'Untitled Fragment #1'

I can't remember exactly when I wrote this, but it was sometime in 2008. I think I was attempting to capture a flavour of the atmosphere/style of Michael Cisco's 'San Venficio Canon.' Whatever it is that I achieved, here it is.

'Untitled Fragment #1'

His breathing is frayed: every breath sawing against the back of his throat. A taste like morning rain and TV static.
He swallows, moves slowly to the window, and begins hammering the boards up, counting down under his breath all the while, always stopping before zero.
As the last thin leak of light is dammed it begins, steady as continental drift.
The years bleed out of him, pooling in the corners like mercury. They coat the walls and ceiling, thicker and thicker until the room appears half its size, then smaller still, and now the man is crouching, still counting, cramped by the congealing mass of memories and time that fills the space like so many discarded fish-heads. His breathing saws heavily now, rusted, and he counts on his hands, a fast flickering of fingers, never looking down at them. Always forward. The space continues to contract until there is silence.

Dry and withered as a dead cactus, after two years have elapsed the man crawls out of the box and into the cold sunlight. It is not as though he has been born nor as if he has died but something between. Entropy stilled and distilled. His breathing is slow and measured, but the air whistles in and out of his lungs.
When he steps, dusty black soles landing heavily, there is a hollow noise like bamboo struck, and he rattles a little, muffled deep within his chest.
He retrieves a pair of chipped and battered black plastic spectacles from his pocket, places them on his head backward and without pausing he plunges back into the sepia city.

The traffic is heavy, customarily so, and the streets throng with cars, lorries, buses, patchwork combinations of them all as big as houses. Some are pulled by horses, some by people, one by a flock of birds, one pushed from behind by a horde of spider monkeys that swarm over it when it halts at an intersection.
The man with eyes in the back of his head stops, seized by recognition, and they flicker, lids rustling gently, dirty yellow banknotes. He mutters a word, a proper noun, and then they or it is forgotten, a metallic tear blinked away to splash on the cobbles.
Briskly, the man continues, pushing past the monkeys who jabber at him accusingly. It comes to his ears like a handful of sand, caught briefly on the breeze and then away.

He comes to the place, a shack, its outer walls covered with the remnants of peeling posters. The door is unlocked, swinging open with barely a nudge. It is as it was, he thinks, a brief flavour of lucidity nudging the blankness. It is the same in every respect. He waits a while for someone to arrive and complete the picture.
Picking up a book, he leafs idly through it then tosses it away, noting that it comes to rest precisely where it had been.
Walking to the window now, he runs his finger along it to trace a line in the dust that remains undisturbed nonetheless.
Once again a brief waft of clarity and he knows suddenly, surely that she is not coming. Under his breath he dredges up a word, and before the droplet has hit the bare floorboards he has begun shaking the petrol can around the room. When he leaves the place is roaring and spitting embers, splashes of petrol stinking on his shoes and ragged trouser-legs.

He bumps shoulders as he walks through the crowd that is forming to gawp at the fire, and he is headed now toward the canal, with its dirty bottle-green brick path and its water a shade darker.
The man with eyes in the back of his head walks down the steps into the canal until he is entirely submerged, swallowed up by its cold gritty stillness. He is not alone down here. Pale pillars of light from the surface illuminate several limply floating figures, weighed down with weights tied to their arms and legs with rotting red ribbons. Their eyes are closed, their faces expressionless...

'The Telephone'

I wrote 'The Telephone' in early 2008.

One of my greatest and most abiding fears is homelessness. That, and forgetting my mobile (cell) phone one day, goes some way toward explaining how this story came about.

