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It’s the poo poo that Makes You Unique! 1499 words. The second the tower goes into lockdown I know that no matter what future I might look back from to these moments, they will forever be a scar cut into the tissue of my life’s memories - the point at which everything became different. Before the blare of sirens heralded the slow descent of shutters across every pane of glass on the outside of Void Tower One I hadn’t even realised that I’d lived until now trapped in an endless present, never really facing the stark realities of “before” or “after”. Now that the innocence of that unmarked expanse of time had been ripped from me for good, I find myself straining for the first time under the yoke of history, blinking in excitement at the thrill of the new. I must have known from the second I first saw you that you were marked for head-on collision with the limits of possibility. When we locked eyes as you lifted cans of poo poo from the grocery store on the 1200th floor, and I clocked the security guard who’d have noticed you a second later, something about you made me knock a wine bottle to the floor to distract him. I had never done anything like it. Among the countless identical housing units of Void Tower One, I could already tell that you were a singularity. Your wiry body excreted portents like pheromones. It was hot as Hell. Still, you never let me convince you you were special. I remember the last time I tried to, a few months after we’d run into each other again and become friends. You were drinking poo poo then, too, as you always were. You’d started on the stuff as a joke, amused by the self-seriousness of the gimmick energy drink's name and tagline: “‘It’s the poo poo that makes you unique,'" you'd scoff, mimicking the ads we heard ten times a day on the corporate radio. "There's a hundred of these cans in every mini-mart on every floor. Every gormless Voidboy drinks this and wants to be special - what's unique about that?" By the end I think the poo poo was the only thing keeping you alive. The last time I tried to convince you you were special, we were sitting on top of your bed. I wished we were under the sheets but I didn’t know how to ask. "Do you ever feel like you're living in a hall of mirrors?" you’d asked me, swilling the poo poo at the bottom of your can. It was a familiar refrain. "Only sometimes." Beneath the heaving mess of your bedroom - towers of books, printouts, and cans of poo poo on every surface - you had approached interior decorating with your trademark bitter irony, forever buying duplicates of items intended to look like they were one of a kind and displaying them alongside each other, to put all their deceptions on show. Two identical driftwood owls, three identical bonsai trees under bell jars, four Jackson Pollock knock-offs, their splatters of paint matching with pinpoint precision. "I'm serious,” you said. “When was the last time you looked at something and knew that it was the only one of its kind?" "I'm looking at you, aren't I?" I said, only pretending to be joking. With a bitter laugh, you dropped your empty can to the floor and groped around for a full one. I was starting to realise that your detached irony towards poo poo had since lapsed into an addict’s conviction. Finding two on the floor, you threw one to me. “I think you should drink this,” you said. “I was wrong about this stuff, you know. I think it’s the real deal.” “It’s a head trip?” I asked. “Not exactly. Drink it.” I did. Not exactly, drink it, someone said at the edge of my hearing. “Do you hear them?” you asked. Can you hear them? “Yes,” I said. “In the infinite apartments of Void Tower One, an infinite amount of people take their first sip of poo poo.” In the infinite flats of Void Tower Twelve, infinite people sip poo poo for the first time. “Christ, Frank,” I said. “That’s quite a head trip.” “It’s not a head trip,” you said. That’s no head trip, kid. They’re real. “They’re real, believe me. This stuff connects you to other people going through something similar, somewhere else in the Void Towers. Of course, there’s plenty of them.” You get used to it after a while. “Can I shut them up?” I said. “You’ll get used to it soon enough. But seriously, it fades pretty quickly if you don’t keep topping up.” I laughed and looked at you. “I don’t understand you,” I said as the voices faded away. “You’re obsessed with being something unique, but you surround yourself with reminders that you’re not.” “How else will I know?” you said. “Anyway, this isn’t just about me. It’s about the possibility of anything new happening ever. Don’t you find it repulsive to be trapped in an endless spiral until the heat death of the universe? So repulsive you can’t look away?” “I don’t really think about it,” I said. “Well I do. I feel like a cigarette butt swirling round a drain, round and around, going nowhere, just waiting for the end. Not admitting that would be cowardice.” You fell silent for a minute, then started softly sobbing. I took you in my arms and held you close. After that we drifted apart for a few weeks, unsure what to do about the intimacy we had briefly shared. When we eventually ran into each other, you said you had something to show me in the greenhouse on the top floor. You seemed excited in a way I had never seen. From the top floor you could see more of the city than anywhere else in the tower. On the skyline, the squat masses of Void Towers Two and Three masked their infinite depths. Since there wasn’t anything to buy up there, the floor itself was usually deserted, and the first thing you did when we got there was jam a metal broom between the handles of the doors to the emergency staircase. “Lifts won’t work in a crisis anyway,” you said enigmatically. Under a tarp in a hidden corner of the recreational greenhouse, a writhing knot of flesh and bark twitched in the afternoon sun. “The gently caress is that?” I asked. “Nothing that’s ever existed before,” you grinned, as a proud parent might back when it was never certain what your child would become. “I started feeding poo poo to one of my bonsais just to see what would happen. Nothing did in my room, but whatever’s in it seems to react in the sun. Watch this.” You pulled out a can from somewhere and poured it onto the mass at my feet, which swelled thirstily towards the falling stream. By the time the can was empty, the wriggling thing was almost a foot wider than it had been before. “Christ, Frank,” I said, but you were already pouring out another one. “If that’s what it’s doing to the tree, what has it been doing to you?” “Yeah,” you laughed, “I know. Honestly, I think I can feel the poo poo moving behind my eyes, like it wants to come out.” “Doesn’t that bother you?” I asked. “It’s different, isn’t it?” you said. “When I’m up here, it’s the only place that I can’t hear the echo. This feels new.” Before I could register what you were doing, you’d taken another can of poo poo and raised it to your mouth. I shouted “No!” but it was too late: the poo poo was flowing between your lips. Veins began to pop on your forehead, only they weren’t veins but fingers of probing liquid that moved beneath your skin. Eventually you swallowed, and as you did a congealed mass erupted from your eye sockets in a torrent and fell upwards, fractalizing like a tree bursting from snow. Whether in rigor mortis or compelled by some other method, your body didn’t topple but stood still, forming a steady base for the superstructure still growing from your head, questing upwards towards the sunlight. “It’s beautiful,” you said from beneath it all. I don’t know how you knew it but it was. Seconds later, your highest branches punched through the greenhouse skylight, sending shards of glass raining down on us as Void Tower One’s alarm system wheezed into life. In the second before the iron shutter blocked it out forever, I caught a glimpse of the strange growth from the top floor of Void Tower Two, and the one erupting from Void Tower Three. Each one is more beautiful than the last. The shutter on the skylight has jammed against the thick red trunk that now extends upwards from Frank’s head, leaving a thin blue shaft of sky visible above me. I can hear fists pounding on the blocked doorway to the emergency staircase. As I start climbing upwards I have never felt more alive.
