eventually. My gaze fell to the floor, on which lay a glorious weaving. Something in the pattern intrigued me, drew me into the weave. My earlier restlessness returned and I could no longer sit still.
The twitching unease roused me from my seat and took me on a nervous curlicue of the intricate carpets. The paths I traced were surely unknown to the skilled carpeteer whose only design was that of ornament, and yet- and yet… Were not those patterns which my spirit sought out through the elocution of mine toes as they plunged admirable into the weft those patterns which had been framed in my very mind? Framed and presented to my waywarding soul in the dark resplendence of the waking dreams into which I had been lured by those awful vilified peerless ancients whose dead breath I felt in my mind’s ears. Those very treads marked the stain they had left in me.
And exposed, I saw them – naked in the furrows ploughed by my toes and heel. In a panic of fluttering wrists and palsied eye I took pen to paper to record the daemonic maze I had limberly scribed. Paper was not enough and I tore from the walls such decor as I had looked upon with former affection and littered the bed with them. High-kneed I over-stepped my footed pattern and mirrored it on the four walls of my quarters.
My work completed I fell back amongst the ruin of treasures, broken jags of frame and torn tapestry my mattress. About me I could truly see the messages the ancients had so crudely couriered to our world through the unwilling postiary of my half-woken mentation. It was only as I traced my psychic horrors on the chamber walls with a faltering thumb that I realised my error.
How stupid, how ignorantly rapt in their eldritch influence I had been. Laid bare about me I saw the nightmare gate I had etched in first ink, then, my bleeding wrists attested in the blood of my veins. And wrought a dire magic.
The runic gateway I’d mindlessly daubed were filling with a ghast light, from that place beyond emotion and life where they dwell. And from where they would soon return.
Gaargh, me beloved ship’d more holes in her than a Marseilles whore. Alas, she were sinking, her beautiful length up-tipping in the water under constant fire from ye Dutch vessels under command o’ Captain Hendrijk Shtroken. They’d tracked us through a mighty storm and on findin’ our sails in a tatty state took pleasure in holing her.
I bade me lads take what life craft we’d left intact for as a good captain I’d be going down with me ship. Well, I’d gotten me peg leg trapped when one of ye cannons made a break for the ocean. Twas not till the water came over me head that the ship, as it sailed down to the sea bed began to loosen her innards and ye cannon tore of me peg, leavin’ me free to drown.
It looked like I was about to see Davy Jones’ locker first hand. To me shame I were not drowning gracefully. With me last remain’ breaths I flailed at the doorway which steadfastly denied me exit and did what little bellowin’ ye can deep underwater. Gaargh, and then it all went a mite dark and Jelly McFish was there chidin’ me for me carelessness.
I was roused by a curious nudging in me spine. I twisted me back in a manner unnatural so surprised was I by the touchin’. I’d feared to find meself dead and cold in some dim lightless realm populated with grey faces and a tedious range o’ board games to play. Instead I was presented with the grinning face of a Sharktikal Wench.
Aye these are the devilish cousins of me beloved merladies, for they’ve the faces of the terrifying oceanic predators with whom their forbears managed to mate without too much fatality. Tis no surprise then that I jerked back as far as me twisted back would let me, till I was face and shoulder to the wall, me legs splayed behind me at an awkward angle.
The razor toothed lady snapped hungrily and drew herself alluringly over me. She was as appealing a prospect as any lady with bladed skin and a grin that made a dolphin clear its blowhole could be. So rough was her sparkling tail that it tore me britches to scraps and sanded down me peg leg. Gaspingly I enquired as to whether I owed the oceanic vision of feminity me life. She replied in the incomprehensible growlin’ tones of her kind, for their speech is obstructed by the ranks o’ spiky dentition.
Either way I felt I’d little option, and in truth though her seduction was sharp I acquired no more injuries than in a minor sea battle. In the bloody aftermath of our conjugation she kindly unscrewed me abraded peg leg and replaced it with the pincer of a massive crab she’d dismembered in her courting ritual. Twas a good fit.
Though her sea cave was a fine pad and I were grateful for me rescue and love scrapes it was in me heart to return to the surface and a more enduring air supply. She kept me breathing by way of cuttlefish which she inflated at the surface and brought back to the cave for squeezing. Twas not the tastiest of lung gas and despite the pleasing frequency with which our intimate courting occurred I had to make my escape.
I explained me predicament to Lady Sharp Gills (as I’d named her), and her eyes grew moist in sympathy. Perhaps, in retrospect it was merely the sea in her eyes but at the time I took it for a pleasing sign. She fetched me one more cuttlefish and showed me how to tie it about me face for a breathing bag. Then she drew me outside of her cave, into the middle of circling ring of her kin. She gave me a gentle push, to which I responded by drawin’ closer to her rather than further. She escalated to a snap with her lady maw, which did drive me on.
