this is a silly story i started a long time ago. need to fix it up. any ideas?
DISCLAIMER
These documents have been collected and produced by myself. It is the 23rd century, despite the printing date of these articles. The government is lying to you. The question may arise as to how I have been privy to some of this information. Basically, I have more cameras than Big Brother. I have also included documents of relevance by a higher surveillance format that interestingly emerged recently through the internet and over the course of these events and circumstances. Articles that are not noted as replications are dramatisations by myself, reproduced from certain limited technology, and should be considered as such.
1. SETTING THE SCENE FOR TIM SMITH
General Tardy was still reeling from the shock of the days football results when he carelessly but quite deliberately ordered the 37th division to move into Trenchwood.
Trenchwood was a small town that had been offering a small resistance to the order. It was nothing serious. They were unarmed, and due to the conscription some months earlier, largely populated (although their population was not large) by women and children. The only people there strong enough to wield any object capable of causing any possible concern for armour clad, laser guided rifle wielding, professionally trained military soldiers was either born with, or had developed a physical/mental defect of such a debilitating manner that they were most likely to incapacitate themselves before any military involvement was necessitated.
Tardy had briefly considered his other options. He could have simply starved the town, which was already happening of its own accord. However, Tardy was a man of action, and simply could neither stand, nor even sit at his desk and do nothing about it.
Besides, it was an ample occasion for his divisions to experiment with some of their new troop formation patterns, which it affords mentioning, when viewed from above were a spectacular sight to behold full of colours from husky auburns to interventional reds. Earlier in the revolution many divisions had come to close ends in their encounters, even with greater numbers and heavily superior fire power.
Tardy accounted this to a lack of ground experience amongst his troops. Most of the war had been fought from above with air raids and the latest fashion in fire works. The light shows were a great morale booster, if you were lucky enough to have a good seat.
Sitting at his desk, Tardy took up his copy of the Moran and searched for a passage. He needed comforting, the kind only the book could provide. It was easy to find what he needed as this particular page had taken quite a beating over the years and almost fell out of the book into his hands. He sat back and indulged.
“I serve action. He, or she, who I make no claim to know, who made me guides my hand. He (or she) made my hand, my feet, my mind, my will. I must follow my will for it is theirs who knows enough to care.”
With that, he thanked the lord for making him so wonderfully unfaithful to his wife as he dialled the number for his preferred escort agency.
2. GETTING TO TIM SMITH: NOW
Tim had no uniform, no medals, not even a collared shirt. He tried as hard as he could to avoid any reference to a group mentality. He was very aware of what a single individual was capable of, what atrocities could be expressed with a simple gesture, and shuddered at the thought of anyone combining their powers with another. This basic principle of Tim’s was disastrous for his sex life, as there were no bars, cafes, libraries, courtyards or any appropriate location for that matter to perform a mating dance in the small section of the forest bordering Trenchwood that he called his home. Here he had lived for nearly 16 years now, sustaining himself by the gifts of the earth. He preferred to refer to them as gifts these days. Earlier on he had held himself as ‘the butcher’, the sole plunderer of this small and delicate ecosystem. However after years of decapitating berries, trodding on ant’s penthouses and grounding the occasional bird, he could see little impact on his new home and decided that the butcher was not quite appropriate, and he was glad of this. When he had first arrived in the forest he had considered adopting a new name for himself, something more suitable to his new surroundings. His favourites were as follows:
1. Thievy Prune
2. Fowl (like “madonna”, just one word)
3. Proactive Vulture
Another that he wrestled with for some time was Manure. He loved the imagery of it but in the end had to put it down simply for its inseparability from Man, something he was running far away from.
On this day, Tim was running through the forest naked screaming GollyGollyGoodieGod, a game he had invented of the same name. It was a dance he performed when his food reserves were running low and he was preparing to hunt. To Tim this was an important ritual for maintaining the proper health of his environment, his mother, his community, as any creature stupid enough not to have fled the vicinity either for fear or simple revulsion was a member of this society that needed to be culled. Moving to the woods and wiping his arse with his own hands was not something that had affected Tim’s high personal standards in any way. When a day came that there was not a creature left after his game, he thought that he would willingly accept that he was then the resident that needed culling, a fact that he would find terribly hard to dispute immediately after running through the forest scaring away his only sustenance as his naked body tore on passing barbs and thorns.
3. GOD SENDS A GROUP EMAIL
Dear Humans.
Hi, God here. Now usually I don’t do this, take the time to address any person or species directly that is, but the universe is running out of raw elements for me play with and so day to day I’m finding myself with a bit more spare time on my hands. I’ve been catching up on my mail lately, and I see a lot of people have the same questions for me. “why have I forsaken them?”, “why do I punish the innocent and reward the savage?”, “why are we here at all?” and I’d like to take the time to answer these questions as best I can, and I hope this is of some use to those concerned. Firstly in response to the first two questions, I have to explain that I have been very busy lately. Expanding the universe at a constant rate is a very time demanding job and once I’ve made one planet I pretty much have to move on to the next in an instant, in all directions at once. If you’re wondering, the pay isn’t great or even existent (john:16 - you can be your own boss but you can’t write your own money) but I do get a lot of respect which personally I feel is more important. But I digress.
The common misunderstanding underlying these questions is what my job actually is. A lot of people seem to have it in your heads that my job revolves around each of you and your affairs, which it does not. I am a creator, not a caretaker. Therefore I have never forsaken you, don’t be so damn pathetic. That means that when the innocent are punished, that’s not me, that’s you. Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news but it is something that needed to be cleared up. As for the last question “why are we here at all?” I don’t quite have the answer for that one yet. Last time I saw your planet it was just a nice landscape painting with some microscopic amoeba breast-stroking all over the place. You guys are breaking news to me. What I’ll do for you is keep an eye on the situation in my spare time and let you know if I figure anything out.
Yours sincerely, God.
PS. Hope you weren’t expecting a longer response or explanation. I’m really not one for words. I’m more the action type.
4. GETTING BACK TO TIM: THEN
Tim needed a new start. Sure, now he had a degree, an access all areas real life pass, but he didn’t feel too excited about it. Most of his friends had finished up their studies before him, moved straight into a career. They were all half married and seemed half awake but the time he got to them at the end of the week. Before he could bother himself with any thought of a job he had his gap year, so that morning on waking he had set out to the travel agency on Burgundy Road and picked up every brochure covering the planet from banana republic to corporate penitentiary. There were quick co tiki tours that would take him around the safe strips of the better suburbs of badlands, and there were all out intensive prisoner exchange programs to help provide Tim with the life experience he felt he needed to implement his character, to make him the type of person who could get the right girl and keep his balance, having always a clear and distinct set of priorities and principles that guided his every just movement. This is what Tim was looking for, and a million questions answered cleanly and concisely was the only thing that could provide it.
With too many options staring at him, Tim made a quick decision and threw away every gloss printed pamphlet. If he could vaguely make out his own reflection then that state had too much of himself in it and too little of what he needed, which was everything else. Now he had a much smaller collection of cheap xerox’s and minimalist slips that read like message board notices.
A little place called Hades had a family portrait held at gunpoint printed crudely. “…come and stay”. Another was a simple folded sheet of A4 paper printed like a theatre program. It’s Visa required a 3 hour English exam focusing on classic literature and the performing arts. Apparently it was a subdivided sector of SafeLoq’s very successful network of Industrial States, commissioned to fulfil Safeloq’s legal cultural Requirements. A great part of Safeloq’s success was it’s branding, illustrating itself to the public as the ruthless economic power with the face of Bambi, the obvious choice. Tim took out some blue-tak and attached these to the wall above his desk. He didn’t know what he was looking for yet but at least he was getting closer to knowing where he was going.