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Apr 5, 2020 23:28
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Apr 6, 2020 22:58
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Apr 23, 2020 16:18
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The Standing Stone 1243 / 1250 words At nearly eighteen and captain of the school chess club, Carl felt too old to be fighting over a girl and too square to be fighting much for anything. He’d half-expected that meeting Maxim after school in the clearing with the standing stone would just be an embarrassing pantomime: they’d make enough clumsy swings for Maxim to get whatever it was out of his system and then sheepishly scuttle home, making up lies about where they’d been as if they’d sneaked out for a covert hook-up. He certainly didn’t expect Maxim to hand him a knife. “Are you serious, dude?” asked Carl. “Yes,” said Maxim, holding his own blade forwards like a dead-eyed fencer. “Fight me.” Before Maxim moved school, Carl had thought that the two of them getting into a physical fight for Heather’s affections was all but inevitable. Always the three nerdiest kids in the class, he and Maxim had shared crushes on her since before they knew what that meant - and although their arguments and confessionals looked in retrospect like embarrassingly macho drama, Carl could remember how raw they’d felt at the time. When Maxim transferred to a private college for Sixth Form, Carl promised for the sake of their friendship not to go after her. A few months later, when he and Maxim had already drifted apart and Heather made it clear she was interested, Carl allowed himself to forget he’d ever said anything. As Carl got to know Heather better, the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ he’d once made seemed increasingly absurd - just arrogant boys making proclamations about something they could never understand. Learning to love the real Heather made him realise that what he and Maxim had felt hadn’t been love at all, least of all love for a complicated human being. Still, the guilt of breaking his promise continued to gnaw at him - enough for him to agree to Maxim’s odd request, made after they’d run into each other for the first time in over a year, to finally “settle this like men” among the rusty cans and scattered needles in the woods behind the radio tower. “Raise your weapon,” boomed a voice from behind him. Carl glanced at the ring of figures just past the treeline, encircling them like gladiatorial spectators. When Maxim had told him to come alone, Carl had assumed that meant both of them, but evidently his old friend hadn’t seen it the same way. From the way their prim scarlet blazers clashed uneasily with their greasy hair and stick-and-poke face tattoos, Carl could see how the students at Maxim’s new school had acquired such an odd reputation. “Come on, Maxim, what is this?” said Carl, testing the weight of the knife that had somehow ended up in his hand. With a handle of spiralling steel and brass, it looked more like a fancy letter opener than a weapon. “If you wanted to LARP with me you could have just asked, man.” Maintaining his duellist’s posture, Maxim began to close the distance between them. “You said you would fight me, Carl. So fight.” Carl backed away. From the centre of the clearing, the carved standing stone watched over them like a mute referee. Carl knew the Victorian fake wasn’t as old as it looked, but still its presence unnerved him. “Not like this, man,” he said. “What’s the difference?” called Maxim. At that moment Carl’s heel caught in a tree root and he stumbled backwards, only to find a firm palm against his back, holding him upright. Below it, he felt the prick of something cold and hard. “This isn’t a choice,” said an unseen voice, then with a rough shove the speaker sent Carl staggering towards Maxim’s outstretched blade. Carl twisted his body to avoid impaling himself in the fall, only for Maxim to flick the knife out with his wrist, ripping his shirt and nicking the skin beneath. “What the gently caress, man?” Carl shouted, dodging back towards the centre of the clearing, but Maxim didn’t give him time to think before lunging forward for another strike. Carl jumped out of reach, raising his own knife to contest the space between them. Is this really all about Heather? he thought. If Maxim had kicked the poo poo out of him, he’d have been hurt, but he’d have sort of understood it. All this was something else. I might die here, he though. The realisation gave him clarity: suddenly he felt the way he did in the cold heat of a chess match, when the knotty concerns of his life became distant and nothing mattered except the board and the logic that ruled it - flat, geometric, bloodless. And this was a chess game, in a sense: if the space between them was the board, their blades were their best pieces, trying to find the position from which they could move in for the final blow. When Maxim played, he’d use his Queen to contest the centre, but only as a feint. The real attack would come from a flank. A second after he thought this, Carl spotted Maxim swinging his left hand in for a hook to the face. Stepping aside, he let Maxim’s momentum send him careening clumsily forward, then dashed him hard between the shoulderblades with the hilt of his weapon. Maxim staggered for a second but spun around, knife before him once more. “You’re holding back,” he said. As Carl caught his breath, the pounding blood in his ears quietened enough for him to notice that the forest was no longer silent, and possibly hadn’t been for some time. The trees around them echoed with an undulating guttural chant in a language he didn’t recognise, that forced its way into his head and made the whole surreal situation feel almost like a dream. What on Earth have you got messed up in, Maxim? Then Maxim lunged forward and Carl snapped back into the moment. Everything else would have to wait: all that mattered was the shape of the space between them, the unruly geometry of their thrusts and feints. Clocking the trajectory of his opponent's swing, Carl deflected the incoming blade with his own then stepped forward, forcing Maxim onto his back foot. Undeterred, Maxim tried to move in again, only this time he slipped, or maybe Carl flicked his wrist out just in time, but either way Carl found that the knife in his hand was lodged up to the hilt in Maxim’s chest, and blood was pouring out of the wound and running across his hand and spilling onto the grass between them. The chanting erupted into a screaming crescendo and then stopped. Maxim slumped to the ground, coming to rest against the standing stone. Carl wondered whether it had always been that close, or if it had somehow moved when he hadn’t been looking to be sure it could soak in the spilt blood. Leaves crashed in the forest for a few seconds as the watchers left their posts, and then everything was silent except for Maxim’s ragged breathing and the call of a wood pigeon. Carl sat down next to his old friend, unhurt but dazed. The abstract state of mind he had inhabited during the fight was ebbing away, replaced by the crushing complexity of reality. “What the gently caress do I do now?” Carl asked his friend, but got no reply. The trees around them looked like the bars of a cage. Ceighk fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 26, 2020 23:08
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In, :: , 1980s
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Jun 16, 2020 21:36
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For a while after the aliens came and started sucking everyone up into their little space ships there was a tremendous panic, but eventually it just became a thing that happened sometimes. 1466 words. Song: 'I Ran' - A Flock of Seagulls. For a while after the aliens came and started sucking everyone up into their little space ships there was a tremendous panic, but eventually it just became a thing that happened sometimes. At the beginning every street had a few people a day suctioned into the air and taken away forever. Then it died down to one or two a week, and then to just a couple every month. Some Jesus people got on television claiming that the rapture had started, but we soon realised that our visitors were aliens of the archetypal variety. They zipped over our motorway junctions and industrial estates in silver space ships shaped like frisbees with domed roofs and tripedal landing gear (though they never landed), and they sucked you up in a big cone of yellow light, just how we had all expected that they would. Some people claimed to have seen them, and those who did said they had big grey heads with bulbous black eyes and little mouths. There was a period when all the world’s governments spent lots of money doing things with fighter jets, bombers, nuclear warheads, scientific and/or diplomatic landing exercises, unusual radio frequencies, anthrax bombs, and so on, but none of it ever made a difference to the aliens and often it just made a mess. If there’s one word I’d like to associate with the aliens it would be “unperturbed”. Sometimes the person who got sucked up was an important figure like the Prime Minister of Canada, but more often it was someone like Jo from the car wash, who was only important to me. Although the Jesus people who believed that this was literally the rapture were