That spiderwebs look like necklaces is hardly surprising. You made really good use of the cookies. They lived in your brain and measured time like a smart meter to cost more, horrible sharp smell of time, golden darling. The temperature got cold enough so that spiderwebs were necklaces encrusted with sharp frost, to unhook from trees and arabesques of gate to wear at night. The people took pictures of glaciated cities and posted them on the outer gates, with affections measured by the gram. They wore black tourmaline wolf spiderlings and blizzard stone zebras to cover their décolletage. Inside the small room, scared my hot water bottle would burst on me, I was too cold to have glamour. I looked at my golden darling coming close to coming, I could hardly wait for winter to end its solo guitar on the buttress of autumn. It wasn’t as though time snatched the web from her neck and said no more posting, no more selling yourself short as a small glass animal. Often I was a gelid cadaver, after a fuck. The man on the podcast who was a famous director said he hated to be in pain and encouraged women to stop poking their own wounds. He said to do things that made you feel better, instantly, and he put those words in the mouth of a blonde and glamorous actress. I used to buy lighthearted eyeliner and dot my face with artificial freckles to look ‘healthy’. Squinting at the sun is a personality. The moon is our universal friend. Those cookies will be hatching soon and we’ll live in the fat of their secrets. I couldn’t be alone again, especially with the gimmick machine of octovision. I had studied the web and was now found styling myself a spider matriarch, highly resistant to magic, indulged in the cannibalism of love’s imaginary, myself at the end of Verity Spott’s Hopelessness. Frost crystals glitter in the gathering wind saying people make mistakes. You can tear this from me, all of my necklacing sentence, I don’t care anymore.
Tag: daily writing
Ornament & Missouri
Once, the temperament of the bellflower was of concern to me. I wrote down words like ‘ornament’ and ‘Missouri’. I had a Lamy pen to write sideways, slantwise, of my other life. There was one club in particular where I excelled in the art of other people’s music. What some call karaoke but I call languishing in melody, obsessively, falling apart in front of an audience. I was like the VHS girl-child in Aftersun butchering ‘Losing My Religion’ with such sweetness the whole resort goes silent. What talent had I for pitch or flourish? There was a column of white light above my head at all times which I imagined writing into, solemnly, a long list of my songs. The more they snared in my throat, the more they became me. The newspapers declared this behaviour ‘cheery perennial’ at the local, noted my penchant for particular martinis, the olive glow of the evening. Any evening, you could find me there in a sequin distress, picking my excess off the floor. I had this thing called a hem. It was the way my voice dropped. The way I gathered it up. Outside the club was a cottage garden, can you believe it, where I tended these purple flowers. I spritzed the last of my drinks across their wilted leaves and I murmured the inside scoop of each song, so only the flowers knew. Their growth was writing itself all over the skirts of the club, I was feeding it; soon we would nourish ourselves from the fruits of trial and error. It seemed appalling that my whole generation had fallen back into the habit of other people’s songs. As a child, I was dragged along to open mics, and all the songs were original, weren’t they? You had to put a few coins in the kitty to get on the list. According to the principle of locality, a particle is influenced by its closest surroundings, with interactions limited to the speed of light. But according to Bell, there are variables. The risk of being heckled or worse, adored. I knew my theory of the song to be incomplete and quantum. It went very far. I stroked the rare blue hue of my partial shade. I queued Outside. Sung the non-lexical vocables of glossy stars. Ate lyrics for kicks. I paid the price.
Playlist: October 2018
This month of intense transition, brisk walks after dark in a state of delirium. This PhD is all over me. My screen is so white and it glares all day. The moon is so white it’s almost offensive and so is the carton of milk which sits by the homeless man at Charing Cross. He rolls cigarettes and watches the traffic. I rarely see him smoke, but he is often rolling, and watching. Rolling and watching, as if the two were entwined and utterly necessary. I am watching too as I walk, but I walk fast and make of all features a blur. I run out of routes. I take the park at night to see the stars spread out on a sky of blue velvet. Nothing is nameable this way. It grows colder.
My feet look for a path but often find the grass instead.
Days pass, immersing myself in the journals of Gilbert White for a sense of the seasons, and how they manifest in the Earth. All the dead leaves of centuries swept. Then also Derek Jarman’s garden, so lovingly noted in Modern Nature.
To have such connection to the land, documenting its events. White:
Baker’s hill is harrowed-down after these great rains: it was no easy matter to subdue the clods at all. Some of the olde elders round the garden are almost leafless. Wallnuts are this Year innumerable. The white-apples are fit to make pies. Grapes, peaches, nectares very backward.
This is in August. Arboreal fruits and other riches. I ate a lot of apples in August, because there are always apples at conferences, nestled on paper-linings. In air-conditioned rooms, you crisply attend to knowledge. Something tart and sweet that activates the acid of many collective stomachs.