5. GOD GETS BACK TO US
Dear Humans,
I’ve been listening to some of your Earth Radio lately and I have to say, the ‘Beatles’ rock! Hard days night is my absolute favorite. I always listen to it when I’m working.
Apart from the beatles I really can’t say it’s looking very good for you guys.
That is all.
Yours faithfully, God.
PS Jesus was a good bloke. Not my son. Wish he was. No reproductive organs on this unit whatsoever. I’m infinite. No need.
PPS I just learned that what I just wrote earlier is called a FAQ on your planet. I hope you enjoyed my FAQ, please keep in mind I’m only just learning your language now. Oh and I could do the translations myself, but if you really want to help me help you, could you translate this stuff into all the languages on your planet for me? That would really save me some time. Can I trust you with that? It’s pretty important stuff. You don’t really have a good track record with this kind of thing. I’m giving you a chance here.
I think I should mention I really have taken an interest in you guys, and I’m being sincere about that. I really wish I had more time for you guys. The interesting thing is that the only reason I really took a look was because you are the only other intelligent life to originate in your solar system. Mars the planet died out years ago, but those little critters moved on way before that. They are the most vicious savages inhabiting any of my works, working together to chase their obsession with power over the galaxies. You guys only seem to be killing each other. That really fascinates me. We’ll talk more about this later.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
missing artwork credits
the banner artwork i found a long time ago on the internet. I have lost the name of the artist. If anyone knows, please explain. It is so very grand.
Where We Are Now
by Jesse Morris
The car jerks to a halt and rattles with a warning. It clearly wants nothing to do with moving again. I look to my sister in the passenger seat alone beside me. I may have stopped the car but is this little girl any safer now? Dad said a Volvo was the best decision a family could make and I believed him. The safety of a family car is paramount when your dad’s an alcoholic.
He didn’t know that I knew, or that I even knew what an alcoholic was for that matter. He certainly never volunteered an explanation. Mum had told me once a long time ago, when she was sitting at the end of my bed: the position she took when she had something very difficult to explain to me. I simply thought I was in trouble: it took me a while to understand that it wasn’t me she was angry with. She sat there, perfectly still besides the panting, just staring out through our painting. It was a picture of a window opening to an impossibly perfect day. There were kites, but not those looming doom stunt kites, not the ones that duck and weave and you just watch unable to move waiting for someone to be garroted - they were the nice kind of Kite. The one’s that just sit in the sky, satisfied with a bit of fresh air and they are so happy they simply refuse to budge an inch. There were balloons and children in summer clothes chasing deer and ripe berries growing everywhere. A bit over the top (unrealistic some may say, a lion wouldn’t play with an antelope quite like that) - I know - Mum had painted it for me years ago when I rarely had a room with a window. That night I had a real window in my room, but we’d got in the habit of staring out of this one. The curtain on my actual window was shut, the only thing behind it a brick wall. I’d asked her if we could paint the garden on the wall outside the real window. She said it wasn’t up to her, but she’d ask for me. It turned out we weren’t allowed to.
Skip doesn’t look ready to get out of the car yet so I just wind down the window to ease us into it, tempt her with some fresh country air. She stares straight ahead so that’s what I do too. If she doesn’t want to look in my eyes I’m not going to let her look. That’s the parental psychology I’ve got. Just don’t look back Skip. The floor in the back of the car had partially collapsed when Skip was helping me put grandpa’s old clock in behind the driver’s seat, ready to take it home to the farm. Her little nine-year-old arms had struggled with the weight, but she was tough when compared to the car. The crusted floor caused little hesitation in the clocks descent. Now, outside Granddad’s old place, the tall grass was already creeping into the car through the floor and brushed mockingly against our under-thought itinerary. I wrapped around the drivers seat and look into the back of the car to the summary of our combined worldly goods. Dad’s old clock formed the structural framework of our collection, jammed between the back seat and the drivers, hovering above the gaping chasm and wedged in with a delicate angle against the roof and window seal. Skip said it was a dangerous angle, but I had a word with her and we agreed to call it a delicate angle from now on. I could tell I was going to have to be careful with Skip. It was the semantics of how you described our situation that defined our possibility of salvation. Someone operating on pure reason alone could never understand how I hoped to pull this whole thing off.
Around the clock the car held little else; most of the things thrown in there just to make the collection seem more official, or at least more considered. Some garbage bags were filled with clothes, some pots and books; some things to help get us started. Many were just full of garbage. I do not say ‘garbage’ in a sarky sentimental ‘that old garbage, the memorial of my youth’ kind of way. The bags are quite literally full of household trash. The bags filled out the car and were labeled as skips school things. They were packed carefully, a fragile balance was achieved to ensure that the bags outlines suggested textbooks and clothes and that these outlines remained only suggestions, and did not tear to reveal their actual contents - mostly pizza boxes and newspapers. It all looked so official that even I was foolishly impressed. It was easy to create the illusion: I had a lot of stuff to throw out. My installation art piece was such a success the social worker actually believed that I was prepared for this and we were cleared for take-off.
It’s been three days together on the road. I felt just like dad stopping at motels. Now we are actually here and I flick the keys from the ignition. It could take me awhile before I get any more gas in Dad’s old pride the way it is at the moment. It’s going to be a race against the weeds to see who keeps the car. I take the safety lock off and look up at Skip. She’s still got her seat belt on and she’s not too keen on moving either.
“Is this it?” She’s asking about the new home in front of us, the farm the Dad she never met grew up on, but she’s just staring into her own little lap.
“Come on Kipper.” I’m about to go into a look on the bright side speech like I’m mum as I grab her masters of the universe bag from the back seat and sling it over my shoulder, like I’m dropping her off at school even though she doesn’t want to go, but I know what’s best for her. I can’t say it though. What do I say? Come on Kipper, trust your brother you barely know who’s brought you 1200 kilometres away from everyone and thing you know. Forgive him, he was entertaining on the trip, singing along to the Rolling Stones at the top of his lungs, changing the lyrics slightly in a contextually appropriate-clever-but-still-upbeat-and-down-to-earth kind of way, singing Wild Wild Horsies. At first when it came on the radio as a completely spontaneous hilarious type thing, then again on the other station in a coincidental joking way that subtly makes suggestions to a sense of the whole world just spinning in tiny circles around us in the car. Skip and her older brother, a tiny significant joke that made a nod to our own importance, our own unique moment at the centre of the universe.
Then I sang it again, one more time when I found the tape after I figured out how to open Dads tape chest, when we were at the rest stop 700km down the road, but this time in a I know’s I’m taking this too far kind of way, Skip thinking he’s not gonna sing it again, though I do, just one more hook, but not again, that would be too much. I make my point that she should listen to Jagger. He’s a passionate, wise/foolish man and there’s just not enough of them these days. Well there’s a lot of them actually, but you tend to hear too much of the wrong ones. So even though your brother did all this on the way, even though he can’t really sing and he knows it but still hopes, he’s still taken you 1200 kilometres away from your only friends so he can get away from his own troubles. Trust him, he’s doing this for you. Everyone’s dead Skip, it’s just us. Be a Sport, Skip. We’ve driven past every destination that could have looked exciting and ended up here, in a dustbin. Here I am with my little sister, her only family left, and I just learnt her favourite colour 1200 kilometres ago. What on earth am I doing? Come on Kipper. Be a sport.