no longer taken seriously, having been debated out of the public sphere by an uneasy alliance of popular scientists and photogenic theologians, in many ways they never left, as the secular public remained more or less in agreement with the core tenet of the Jesus people’s beliefs: that being sucked up by an alien never to return in one way or another represented a moral judgement made by the alien, a consequence of how the person sucked up had lived their life prior. Even so, the finer points of this assumption remained up for debate. One group closely aligned with the Jesus people believed that the aliens were here to reward the virtuous for the good things they had done, and that we should live virtuous lives to increase our chances of being sucked up to an extraterrestrial paradise. They were referred to as Pseudo-Rapturists by marketing departments and in the academic literature. The other main group, which was only slightly larger than the first, believed that getting sucked up by an alien was a terrible thing that only happened to terrible people. They were known as the Retributionists. Between them these two groups contained about 65% of the global population. Although the exact balance of demographics varied through different regions due to culture and other specifics, it was to a remarkably small degree. At a large enough scale, everywhere was about the same. I think for a lot of people which camp they landed in depended on who got sucked up first out of the people they knew. When it happened to my step dad, I found quick kinship with the Retributionists and thanked the aliens for taking him away. I remember coming home to my mum and seeing her relieved, as if a heavy weight had been sucked up with him. That night I got on my bike and pedalled out to Jo’s house. We lay on her trampoline with a bottle of gin I had taken from my step dad’s hidden cupboard. Gazing up between the stars to look for space ships, we laughed like I hadn’t in years. She got sucked up a month and a half later and after that I wasn’t so sure. A lot of people, when presented with conflicting information, would try to explain to themselves why it fit in with what they already believed, even if it didn’t feel like it should. My mum only met Jo in the weeks after my step-dad was taken, but they got along well, and that made me happy. But when Jo got sucked up, my mum was quick to start casting aspersions. I don’t believe Jo was a saint but I know she was a better person than me. The reason for this is that I was with Jo when the cone of yellow light shot through a cloud and engulfed her and lifted her a centimetre off the ground. She reached out to me. She was terrified. So was I. I didn’t move to take her hand, and then she was gone. I knew then that if the aliens were taking away bad people I would have just sealed my fate. Among those who were neither Retributionists or (Pseudo-)Rapturists, one of the most striking groups was the Absurdists, who thought this was all a huge cosmic joke. There was an Absurdist group at my college, led by a philosophy lecturer who would smoke rolled cigarettes out the window when other staff members weren’t around. In the numbness that immediately followed Jo’s departure, the detachment of the Absurdists felt like a balm. As time went on, it lost its appeal. I felt like I wanted to be an Absurdist more than I was sincerely able to, so I stopped pretending. They mocked the self-assurance of mainstream thinkers, but in many ways they were no different. I don’t think they understood that everyone was grieving in their own way. If any of them had family who had been sucked up, they would either not discuss it or pretend they didn’t care. For as much as they talked up the cosmic inexplicability of it all, they clearly wanted to feel in on the joke. As I grew detached from the Absurdists at college, I began to realise I was harbouring an agenda of my own. I had failed Jo before and had to make it right. I needed to get an alien to take me to her. There were three groups whose desire to get sucked up by an alien aligned with my own. Most prominently, the Pseudo-Rapturists believed that you would get sucked up if you lived a virtuous life. However I knew from my step dad that this was not the case, and it made me sick to hear his name in their mouths. Next, the Left Behind were people in my position, who had lost loved ones and wanted to be reunited with them. I went to one of their support groups but the atmosphere was maudlin. In the end I fell in with the Fetishists, who didn’t claim to know what was happening but found it hot, and were desperate for the aliens to take them wherever it was people were going. Everyone else hated the Fetishists but I didn’t care. After the Absurdists and the Left Behind, they were a breath of fresh air. There were less and less people now, and many of the cities were deserted. Seven of us would drive through the ghost towns in a mint green campervan, siphoning petrol and looking for yellow lights on the horizon. Whenever we saw something, I would slip off while the others had their fun. They knew I wasn’t along for the same reasons they were but they looked after me all the same. It took around three years for 90% of the world’s population to get sucked up, and in that time a lot of things changed. Since most people believed the aliens were the only real arbitrators of right and wrong, legal systems became obsolete. And since no one felt like they had any agency, narrative fiction went out of fashion, replaced by meditative poems and lyric essays. Everyone’s story ended the same way, but for some it took longer than others. When everyone else from the campervan had been taken I started spending a lot of time with animals. Cows were never abducted - or mutilated, for that matter - and I would lie against them to feel the warmth of other bodies, making sure to leave their gates open so they could find greener pastures once the humans were gone. It became sort of a mission to free as many animals as I could. When I slept among them I would dream of my mum and my step dad but mostly Jo and the look on her face when I didn’t grab her hand. Sometimes I would stand up on a cliffside and scream into the night: “Why haven’t you taken me, aliens, why have you left me to die here alone all by myself?” But I never got a response.
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Jun 21, 2020 12:31
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Thunderdome Week CDXII: ACTIVATE YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND The Surrealists believed that their weird paintings could allow you to access your own unconscious in new and exciting ways. This week we will put that to the test. Post that you're in and I will assign you a surrealist painting. Your job is to meditate on this image, allow it to juice up your brain gunk all good and proper, then spew out the story that was lurking in there under all the cobwebs and whatnot. Stories should be connected to the image in some way - whether thematic, emotional, affective, etc. - but in the spirit of the surreal don't worry about being too literal. For example, if I assign you that Dali painting with the clocks, I'd be a lot more interested in a story that tries to capture the mood that painting creates or grapple with its implications regarding time and space than a story about a man walking along until he finds some hosed up clocks. If you do end up incorporating some visuals from the painting into your story that's fine, just as long as it works - don't force it. In fact your story does not have to be 'surreal' in any direct sense, though it can be if you want. As we all know, regular pictures are worth 1000 words, but these ones are pretty wild so I'll give you 1500. JUDGES 1. Me 2. Sparksbloom 3. Something Else ENTRANTS Kiyoshimon Obliterati Anomalous Blowout Thranguy Almighty Derelict flerp Doctor Idle Nikaer Drekin Crimea Saucy_Rodent Pththya-lyi Djeser Surreptitious Muffin Salgal80 MockingQuantum The Shortest Path hexwren Flesnolk Killer-of-Lawyers Sebmojo Sitting Here Tyranosaurus Sign up by MIDNIGHT FRI 26.06.20 >>>BST (GMT +1)<<< Post story by MIDNIGHT SUN 28.06.20 >>>BST (GMT +1)<<< Ceighk fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Jun 25, 2020 |
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Leonora Carrington - And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur https://www.moma.org/collection/works/393384 Leonora Carrington - The Old Maids https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/leonora-carrington-7615/love-friendship-rivalry-surreal-friends Dorothea Tanning - The Temptation of St Anthony https://www.christies.com/lotfinder...c1-2dad11d70875 Max Ernst - The Nymph Echo https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79316?sov_referrer=artist&artist_id=0&page=2 Pierre Roy - A Naturalist’s Study https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/roy-a-naturalists-study-t01182 Wifredo Lam - Dark Malembo, God of the Crossroads https://www.artsy.net/artwork/wilfredo-lam-dark-malembo-god-of-the-crossroads kiyoshimon posted:Thank you judges for your critiques, I'm in. Rene Magritte - The Therapeutist https://arthive.com/renemagritte/works/333257~The_therapeutist Simply Simon posted:Thank you for the crits, esteemed judges Thanks for the catch - that's fixed. sparksbloom posted:I'll judge! Great!