Mostly White’s journal compends the minutiae of fruits and vegetables grafted and grown and harvested in the garden. Little discoveries named in both English and Latin. The beauty of regularity and daily rhythm. But there are glitches: talk of ‘vast rain’ in the night, eerie events that just happen and remain unexplained —
A great light seen, & a vast explosion from y S: about a quarter past nine in the evening: the Cause unknown. It shook peoples houses very much. It seems to be meterous.
(White)
I write this on a Sunday morning, just as the bin men are creating a cataclysm of the garden. On Wednesday morning, the cleaners come early and the sound of the mop hitting the wall wakes me up from insomnia’s half-formed slumber. I dwell in these rhythms of other people’s labour, and consider my own, fingers on keys.
I have been thinking about data and how we access climate change as both event and ontological condition. What kinds of data do I attend to on a daily basis? I do not check the fluctuating air quality of my city, although Google allows you to do this. I rarely check the weather, at least beyond a cursory search as to whether to prepare with waterproofs or not. Checking the weather reminds me of the days of the week and all I have to do, and how the days are just units and thus the struggle of cramming things into them. I stay up very late because I am anxious about the days ahead, the things I am supposed to do in them. I remember a period of my life where I’d stay up all night all the time with friends, and when they’d lament the loss of their imminent day I’d say, no but this is great, it’s like cheating time! I did not realise they would sleep through the day, while I would ride wild on a sleep-deprived high, seeing the world as through frosted glass. The wee hours came, then the sun, and they would roll cigarette after cigarette in televisual flickers.
Summertime draws to a close, and dusk acquires a drama of light that demands photography. I skirt around Park Circus, following the curve of the streets, the incline. Ruffles of deeper darkness. How many memories are concentrated at the top of Kelvingrove Park, with the lights spread in ribbons of gold and red and glimmering distance. Collect my intensities, try not to think too hard. The air in my lungs reacts and is hot and sweet. The clocks go back and what a pleasure it is to flip straight to 1:01 again. Where does the hour go that is lost? It shaves a little light off my evening, for which I lament. Last year I was working until 3am when the clocks went back, and I was scared I’d have to work the extra hour unpaid. This is something we never talk about, the impact on those who pull night shifts. Luckily, there was a system. But customers did not understand. It got to 2am and we were kicking them out and they demanded we stay open till 3. The way it was on their phones, which automatically reset in electric synchrony. We were open till 3am that night; just on retro time, the time of before.
So tired I fall asleep with the light on, my face in some book. The luxury of curling into yourself and disappearing until all the dreams come.
The moon this week was consistently incredible. As in, cloaked in a halo of rainbow; magnetic, amphetamine rush of staring at it. Walk walk walk with the moon above, so below. The white pools of light that fall on the street. It gave me this charge or energy. I couldn’t sleep because I was full of the moon. Some lunar reaction inside me. I wanted to be more alone.
A friend describes my poem, ‘A Beautiful Video’, as ‘an autumn harvest of internet trash’, which I like a lot.
Adulthood means getting your bike fixed, over and over. Testing the brakes. It means learning to say no to things. It means being responsible for this and that. The ontological condition of email, with its beautiful intermittence — the sway of send and arrival. Kindest of wishes. I have been trying to start a letter all week but there are so many things I want to say to you. It’s been so long and I have no idea how you’re living.
It hurts to write ‘now’, like the lostness is already always.
On Hallowe’en, I’ll see Grouper play in Mackintosh Church.
The month began with me listening to Leonard Cohen, and ended in electronic abyss.
Spooky as the air is, filling the wood.
In my diary I seem to write a lot, ‘I feel sick at the thought’.
This is the month I leave my job of five and a half years. I have a lot of separation anxiety and maybe one day I’ll be back. Strange to have such emotional dependence on a place and its people. To measure yourself against the pace of its shifts, the demands of others. To love and love and love unconditionally. I miss everyone already; I did the very moment I set foot in the door for my last shift. We played a game of flexibility and were lovely to everyone, got good tips. A table of Texan tourists, the last people I served, told me: ‘you’re so pretty…you’re like as pretty as this glass of rosé wine’. The wine in question was our house, Angel’s Tears, so I said, ‘and I’m as sad as the tears of the angel’, to which they laughed uneasily. They meant it earnestly and I checked on the menu and a large glass was £7, so I am happy that my apparent attraction matches my second-favourite number. It was a cheap thing to say but I kinda liked it.
There have been these twangs in my chest, like someone pulling the strings of a harp too hard. I have not been sleeping too well.
Maybe I don’t miss the lush excesses of summer’s end, but I miss the extra light.
The way it feels to cycle downhill in freefall, giving yourself to the traffic, choking on the fumes of the cars around you. Red light upon red. Watching a film about homicidal ants. Messy situations and Skype conversations. Virtual reality and the value of objects. The enchanted beings appear on Byres Road, glitter-eyed at the crossing. Have written a sonnet a day for a week.
When I write in my diary it always begins so tired, so tired, or a variation of. I feel like I’ve done everything and nothing, and there’s so much still to do, to write into.