Before Skip was born, Dad used to move us around a lot. We’d follow his glossy sales pitch door to door across every motel in the country. The way Dad talked when we got somewhere new he could make a dingy room seem like a place to raise a family. He’d talk about all the things we would do to make the place shine, and he would assure us that we would do them this time and somehow he caught the light from all the right angles in his words, and we believed him time and again. I don’t understand how we kept believing him. Mum was always exhausted. We never stayed in one place long enough to make buying a vacuum cleaner worth the damn. I left as soon as I realised I could. Dad showed me the way, really. It makes you think you can walk away from anything when you watch your father leave your pregnant mother.
“Look how big the garden is Skip, you ain’t never seen a garden so big.” I say to her, and I notice that I’ve slipped into a light Mary Poppins imitation and I feel like a jerk. I need to update Mary Poppins for the twenty-first century, I must give her a new image so she can resonate with the symbols of today, with Skips youth culture, and I can’t even remember how that film ended. She left didn’t she? Everybody leaves. What a depressing film. “That ain’t no garden.” She was right. It was a few Acres of weeds that were lucky to be growing in the soil they had with a weathered old ghost house in the middle looking like it hadn’t been built there, it had just fallen there and felt it too.
This old farm we’re standing in front of was where Dad said we were going to be happy, not that Skip would know. It’s where we were gonna be raised proper, somewhere with friends who knew where we lived and a shop we knew the clerk at, even though he wasn’t wearing a nametag. Jimmie, or Oscar, somebody with a catchy name and attitude worked there. Something you could call out in a quirky voice in the company of strangers, (not that you would be in the company of strangers in a town like this) and when you bought the paper off Jimmy or Oscar or Ziggy, it didn’t matter what was happening, because you and Jimmie (or Oscar or Ziggy) understood, in an unspoken way, everything that could ever happen. Dad and I had put together a few rough characters but had yet to finalize casting on the town we’d call home one day. Sometimes dad would tell me what the guys were up to, these people we had invented: our neighbours - and he’d tell me about how much they were missing us and couldn’t wait till we got there. These were the stories I was told in the back of the car on the way to the next stop, every time. All that was gonna happen when Dad had made his break of course. He was always quite secretive about the nature of the break. He didn’t know what it was but he knew it was coming. It was just the break. Being a kid I simply wouldn’t understand, and again he never volunteered an explanation.
I went back home when Mum got sick. I stayed for the last year. It was hard being around her, spitting out green cancer phlegm into a little dish beside her on the couch. She stayed on that couch so long and I kept trying to convince myself it was the couch that was getting bigger. We went to stay with Aunt May after she died. Well, Skip stayed. I went to the big city and stole anything I could for rent. Started selling speed for a few years, but I was too lonely to stay safe and I got rolled. Now I’m here, pretending I’m dad. And I sound exactly the same as him, acting like this bleak farm is a renovators dream. But I’m not the same. I can’t let that happen. That’s what happens when don’t make something happen. The exact opposite happens to happen. My point is, you can’t escape inevitably making something happen.
“We’re gonna plant all the right pretty things in this garden Skip, they’ll grow fine if we treat em right.” I start telling Skip about all the flowers we gonna plant, and I tell her all the names: Lilly’s, Roses, Buttercups and Lavender, all the ones I know. I tell her I’m sure there are others I can’t remember. There’s gonna be Potatoes too, Strawberries and all those things.
Skip’s being real quiet. I wished she would pipe up and get excited, get involved and help me think of more farm food and make my whole dreamscape sound more convincing. Maybe she’s smart enough to suspect me. She might not be old enough in some people’s books but she’s sure seen enough. She can see through me in a second. She’s just kind enough not to say anything about it.
“You can play in the garden so long an’ never get called in for tea,” I tell her, “cause it’s all out here. We can have Easter hunts for our food every day.” All out here on grandpas deserted old farm in the weeds and dust and I feel just like dad must have when he knew it was a lie.
“We don’t know nothin’ bout gardenin Jobe.” As I’m thinking it she’s saying it, but I can’t afford to think like that. Maybe if I don’t think it, I won’t project it on her, and she won’t have to go and say something to spoil the mood I’m working so hard to create here. “Nothing we ain’t gonna find out soon enough Skip.” Good. Positive. Sounds achievable, without putting too much pressure on her, or me. I’m not setting her up for a fall, am I? You don’t want to strangle them.
Sal, grandad’s survivor, the guy whose idea this all was, whose fault this all is, said on the phone he had the power in the house working for us so we head straight in. I still haven’t met Sal face to face, so you’ll have to wait for a proper description of him. Right now I picture him as Ebenezer Scrooge, but from the very end of a Christmas Carol, the Scrooge who knew love for everyone all too well. As we walked across the overgrown path Skip kept her head down, her little ash fringe swayed in front of her, shielding her eyes from whatever was ahead. She wasn’t very happy with me and wanted me to know it. It suits me for now. I don’t want Skip to see the yard properly just yet and as long as she’s grumpy she’ll keep her head down. I can’t see much in the darkness myself now and there isn’t much motivation to look. I’m trying to convince Skip that I’m excited to be here but it’s proving extremely difficult when I’m keeping my head down to avoid seeing what a shit hole I’ve just imprisoned us in.
In the house Sal’s left us some milk in the fridge and a note to come see him in the morning. He lives just downstream the creek about twenty miles, so follow it along, good walk it is and all. The river flows slowly so you don’t need to rush. I want to drive but there’s no gas. Sal seems real good. He was a friend of grandpa’s since they were boys smoking in the alleyways. He’s getting too old now to run his farm lately, and I think he’s been solitary since he’s outlived everyone, and here I am to save the day, with sidekick in tow. Out of nowhere. Looking to be saved myself.
“How long are we going to be here Joe?” I realize that I have no idea how to answer her. I’m talking to myself. We’re going to grow our own food Skip. We are going to learn how to do it. We have a place to do it now. Come on Kipper. Be a Sport.
The car jerks to a halt and rattles with a warning. It clearly wants nothing to do with moving again. I look to my sister in the passenger seat alone beside me. I may have stopped the car but is this little girl any safer now? Dad said a Volvo was the best decision a family could make and I believed him. The safety of a family car is paramount when your dad’s an alcoholic.
He didn’t know that I knew, or that I even knew what an alcoholic was for that matter. He certainly never volunteered an explanation. Mum had told me once a long time ago, when she was sitting at the end of my bed: the position she took when she had something very difficult to explain to me. I simply thought I was in trouble: it took me a while to understand that it wasn’t me she was angry with. She sat there, perfectly still besides the panting, just staring out through our painting. It was a picture of a window opening to an impossibly perfect day. There were kites, but not those looming doom stunt kites, not the ones that duck and weave and you just watch unable to move waiting for someone to be garroted - they were the nice kind of Kite. The one’s that just sit in the sky, satisfied with a bit of fresh air and they are so happy they simply refuse to budge an inch. There were balloons and children in summer clothes chasing deer and ripe berries growing everywhere. A bit over the top (unrealistic some may say, a lion wouldn’t play with an antelope quite like that) - I know - Mum had painted it for me years ago when I rarely had a room with a window. That night I had a real window in my room, but we’d got in the habit of staring out of this one. The curtain on my actual window was shut, the only thing behind it a brick wall. I’d asked her if we could paint the garden on the wall outside the real window. She said it wasn’t up to her, but she’d ask for me. It turned out we weren’t allowed to.
