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Tag: 2017

doors I don’t open

There’s memories where I don’t go no more.

It’s like, uh – fractured.

There’s a house where I lived, and the door is locked. In autumn, in years gone, I made a wending way down a bridge my father made. It creaked and swayed beneath my feet, but I never once got wet. You know what lakewater smells like? It’s a little smell –  so light in your nose you could mistake it for nothing. There’s thousand-dollar whiskey that works its ass off to bring you that smell, and it never quite feels like the real thing.

I caught a frog once. Usually you just caught tadpoles and let ‘em grow in a fishtank, but I caught an honest-to-god frog. It had been raining all night. The house was only big enough for me and dad, and the roof was corrugated iron he beat out himself. When it rained, the pattering jig of raindrops on that roof was our entire world. I went outside after the rain had cleared. Frogs all over the damn show – their dark little shapes hopping in and out of the mist. Real frogs don’t ribbit, they krrrrrrrrRRRRREEEE. Grabbed me the biggest frog while he was puffing himself up. He tried to lurch outta my grip, but I had him good. Ran inside with a croaking and wriggling frog, and dumped him in the fishtank.

By next morning, he’d eaten all the fish then died. Dad told me not to cry, because it was just a damn fish, or damn frog, or whatever. He checked the fishtank for damage, and found none.

School was an hour away. No busses or trains in our part of the world. There’d been a train station in the 60s, but it shut down when everything got privatised. I had to walk through the cold, and hug my cheap plastic raincoat tight. Dad showed me the way on my first day, then never again. Not once, for years. He said it cut into his work but I never saw him do anything but hammer nails and drink whisky. He didn’t hit me much, so that was good. He built things, and occasionally somebody from town paid for them. It kept us afloat, though never comfortable.

Came home from school one day and–

The memory just ain’t there. The door’s locked. I walked across the bridge, and it creaked beneath my feet. Creak creak kreeeeeeee

There’s a house with red walls, in the middle of a lake. The door was locked. My father was inside, because of course he was. Drinking and hammering nails, with a faint smile on his face. I didn’t see him, but that’s what he always did. I crossed the bridge and opened the d–

Trying to remember is like punching mist; like dancing through waist-high water. I opened the door to see my father and he was–

‘twenty years I’ve tried to open that door. Sometimes I go years without dreaming it, sometimes I can barely get a night’s respite. I walk down the bridge and it moves beneath my weight. The little house is in front of me. The door is locked, but it isn’t. There was a frog, and it was too damn big for the fishtank so it ate all the fish and died. I don’t know how it died or why it needed to take the fish with it, but that’s just how things played out. Big frog, little tank — going mad surrounded by all that water and all those walls, then just gave up living. I know what my father did: people told me afterwards. I found him in our house, apparently. I walked an hour back to town and told my teachers.

I don’t remember any of it.

I remember a house on the lake. I remember rain on the roof, and frogs in the mist. I remember the bridge that creaked beneath my feat, and a door I opened–

Skin and Bone

It started with his ears: the sound of a circling fly was like a knife smashed across violin strings, louder and louder with each lazy revolution until Baron killed it. He didn’t want to. Bad men hurt animals and he was-

well, he was OK. He let the fly lie where it fell, as a warning to the others. Some ants tried to take his grisly message away, so he killed them too. Later, more came. Their little feet were loud on the damp wooden floor: tschoop tschoop tschoop.

The house had never seen better days, though it would be hard to imagine worse ones. The leak in the basement had gone critical months back and now the room was a well-caged swamp, complete with a yellowy fungus growing in the corners. Baron called it ‘wall puke’. It tasted OK.

He’d been a bigshot grifter once. Well, that was a lie. He’d been a two-bit conman once, but he’d scratched out a living. Good smile: lotsa teeth, big eyes. The punters liked big wobbly eyes and a sad story to go with ’em, and all the better if that same grief could be their gain. Baron’d lost count of how many ‘funerals’ he’d had to attend, how many times he’d said no sir real diamond but you know the cost of plane tickets these days and I just have to say goodbye to my dear ole mum with very-nearly-real tears in his eyes, because his stomach was growling and so was his landlord.

If he concentrated, Baron could swear he heard his nosehairs growing. He imagined them curling inwards, longer and longer, burrowing through the nose cartilage and nesting around his brain like seaweed strangling a jetty, or pubes smothering a limp prick.