I watched The Garden until five in the morning and my eyes burned red all through the day. Something extravagantly eccentric about the manner of epic. Rub salt.
Erase yourself for rain and call it extinction. People have a lot of things to say on the matter.
So I sit here polishing pairs of shoes. At least I have something to walk with.
Begin again ordering rounds of Guinness. Almost asleep in the taxi, river-cross, the motorway morning orbits a thought. The mattering treacle of darkness. The air so cold it is almost sticky. When you see the abyss but take it anyway. This is such a soft short story to write in the library.
I lost my keys in the litter and leaves. I lost something in the hills, along time ago. Finding the words to say it.
~
Pinegrove – Rings
Angel Olsen – California
Red House Painters – Grace Cathedral Park
Sharon Van Etten – I Wish I Knew
Half Waif – Every Animal
Big Thief – Capacity
Karen Dalton – It Hurts Me Too
Haley Heynderickx, Max Garcia Conover – Slow Talkin’
Fleet Foxes – Icicle Tusk
Kiran Leonard – Working People
Leonard Cohen – The Partisan
The Innocence Mission – Lakes of Canada
Cocteau Twins – Summer-Blink
Arthur Russell – Losing My Taste For The Night Life
Sun Kil Moon, Jesu – You Are Me and I Am You
Oneohtrix Point Never – Love In The Time Of Lexapro
Lo Kindre – Torment Of One
Hiro Kone – Outside the Axiom
Low – Words
Mazzy Star – Mary Of Silence
Sibylle Baier – I Lost Something in the Hills
Nico – Afraid
~
Playlist: October 2017
(disclaimer: my god i’m feeling autumn morbid)
Time is a stopped drumbeat tonight; it is the remnant of old Halloween feeling. Singular childhood memories: salt-crisp toasts in the shape of witch hats, chocolate spiders, fireworks; a plastic bag snagged on a tree, resembling the gossamer trace of someone’s soul. Pumpkin seeds sprinkled paprika, oven-roasted. Surrender to central heating. I close my eyes to desolate parking lots where the wind buffers round and round in the thick-whorled conch of my ears, which have not heard enough in their time; filled with white noise and melodies honeying the sore parts to moan or depart. We talked about feeling passionate or just not at all and long communications across channels across waters and distances of spacetime unfathomable to the little things beating in our chest that were tender of fibre and sinew, blood and bone. Heart attack, absence. A craving for airports, places of arrival and departure. Erase all communion. At the very least, some ferry terminal where the rain lashes my face and it’s like being born again and over and over–the way a shell is each time the tide unfurls some granules of sand in ribboning form, sweeping layers of time back over the nacreous skin. A white shape looming chltulu from darkness, from blue. Suddenly nostalgic for everything; days where less pressed upon the brain, where a deep abyss still made its outward ripples around me. The wake of a ferry, see the whitening arabesques of that line. Days sloshed out with delicious, ice-deprived, inexpensive whisky. The blurriness of alcohol a delay, an appeal. Repeat. Too many nights lost in flats without sense of an ending, every corridor a wind tunnel. Cycling home the abstraction. Best to present this as fact or fiction?
Bursts of prose, aches and pains behind the ears, deep in the muscle and bones. Getting harder to cling to routine. The nights draw in malevolently, extravagant in their darkness. Things to look forward to seem less and less. Sometime you come home; you come home and there’s a version of home I swim through, salt stung and sober but nonetheless longing for home. Less lost tracing same old routes, longing for the everywhere nowhere of hill mist and sea fog, rivers you step in forever for each time is another, another. Moss between cracks in the patio driveway. Keep mesmerising beats still close to sleep. Fabricate reality.
Spent inordinate quantities of time this month listening to Elliott Smith. Sad pale lullabies from a lonely Los Angeles. I pace these streets, pretending they’re boulevards. The only palms here are ugly, reedy, hardy. Stop wearing liner because regardless the irises stream. The wet leaves gather and stick and are swept into gutters. Gelid, compact. Packed into bags. I don’t know where they go, where the end is.
We put the radiators on for the first time since spring.
Autumn requires more indulgence in pleasure. Thickening of the flesh. I buy spice and wait for sweet potatoes to warm on the stove, thinking of how music creates space and it’s space that I need—so much space and space. Space is space is space. Where strings elasticate the littler twinges of pain, I’m counting the falling beats of a piano far from my room, far steadier than the twitches of dreamcatcher feathers above my bed. Tidal sighs. Voice grows frailer with audience, chance Saturdays off work recounting old lines in the sea pace of rain that steadies the brain in concrete roads. The opening chords, like coming home. Dusk slowly loses its dramatic autumnal sense of transition. Winter steals ruthlessly, magpie glitches of silver light. My hair dulls against the cognac gold of the leaves, their magical lambent light. My skin gathers sapphires, latticed and laced with violet blue, violent hues. Bumping my legs on things in my room because it is all too small, dollhouse small & ever shrinking; the arrangement of objects and clutter and books that spill over and spaghetti tangles of words I can’t follow because sleep might steal me. Words, words. Lurid in sentence through sentence. Sleep is a sort of ache you have to embrace for the sake of refreshing, a scab you can’t pick off the physical. I might dream of tomorrow then fold back on the future. Sentences come in again, re-calibrate time. I wake up frozen or burning; or I stay up late, stay up beyond human time, missing summer’s songbirds in the garden. It is all too cloudy, shivery, silent. What time is it wherever you are? The maps provide little flavour; I cannot orientate myself on those pastel colours. Still, there is a durational beauty to everything we speak of, itching towards light with crisp new lines. A photograph, then words. White upon deep, messenger blue. What doesn’t feel borrowed, what feels mystically distinct and uncertain. It’s lovely. Confessionals kept abstract as always. So many meetings with those who inspire. Except there’s the dread. How can you hold so many words in your head?