The Telephone

You leave your home one bright morning; setting off to work or learn, to meet a friend or just to get groceries. It is not important which and before long you have almost forgotten why you ventured out: you are preoccupied with something else. You haven’t brought your mobile phone.
      Like many you have become so accustomed to having it, and being able to contact and be contacted by others wherever you are that without it you feel a strange loss, like losing a limb or your voice. The nagging discomfort is such that you decide you cannot last for long without it, or rather you don’t need to, because although the telephone belongs to you rather than vice versa it is still a necessity.
      You turn and make your way back home. It seems to take longer than usual, considering the haste with which you are travelling. You feel as if only lightly anchored to the pavement, skimming the surface but seldom touching it.
      After an interminable time you arrive and reach in to your pocket, searching for keys that, as it transpires, are not there. You wonder whether you have left them indoors with the phone or whether you dropped them somewhere but how this has come to pass is not as pressing a matter as how it will be resolved.
      You think about phoning a friend with whom you have left a spare set. A good idea in all but one thing – you don’t have your phone. The reminder of this fact, coupled with your current lack of access to your home, begins to worry you a little, although it can all be dealt with.
    The payphone is not far away. It stands on the corner by a high-rise block, a skeleton, every pane broken and glittering in a ragged corona around it. It stinks of piss.
      You enter and pick up the receiver gingerly, as if a poisonous spider lurks beneath. It must be broken. There is no dial tone, not even the sound of your own breathing on the line, silence.
      It occurs to you as if it is somehow more than that, not an absence of sound but a negation of it, as if you could open your mouth to speak and nothing would come.
      You step outside again, leaving the handset dangling, deciding to visit in person. They will probably be at home.
      After walking all the way there (you find now that you don’t have your travel pass) you knock on the door. You wait there for some time, until a woman arrives, weighed down by supermarket bags.
      She sets them down on the floor beside your friend’s door, takes out a key, and proceeds to unlock it. You guess that she must be a new flatmate, and enquire about your friend.
      She looks at you strangely, furrowing her brow, impatient for the conversation’s end. She has never met or heard of your friend; and claims she has lived here for a year at least. You leave, puzzled and somewhat troubled.
      On your way out, you notice strange graffiti scrawled upon the building, nonsense words and phrases, jagged shapes that appear to depict something different every time you look. The more you try to understand it, the more disconcerted you become.
      Stopping outside a shop, thirsty now, hungry, inexplicably tired, you reach into your pocket for your wallet. You feel its weight there, heavy and comforting. Moving to take it out, it slips through your fingers, and you reach again, touching it with the tips of your fingers, but again your hand leaves empty.
      You turn your pockets inside out. You turn every pocket inside out. People are looking at you.
      For the rest of the day you visit the addresses of friends and family, even mere acquaintances, everyone in the city that you know. The result is always the same. One house visited is derelict, gutted by a fire that appears to have occurred months before even though you remember having dinner there a matter of days ago.
      By now you are panicking. You eventually reach home at nightfall, and attempt to break in. This is seen by a passer-by who calls the police and they arrest you and take you back to the police station.
      After listening for a full hour but somehow, you think, not hearing you at all, they assume you are mentally ill or a harmless drunk and lock you in a cell. You eventually fall asleep, disturbed and in great discomfort, your wrists rubbed red raw by the handcuffs.
      In the morning you are freed, sent away with hot tea in a white foam cup. The city seems to be different, familiar buildings not where they should be, architecture unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
      You walk a little way and stop, a hollow feeling within you, bending to vomit in the cold light. You spew white dust on the pavement; yellowed and crumbly like peeling paint, and crisp packets, cash-point receipts, ring-pulls from soft-drink cans, a small sodden mouse; the kind you see in subway tunnels.
      Wiping your mouth with your sleeve you wonder whether somehow you are purging the city, or whether it is purging you.
      You wander the streets for a few hours, and find that they’ve become a labyrinth, implacable and horrible in its unfamiliarity.
      Every car that passes you seems the same, as if when one disappears in the distance, you turn to see the same one coming toward you from the opposite direction. Looking at the driver, you see that they have no face, no eyes or nose, ears or mouth, instead a blank taut sheet of skin stretched around their head.
      When you approach you realise that what you are seeing is your own reflection in the window.
      You walk until the flow of people on the pavement and cars on the road peters out to nothing. That night you sleep on a piece of cardboard in a shop doorway, part of a chain that you’ve never seen before in your life, whose sign is in a lettering and language that you can’t read.
      Now when you wake the shop is gone, and the cardboard is gone, and so are the buildings, people, the city itself. You stand there and take it all in, wishing that a breeze would disturb the stillness, that some sound would end the silence. There is neither. Around you there is only a vast all encompassing vista, a blue sky empty save for the sun. For some reason you feel unwilling to turn your back to it in case you turn again to find it is no longer there.
      You consider that this makes the whole telephone fiasco seem quite trivial. You check your pockets one last time to make sure that it hasn’t been there all along.

'Does It Matter?'

This piece won first place in the 2008 London Metropolitan University Creative Writing Competition, and also the Vice-Chancellor's Prize. I wrote and submitted it early that year.

Does It Matter?

‘What is your name?’ he asks.
       ‘Scheherazade’.
       He will never know if it is true.
       That night they drive to the desert. The house is left empty, save for the cat. It wanders the streets like a small spectre in black felt, or a breeze blown bin bag. Vague shapes on a dark night can be interpreted as anything.
       For a thousand days it encounters adventure and adversity fit to fill a thousand pages, before returning to find a single lit window in the highest room. The cat becomes a casserole, prepared by the new owner, and its pelt a pair of fine warm socks. They aren’t worn for long however: the wearer chokes on an avocado, chosen on a perverse whim.

An undertaker and an estate agent line their pockets, the world continues to revolve, and then there is someone else, sitting in an armchair.
       He is reading a book. It contains a story that begins with a drive to the desert. He has almost reached the part containing an amusing but fatal misunderstanding but then he rises from his seat, perturbed by a nocturnal creak. He takes out his gun, stuffed into a rip in the chair’s lining. He has already lost one good television set to thieves and doesn’t intend to lose another. As the door swings open he fires once and is blasted in return. The bullet passes through his heart and shatters a goldfish bowl behind him.
       As she, her husband, and, most tragically, the goldfish lie dying, his wife wonders why she assumed her spouse was asleep in his box-room when she embarked on her pistol toting burglar hunt. The man considers that he did not slip enough sedatives into his wife’s tea that evening. The goldfish contemplates that it was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
       Chalk outlines are drawn and erased, stains scrubbed and, after the moon has chased the sun and the sun the moon a few times, normal service is resumed.