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Jun 23, 2020 10:19
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Nikaer Drekin posted:It's been way too long since my last entry, so I am IN! Toyen - Objekt-Fantom https://www.wikiart.org/en/toyen/objekt-fantom-1937 Ceighk fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 13:33
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Leonora Carrington - Green Tea https://www.moma.org/collection/works/297568 Max Ernst - Celebes https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ernst-celebes-t01988 Pththya-lyi posted:I should get back on the horse. In. Rene Magritte - The Blank Signature https://www.renemagritte.org/the-blank-signature.jsp#prettyPhoto
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Jun 23, 2020 18:27
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Paul Nash - Equivalents for the Megaliths https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-equivalents-for-the-megaliths-t01251
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Jun 23, 2020 19:29
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Dorothea Tanning - On Time Off Time https://www.moma.org/collection/works/134284
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Jun 23, 2020 23:31
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Paul Nash - Landscape from a Dream https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-landscape-from-a-dream-n05667
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Jun 24, 2020 01:27
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MockingQuantum posted:in Rene Magritte - The Annunciation https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/magritte-the-annunciation-t04367 The Shortest Path posted:It's been a long time, but the reminder that this place may not be here anymore soon made me feel like coming around. Max Ernst - The Entire City https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ernst-the-entire-city-n05289
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Jun 24, 2020 21:27
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hexwren posted:
Joan Miro - Still Life with Old Shoe https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80555 Flesnolk posted:In. Salvador Dali - Metamorphosis of Narcissus https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dali-metamorphosis-of-narcissus-t02343 Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Surreal year anyways, I'm in. Leonora Carrington - The Temptation of St Anthony https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/collection-of-lorenzo-h-zambrano-n09230/lot.17.html
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Jun 25, 2020 01:14
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sebmojo posted:In, for ruin, and a red dawn Diego Rivera - Symbolic Landscape https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/40-6551/ Sitting Here posted:in because i love you all and if i never post here again i'm going to literally cry. hit me with with a flash please. Dorothea Tanning - Some Roses and Their Phantoms https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tanning-some-roses-and-their-phantoms-t07987 Flash: Your story takes place IN SPACE Tyrannosaurus posted:In. Imua. Imua e nā poki‘i a inu i ka wai ‘awa‘awa, ‘a‘ohe hope e ho‘i mai ai. Paul Nash - Habour and Room https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-harbour-and-room-t03206
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Jun 25, 2020 11:45
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Signups are now closed! Also this is your reminder that the deadline for this one is Sunday midnight  GMT + 1 so please plan your last minute sprint accordingly.
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Jun 26, 2020 23:03
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If you've entered and haven't yet submitted, I'm giving another 10 minutes grace for you to post whatever you've got to be judged. After that there will be no mercy!
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Jun 28, 2020 23:05
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SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW CLOSED well done to everyone who got something in, judging shall now commence.
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Jun 28, 2020 23:17
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JUDGEMENT This week was a good showing where even many of the lesser entries had something enjoyable about them. Unfortunately there is one clear exception here with our loser, Salgal80. Honestly, we were on the fence about disqualifying this entirely on the grounds that a) it isn't really a story and b) you didn't seem to care about losing. However given that the other weaker this stories this week weren't all that bad, we felt comfortable letting you eat the loss for their sake. Please try harder next time. Next we are going to dishonourably mention Pththya-lyi's La Belle Dame Sans Merci. This isn't awful, and in another week could probably have scraped through without notice, but it suffers from being very predictable, without much depth or a particularly satisfying payoff. Honourable mentions go to Anomolous Blowout's very sweet Tipping The Scales and Tyrranosaurus's deftly written other people. Finally, the winner is Sebmojo with the deep and delicate Liminalia. Sebmojo, the throne is yours.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:42
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Crits Crimea - you will wait for the rest of your life There is something compellingly strange about this story, but I’m having a hard time thinking through how much of that is because of the way it is written - warts and all - and how much is despite it. If this story was going to succeed, it would do so on merit of its voice and style, and although I get what you’re going for stylistically - you do convincingly convey the Hamlet paradox of narrating from the point of view of a character who is both pretending to be and actually mad - it is unfortunately held back by an overall sloppiness, both in the copyediting, where a few words seem to be omitted or incorrectly substituted, and in the sentence construction, which can be grammatically unwieldy with a few questionable word choices. There were a few moments where I really winced at clunky sentences, with the worst being “After I am force-fed mushy medication I am being jolted and pushed into a great hall”. The tense here is jarringly odd, and like a few other the sentences here it ends up at this unfortunate point of seeming both overwrought and under-considered. I don’t have an issue with relatively ‘purple’ prose per se, or with expecting the reader to do a bit of work to find out what’s ‘really going on’, but when you’re writing like that it only makes it more important that you are precise and economical with the words you choose: both so that the reader can enjoy the prose for its poetry and so that they will trust you that it’s worth the effort to sift through and find hidden nuances. Also, while the Neutral Milk Hotel drop does fit the mood if the reader is familiar with that album, and I sort of liked how much it doesn’t make sense in context, it is a bit egregious to just throw in there, especially in a piece this short. Salgal80 - If Thunderdome was a Surrealist Painting of Words Man I’m not opposed to the idea of doing a metatextual essayistic story about the process of its own creation, but this is absolutely not how to do it. If you’re going to attempt this sort of writing you have to do something to elevate it into a story over a rambling blog post, but sadly you don’t: Italo Calvino this is not. If for some reason you did have to submit a blog post rather than a story it could at least be a good blog post, but for the most part this is pretty boring (the comparisons between Thunderdome and surrealism are trite and unearned), with a sharp turn into ‘yikes’ with the extremely clumsy reference to some very serious accusations in the final paragraph. Mocking Quantum - Monument This is good. It’s a bit slow to get going and there are a few clunky/imprecise word choices early on (e.g. “a brace of features for each of his flock”), but it’s solid: a compelling central mystery with a satisfying payoff. The slow start works to build tension, but I wonder if there would be a way to make the early going a bit more interesting - or perhaps just shorter - without sacrificing what works: possibly by injecting the priest character with a bit more personality, or by raising the stakes somehow early on. Perhaps you could more clearly set up the idea that his congregation are young and fun loving - possibly even to the point of the priest finding them juvenile or annoying - which you can then contrast with the aging / decrepit populace of the town before he found the monument, making his decision seem more understandable as well as just injecting a little colour. But yeah, this is mostly solid, and a very satisfying response to the picture given. Tyrannosaurus - other people This is a good, very tight story about guilt and hell being a prison we construct for