I make notes on the moods in work the way you would weather. There is often a pattern, a miasmatic misery catching. A cold front coming. Hysterics and dashboard laughter. Smashed glass. Not even a full moon and still the weirdos flock in with awful demands: this wouldn’t happen in St. Andrews! I picture myself between two places; oscillations of identity with a flareup of possible rupture. Between two needs. She says there is something deeply wrong, a pang out of sync with the rest of her body. Is it possible to be this body without organs? For you are all fingers and bruises, lashing trellis of glitter and breath. There was a hurricane that buffeted our ill-equipped figures, our red raw fingers. You could hear the wind flapping in the scaffolding like the masts of a ship. I walked west alone, the cold so hot in my throat. Strangers asking me where to dance. Plug up the volume. When the trippier synths came in, eloquent cross rhythms coasting, the serenity would cure this feverish dreams. Too many tenses tangled. Stifling coughs in working clubs, watching a friend make music on telly. Fairy lights blinking out of sync. A sudden swelling pride over the fact that such beautiful things can exist. His reticence, his crazed expression. What was it she said? We can’t have nice things, that’s why we lose them. It’s true, they slip away from you; or else we’ll drop them like keys down the drain. Maybe that’s okay, maybe that’s the best part, the losing and leaving and dwelling in pain. O sweet naivety. Everyone is leaving. I would hurl my keys in the sea for you.
Far away on a rooftop smarting my brain on the stars and learning to drink again.
I walk home in the lost hour and screaming teenagers costume the streets with vague and avid despair or else carnivalesque they paint dawn with hilarious shadow.
=> Switching the radio on at six in the morning haven’t slept yet & what comes on just another crap Motown no. recalling fresh restaurant hell… <=
UNIT. UNIT. UNIT. // these misdirectives I will follow forever not knowing, not knowing. She sounds a bit like Bjork when you turn the sound right up to a shrill; a brittleness threatening to shatter all that is cool and sound and sound. She is pure sound. She is bitterer, sweeter.
><
I wonder how long to lose a day to a train? Somehow the north beckons: the sense of my smallness; a need to be swaddled in brisk wind, sea smell, true Scottish frost…may we bury our feelings in negative hypothermal versions of now…but for now I can only look forward to seeing Com Truise on Thursday & drown out & drown out…
*
Lee Gamble – Déjà Mode
Alt-J – 3WW
Moses Sumney – Lonely World
William Patrick Corgan – Aeronaut
The House of Love – Fade Away
’Til Tuesday – The Other End (Of the Telescope)
Phoebe Bridgers – Would You Rather
Elliott Smith – Twilight
Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile – Peepin’ Tom
Rob St. John – An Empty House
Sufjan Stevens – Wallowa Lake Monster
Cocteau Twins – Pearly-dewdrops’ Drops
Good Good Blood – Running in the Dark
Joni Mitchell – Roses Blue
Kathryn Joseph – the bird
Johnny Flynn – Hard Road
Simon & Garfunkel – Kathy’s Song
The Door
She laughed at that, her maraschino heart would sweeten the moment with its tender syrup of lies.
“It’s just a door,” he said. The pair of them made a couple of magpies. She was green-hued, he was jewelled with blue.
They made their way through the suburbs, so easy the way they rolled along concrete with those slender legs. I have made a pinball of their trajectories. Soon they realised their mistake.
“We have to go back for the door,” she said. She was insisting. He admitted her this.
They carried the door along many streets. It was painted the colour of duck eggs, a pale blue paint that flaked in places. People stared, assuming they were a lovely young couple setting up their new home. Sometimes, she patted her pocket to make sure the stuff was still there. Later, they would huddle under the lilac in the rich person’s garden and count their dreams beneath panoplies of blackbirds. For now, there was the door.
“What shall we do with it?” he asked.
“It has a purpose.” She propped it up against the red brick wall of the old agora. It had beautiful windows, the kind of windows you imagine on doors in twee country houses, where nice mothers served sugar-bread to doorstep strangers.
“We could do anything with it.” They flirted with the idea of hacking it to bits, chopping for firewood. The forest was not far away; though really it was just a copse of trees, the undergrowth littered with cigarettes, sweet wrappers, needles. Not enough space to get lost in. You could hardly build a fire without alarming the neighbours.