Skip doesn’t look ready to get out of the car yet so I just wind down the window to ease us into it, tempt her with some fresh country air. She stares straight ahead so that’s what I do too. If she doesn’t want to look in my eyes I’m not going to let her look. That’s the parental psychology I’ve got. Just don’t look back Skip. The floor in the back of the car had partially collapsed when Skip was helping me put grandpa’s old clock in behind the driver’s seat, ready to take it home to the farm. Her little nine-year-old arms had struggled with the weight, but she was tough when compared to the car. The crusted floor caused little hesitation in the clocks descent. Now, outside Granddad’s old place, the tall grass was already creeping into the car through the floor and brushed mockingly against our under-thought itinerary. I wrapped around the drivers seat and look into the back of the car to the summary of our combined worldly goods. Dad’s old clock formed the structural framework of our collection, jammed between the back seat and the drivers, hovering above the gaping chasm and wedged in with a delicate angle against the roof and window seal. Skip said it was a dangerous angle, but I had a word with her and we agreed to call it a delicate angle from now on. I could tell I was going to have to be careful with Skip. It was the semantics of how you described our situation that defined our possibility of salvation. Someone operating on pure reason alone could never understand how I hoped to pull this whole thing off.
Around the clock the car held little else; most of the things thrown in there just to make the collection seem more official, or at least more considered. Some garbage bags were filled with clothes, some pots and books; some things to help get us started. Many were just full of garbage. I do not say ‘garbage’ in a sarky sentimental ‘that old garbage, the memorial of my youth’ kind of way. The bags are quite literally full of household trash. The bags filled out the car and were labeled as skips school things. They were packed carefully, a fragile balance was achieved to ensure that the bags outlines suggested textbooks and clothes and that these outlines remained only suggestions, and did not tear to reveal their actual contents - mostly pizza boxes and newspapers. It all looked so official that even I was foolishly impressed. It was easy to create the illusion: I had a lot of stuff to throw out. My installation art piece was such a success the social worker actually believed that I was prepared for this and we were cleared for take-off.
It’s been three days together on the road. I felt just like dad stopping at motels. Now we are actually here and I flick the keys from the ignition. It could take me awhile before I get any more gas in Dad’s old pride the way it is at the moment. It’s going to be a race against the weeds to see who keeps the car. I take the safety lock off and look up at Skip. She’s still got her seat belt on and she’s not too keen on moving either.
“Is this it?” She’s asking about the new home in front of us, the farm the Dad she never met grew up on, but she’s just staring into her own little lap.
“Come on Kipper.” I’m about to go into a look on the bright side speech like I’m mum as I grab her masters of the universe bag from the back seat and sling it over my shoulder, like I’m dropping her off at school even though she doesn’t want to go, but I know what’s best for her. I can’t say it though. What do I say? Come on Kipper, trust your brother you barely know who’s brought you 1200 kilometres away from everyone and thing you know. Forgive him, he was entertaining on the trip, singing along to the Rolling Stones at the top of his lungs, changing the lyrics slightly in a contextually appropriate-clever-but-still-upbeat-and-down-to-earth kind of way, singing Wild Wild Horsies. At first when it came on the radio as a completely spontaneous hilarious type thing, then again on the other station in a coincidental joking way that subtly makes suggestions to a sense of the whole world just spinning in tiny circles around us in the car. Skip and her older brother, a tiny significant joke that made a nod to our own importance, our own unique moment at the centre of the universe.
Then I sang it again, one more time when I found the tape after I figured out how to open Dads tape chest, when we were at the rest stop 700km down the road, but this time in a I know’s I’m taking this too far kind of way, Skip thinking he’s not gonna sing it again, though I do, just one more hook, but not again, that would be too much. I make my point that she should listen to Jagger. He’s a passionate, wise/foolish man and there’s just not enough of them these days. Well there’s a lot of them actually, but you tend to hear too much of the wrong ones. So even though your brother did all this on the way, even though he can’t really sing and he knows it but still hopes, he’s still taken you 1200 kilometres away from your only friends so he can get away from his own troubles. Trust him, he’s doing this for you. Everyone’s dead Skip, it’s just us. Be a Sport, Skip. We’ve driven past every destination that could have looked exciting and ended up here, in a dustbin. Here I am with my little sister, her only family left, and I just learnt her favourite colour 1200 kilometres ago. What on earth am I doing? Come on Kipper. Be a sport.
Before Skip was born, Dad used to move us around a lot. We’d follow his glossy sales pitch door to door across every motel in the country. The way Dad talked when we got somewhere new he could make a dingy room seem like a place to raise a family. He’d talk about all the things we would do to make the place shine, and he would assure us that we would do them this time and somehow he caught the light from all the right angles in his words, and we believed him time and again. I don’t understand how we kept believing him. Mum was always exhausted. We never stayed in one place long enough to make buying a vacuum cleaner worth the damn. I left as soon as I realised I could. Dad showed me the way, really. It makes you think you can walk away from anything when you watch your father leave your pregnant mother.
“Look how big the garden is Skip, you ain’t never seen a garden so big.” I say to her, and I notice that I’ve slipped into a light Mary Poppins imitation and I feel like a jerk. I need to update Mary Poppins for the twenty-first century, I must give her a new image so she can resonate with the symbols of today, with Skips youth culture, and I can’t even remember how that film ended. She left didn’t she? Everybody leaves. What a depressing film. “That ain’t no garden.” She was right. It was a few Acres of weeds that were lucky to be growing in the soil they had with a weathered old ghost house in the middle looking like it hadn’t been built there, it had just fallen there and felt it too.
This old farm we’re standing in front of was where Dad said we were going to be happy, not that Skip would know. It’s where we were gonna be raised proper, somewhere with friends who knew where we lived and a shop we knew the clerk at, even though he wasn’t wearing a nametag. Jimmie, or Oscar, somebody with a catchy name and attitude worked there. Something you could call out in a quirky voice in the company of strangers, (not that you would be in the company of strangers in a town like this) and when you bought the paper off Jimmy or Oscar or Ziggy, it didn’t matter what was happening, because you and Jimmie (or Oscar or Ziggy) understood, in an unspoken way, everything that could ever happen. Dad and I had put together a few rough characters but had yet to finalize casting on the town we’d call home one day. Sometimes dad would tell me what the guys were up to, these people we had invented: our neighbours - and he’d tell me about how much they were missing us and couldn’t wait till we got there. These were the stories I was told in the back of the car on the way to the next stop, every time. All that was gonna happen when Dad had made his break of course. He was always quite secretive about the nature of the break. He didn’t know what it was but he knew it was coming. It was just the break. Being a kid I simply wouldn’t understand, and again he never volunteered an explanation.
I went back home when Mum got sick. I stayed for the last year. It was hard being around her, spitting out green cancer phlegm into a little dish beside her on the couch. She stayed on that couch so long and I kept trying to convince myself it was the couch that was getting bigger. We went to stay with Aunt May after she died. Well, Skip stayed. I went to the big city and stole anything I could for rent. Started selling speed for a few years, but I was too lonely to stay safe and I got rolled. Now I’m here, pretending I’m dad. And I sound exactly the same as him, acting like this bleak farm is a renovators dream. But I’m not the same. I can’t let that happen. That’s what happens when don’t make something happen. The exact opposite happens to happen. My point is, you can’t escape inevitably making something happen.
“We’re gonna plant all the right pretty things in this garden Skip, they’ll grow fine if we treat em right.” I start telling Skip about all the flowers we gonna plant, and I tell her all the names: Lilly’s, Roses, Buttercups and Lavender, all the ones I know. I tell her I’m sure there are others I can’t remember. There’s gonna be Potatoes too, Strawberries and all those things.