ourselves. The twist it takes toward the end, where it goes from being a story about the possibility of redemption to a story about being damned by your own actions, is very smoothly executed and a total sucker punch. On top of that, the dialogue is sharp, the characters are very clearly drawn, and the whole thing moves along at a very nice pace. Personally I wonder if you could drop the last line - I think it’s clear enough what is happening here without having to explain the title - but that’s a minor issue and maybe something worth asking other readers to get a consensus on. Other than Sebmojo’s story being very good, the only thing holding this back from a win is that out of the stories here, it’s among the ones I have the hardest time seeing the prompt image in. Aside from that though it’s a very solid piece. Pththya-lyi - La Belle Dame Sans Merci This story isn’t offensive, but it does have a core issue in the fact that we aren’t given a reason to care about the reversal that takes place when the faerie goes from the hunter to the hunted. We don’t feel the triumph of the maiden because we don’t know anything about her until she’s already won, and we don’t feel sad for the faerie because there’s no depth to her character beyond being an immortal being that drains the life force from mortals every so often, for whatever reason. Like, the faerie brought her punishment on herself, sure, but we don’t even know why she cares so much about abducting people and stealing their youth. Is she terrified of getting older? Of dying? Does she hate humans for some reason, logical or otherwise? She underestimates them, sure, but there’s not really an exploration of what it means for the speaker when she realises that humans are actually more than she thought they were, other than being mad that she’s been locked up for however long. Does it make her sad that the people she’s been murdering show themselves to have agency? Does she feel like she deserved this fate but couldn’t control her need to kill? Sorry for all the rhetorical questions, but something like that would have done wonders in making this story more interesting. If you’re going to write something like this from the POV of the monster, you really need to give the reader a reason to care about them, or else you’re better just sticking with the victim/hunter’s POV from the start. Obliterati - RE: WHAT IS SHE DOING DOWN HERE? Okay that title/opening paragraph combo is killer: extremely funny and sets up a strong hook, compelling voice, and really great tone right off the bat. I am so here for shapeshifting mother-daughter drama deep underwater, and I found some moments extremely funny: “We would talk about this little outburst later, when I had a larynx” is a 10/10 line, as are the daughter’s convincingly teenage written retorts she does with her tentacles. Also the mum accidentally doing echolocation while trying to tell off her daughter is such a smooth transition from one moment to the next. Unfortunately, it all gets a bit confusing later on. For a story this length, I think the stuff about the dad being a supervillain(?) and the kinda drawn-out fight with the diver guy are a bit extraneous. What works here is the clash between the all-to familiar tone of one parent arguing with another about what they’ve been letting their teenage daughter get up to, and the fact their daughter happens to be able to transform into a Lovecraftian squid monster, questing deep into the ocean for some incomprehensible reason. Really, that dynamic is so good that anything that doesn’t directly add to it feels like a distraction: the story would probably work better if you laser-focussed in on that relationship and cut out or severely downplayed the rest. Still, there is the core of something really good here, and I would urge you to keep chipping away at it until you can really bring it out. Nikaer Drekin - I See You There’s a real emotional intensity here and a good amount of plot and character stuff, but unfortunately what’s good about this story does get a bit buried under a certain sloppiness of presentation. The conversation at the start reads a bit like expository dialogue in a TV show, which isn’t necessary in a medium where you can just explain what’s happening and save actual dialogue for more interesting conversations. Similarly, while I like the ambition of the main character’s para-theological vision quest / descent into inner space following a traumatic event, I’m not sure this presentation quite allows the nuggets of real ‘stuff’ hidden away in it the chance to shine with the intensity they should, given the effort it takes to dig them out and the general disjointed experience of reading it. Hexwren - Curative This isn’t bad, but it’s very slight. You set up the premise well, but it doesn’t end up going anywhere unexpected - or really anywhere at all. One good twist at the end would make this worthwhile, but there really isn’t one: her getting shunned because she has weird eyes just feels weak, with the last line being particularly limp. As it is, this almost feels like the first third of a story you ended up not having time to finish. Thranguy - Magnolia Gothic This is solid, though it took a couple of goes before it really clicked with me, and even then I feel like it doesn’t quite break through as much as I’d like it to. There’s a whole lot of ‘stuff’ in here that really works - the guy who trades tree serum for a vodka, the descriptions of the process of transformation, the utterly brutal violence right at the end, but I feel like it doesn’t quite hang together quite as well as it could. I’m not sure what exactly the issue is, but I wonder if this is really the best way to structure it. I get why you’d want to have the scene of his parents’ muder suicide at the end as a climax, but the narrator sort-of-but-not-really repressing the memory feels a bit too easy, and the decision to have that stuff come so late in the story means that the narrator’s decision to return to the family home to become a tree has much less weight to it in the first half of the piece. Also I don’t really understand what the bolded words are doing - if we’re meant to read them together as a hidden little sentence then I’m not sure the message given is quite clear or interesting enough to work. Sebmojo - Liminalia This is a hard piece to crit because it’s just so focussed and assured - a very beautiful, quiet vignette on grief and depression and trying to talk about them without talking about them. I like it enough that I want it to be longer, but it’s also such a perfectly rendered little moment that I’d worry that would ruin it. Anomalous Blowout - Tipping the Scales This is very sweet, with a compelling central theme - a guy’s desire to ‘do good’ where he can, to counteract the sorry state of the world on the smallest scale. The relationship between him and his wife is well rendered as well, and we get a good sense of their different but complementary personalities in a short space of time. The two issues I do have with this story are that a) the first section drags a bit and can probably be trimmed somewhat, and b) the last section very nearly verges on being too sweet - it mostly makes me smile, but there is a cynical part of me that also rolls my eyes in the way you do when you have to spend time with two people who very clearly love each other, and I could imagine other people having those two responses but to the opposite degrees. Sitting Here - Universe is Here The first half of this story is a great set up, and the second half does adequately well at conveying something that is by its nature extremely difficult to convey. Articulating the inexpressible expanse of the great cosmic mind was never going to be easy, and I respect the attempt to do so in a unambiguously positive emotional register - as defined by love rather than horror. Even so, the second half doesn’t quite break through to the extent that it could, either as a meditation on the nature of the universe or as a portrayal of this couple’s relationship - we get some cute moments they share, but not really that clear a sensation of who they are as individuals or their relationship dynamic. Still, this is a very endearing piece over all that ends on a deservedly affirming note. Ceighk fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jun 29, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 19:22
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in hellrule
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Jun 30, 2020 11:10