When we are drawn out of nothing we are drawn into possibility. The couple knew the door was their portal, knew it as sure in their blood as they knew their daily hunger. Sometimes at night, she would let him scratch the sores on her skin, sending her off to sleep. She knew he spent those nights awake, scraping the bark off any hide he could, clotting the soil in his nails. They borrowed a suitcase, abandoned at a bus stop. An old lady’s worldly possessions treated them briefly to cardigans, palma violets, little nips of hip-flask whisky. They were warm for weeks, till the wool unravelled in winter’s first storm, till the liquor ran out one cold dark night.
Combustion or invitation. He gripped her arms and tried to shake her from every undulate leafy trembling. Her blood was beyond human; she had set up her fix long before sundown and this was wrong. He stayed with her through the worst of it, the 4am rattles and the toothache. If only the medicine worked, if only. Night-blooming flowers made cheap companions. An amazing array of skinny women would pass through the copse, the side alley that led to the 24 hour Spar, the petrol station. Cars would always pass regardless. The wholeness of the city was a great sprawl of this transitive passing.
And then the door.
She twisted the brass handle. The screw screamed in its lock, but nobody heard it.
(Can we always be stuck like this, honeycombing our bodies?)
It felt magnificent, holding him in the darkness as she always did, the frost forming rime on the skin of their lips. Somehow they knew the door was a separation. A transmutation of the flesh would occur in its fold, the way the pull-back of a hinge would sweep away time as they knew it. This was okay somehow, almost reassurance.
[…& continue].
Green Shoots
For the third day in a row, Brian looked down while brushing his teeth and saw a tiny green shoot sprouting out of the drain. Only last night, at 2am no less, he had pulled the little fucker out and thrown it down the toilet.
“Miriam!” he shouted to his wife, who no doubt was still curled in bed. “The tree’s back!”
“Mhmh?” Cursing at her lack of interest, he spat out toothpaste and watched how the white foam flecked the two bright leaves of the shoot. Remnants of raisins and granola showered like rubble around it. He turned on both taps and washed it away, but the shoot remained.
On his commute to work, he noticed something was on fire at the side of the motorway. The flames were big, apocalyptic, and when he opened the passenger window the black stench of burning rubber filled his car. There wasn’t a scrapyard round here; there were no reasons to be burning rubber. This was the fucking countryside, not some rustbelt wasteland.
At the office, he turned in the financial reports that were due at 10am. He sat through a meeting which featured the usual pantomime antics of his boss, the kind of man whose entire career is based on imitating the flamboyance of a Disney character while necking enough coffee and bourbon to seem manically on form at every performance.
“What we are building up to,” he announced, “is the ultimate synergy.” His arms flailed back in grand gesture, nearly knocking over the pie chart drawing his assistant had etched on the flip chart. “Capital merging with capital, a clean abstraction, the upward surge of profit. Think of this as MarioKart. How many of you have played MarioKart?” His eyes narrowed as he surveyed his colleagues round the table.
There was much quivering, as only a handful of people raised their hands.
“Well, the chosen few will know what I mean by the Rainbow Road,” he continued. “We’re on that motherfucking Rainbow Road. One veer off and we plunge into space, the black void, and that’s that. So I can’t afford a single mishap, I don’t care what happens. We need to synthesise, synergise, synchronise. You hear me?”
Every week, the boss delivered a near-identical speech; the only thing that changed was the arbitrary cultural reference he dragged up, presumably from the stacks of CDs and video-games in his son’s bedroom.
At this point, the assistant stood up hastily. She was young for the job, a high achiever, reaching for those virtual stars in a pair of vicious heels.
“What we mean,” she said, trying to clarify, “is it’s important not to underestimate green shoots. Those little signs of growth. Shares in petroleum, in plastic, are rising nicely. Not to mention South American superfood angiosperms, part of a wider move towards elite organic harvests. While the economy flounders around us, clinging to the small things is what will help us reach that upward surge.”
“Thank you, Heidi.” The boss shot her an appreciative leer. “Now what the fuck is an angiosperm?”
On his lunch-break, Brian ate a sad desk sandwich with a fellow number-cruncher. The two of them were the runts of the litter, the ones that never got invited to the cloying, marathon lunches the boss often dragged the office out on. This meant they were never in line for promotion, but bore the advantage of letting them avoid the poisonous oysters and chardonnay which often left their colleagues retching all afternoon.
“You know Liam,” Brian mused, “I found a green shoot in my sink the other day. It’s still there, even though I thought I pulled it out.”
“What?” Liam was dim-witted and this was maybe why he never got called out to lunch.
“Like, an actual green shoot. I think it’s getting taller.”
“Maybe God’s trying to tell you something,” Liam said ominously.
Back home that evening, Brian found that the shoot had gotten much taller indeed. So tall that various branches curled out thirstily, wrapping themselves round the taps. Brian shrugged and didn’t bother brushing his teeth that night. He pressed himself into Miriam’s back but realised she was already asleep. It was what, nine o’clock?