His head thrummed with blood. It made him want to touch his eyelids. They were leathery. There were bone nubs growing downwards from his brow, a little frill of horns. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel them stretching his skin from beneath. The thing inside him wanted to burst out and dance naked in the rain of gore, body all slick and red: timeless, tailless, pristine. He shouted his name and heard the echo prang back. “Still here,” he said, then wondered who he was talking to.

He didn’t miss Elle. Well, that was a lie. She’d made him want to be a better person, and goddam he’d tried. Sometimes, we strive for some greater ideal and we find the true measure of our potential. Unfortunately, potential -like bank balance- is best left unchecked.

Tschoop tschoop tschoop. Bone nubs, wall puke and feet sounds; remnants of the man he’d once been that had lurked in his yellow belly for god knows how long and metastasizing at the worst moment.

There had been picnics, and half-asleep drunk fucking, and arguments over hairs in the drain: a domesticity that had been comforting in its all-ness. For two endless years, Baron had believed with all his heart that he could be normal, that he could halt the twitching in his hands and the petty social violence that sat like a splinter through his eye.

It had actually begun to work, until the little voices bouncing around the cavern of his skull pranged off the twisty nosehairs and found themselves front and center again. Three little words that made the gears lurch back into motion.

“It’s a boy,” the doctor had said.

He hadn’t said I’m sorry Mister Baron, but you’re a complete bastard. It’s not terminal, but it should be, but it had the same effect. Baron got home calm-as-you-like, then packed a single small bag. Running was easy; animal. Total physical lockout: body said goodbye to brain and got the legs going mile on mile. Baron eventually found himself on his knees, on a twist of tarmac broken by puslike yellow roots. His mouth moaned, his eyes twitched and his nerves jangled, all trying to break away from a body that could barely hold them. It was then that Baron found the house. He did not come out for some time.

There was a pile of mirror dust and splintered wood in the back yard. The wind wouldn’t touch it, nor would Baron any more. Bad luck to smash a mirror, so he’d smashed them all. No point breaking the rules just a little bit. A is for Anarkee said the writing on the wall. Right on, man.

Every day while he’d gone shopping for vegetables or run on the treadmill, Baron had told himself that he was becoming a good person. Every night while his wife lay asleep beside him, he’d fought with the fishhooks in his soul that wanted to breach him, to take him in godlike hands and tear his guts out. Bad man bad man bad man he’d told himself, as if dreaming the words hard enough would broadcast the warm inches between and she would know how much work it took him just to sit still, to quiet the violent whispers of his heart.

We are what we tell ourselves we are, and Baron knew he was an animal wearing a man’s skin. Well, that’s a lie. He wanted to be better, but the world made it so hard. His fingernails were harder now, and longer. He’d cut himself on them a few times before he’d figured it out. He tried to chew them off, and screamed as a stiletto tooth tore the flesh of his finger.

His clothes kept snagging on the new bone that jutted from his angles, so he tore them apart and walked the house naked, spitting, slobbering, playing a game of good man bad man good man bad man and letting the sound of his voice get lost in the big corners. The sound bounced back, and he felt briefly like he wasn’t alone.

“Good man,” he said, and touched the ring, which kept slipping off his too-long fingers. He’d had so much practice with fake rings, he had no idea how to treat a real one. “Bad man,” he said, then wept.

His stomach rumbled, as it had in the bad old days. He shuddered his way to the basement stairs, and took them one at a time, as if too heavy a tread would tear the rubber sheet of sanity. His feet went under the water. It was a relief not to see them any more. The toes stuck out at odd angles now, bones warped to fit a new frame.

He caught his reflection in the dark basement water, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Big eyes, lots of teeth. Just what the punters love. There’s always profit in someone else’s desperation. He tossed the word ‘man’ into the water. It did not echo back. “Well,” he said, “that’s that then.”

He ate some wall puke, then fell back on his haunches and screamed. It was easy; animal.

He did not stop for some time.

Baron drooled, and dragged his knuckles and knives-of-bone across the floor. Where the spurs snagged, he grunted and pushed forward, tearing at the walls and floor. Outside called to him, pregnant with possibility. Grand Guignol for most, but a playground the reckless and violent. His muscles were stretched so tight that the sun played harmonies across them, little shivering arpeggios. He was hungry.