Skip’s being real quiet. I wished she would pipe up and get excited, get involved and help me think of more farm food and make my whole dreamscape sound more convincing. Maybe she’s smart enough to suspect me. She might not be old enough in some people’s books but she’s sure seen enough. She can see through me in a second. She’s just kind enough not to say anything about it.
“You can play in the garden so long an’ never get called in for tea,” I tell her, “cause it’s all out here. We can have Easter hunts for our food every day.” All out here on grandpas deserted old farm in the weeds and dust and I feel just like dad must have when he knew it was a lie.
“We don’t know nothin’ bout gardenin Jobe.” As I’m thinking it she’s saying it, but I can’t afford to think like that. Maybe if I don’t think it, I won’t project it on her, and she won’t have to go and say something to spoil the mood I’m working so hard to create here. “Nothing we ain’t gonna find out soon enough Skip.” Good. Positive. Sounds achievable, without putting too much pressure on her, or me. I’m not setting her up for a fall, am I? You don’t want to strangle them.
Sal, grandad’s survivor, the guy whose idea this all was, whose fault this all is, said on the phone he had the power in the house working for us so we head straight in. I still haven’t met Sal face to face, so you’ll have to wait for a proper description of him. Right now I picture him as Ebenezer Scrooge, but from the very end of a Christmas Carol, the Scrooge who knew love for everyone all too well. As we walked across the overgrown path Skip kept her head down, her little ash fringe swayed in front of her, shielding her eyes from whatever was ahead. She wasn’t very happy with me and wanted me to know it. It suits me for now. I don’t want Skip to see the yard properly just yet and as long as she’s grumpy she’ll keep her head down. I can’t see much in the darkness myself now and there isn’t much motivation to look. I’m trying to convince Skip that I’m excited to be here but it’s proving extremely difficult when I’m keeping my head down to avoid seeing what a shit hole I’ve just imprisoned us in.
In the house Sal’s left us some milk in the fridge and a note to come see him in the morning. He lives just downstream the creek about twenty miles, so follow it along, good walk it is and all. The river flows slowly so you don’t need to rush. I want to drive but there’s no gas. Sal seems real good. He was a friend of grandpa’s since they were boys smoking in the alleyways. He’s getting too old now to run his farm lately, and I think he’s been solitary since he’s outlived everyone, and here I am to save the day, with sidekick in tow. Out of nowhere. Looking to be saved myself.
“How long are we going to be here Joe?” I realize that I have no idea how to answer her. I’m talking to myself. We’re going to grow our own food Skip. We are going to learn how to do it. We have a place to do it now. Come on Kipper. Be a Sport.
RITUAL
By Jesse Morris
Jim sat and stared as Freddy raised the record. He rotated the vinyl slowly and adjusted it to catch the low light that crept through the dusty stained glass of the old church hall. Jim had been running a small records table at the back of the Sunday Market for over three years, only occasionally missing a week now and then due to illness, exhaustion, depression, or some assortment of the three. On his first visit Freddy’s incessant curiosity was promising, his enamoured assessment of each record obviously destined to end in a sale. Boy, could he do with a sale. Beyond the few dollars he might make he had to pay to keep what he couldn’t sell in a storage locker. He had slept at the locker on occasion. Never was he homeless however, quite the opposite. Jim stayed in the lock up to take brief moments away from the house he had always lived in.
Freddy slipped to the next stall after leaving fingerprints all over every record again. On that first visit years ago Freddy had been a disappointment. When he appeared the next week and repeated the process exactly, then he became agitating. Finally after three years his eccentric ritual was just another oddity that Jim had grown accustomed to. Besides, it gave him something to talk about with the other stallholders; the ones who liked to talk at least. He had to endure him; after all, everybody else did. These days Jim even drew some comfort from his familiarity, though the two had never really exchanged more than glances and proximity. Freddy would come and meditate over each of his records individually in his usual trance. His eyes tracked along each groove in order like a needle. If he knew the record, he would chant along under his breath while his eyes swam in circles through the grooves. The ones he didn’t know he would simply hold to the light, uttering static noises as if in a private conversation with the vinyl. It seemed to do most of the talking, and Freddy was very attentive. The noises shifted with his gaze, and each revealed a new revolution on his peculiar face. Approval, hesitation, concern, sometimes he let out a snicker as if he were in secret communion with an old friend. It actually made sense: some of these records he’d looked at week after week for years since Jim had set up his stall to help ease the tension of his child support. It was these little moments that Jim tried the most to ignore. He had learned not to laugh at Freddy, not to his face. It still took a lot of concentration. Jim had managed to make some sense of him over the years, enough that he didn’t really need to bother wondering about him anymore. Freddy came each week and made his quiet appraisals then turned to Jim as if considering another inspection. This was the time Jim found it hardest not to laugh. Looking up to avoid his stare, Jim rested his eyes on a scar in the church ceiling. From this distance - though his eyes often failed him from much closer - he could make out a series of violent scratches. Perhaps an amateur builder had aborted his attempt to install a skylight in the churches roof, to bring the light of god a little closer to the long darkened halls. Perhaps halfway through he realised that desecrating his church would not necessarily achieve his aim. Entertaining as many possibilities as he could, even the ridiculous, Jim saw an angel clawing at the roof till their fingers scraped to bone. This helped waste enough time so that on returning his gaze Freddy had already taken the few steps to the next table and continued his process like a slow melodious dance. Round and around he went until the floor was empty of goods to assess. Then he would leave. Jim had never once seen him purchase a single thing.
As Jim performed his closing ritual, Julie unplugged her plastic light up Jesus and set the kettle to boil. A cup of tea is simply necessary after a long day at the stall. It was a mantra she often recited when there was someone available nearby to hear her. She packed her mother’s heirlooms into a small box. The priceless items she was never to touch in her mother’s lifetime were not met with any interest at her stall for another week. Perhaps if she had a higher shelf to place them on, just out of sight and reach, maybe then somebody would be interested like she had as a young girl. The crockery pieces had lost their mysticism when she had grown tall enough to see them without a struggle.
“Strange day today.” Julie said, though she didn’t really believe it. “Nobody so much as looked at my teapot, except Freddy of course. Who wouldn’t want a teapot?” Jim stacked the records into his trolley silently. She was hoping he’d noticed something actually out of the ordinary. “I’m just glad we’ve got Fred to keep the dust off on days like today” she said, a little louder and patting his hand to guarantee his attention. Jim turned to her with a smile and finally spoke. “He keeps the dust off everything but my sales log.” Julie chuckled, though she could no longer remember the number of times Jim had made the joke before. She supposed she couldn’t have counted that high, having never truly applied herself to mathematics. Still, she liked the way Jim tried to stay positive, even with such a dismal face. “I saw his hands as he was leaving today. They’re just filthy by the end of his round. I always imagine him going home to his mother to get in trouble for those hands of his. I know he’s a grown man but I can’t imagine him living with anyone but his mother. I don’t know why.” Julie trailed off as she realised what she meant to be funny was rather depressing. She felt it was a bad habit to assume too much about a stranger but she never stopped herself until she was already done. Jim sipped his tea and thanked Julie for it. He told her he didn’t like to think about Freddy at home, it was already too much trying to understand him as a customer, though that title seemed entirely inaccurate.