He got up very early and left the flat straight away to get to work. The accounts were flying off his desk that morning.
“Good work Ben,” his boss said, floating past the desk, collecting his documents.
“I’m on the upward surge,” Brian nodded.
On his way out the door that night he gave Heidi a contrived and lustful glance. She looked at him with eyebrows raised, but this could mean anything. He decided to drive out to the spot where yesterday he’d seen the flames. It was a pit in the ground, a charred patch of grass gone black. He fancied there was some resemblance to a pie chart, the way the different shades of burnt matter lay, wedge-like, in the circle. He did some rearranging, moving shrivelled plastic and ash and wood chips around until they met satisfactory dimensions.
When he came home with soot all over his hands and face, Miriam said he looked beautiful. She was a Leo and had a thing for fire. He looked into her eyes for the first time in weeks. Her whole body seemed to pause, to start melting right in front of him. The light from the kitchen window made her skin so pale, except for a flash of orange across her face. He was about to kiss her, to fall into the molten mass of her body, when she reached straight for his belt buckle. This was a first.
Afterwards, he went into the bathroom to wash his face. The tree had taken over the entire bathroom. In just a few hours, the little green stems had become proper woven wooden branches. He had to climb over and around them just to take a piss. What came out of him was yellow, dark. The flames were inside him now, and the leaves of the tree shimmered around his body, bathing him in luxurious gold.
“Honey,” he heard Miriam’s voice at the door, glistening with the shrapnel of Heidi’s lisp. He realised he was still clutching his limp penis. “D’you think the world’s ending?”
Layering
I woke up and the skin was peeling in the webbed bits round the fingers. Last night I’d soaked it in coconut oil from his ma’s spice cupboard but in the morning it made the pores feel all empty like they’d lost something. Still, the smell was nice. I just lay there and started scratching the wee red dots he gets on his arms from too much drinking, then he opened his eyes all red too like and says, You smell of summer. Sun-tan. Something.
His room is painted the colour of grass when it burns. It’s the blinds and that crap paint you get in Pound shops. I always look up and meet the eyes of Kurt Cobain on the wall and we share the feeling of being hurt; just for a second, the time it takes to yawn, then I roll over to kiss him but he’s sour-tasting on account of the whisky or something. A film on my tongue like when glue goes hard on your skin and you flake it off. His tongue feels furry too.
I reach to roll the first cigarette and tobacco gets on the bed and I know it makes him mad so I stop; my limbs unfold from the sheets and the cold rush clings to their bareness.
He makes this sound all like mhmheeh but I get up anyway and roll the cigarette sitting on the windowsill looking outside. The rain is coming on again and the glass is all stained like when you rub your eyes too hard and it’s all these lava lamp patterns swimming in your brain and nothing gets clear for a good full minute.
It’s February 23rd, just so you know. I keep thinking about that bit in Twin Peaks when the handsome detective is like reading a page torn from Laura Palmer’s diary and it says on that date, ‘Tonight is the night that I die’. Makes me feel a bit nauseous, especially after the phone call. The one from last night. When I get downstairs, softly-stepping so’s not to wake him, the phone is still off the hook where I dropped it and you can hear the woman saying please hang up and try again like she’s trying to make it into a techno song. There’s a loud ring when I slam it back on the receiver.
He finds me an hour later on the floor by the washing machine greeting even though I’m trying not to but he stands there and he runs his hand through his hair which I want to live in the way you could live in a meadow of long sweet grass in summer and he’s saying something like, You’re unravelling, Lara. I can’t help the puffiness and my face burns up when he leans down and I don’t want him to touch me. In fact I kick in protest but my foot gets cut on a broken floor tile that comes flying out in a bad joke. He laughs as the blood gels and already I’m thinking how good it will feel to peel off the scab like lichen from a tree.
Get up will you, he says. It’s in my chest rattling now; I’ve got it all hollow. Come on, get up.
There’s his guitar there’s the song about us there’s the yummy smell of coconut. It would be funny to eat your own fingers. He finds the mustard jumper wraps it round the shoulders pulls me up all bare as Eve and there’s the key in the lock his ma coming home too early.
Please hang up and try again.
The things needing done, the shame of it.
The Weather Turns
[ a daily free write ]
The weather turns, ineluctable as that mist that mysteriously fogs up my glasses (Footnote: Why do I wear glasses? Something a man once said about parallax and the need for clarity of distance, the reassurance of one’s own substance). The city is a haze of something else today, foreign as a postcard marred with scratches of time and travel. Must I always be up to my neck in vapour, in unfinished melodies? They always catch: grooves on a record, gum on the pavement, hair snagged in a glue binding, specific as a bookmark; melody after melody. The notation would be very messy. I’m picturing spaghetti-tangles of quavers, misplaced on the staves with no home of their own. What of this note? oOoOooooooooOOOooOooaaAAAaaaaaAaoo……. Does it belong in the sonic realm of an F#? The problem is, I picture my life in A minor, every time. The soaring long echo of a siren call; so sad, so sad. Picture this, pretty fake glass vase, all containers of vapour, elaborated with black-printed Celtic patterns, impenetrable as ersatz ~internet~ Japanese.