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Eternity in an Hour Rule: "Your outlaws don't understand the concept of time" 1174 words At the centre of the facility stood a huge glass dome filled with dimly lit water, some 80 metres in diameter. Within it, mostly unmoving, floated a large number of men and women. Some hung together in small groups while others were suspended entirely alone. Other than their breathing apparatus, which covered their heads and connected them by hosepipes to some unseen oxygen supply in the far depths of the tank, they were completely naked. “I like to think of this place as a modern-day convent,” said the man at Langdon’s elbow, a Dr Alan Richards. “Sequestered away from worldly injustices and their personal traumas, these people have bound their lives to a promise the rest of us can scarcely dream of. They live on the border between our world and a great and beautiful unknown.” Langdon turned away. He had come here to kill Richards for providing unlawful surgical procedures, and the unfortunates in his dome for consenting to them. Given how immediately it had become clear that further infiltration of the facility would be unnecessary - Richards made no effort to hide what he had done to these people - he should have done it days ago. Even the most cursory sweep by the local police would find more than enough evidence to justify Langdon’s actions in the courts and, if it became necessary, to the public. So why hadn’t he done it? Instead, Langdon had remained Dr Richards’ guest, allowing himself to be talked through the intricacies of the procedure and its justifications. “This is not an icepick lobotomy,” the Doctor had informed him as he began a live demonstration on a new initiate. “We are not trying to haphazardly replicate some sedentary ideal of the amenable mental patient. No, we know exactly what we are removing from the brain, and to the mind produced from it.” “Her ability to perceive time,” Langdon had said, looking at the middle aged woman sedated in the chair, head firmly clamped in place. “Precisely,” said Dr Richards with a smile. “And she wants me to do it.” *** At first, Langdon found himself delayed by his simple curiosity: the flaw that had long prevented him from climbing ranks at the bureau; the reason he was going on sixty and still an overpaid footsoldier. In contrast to his superiors, Langdon found it hard to believe anyone could spend their life infiltrating subversive organisations without becoming at least somewhat curious about their philosophies. “There are various reasons why people choose to live here,” Richards explained later, over whiskey. “Of course, many of our flock are terminally ill. Without perceiving time, a single moment is infinite, and the rest of your life is but a moment. We offer eternal life and euthanasia at the cost of a headache. But that is too practical a way of looking at it. Even among the terminally ill, there is usually a religious component to their resolve.” Langdon swirled the ice in his glass. “For the lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day,” he said. “Precisely,” said Richards. “Though not everyone here sees it in Christian terms. But if you believe, like I do, that God is out there - outside of Time itself - is it that much of a leap to think that restructuring one’s perception might allow them to escape the limitations of their body, to be closer to Him in Eternity?” Langdon set his glass down and watched the ice continue its steady clockwork motion. “Well,” he said, “does it work?” Richards fixed him with a beady stare. “I should think so, yes.” *** There were no clocks in Dr Richards’ facility, but every moment Langdon spent there he was aware like never before of the ceaseless current of time. He imagined he was sitting on the bed of a dark, slow, river, gazing at the faint light from the surface, far above. He knew he had been in the river all his life, and had felt it keenly since seeing the photograph of the tumor still destined to kill him just two months prior. But not like this. Now he was painfully aware that every second brought him closer to his cover being blown, or the Bureau getting restless and sending in backup, or his own sudden death, which would continue to stalk him regardless of the outcome of this operation. Maybe time would kill him this year, maybe the next. Until now, no one had said they could make it stop. He imagined launching himself up from the dark riverbed of time until the light from above filled his vision, breaking the surface for the first time in his life. *** Dr Richards woke Langdon in the middle of the night and led him through the silent halls of the facility. “So sorry to disturb you,” he said. “But it would be sacrilegious if you left our priory without first hearing the choir. It is the finest joy of our seclusion." Outside the dome, Richards flipped a switch on something like a ham radio. Through it came voices singing without tempo, rhythm or movement: beautiful, ethereal music constructed purely from complex static harmonies with unimaginable depth. Every chord seemed to stretch on forever but each carried the emotion of a whole opera, with exuberant highs and unbearable lows. Unearthly but not inhuman, it was the song of a people whose experience of the world was unimaginably different to Langdon’s own, that strained the very edge of his recognition. Langdon gazed into the tank. He could not clearly see the singers, but once his eyes adjusted to the gloom he thought he could faintly make out a dark mass of bodies in the upper depths, slowly spiralling as one. After some time, the singing faded into static. “I would like you to treat me, Doctor,” Langdon said. Langdon held no illusions about the charity of his actions. It might be weeks or months until the Bureau got impatient and sent someone in after him, but sooner or later it was inevitable. He had given Richards and his flock some time, but little else. If Richards was lucky, he would figure out who Langdon had been working for quickly and drag him out of the tank to kill him himself, then make his escape. It didn’t matter to Langdon. An eternity was an eternity, after all, and it wasn’t like he had anything else to live for. *** After the operation, the final months of Langdon’s life happened all at once, but every moment was infinite. Months later, when Richards lay coughing up blood with a bullet fired by Langdon’s ex-colleague lodged in his lung, he listened to the final song of his pioneers - seemingly unaware that their sanctum was about to be cracked open like an egg, sending them tumbling back into a world they were no longer fit for. As Ricardo lay dying, he heard one voice stand out from the rest: a quavering baritone whose timbre expressed nothing but boundless regret.
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Jul 6, 2020 01:33
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sure, in
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Jul 15, 2020 22:30
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Tough Leather 1367 words. Prompt: Shoes. We had no pictures of Dad in the house, and everyone else seemed to have forgotten him. Even Beth, who cried for days when he died, and Granny, who used to mention every time we saw her how brave he was, now acted as if he had never been here at all. Uncle Eddie still talked about him, but since him and Mum didn’t get on we were rarely there to hear it. Sometimes even I forgot to think about Dad. It was hard to remember him as anything more than the feeling of waiting, punctuated occasionally by surprise trips to Chester Zoo or Alton Towers. I think he wanted to make up for all the time he was away by making the few days we had with him as memorable as possible, but if that was his intention, it didn’t work as planned. Instead, the days themselves overshadowed his presence in them, making it impossible to disentangle him from the whirlwind that came alongside. As I saw it, the difference between me and the rest of the family was that I wanted to remember him. I wanted it constantly, with a dull ache that intermittently solidified into a hard, unbearable, need. When it did, I would wait until Mum was engrossed in the television or some chore and sneak inside her wardrobe, climbing right to the back. There, where his uniform still hung as if he had only just stepped out of it, Mum’s pink and white dresses formed the eaves of a shrine to a forgotten religion, and I its only parishioner. Our secret creed had precious few relics. In Dad’s left boot I kept the only photo of all four of us I could remember seeing: a man in a buzzcut holding a baby, a young woman resting her head on his shoulder, and a little girl - Beth would’ve been five at the time - sitting on her mother’s knee, smiling in that way kids do before they learn how to make it look natural. Now, the scene was bisected by a white cross from being folded and refolded countless times, with each of our faces partitioned off in a separate square. I would place his heavy boots under the dangling legs of his trousers and pretend he was standing over me as the stern but caring masculine presence I knew he would have been if he was alive. The boots embodied his personality as I imagined it: strong and reliable, like tough leather, but soft within; designed to protect, to keep safe. When I knew I wouldn’t be heard, I would talk to them like he lived inside them. Any movement from the house below was a sign I should cut short my communion. It was never worth the telling off for Mum to find me there. I got in much worse trouble than that protecting his memory. It wasn’t that I got angry often, but when Peter Cullen tried to badmouth Dad on the playground I felt myself explode uncontrollably, like