They laughed again later as they walked out into the car park together, Jim pushing his records and her crockery in the old trolley he had found abandoned by the market years ago. He may have been embarrassed by it but he still insisted it had served him well. It wasn’t far to their street and soon they were home. Apart from a few light cosmetic upgrades and the new commission flats, the walk was identical to how Jim remembered it when walking home from service when he was a boy. He knew it all so well that he could barely recognise a thing anymore. The only small change: he wasn’t nearly as afraid of the old ghost house nowadays. Why should he worry about that old place anymore? Developers had purchased the property years ago, but nothing had come of their plans. ‘The Crypt’, they used to call it. What are the kids calling it today? Are the kids still afraid of death, or in all their capacities are they somehow excited about that as well? Do they even take an active interest?
As he passed Julie her box of crockery from his trolley, he thought of how much he’d like Julie to move in and help him take care of himself. He could cook and maybe she could help distract him from his records. The collection now took up the greater part of his parent’s old home, and he was much more talented at acquiring doubles than selling them at the stall. He had heard about selling on the Internet, but he would have to sell enough records to buy a computer first. Then he would probably have to pay for classes to learn how to use it. Maybe Julie had one, maybe she could teach him the way. He understood the simple reason why he loved her: she would never return the favour; satisfied as she was with the brief and comforting ritual they shared each Sunday evening. She was a mirage he had contrived to perpetually glisten on a horizon he claimed otherwise deserted. Jim knew it was all illusion; he had seen before the interminable power of his own imagination. Forever his heart only beat for that moment coming before birth, that slipping second when things can only be known as possibility. It was this sentiment that cursed his days: that a dream that wills itself into existence is simply suicidal. Knowing this Julie was a light he could only let flicker in and out of shadow. Turning full spotlights onto a world of dreams could only hope to wake him from the security found only in his ephemeral fantasies, like little magic tricks too sustaining to dismiss as entirely entertainment. His mistake may have been thinking it could only be illusion, or somehow he took its illusive nature to mean more than it needed to. Preferring not to indulge himself in her flesh in case it caused the ghostly oasis to disappear forever, Jim wished her well, insisted she ‘take care’ then continued to his own home four houses down. He liked girls and Julie was a pleasant example, but after all these years he still didn’t believe he could be good to one. His marriage had not been a gracious experience.
Once in France Jim had seen a Rembrandt painting apparently depicting a divine companionship. Something about the painting wasn’t right. Not the dimensions or the perspective or anything like that, they were pretty tidy Jim thought. Even the frame was nice, not too garish. It was the look of malice in the Husbands eye. He would have liked to turn away from the painting at that point, but photographs were not allowed and it seemed he should at least look while he was there. Taking his time, trying to articulate his own response to himself, all Jim could say was the painting stirred in him some kind of perverse jealousy. Nobody ever has divorce portraits. It’s the good moments you struggle constantly to immortalize yourself: the bad ones do it for themselves. He shook his head as if it would somehow help him finish his internal sentence. Whenever he caught himself wondering why about things he was already sure that he knew, he stopped himself to keep from getting nowhere. He laid his head down on the bed his parents once shared and sighed heavily. The room still smelled of his father’s shoe polish.
He looked above the closed fireplace, to the mantel lined with his family’s portraits. The frames stood as his parents had arranged them. The exception: a picture of young Jason, taken when he was three. He would be about twelve now. Jim thought he might try to write to him someday soon. Was he old enough yet? It seemed too difficult to say in anyway he could understand himself. He certainly didn’t trust himself to find the words that could express it all in a coherent fashion to a young boy who learned to ride a bike with another man. Bicycle by Queen started on the stereo and Jim got up to change the track. He never learned to ride a bike, and with the grocery store at the end of the street his mother had never pressured him to learn. The only demands she ever made were to be home for dinner, which he did and he grew up big. He took the stall at the back of the Church hall to avoid the embarrassment of customers struggling to pass him in the small space available between tables.
Jim was hungry. He could cook a meal, but he wouldn’t. This evening his body could eat off of itself. He would sit, he would sit on the bed, he would not lie down and he would not eat. All his body needed for months would be water. More than his mind at least he had built his body to a state of self-sufficiency. He would keep this up until he could find the words to say to Julie, or maybe just a new joke for next week, or choreograph some small gesture towards kissing her, or maybe Julie isn’t it at all, as nice as she is. Maybe next week he would ask if she’d like coffee instead of tea. He could seduce her: that was a definite possibility. The culinary feats he could conjure were nothing if not effective. Being a talented cook not only helped Jim recover from the crippled sexuality of his obesity, it somehow managed to excuse it. Who could blame him if he was a little overweight when he had such sumptuous banquets at his fingertips? Yet he could not bring himself to invite her. He could only see depravity in that path. He would not convince her to sleep with him, and Julie to him would be allowed perfection, if not existence.
Four doors down, Julie put a frozen lasagne into the oven and sat watching her favourite soap on DVD. She mouthed along with her friends as they read their lines and soon enough she had a hot dinner in her belly and it was late enough to go to bed. The show was never really popular and had only survived for so long due to low production costs and the networks contractual commitment to producing local content. Her best friend in high school Sam had a small role working at the general store in the show, and since it’s cancellation had found steady work as an extra in most locally produced dramas and sitcoms. Sam’s features were vague and friendly, lacking illumination or any characteristic that could bring her out of a crowd. She fitted the extra work well: a perfect backdrop for the stars to shine on. Though she wasn’t necessarily happy with the work it was easy, regular enough and saved her the surprise of some new disappointment. Julie shivered whenever Sam invited her to mill about with her in the larger crowd scenes. Though the thought of being so close to the stars excited her, her exhilaration wavered whenever she pictured the camera casting her directly against those lucky souls deemed professionally beautiful, leading her always to politely decline the offer.
Jim realised he couldn’t just sit there. It’s so important: you have to do something. You have to take a stand. Countless films, songs and acquaintances had reiterated the point until he barely knew what they meant by it anymore, all he knew was he supposed he agreed. He picked himself up from the bed and considered his posture carefully in the mirror. It felt awkward just standing in the middle of his bedroom half naked. He didn’t feel at all like a man taking a stand. He was a guy who had stood up, nothing more. The window stepped out from across the room. That could be a good place to start: People make important declarations out of windows. The Japanese Emperor only ever meets his people through a window, once each year in January. At least, Jim had been to Tokyo once in January and seen the emperor on a balcony through bulletproof glass, and it was a very special event he was led to believe. Thousands of his people would cram into the palace square waving thousands of miniature paper flags at his grace through the glass until they tore from their plastic pipes. Then they would shuffle out, as the next load would storm in to tear up their flags in turn. This filled the Emperor’s whole day, waving through glass to hysteric masses. The Japanese were normally such reserved people. It was unsettling. He understood why the Emperor only put on social events so occasionally.