One attempt at pottery is quite the attained luxury. I think I will try out something new. The raising of a blue hand in order to trace the pulse of purple veins. Not too bad for a hologram. This is sweet and clear and maybe okay. Like walking past the graveyard of pines. Must I call it that? Too long it has been since I’ve trailed through a cemetery. A habit picked up from my grandmother, I glance at the old headstones, my brain knotting in each line and crack and crumble. I forget dates; they fall away. When you realise that you are walking a few feet above the bodies of dead people, your heart does a turn and slips to your stomach. The ground is so soft and mossy. Flesh is a good fertiliser, it spreads lush bright vitamins to the soil. In fact, it might be quite nice to lie down in and dream.
If I slept in a graveyard, would I have reveries that channel the dead? It’s a distinct possibility, the amount of fragmentary matter that must float in the air like electricity. The hormone we release when we die: dimethyltryptamine, DMT. They say it makes us see fairies, elves and tunnels of light. Lost soulmates dwindling in the twining of shining limbs. Silver rings in a stranger’s nose. Near death, the liminal weirdness of the world crosses its own boundary. No wonder I have always loved the word psychotropic, its connotations of a spliced brain opening out like a Polly Pocket to uncover an island of swaying purple palms, a guava pink sea, an assortment of oozing neon beads. This great, gritty, sparkling geode. Would a brain like that bleed? Do brains in general even bleed? The lavish quality of this vision is undoubtedly a product of sugar cravings. The dangerous dip, the faint-headedness. Our bodies being an assortment of chemicals, it’s only natural that the synapses of our minds produce very queer imaginings indeed.
Pineal gland: essence of palm. The oil extract no longer lucrative in worldwide trade, though popular, cheap and downright nasty. Spread it on bread like honey and sweeten. It makes things swell, tighten.
Things to desire: serotonin, colour, daylight. There was a time where I substituted existence for an array of colours, the kind that come straight out the packet. The need for something pure and vivid, so vivid as to seem utterly distilled of all trace matter, was completely upon me. Splat after splat after splat. I could have squirted that colour on my tongue and hoped for the same result of a manic acid trip. I wanted to see the gravestones melt, the names shimmer and vaguely disappear, leaving scraps and lingerings of unfinished letters. Is it possible, really, that some expert kneeled in the moss and carved those names so beautifully?
Crack open the sky over the sea and tell me what you see. The bold aroma of a rainbow comes quickly and glows like some other sun is ripening behind it. A pale blue sun, perhaps, stolen from Mercury. Planets out there, swapping their radiations of time. Down below, the ocean groans under globules of oil, fat black spills which ooze and spread. Each secretion has its location hidden; sometimes gushing, sometimes slowly swirling. I think of butter melting into chocolate, ink being marbled in gelatinous jam. The favourite taste, all bonfires of strawberry. Some god is spinning the water with a cocktail stick, languid and bored like a hungry person in a bar, waiting for love. We hallucinate, don’t you see? There is a complete quality to what comes next, the fiery upturning of all this trace matter. Waste. Be flamboyant as an artwork. You pinch the thin skin of each of my fingers and the lightning shoots right through me.
Things to desire: rock pools of igneous glass, starfish, the dying white rose at the side of a grave.
I hear the knell from far away. Such tocsins call me back from the realm of the dead, though I am happy here, my body breaking down into succulent little pieces. The woman opposite me mutters litanies to herself; stickily, as if each word were cheaply enthroned in lipstick. Is there work still to be done? These days, I mix the colours. I like to see the vibrancy break down, meld into subtler hues, details you see only up close. The paint sticks in my brushes, the glitter of light in my lashes. It’s not mystifying anymore. The greyish haze is my outpourings of smoke, enough to cover the whole skyline, swallowing up what good is left of tomorrow. I inhale matter in wholes and halves. Like yesterday, it will be black (the city, that is): gilded, ink-ridden, brilliantly viscous. A whole ocean will roll from the distance and its golden ore will cover us, just so many bubbles of oil pasting our brains. For now, it rains.
***
London Thunder
We arrive at the bus station. It’s four in the morning and god knows why people are still here. Where I’m from, people are in their beds at this hour; the old folk know the truth of properly impenetrable slumber, even mothers draw brief glimpses of sleepy solace amidst the screams of their babies. Chimneys may shudder, walls may fall, but people will sleep. No, the folk where I’m from don’t haunt train stations, unless they’re homeless and know the secret places where you can hide from the rain. Benches scratched with ink and tip-ex, territorial markings. Nowhere to buy spray cans. Nothing interesting to hang around for. Here, I look around and all the same places flash in the ugly strip lights: a Starbucks, a sandwich bar, a Marks & Spencers. Nothing open, except some stand selling donuts, which smell fucking lovely even though I hate donuts. It’s that hot promise of oozy sugar, mouth-melting jam and fluffy fatty dough. Chewy. I can taste it, just as the guitars kick in, clean as the stars which god knows in this city you can’t see.