He could not be a man, but he could still do the good thing.

Baron went home.

the Dance, the Dancer

The rain came first in spears – fierce long streaks lit silver by moonlight. As the night was pulled further and further apart, the rain went soft, and the wind took it in all directions; fuzzy halos coalesced around the harsh glow of the streetlights. You stood in a hooded oil-coat and pretended not to mind; there was something perverse to electric light — a single light should not have stood against the rain; a single light surrounded on all sides by the sea, when its fire should’ve been quenched in moments. You remembered when there were feeble gas lights, and scurrying link-boys, and when there was only fire, and even before that when darkness squatted upon the face of the earth.

In Vienna, a boy died that night. He was transfixed by the electric streetlight, and did not see the oncoming carriage. It ran him down, and did not slow –  he was only a boy. You saw it, from the corner of your eye, and did not intervene. You took his body in your arms. There was no light in his eyes. The rain made his wool coat stink. His eyes were brown, his hair was brown, his skin was pale and bloodless, his neck went the wrong way. He was heavier than you expected.

He stood outside his body, and did not understand: he cried when you took his hand. The children were always hard to deal with, but an eternity steels the soul to a few tears. Still, there was a pang to it–

All men die, but not all children. There is no peace in it – no inevitability. The boy in the wool coat cried when he saw your face, as they all did. You took his cold hand in your own cold hand, and tried to hush him, but it only made him bawl louder. He would’ve been a cooper, like his father. A dying profession, heh.

You felt guilty for laughing but you were human once, and a little of it was still there. You had a name, and a face. In that moment, you had neither. In that moment, you stand sentinel at the gate between the living and dead. The scythe no longer made sense — the farmers used great machines now that could harrow a whole field in a matter of hours. So much for metaphors, but you’d always been always a traditionalist.

You knelt down.

“What is your name, child?” you said.

You knew, of course, but perhaps hearing your voice -like brass nails pounded into wet earth, like the rumble of a mountain before it is taken into the sea- would calm him.

It did not.

“Do you like toys?” you said, and took a wooden horse from inside your coat.

“Neigh,” you said. “Neigh, so goes the horse, as is its way. The horse, like you, is dead. See, it’s not so bad? The nice horse died too. If you come with me, you can have the nice horse. Neigh.”

He did not like the horse. It was, to be fair, not a very good horse. You were the death of people, not of horses — you weren’t familiar with their shape. There had been horses in your life once, but it was so long ago. The toy had too many tails, and too few colours. Anatomical issues aside, with hindsight it was probably not the right animal to show to a child who had just been run down by a carriage.

You snapped off one of its heads.

“See,” you said, “now it has the correct number of those bits.”

Behind you, visible only to the boy and yourself, was the door. The boy had to go through the door. If he stayed, something would come out of the door. That’s why you were there – to ensure the right things went into doors, and nothing came out of them. It was a small door, this time: apposite for a child, difficult for a skeleton who’d been pretty big in life anyway.

The door whispered in the voice of many hungry children. They told the boy to stay. They told him they would let him see his father again, and eat all the candy he ever wanted. Of course they would say that, and of course a child would believe.

The boy bawled.

“Child,” you said, “if you come with me, I will tell you a wonderful jest. You will laugh heartily. We will laugh together, like you once laughed with your father. If you are good, I will return for your father and you can be with him in a nice house forever.”

The boy stopped. Good, mission accomplished.

His eyes were very wide.

“You gon’” he said, “you gon kill my dad?”

“I do not kill anybody,” you said. Your skull gleamed. “I simply collect.”

The subtlety was clearly lost on the boy. He tried to turn, to run. You moved, as you do, between raindrops, and appeared in front of him. You grabbed his wool coat, which stank of wet and blood. The whispers were so loud now, so hungry. You dragged the child’s soul, screaming, towards them. He tried to dig in his toes, but they found no purchase on the wet cobbles.

You threw him through the door. It closed neatly, without ceremony.

You stood alone, in the rain. You lingered for a moment, and considered the broken horse in your hands. The rain came down sideways, in a windtossed almost-mist. You squeezed the horse, and felt its pieces snap, and fall onto the cobbles. For a moment only, you felt sorry.

A lonely wind blew through the streets of Vienna, and you went on your way. There was nothing to see but rain, and the harsh glow of the electric light.