I had become engulfed by cold flames. I pushed Peter to the ground and squatted over him, pummelling his chest with my two balled fists. The other boy was too surprised to resist. When Mum drove me home she didn’t speak once. A few weeks later, Uncle Eddie’s car was in the driveway outside Granny’s house when we got there. “You didn’t tell me he was here,” Mum said when the door opened. “Come on, Sue, don’t give me that look,” said Granny. “I’m sure the two of you can get on.” Beth and I stood behind them, unsure what to do. It was always strange to think of Mum as someone else’s child. Mum told us to wait by the car while she and Granny disappeared inside. A short time later, Mum stuck her head round the doorframe to invite us in. Uncle Eddie didn’t join us for lunch, but Granny’s house was scattered with signs of his presence. His dark leather boots - a scuffed replica of the pair in the back of Mum’s closet - were messily abandoned by a chair in her otherwise neat, bright, living room. On the coffee table next to them, her beige desktop computer lay half-disassembled. My life was haunted by the half-presences of men and the things they left behind. After lunch I went out to play in the back garden and there he was, smoking a cigarette behind the tool shed. “Your Granny thinks I’ve given up,” he said, glancing at the burning tip. “You won’t tell her, will you kid?” “I won’t,” I said. It felt very mature to keep a grown up’s secrets. “Good,” he said, giving me a conspiratorial wink. “You’re a good lad. She told me what you did at school, you know. You did good. Even if our Mums don’t agree, it was very brave to stand up for your Daddy like that. This country needs more brave men like you and your Daddy.” I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t felt brave when I knocked Peter down, only angry. But I hadn’t felt scared, either. Maybe that was how it felt to be brave - how Dad and Eddie had felt all the time. Uncle Eddie rolled up his right sleeve. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a smudge of black ink on the inside of his forearm, cigarette gripped in his teeth. “Your Daddy had a tattoo just like that. It was the patch of our company. I’m not ashamed of it, no matter what anyone says. He loved this country and he died protecting it. Don’t you ever forget that.” At that moment, a firm hand grabbed my wrist and Mum pulled me back to the house. Uncle Eddie laughed bitterly and stamped his cigarette butt into the mud. When I was eleven, we searched our own names in IT class. That’s when I found out what Dad did, and how he died. It is impossible for me to explain how it felt to see his name in black and white on that grimy LCD screen, contained within an article that was only more horrifying for how little I understood it. Anything I say now will be a false projection, a narrative that has retroactively accumulated through the thousand times I have relived the moment in my head, or relitigated the arguments that followed. All I remember is that a barrier suddenly appeared between me and the world, as if I was six feet into my skull in every direction. I didn’t speak for the rest of the day. When I got home, I waited until Mum gave up on getting me to tell her what was wrong and had retreated into the glow of the television, then snuck upstairs and back into her wardrobe. It felt like saying goodbye. What I had read, and the images I had seen, was impossible to square with the vision of him I had constructed. I took the photo out of the boot and realised he was smiling less holding me than in the photo I had found online, where he wore a horrible, savage grimace that didn’t reach his eyes. Were these the same boots he wore in that photo, standing on the neck of a distraught woman while his buddies jeered, electrical wires clipped to her exposed skin, blood covering her bruised face? Was it a belt like this he had used to hang himself after the pictures leaked rather than face the consequences? I don’t know how long it was before Mum found me. It felt like an age. She tenderly picked me up from the darkness of the wardrobe and guided me to the bed, like I hadn’t grown at all since the day he had died. She held my head gently as I cried into her neck. For the first time I saw the unmentioned gulf that had been widening between us. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said between sobs. “Why did you just let me keep loving him?” She stroked my hair. “This isn’t how I wanted you to find out,” she said. Warm tears landed on my forehead.
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Jul 20, 2020 01:04
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Saucy_Rodent posted:If you pick a genre that is too vague (like "comedy" or "horror") I will narrow it down for you In that case, in with horror 
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Jul 21, 2020 02:15
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15 ways to process your trauma following an extraterrestrial abduction in your early teens 1554 words 1. Say nothing about it to anyone for your entire adolescence. Let your grades slip in school. Inspire worry or frustration in each of your teachers, seemingly at random. Shut down whenever coaxed to open up or yelled at to stop spacing out. Feel as little as possible. Repress the memories if you can. Avoid even thinking any words that might trigger them. Stay in well lit urban areas. Sabotage your parents’ holiday plans so you don’t have to leave the city. Never stay out after dark. In fact, stop talking to your parents altogether. Refuse to notice their significant glances over the dinner table. Let them ruin their marriage as they each struggle to untangle what happened to their smiling boy. Watch as they blame themselves, each other, the grandparents who took you camping. Let suspicion fester in your family until it rots apart like so much dead wood. 2. When it comes time to piece together a new outward-facing persona, do it slowly. Your chance to be normal has passed. Instead, grow your hair long and stop washing. This will make it easier to befriend the kids who listen to Slipknot behind the bike sheds, huffing solvents for kicks. They are your people now. Embrace it. When younger kids call you a “whiny little emo” on the schoolbus, don’t let it bother you. Instead, wonder whether subcultures preoccupied with the morbid and the extreme are inherently more accomodating, or if you just feel more comfortable around other outsiders. Maybe all your friends are all dealing with something inexpressible that makes it impossible for them to feel at home in everyday society. Resolve never to find out. Try to laugh along with their jokes about freaks who say they were abducted by extraterrestrials. Learn to resent the uncomplicated soul you once were. 3. Be advised that you may find sleeping difficult, and that the fragments you do catch will be wracked by nightmares so horrific you will wish you hadn’t bothered. Instead of sleeping, spend too long on imageboards. Desensitise yourself to cruelty. Try to go until dawn without looking out the window. 4. Feel your eyes glaze over whenever someone talks about their problems. If you can blank out your mind entirely, take it as a blessing. Bask in its emptiness for as long as you can. 5. There is nothing you can do to stop the memories from eventually returning. When they do, lie in bed and run through every moment of what happened to you. Convince yourself that something was implanted in the top of your back - you can feel it move against your spine. Spend the night in the bathroom setting up mirrors and twisting your neck. Get a knife from the kitchen but chicken out before breaking the skin. When your dad comes in at dawn to brush his teeth, blink at him without speaking. Hide the knife in your shirt. Try again the following evening. When you cut out a black metal object the size of a pound coin that glistens like spilt oil under the fluorescent lights, be sure not to take your eyes off it. Certainly do not place it on the edge of the sink while you scrub your blood off the linoleum, or it will have vanished by the time you are done. Resign yourself to never having physical evidence of what was done to you. 6. In contrast to the greater reality you were briefly exposed to, ordinary life will seem as insignificant as a plastic bag: paper-thin, but suffocating nonetheless. You may find yourself drawn to art that fixates on the cracks in the everyday veneer which so many accept as the sum total of existence. Certain artworks seem poised to break through it entirely, and these will make you feel something almost religious, transcendent. Seek them out. Read widely, wildly. Mention Georges Bataille in your English coursework. Surprise everyone by coming top of the class. Get told for the first time that you might have a future, if only you could stop getting into fights with other students. 