The sharktikals swarmed above me, and as I kicked off from the bottom they thrashed around me. Me heart was in me throat, which I firmly hoped was the furthest from its proper place it might travel that day. Gingerly I swam for the surface, its glimmering blue an enticement that drew me on. Twas as I attained that gorgeous surface and me fingertips broke its magical meniscus that the sea shark women attacked.
Their writhing piscine tails slapped the water and with their deadly dentures bared they sought ye good captain’s flesh. I tore off me cuttlefish mask and beat one of the wenches about the head with it till she took it from me and rended it in two. I thought me end was upon me – for in hoping for home I’d scorned the selachian maiden. Twas not me intent, for I wished merely to live in a region that was sometimes dry. In addition her coarse caresses had titillated an old pirate’s tickling glands and I’d a desire to keep me memories of her for some time.
I espied a turtle seekin’ a swift exit from the apparent feeding frenzy (which I kept at bay with deft kicks from me crustaceous prosthetic) and hauled meself aboard its mighty shell. Now tis a sad tale for me turtlin’ pal for with me weight above the sharkly ladies quite harrowed it from below, till I was left afloat on naught but that homely helmet. The turtle appeased the crazed sea folk and I was left to drift on the waves.
Gaargh, though I was held against me will I owed the sharktical lass me life for I’d have drowned without her curious captivity. I’d always remember her for denticle lodged in me arm and the tooth marks on me thighs throb with an unholy heat whenever the rain falls sideways.
Burstin’ with pride as always to contribute to Flash Pulp ! This week the triadic marvels Jrd, Opopanax and Jessica May have bunged me Polar Adventure into the show.
Listen to it now:
Listen to The Polar Adventure (one of me favourite tales) and a host of pulp related marvels – ongoing serials, bothersome affairs, intriguing letters and news of the weird and wonderful.
I’ve been intent on referring myself onto some more specialist therapy for dealing with sexual abuse. It’s a tough thing to talk myself into, and I’ve found it impressively easy to prevaricate about. The prospect of having to tell someone that I want to self-refer is not especially appealing but I did get myself to ring up last week.
That was last Thursday. It took about two hours to get through without just hitting voice mail. That sort of made it worse; I definitely didn’t want to leave a message – I had a weird fear of rambling at this machine… I don’t know. Too public feeling perhaps. I tried another number for the other office within my county only to find that it was strictly for city cases – despite being geographically closer to the city office than the county one. Sigh. I work in the public sector so I do completely understand how the boundaries are drawn up, and why. But as a consumer or service user it was surprisingly disheartening. They were very apologetic and gave me the number I already had again.
I guess that was good practice for saying “hello, I’d like to self-refer” and I got through eventually.
Unfortunately there was no one there to take my referral and the person who answered could only take a message and get them to call me back. Well… It’s been a week and I’ve had no call. So now i’m back in prevaricate mode, combined with a background tension of anticipating a phone call – at any time!
Realistically people are busy, and I’ve no doubt that a third sector organisation like ISAS (Incest and Sex Abuse Survivors) are probably, and depressingly, swamped with work. I still feel somewhat hurt that I haven’t received a return call and am further discouraged from calling them again. But this is just self-defeating nonsense – I can now pretend to justify not calling because they were supposed to ring me. Silly. On the other hand, i’m on a train right now and that’s not a public phone call I want to have.
On the plus side I learned, or at least confirmed something I believed: the person who took my message was male and I felt this awful internal shrinking away – I’m going to want a female counsellor. That’s useful to know.
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The beach was within reach. At last.
She fell upwards through the blinding darkness. Black night erupted around her. Consciousness hit her like a bus, the shock kick-starting her heart. A whirl of stars as her eyes tracked helplessly in spirals. Focus. Got to breathe. Remember how to breathe. Fresh wet lungs regretfully inflate with the fear of dying so soon. A shuddering gasp; barely remembering what to do. With air the sensations become overwhelming – inside matching the outside. Coldness invades her, at odds with the fever burn of raging senses. Focus, draw it in. Hot. No, cold. Colours; the body cycling through them a painful kaleidoscope. The whorls on her fingertips are huge, overlapping with the revolving star-scape above. The spiky wet green below comes overhead and the dark is behind her again.
My fingers were clenched tight and the bony ridge cut into my fingers. I could feel my blood pulsing past the nicks and gashes in the dismembered skeleton I hid behind, as if they were my bones and it was my blood the floor was awash with. I was giddy with the scent of that coppery tang overlaying the reek of old blood, rotting and soaked into the floorboards.
Ah Summer, a time of sweating heat and the IQs dropping as the mercury rises. I find it harder to care with the endless greenhouse that is work – we’re now hitting 30 degrees most days. It’s horrible. I’m pretty sure if I bathed in the blood of strangers I’d feel much cooler.
This is the tale of how I came to meet a man so ill-starred that the very Fates giggle when he steps out of doors – tis the finding of Luckless Larry. 