Looking out of his own window there was no audience gathered. It was just Freddy, playing in Jim’s own garden, spellbound by a spider and it’s stupid fucking web. Jim quickly tore at the Venetians. He fell against the wall as the blinds finally collapsed. His right hand called violently to him: in his rush the stubborn old cord had cut deep into the centre of his palm. Spread on the floor he could not move. He sat stunned and surveyed the little he could see of himself carefully. His naked belly was a mountain that dominated the landscape. In the distance his bare, stubby feet poked out from his fraying white cotton pants. He felt the growth of his beard, running his fingers through the greasy long hairs and realized his blasphemy: he must have looked like a fat pitiful floundering on the floor. His cheap digital watch was the only thing breaking the illusion of Christ’s inadequate second coming. Surprised by the rich color of his own blood, he stared rapt as the narrow lines drew across his arm tracing their way to his elbow. Slowly collecting together they gathered confidence and prepared for their closing dive. Remembering himself, he cupped his free hand underneath his elbow, picked himself up and raced down the hallway. His legs struggled to pass each other, his awkward body pathetically attempting to thread through the house like a camel at full speed. His muscles creaked with the floor beneath him as he stumbled between the fading lounges. Jim could not remember running with such unified vision in his entire life. The bathroom came into view, it’s fluorescent light radiating into the room. His elbow extended to the heavens in one last plea for salvation as he made his final leap. He made it. Had he made it? Jim collapsed to his knees. He moved his cupped hand and watched the blood painstakingly depart from his bloated elbow. The droplet finally formed drifted in brief reprieve for one last moment before exploding brilliant color onto the cold bathroom tiles. Just. The splatter lay only two inches safe of the clean carpet. Allowing himself to gasp for breath, Jim slowly began to raise the body he had put into shock. Ignoring the bloodied, desperate figure in the mirror he let the cold water run over his hands. He found it best to concentrate on the throbbing. Freddy would leave his garden; eventually, Jim knew that. Then he could open the blinds and try again. The wound continued to weep and he reluctantly opened the cupboard to look for some antiseptic. There would be nothing there - he hadn’t bought any after all - but he felt obliged to look in case he called Julie and she asked if he had. After all: he would feel pretty silly if he hadn’t.
Jim sat and stared as Freddy raised the record. He rotated the vinyl slowly and adjusted it to catch the low light that crept through the dusty stained glass of the old church hall. Jim had been running a small records table at the back of the Sunday Market for over three years, only occasionally missing a week now and then due to illness, exhaustion, depression, or some assortment of the three. On his first visit Freddy’s incessant curiosity was promising, his enamoured assessment of each record obviously destined to end in a sale. Boy, could he do with a sale. Beyond the few dollars he might make he had to pay to keep what he couldn’t sell in a storage locker. He had slept at the locker on occasion. Never was he homeless however, quite the opposite. Jim stayed in the lock up to take brief moments away from the house he had always lived in.
Freddy slipped to the next stall after leaving fingerprints all over every record again. On that first visit years ago Freddy had been a disappointment. When he appeared the next week and repeated the process exactly, then he became agitating. Finally after three years his eccentric ritual was just another oddity that Jim had grown accustomed to. Besides, it gave him something to talk about with the other stallholders; the ones who liked to talk at least. He had to endure him; after all, everybody else did. These days Jim even drew some comfort from his familiarity, though the two had never really exchanged more than glances and proximity. Freddy would come and meditate over each of his records individually in his usual trance. His eyes tracked along each groove in order like a needle. If he knew the record, he would chant along under his breath while his eyes swam in circles through the grooves. The ones he didn’t know he would simply hold to the light, uttering static noises as if in a private conversation with the vinyl. It seemed to do most of the talking, and Freddy was very attentive. The noises shifted with his gaze, and each revealed a new revolution on his peculiar face. Approval, hesitation, concern, sometimes he let out a snicker as if he were in secret communion with an old friend. It actually made sense: some of these records he’d looked at week after week for years since Jim had set up his stall to help ease the tension of his child support. It was these little moments that Jim tried the most to ignore. He had learned not to laugh at Freddy, not to his face. It still took a lot of concentration. Jim had managed to make some sense of him over the years, enough that he didn’t really need to bother wondering about him anymore. Freddy came each week and made his quiet appraisals then turned to Jim as if considering another inspection. This was the time Jim found it hardest not to laugh. Looking up to avoid his stare, Jim rested his eyes on a scar in the church ceiling. From this distance - though his eyes often failed him from much closer - he could make out a series of violent scratches. Perhaps an amateur builder had aborted his attempt to install a skylight in the churches roof, to bring the light of god a little closer to the long darkened halls. Perhaps halfway through he realised that desecrating his church would not necessarily achieve his aim. Entertaining as many possibilities as he could, even the ridiculous, Jim saw an angel clawing at the roof till their fingers scraped to bone. This helped waste enough time so that on returning his gaze Freddy had already taken the few steps to the next table and continued his process like a slow melodious dance. Round and around he went until the floor was empty of goods to assess. Then he would leave. Jim had never once seen him purchase a single thing.
As Jim performed his closing ritual, Julie unplugged her plastic light up Jesus and set the kettle to boil. A cup of tea is simply necessary after a long day at the stall. It was a mantra she often recited when there was someone available nearby to hear her. She packed her mother’s heirlooms into a small box. The priceless items she was never to touch in her mother’s lifetime were not met with any interest at her stall for another week. Perhaps if she had a higher shelf to place them on, just out of sight and reach, maybe then somebody would be interested like she had as a young girl. The crockery pieces had lost their mysticism when she had grown tall enough to see them without a struggle.
“Strange day today.” Julie said, though she didn’t really believe it. “Nobody so much as looked at my teapot, except Freddy of course. Who wouldn’t want a teapot?” Jim stacked the records into his trolley silently. She was hoping he’d noticed something actually out of the ordinary. “I’m just glad we’ve got Fred to keep the dust off on days like today” she said, a little louder and patting his hand to guarantee his attention. Jim turned to her with a smile and finally spoke. “He keeps the dust off everything but my sales log.” Julie chuckled, though she could no longer remember the number of times Jim had made the joke before. She supposed she couldn’t have counted that high, having never truly applied herself to mathematics. Still, she liked the way Jim tried to stay positive, even with such a dismal face. “I saw his hands as he was leaving today. They’re just filthy by the end of his round. I always imagine him going home to his mother to get in trouble for those hands of his. I know he’s a grown man but I can’t imagine him living with anyone but his mother. I don’t know why.” Julie trailed off as she realised what she meant to be funny was rather depressing. She felt it was a bad habit to assume too much about a stranger but she never stopped herself until she was already done. Jim sipped his tea and thanked Julie for it. He told her he didn’t like to think about Freddy at home, it was already too much trying to understand him as a customer, though that title seemed entirely inaccurate.
They laughed again later as they walked out into the car park together, Jim pushing his records and her crockery in the old trolley he had found abandoned by the market years ago. He may have been embarrassed by it but he still insisted it had served him well. It wasn’t far to their street and soon they were home. Apart from a few light cosmetic upgrades and the new commission flats, the walk was identical to how Jim remembered it when walking home from service when he was a boy. He knew it all so well that he could barely recognise a thing anymore. The only small change: he wasn’t nearly as afraid of the old ghost house nowadays. Why should he worry about that old place anymore? Developers had purchased the property years ago, but nothing had come of their plans. ‘The Crypt’, they used to call it. What are the kids calling it today? Are the kids still afraid of death, or in all their capacities are they somehow excited about that as well? Do they even take an active interest?
As he passed Julie her box of crockery from his trolley, he thought of how much he’d like Julie to move in and help him take care of himself. He could cook and maybe she could help distract him from his records. The collection now took up the greater part of his parent’s old home, and he was much more talented at acquiring doubles than selling them at the stall. He had heard about selling on the Internet, but he would have to sell enough records to buy a computer first. Then he would probably have to pay for classes to learn how to use it. Maybe Julie had one, maybe she could teach him the way. He understood the simple reason why he loved her: she would never return the favour; satisfied as she was with the brief and comforting ritual they shared each Sunday evening. She was a mirage he had contrived to perpetually glisten on a horizon he claimed otherwise deserted. Jim knew it was all illusion; he had seen before the interminable power of his own imagination. Forever his heart only beat for that moment coming before birth, that slipping second when things can only be known as possibility. It was this sentiment that cursed his days: that a dream that wills itself into existence is simply suicidal. Knowing this Julie was a light he could only let flicker in and out of shadow. Turning full spotlights onto a world of dreams could only hope to wake him from the security found only in his ephemeral fantasies, like little magic tricks too sustaining to dismiss as entirely entertainment. His mistake may have been thinking it could only be illusion, or somehow he took its illusive nature to mean more than it needed to. Preferring not to indulge himself in her flesh in case it caused the ghostly oasis to disappear forever, Jim wished her well, insisted she ‘take care’ then continued to his own home four houses down. He liked girls and Julie was a pleasant example, but after all these years he still didn’t believe he could be good to one. His marriage had not been a gracious experience.