7. After a long, hard summer, move city to study Literature at University. Be sure to notice the relief in your dad’s eyes when he shakes your hand after helping to unload your belongings. In that moment, you are likely to feel a painful love for him as you realise he always helped as much as you let him. When you have a panic attack after walking in on your housemates watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, refuse to explain why, but know that it is normal to feel flattered by the tenderness with which your new friends broach the subject the next day. 8. The next few weeks are your chance to start hinting towards your history in the vaguest possible terms. When I was thirteen, something very bad happened to me - this is how you have to talk if you want to be taken seriously. It will be hard not to feel guilty about implying your trauma is something more conventional, especially after you share an awkward moment of intimacy with a girl called Anne, who assumes you were both victims of rape. Try not to beat yourself up for lying to her, if only by omission, for stealing her sympathy under false pretenses. Quiet the bitter voice inside you that laughs when she puts her hand on yours and says “it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it”. She will call you again to hang out, so be sure to have some excuses prepared in advance. It’s better that way, for both of you. 9. Just when you thought you were getting better, try getting worse. Have you alienated your housemates by screaming uncontrollably in the middle of the night, then refusing to talk about it? How about not leaving the flat for a month, piling up takeaway boxes in your room until they start to smell, and going entirely mute when you run into someone in the hallway? All these are worth a go. Better still, find yourself an addiction. If you’re old enough to buy alcohol in your local jurisdiction, try drinking every day. You will be surprised how quickly you can get through 70cl of gin. Learn how to use the dark web to order xanax. If Anne won’t stop calling you, drop your phone in the sink. 10. Convince yourself there are more microchips hidden under your skin. Terrify everyone. Make a mess. Wake up in hospital, handcuffed to the bed frame. 11. Find yourself surprised by the persistence of those who care about you, even when you have no idea why they would. It will be harder to ignore everyone’s calls after your dad drives two hours to bring you a replacement phone. When he strokes your head and tells you how he wishes you felt comfortable opening up to him, cry in front of him for the first time in eight years, but say nothing. Wake up at 2AM to see him sleeping in the chair by your bed. Feel unfathomable guilt for the suspicion people gave him following your sudden change demeanour. The psych ward is a dangerous place to admit your particular truth, but it is there that you will realise you have nothing else to lose by not keeping it secret. 12. If you need a reason to smile - which you will - then keep an eye out for the awkwardly respectful interactions between Anne and your dad when she arrives with flowers the following morning, and imagine happier circumstances in which they might meet again, once all this has passed. When he leaves to give the two of you some privacy, take her hand and thank her for coming. Don’t thank her for not giving up on you as soon as it became obvious that your respective traumas were not one and the same, even if that’s how you truly feel. Instead, question how you ever could have believed that she would. Before she leaves, she will reach into her jacket pocket and take out a purple rock on a string. Hear her say: “It’s amethyst. To help you sleep.” Think about telling her what happened to you, but decide to wait. Hold onto the amethyst as you drift off peacefully for the first time in years. 13. After everything you’ve been through, confessing it all to Anne about will be surprisingly easy. “That’s hosed up,” she’ll say, after listening in silence. “I’ve never met someone who’s experienced that, but I did know a girl who got possessed by a demon. Freaky loving poo poo happens all the time, man, people just like to pretend it doesn’t. But I’m really glad you told me. It’ll be okay.” 14. Get drunk on your birthday and tell the rest of your friends. Make sure Anne is there to back you up - everyone knows she’d fight anyone foolish enough to disrespect you in her presence. Let those go who would drift away. Cherish those who remain. 15. Write sad poetry. Exhale freely. Throw rocks at freight trains.
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Jul 27, 2020 01:36
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in & item me
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Jul 28, 2020 12:06
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>°))))彡 777 words It was supposed to have been a holiday, but George was up the ladder again, looking out the window. “Is it still there, whatever it is?” I called up to him. I hadn’t once looked out since we’d got here. At the start I simply hadn’t needed to, and after that breaking the pattern seemed like it would bring bad luck, like smashing two mirrors while standing between them. George said: “It’s not what is out there so much as what isn’t.” He climbed down the ladder and washed his hands. The altar was decorated differently today, though as usual it resembled a place of worship less than a tableau arranged for a still life painting. At the forefront of the display, between a bowl of mouldering peaches and a crisp white flower, lay a rusted fish hook, cruel and barbed. “Who do you suppose sets out these things?” I asked. “We never see anyone coming or going at night, nor at day neither.” Not that I anymore could tell which from which, and if George knew, he wasn’t saying. George picked the hook with grubby hands. “They were just like this that he did it with,” he said. “Not just one, of course, it took more doing than that. But like this all the same.” Then his gaze, rotating me-wards, turned basilisk. “Fancy finding it here then,” I said. At the back of the room, a blue plastic tarpaulin concealed lumps of the kind one might find at a building site. Walking the moors, we’d discovered a cairn. Each stone was covered in moss, and the moss was crawling with bugs. The whole thing was a city for bugs. I felt like I was in an aquarium. Doesn’t every living thing kill something else to survive? Next to the cairn, a shovel, a raincoat. I thought about today’s arrangement and what it symbolised. Had the peaches been acquired new, with the intention of setting them here after a certain stretch of time, in a certain state of decay? That seemed like too much effort, given the necessarily small audience for an ephemeral piece of such narrow appeal. It struck me that perhaps they could be decaying backwards, and that if I took one and sequestered it away from prying eyes, by tomorrow morning it would be firm and ripe. George rotated hook between forefinger and thumb, entranced by the way light caught and didn’t on its mottled surface. I closed my eyes and imagined how the altar would look with the hook at its ordained spot, inasmuch as I remembered. I had long ago given up on George one day appreciating such things. Meanwhile inside, everything rotted, and fast. Lichen stained across glass like ice crystals, and a persistent drip from the belfry had the wooden pews into black sludge. From under the tarpaulin was starting to smell. I hadn’t wanted to go fishing - watching the writhing creatures gasp in air they couldn’t breathe always reminded me too much of myself - but you know how the men are don’t you. Don’t you? I put my hand on George’s shoulder. “What sort of fish did you catch, anyway?” I asked. He tensed. Was that how they talked, the sort of men who went fishing? Was it a ‘sort’ of fish, a ‘type’, a ‘species’, a ‘genus’, a ‘lineage’, or just a fish? “I’m not sure it is a fish, exactly,” George said. I picked up one corner of the tarp and peeked under. “I see what you mean,” I said. George stomped off at that, offended. The walls were closer now so I placed my palm against one and wondered how George’s ladder could lean against such a material without being swallowed by it. When George returned he was hanging from the ceiling, suspended on razor wires by a thousand fish hooks. I turned to place both hands on the mossy wall, which was the consistency of warmish butter, and thought about whether I should leave. George said: “If you leave then how will I get down?” Once George had spent far too long explaining what to do if you got hooked by your own hook so the barb wouldn’t rip when pulled. Now I climbed George’s ladder and got one out of him with a swift tug. It wasn’t too difficult if you didn’t mind the blood. I washed it in the sink and put it back on the altar, where it had been when we first saw it. It seemed a bit of a shame that the way George was hanging meant he couldn’t see the diorama, but, on reflection, not too great a loss.
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Aug 2, 2020 19:07
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| # ¿ Nov 12, 2025 17:28 |
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in & ingredient please
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Aug 11, 2020 11:30
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