A very old man lives in the house now. He enjoys hallucinogens frequently and waters the carpet with a battered tin watering can, having scattered grass-seeds joyfully throughout.
       Eventually, in a moment of grand inspiration, he cracks the floorboards, takes a drill to the foundations, and plants a tree in the sitting room. For him the property’s value has increased immeasurably but to his landlord not even a little. The tree is of an endangered species and cannot legally be removed.
       Bamboozled by the serene bastard, his landlord eventually ceases swearing and, sighing in tearful resignation, writes the house off as a loss. The very old man leaves the next day, his work there done.

The tree grows taller, the seasons fade into one another, and in the desert a man and woman lie on a car bonnet, watching aeroplanes pass overhead.
       ‘What is your name?’ he asks.
       She questions him in return, ‘Does it matter?’
       Trails crisscross the sky. The man and woman look for pictures in the clouds.

The house remains empty, aside from the ghost of the goldfish, sadly lamenting its fate to the tree, which in turn laments the fact that it is fluent in goldfish. Lamentations continue until the tree is dry and leafless and, after the application of an axe, lawnmower, and exorcist, actual human people again occupy the house. Their purchase was swayed by the novelty of a tree trunk coffee table, which proves impractical but a conversation piece nonetheless.
       One of these people professes an aversion to spiders, leading one day to the irritation of the other. ‘Why must I be the one with the rolled up newspaper?’ he cries, ‘Why must I be the one to bear the bad karma of all these tiny murders?’
       She purses her lips and says nothing, secretly believing that she was once a spider and he another man with another rolled up newspaper, hoping that in the next life those roles will be reversed.
       The spider wistfully remembers the days when it was a cat; oh, what days they were. Then a forceful tabloid blow interrupts its reverie and it becomes something else entirely.
       A few months later both human people are mown down by an articulated lorry. In court, the driver claims his vision was obscured by a news sheet blown on to the windshield, and is acquitted of all charges. Somewhere else, the wind picks up dust from the dunes and it dances in a thousand and one swirling patterns.

The house changes hands many more times, once to an exceptionally bad trapeze artist who still insists on ‘following his dream’ despite the fact that it has broken every bone in his body at least twice, another time to a wrathful comedian prone to attacking hecklers, then to a highly successful crack cocaine gang who eventually leave because they feel the neighbourhood has gone downhill.
       Finally it is sold to a nice young scriptwriter who lives there with her partner without incident and dies in contentment at the age of one hundred years, eleven months, and twenty-eight days. While living there she writes her magnum opus, an adaptation of another work, which meets widespread acclaim and smashes many a box-office record. It concerns an ordinary suburban house and the lives of the people that live there over the years.
       Meanwhile wars are fought and lost or won; and humanity loses regardless. Pioneers invent exciting new methods of recreational time wasting. Seconds continue to contribute to minutes, which in turn build hours, days, and years.

The house goes through more owners: a spy who has switched sides so many times that he has forgotten who he works for, a chef obsessed with making the world’s tiniest pizza: invisible to the naked eye.
       The house is converted into a guesthouse, a shop selling fancy-dress costumes, a dental surgery; at one point it becomes the headquarters of a team of con artists who manage to fool even themselves.
       It is torn down to make way for a telecommunications mast, which is in turn torn down by an angry mob armed with pitchforks and flaming torches that claim it is cooking their children’s brains with radiation.
       A house is built in its place, identical in every detail to the one that came before it.

A man and woman drive through the desert in a dusty black convertible. A voice on the radio speaks of a corrupt and tyrannical dictator, of how he is buying big shiny attack helicopters and crowd control flamethrowers from governments that really ought to know better, to the outrage of human rights organisations everywhere. He was once a spider, before that a cat.
       The radio is switched off, and the woman speaks.
       ‘So? Aren’t you going to ask me?’
       The desert stretches on and on in all directions, as if there is nothing else out there and never was.
       The man shrugs. ‘Does it matter?’
       She turns to the road ahead. If it is quiet enough, you can hear anything. If it is dark enough, you can see anything. When she turns again he is gone.

What?

There's an old shoebox under the bed, or at the back of the cupboard, or in the attic, or in the garage - probably getting moldy even though she told you the damp doesn't get in there. You're sure it does.

It's not the one with the memories in it, covered in ragged tape that isn't even sticky anymore because you've taken it off and stuck it on again so many times. It's not the one with the dead batteries, old tobacco tins full of nails, fishing hooks (heaven knows where they came from) and keys to places you left behind a long time ago.

It's the one with stories in it. The stories that haven't quite found their feet yet, so you agreed you'd put them up for a while, help them out til they were sorted. That was months ago. You can't really complain though, they're quiet, not too much hassle. You've long since given up asking them for rent.

That old shoebox.