Once in France Jim had seen a Rembrandt painting apparently depicting a divine companionship. Something about the painting wasn’t right. Not the dimensions or the perspective or anything like that, they were pretty tidy Jim thought. Even the frame was nice, not too garish. It was the look of malice in the Husbands eye. He would have liked to turn away from the painting at that point, but photographs were not allowed and it seemed he should at least look while he was there. Taking his time, trying to articulate his own response to himself, all Jim could say was the painting stirred in him some kind of perverse jealousy. Nobody ever has divorce portraits. It’s the good moments you struggle constantly to immortalize yourself: the bad ones do it for themselves. He shook his head as if it would somehow help him finish his internal sentence. Whenever he caught himself wondering why about things he was already sure that he knew, he stopped himself to keep from getting nowhere. He laid his head down on the bed his parents once shared and sighed heavily. The room still smelled of his father’s shoe polish.
He looked above the closed fireplace, to the mantel lined with his family’s portraits. The frames stood as his parents had arranged them. The exception: a picture of young Jason, taken when he was three. He would be about twelve now. Jim thought he might try to write to him someday soon. Was he old enough yet? It seemed too difficult to say in anyway he could understand himself. He certainly didn’t trust himself to find the words that could express it all in a coherent fashion to a young boy who learned to ride a bike with another man. Bicycle by Queen started on the stereo and Jim got up to change the track. He never learned to ride a bike, and with the grocery store at the end of the street his mother had never pressured him to learn. The only demands she ever made were to be home for dinner, which he did and he grew up big. He took the stall at the back of the Church hall to avoid the embarrassment of customers struggling to pass him in the small space available between tables.
Jim was hungry. He could cook a meal, but he wouldn’t. This evening his body could eat off of itself. He would sit, he would sit on the bed, he would not lie down and he would not eat. All his body needed for months would be water. More than his mind at least he had built his body to a state of self-sufficiency. He would keep this up until he could find the words to say to Julie, or maybe just a new joke for next week, or choreograph some small gesture towards kissing her, or maybe Julie isn’t it at all, as nice as she is. Maybe next week he would ask if she’d like coffee instead of tea. He could seduce her: that was a definite possibility. The culinary feats he could conjure were nothing if not effective. Being a talented cook not only helped Jim recover from the crippled sexuality of his obesity, it somehow managed to excuse it. Who could blame him if he was a little overweight when he had such sumptuous banquets at his fingertips? Yet he could not bring himself to invite her. He could only see depravity in that path. He would not convince her to sleep with him, and Julie to him would be allowed perfection, if not existence.
Four doors down, Julie put a frozen lasagne into the oven and sat watching her favourite soap on DVD. She mouthed along with her friends as they read their lines and soon enough she had a hot dinner in her belly and it was late enough to go to bed. The show was never really popular and had only survived for so long due to low production costs and the networks contractual commitment to producing local content. Her best friend in high school Sam had a small role working at the general store in the show, and since it’s cancellation had found steady work as an extra in most locally produced dramas and sitcoms. Sam’s features were vague and friendly, lacking illumination or any characteristic that could bring her out of a crowd. She fitted the extra work well: a perfect backdrop for the stars to shine on. Though she wasn’t necessarily happy with the work it was easy, regular enough and saved her the surprise of some new disappointment. Julie shivered whenever Sam invited her to mill about with her in the larger crowd scenes. Though the thought of being so close to the stars excited her, her exhilaration wavered whenever she pictured the camera casting her directly against those lucky souls deemed professionally beautiful, leading her always to politely decline the offer.
Jim realised he couldn’t just sit there. It’s so important: you have to do something. You have to take a stand. Countless films, songs and acquaintances had reiterated the point until he barely knew what they meant by it anymore, all he knew was he supposed he agreed. He picked himself up from the bed and considered his posture carefully in the mirror. It felt awkward just standing in the middle of his bedroom half naked. He didn’t feel at all like a man taking a stand. He was a guy who had stood up, nothing more. The window stepped out from across the room. That could be a good place to start: People make important declarations out of windows. The Japanese Emperor only ever meets his people through a window, once each year in January. At least, Jim had been to Tokyo once in January and seen the emperor on a balcony through bulletproof glass, and it was a very special event he was led to believe. Thousands of his people would cram into the palace square waving thousands of miniature paper flags at his grace through the glass until they tore from their plastic pipes. Then they would shuffle out, as the next load would storm in to tear up their flags in turn. This filled the Emperor’s whole day, waving through glass to hysteric masses. The Japanese were normally such reserved people. It was unsettling. He understood why the Emperor only put on social events so occasionally.
Looking out of his own window there was no audience gathered. It was just Freddy, playing in Jim’s own garden, spellbound by a spider and it’s stupid fucking web. Jim quickly tore at the Venetians. He fell against the wall as the blinds finally collapsed. His right hand called violently to him: in his rush the stubborn old cord had cut deep into the centre of his palm. Spread on the floor he could not move. He sat stunned and surveyed the little he could see of himself carefully. His naked belly was a mountain that dominated the landscape. In the distance his bare, stubby feet poked out from his fraying white cotton pants. He felt the growth of his beard, running his fingers through the greasy long hairs and realized his blasphemy: he must have looked like a fat pitiful floundering on the floor. His cheap digital watch was the only thing breaking the illusion of Christ’s inadequate second coming. Surprised by the rich color of his own blood, he stared rapt as the narrow lines drew across his arm tracing their way to his elbow. Slowly collecting together they gathered confidence and prepared for their closing dive. Remembering himself, he cupped his free hand underneath his elbow, picked himself up and raced down the hallway. His legs struggled to pass each other, his awkward body pathetically attempting to thread through the house like a camel at full speed. His muscles creaked with the floor beneath him as he stumbled between the fading lounges. Jim could not remember running with such unified vision in his entire life. The bathroom came into view, it’s fluorescent light radiating into the room. His elbow extended to the heavens in one last plea for salvation as he made his final leap. He made it. Had he made it? Jim collapsed to his knees. He moved his cupped hand and watched the blood painstakingly depart from his bloated elbow. The droplet finally formed drifted in brief reprieve for one last moment before exploding brilliant color onto the cold bathroom tiles. Just. The splatter lay only two inches safe of the clean carpet. Allowing himself to gasp for breath, Jim slowly began to raise the body he had put into shock. Ignoring the bloodied, desperate figure in the mirror he let the cold water run over his hands. He found it best to concentrate on the throbbing. Freddy would leave his garden; eventually, Jim knew that. Then he could open the blinds and try again. The wound continued to weep and he reluctantly opened the cupboard to look for some antiseptic. There would be nothing there - he hadn’t bought any after all - but he felt obliged to look in case he called Julie and she asked if he had. After all: he would feel pretty silly if he hadn’t.
IN-CON-CEIVABLE!
This is a place where I've decided I will put things I have written, as well as any general rubbish I find momentarily important enough to mention. It is my first blog, so please be kind. Haze me if necessary, I'm unfamiliar with the drills. Other than that there is not much to say yet. Hello.
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