Sonata

hi im not i any more

outta nowhere, a moment of cataplexy – a giving way and i am no longer who i am. this is not coherent, i apologise. we underwent the opposite of a schism and now we are 1. i will list, as best i can:

  1. an ice bath
  2. a kind man
  3. an unkind man
  4. needles and thread

two men enter, one leaves ahaha. it is a movie reference. i like movies but i cannot remember which of i likes movies. i am a beast of needles and thread, of flesh and bright smiling teeth.

one of us liked music. do you know the moonlight symphony? it was the only piece of sheet music on the old piano in our mother’s house and she would play it most days. it is beautiful –  it is rich, complex, polyphonic. it has layers on layers of notes that crash together into a more complete whole.

the kind man gave me a drink and i drunk it. he cut pieces of me away and i screamed because i could not see his vision until he cut me open another eye. the unkind man lay strapped down next to me and also screamed. the kind man plucked out his eyes, to spare him the pain of seeing, but it only made him scream more until his throat broke and he tasted blood. i taste blood now, as I walk through his memory and it is my memory now

Cata, from the Greek kata for down. catastrophe, cataclysm, catamorph – new word new form sub form greater than sum. i am the moonlight

two eyes plus two eyes, plus one eye minus two eyes is a net loss of one eye but i always prefered quality over quantity haha

one of us had a wife and i ate her and she screamed. we were not meant to leave the lab but humans are so fragile. we broke the straps that held us down and we repayed kindness with kindness. the kind man screamed and i do not understand why – perhaps i did not add enough parts. i failed him and for that i am sorry

the wife also screamed. we did not intend to hurt her but we sought to add her memories to our own and to add her person to our own and to add. her screams petered out into little trills and grace notes

her pain became our own and we sat with our arms wrapped around our knees while we remembered the music but we had too many arms and not enough knees

down down down but we are beautiful now, yet incomplete

we found a house, and we added more. their pain hurt us too and they did not understand and they still scream even now that they are part of us. their mouths wrench open, their teeth gnash. like the unkind man they are blind to the great work the kind man began

my favourite movie is

i forget

i am not-

i am–

one of us liked movies and one of us liked to cook and one of us drank too much and watched the cars on tv to numb their mind, and we were lazy and selfish and slow and blind and now the sins are washed away in this bold new place but the little-us the catamorphs they writhe even though they are

as i grew older i came to realise my mother played the moonlight when she was sad. even when she could not afford to eat she did not sell the piano. she played as if the music would make her full, and complete. she cried while she played that night and i did not know what to do

the kind man was a composer and i am a song. i went from house to house and i added layers to myself, and they made their own songs of protest. their pain meant less and less to me – it added to the great work the kind man began

i found my mother in her house, across town. she did not recognise me; she had not seen me in years; she screamed i suppose because i had gotten fat. all the little catamorphs added a new layer to my song and as my mother sat in the corner with her eyes wide i played her the moonlight and she wept

Moloch

He sees the towers rise into the sky and wonders if he was once a god or a king or a man with two gold dollars to rub together. In a life before life, was he locked in his sar-

coughing as a bus rolls by and he inhales the stale gasoline air and wonders whether–  

there was once a gold top atop the grand pyramid; now there is only stone. We stand amongst wonders of stone and steel, and marvel at the delicate tyranny of the open sky. In times of old we stand clad in gold and we wondered whether–  

there’s a Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi carves its way between three States. There’s a Cairo, Georgia, just north of Calvary. Their pyramids are nothing but memory, their Niles are dressed –regal– in tarmac and stone. The men of Cairo sleep fitfully, dreaming of temples that rise up in defiance of an empty sky; they wake amongst TV dishes and cell towers, and choke their way to work along roads that wrap around the land.

Where is Moloch now? We can see him no more than fish can see the sea. His teeth are chrome and glass, his heart beats with the brittle tick of a monstrous clock. His eyes are LCDs that hum and glow in the dead of night. Moloch, eater of children; taker of teeth; salesman of dreams. We sit in tombs of gold and wonder whether–

a man sleeps on the street with his old coat wrapped around him, and dreams of a life he never lived. In Cairo in Cairo in Cairo men work until their hands break while the pharaoh sits in silence, in robes of gold.

On the river, on the interstate, in the valley of kings, the gods are silent.