It’s cold. It’s the beginning of August and I’m homesick like the kid stuck at space camp.
It’s dark as hell in my head, that little sleep on the plane still safe, hovering over my thoughts like a shroud. It’s not all that dark outside; traffic passes, the neon from bars still aglow. Signs reflect back in headlights. I blink, rub my eyes. I have this sense of something vast and black. I want to close my eyes, imagine this spreading, seeping oil spill, disseminating its viscosity out over every surface, every gloss or gleam of grease, the echoes of footsteps melting, the pavements dissolving to nothing. I dream of an oil that is precisely that: nothing. It is matter as nothing, it is fat and black and coats everything, inevitably, inexorably. The chorus builds. I can hear something pulsing, a faint chime that cuts through all the sirens; when you pay attention, the littlest things cut through. You just have to pay attention, I’m telling you.
No water, no sound. I’m following someone else’s footsteps. People are everywhere, bumping and jostling, bags clattering on the vinyl floor, the cold stone steps, the deplorable concrete. Wouldn’t the oil flood over all of this, covering even the star speckled whiteness of gum? There is a lull, there is a slow progression of chords. There is a sense that…no. The sleep will not come back. I fall into it; I’m on the bus now, it’s slow thumping rhythm echoing the song. People get on and off; it goes and stops. I don’t know this place, or that. The high-rises are imprints, no longer there. Innumerable blurrings of nameless shops, bars, boutiques. You wouldn’t recognise them. It is all glass, sharp-cut and brilliant. In it, I see the bus. I don’t see my face. I never see my face…
And yet there is a crushing. The smoothness compresses back upon itself, like someone scrunching an aluminium can. I dream of a Diet Coke, fresh from some fridge-freezer, the snap of its top, crack, clack; the way the fizz bubbles fast in your throat. Mmmm, aspartame. I am in a room that is someone else’s. So sweet, so lonely. When they are gone to the bathroom, I get up to look out the window, a foreign sheet wrapped round my shoulders. I see more of the glass buildings, endlessly reflecting. I cannot see the window, nor my face. I’m waiting to return. It’s like vertigo, all the glass and all the lights. I miss the darkness. Sometimes when I’m in a room like this, lying on the crooked bed with my head far away, I think I hear the meteor showers. They come back again, silvers and silvers of them, lilting and sprinkling like the softest, most intangible fireworks. I have this memory of November 5th, ten years ago maybe, spinning round and round on a roundabout in a park in the middle of nowhere, the sky shattering above me but even then I’m so indifferent, just whirling, singing something very random, the scattering mess of everything swirling in my head. And I could fly off to the soft dark ground and let the darkness fall over me and god I wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t mind one bit, just the last gasp of a drowned sailor and that promise of a ————————-
Pieces of You
(Not the darkest thing that has happened today…)
Flash Fiction Challenge: Write a story in the form of a speech
On the bedspread, firstly you splayed out your brain. There were glitchy, silvery pieces which seemed to spark as I tried to touch them, startling me with static shocks. The wires were swelling, I could feel them still pulsing, every synapse snapping – even though you were dead. Dead as you needed to be, for what I was going to do.
You didn’t make a mess. There was a pureness to all your corporeal form; it did not expel itself, as it possibly should have. Like a clock out of joint, your heart still ticked, reaching its soft hissing snare as I clawed at the edges. I could have eaten your whole bloody heart. That was how it felt, the longing. I can hardly explain it.
Did you unravel, did you unshed yourself from your skin? This is the thing: in all the gore and clot of your muscles and blood, I could not find you. I scooped up the cells like caviar, kept them close to me in various unlabelled jars, but still I struggled for your essence. It seemed to elude the very materials, the particles that held it, bubbling and dancing but nonetheless should have held it. You tasted sour as iron, your skin became lurid and turquoise under the chandelier, whose diamond-like light picked up every pore. My longing was poisoned, this scarlet ore which poured from my body, making its frail emanations. Carefully, I pressed in the needles to preserve you. I saw my own skin, pink-fingered against your lovely pale cerulean. It was a crying shame; to have to touch you, to desecrate the grave where you clung to the world like gossamer caught on the winter-thin branch of a sycamore.
The air around us grew ambient. I say it like this: there were radio sounds, snatches from the ether, drowned-out voices lost at sea, the swirl and churn of arpeggios, piano notes scattered on a tidal swathe. I recalled a million conversations, little snippets of things that you’d said, speeches preserved in that nook of your head where nobody could reach but me, clawing and hungry for any debris. For how long had we lived inside one another? And now that hideous beauty, taken to its logical conclusion. I disentangled your veins, drew out the molluscs of your organs, pulled rust and pennies from your gut, scraped clean the bones of your ribcage—but always your soul slipped away. I left your heart to stew in the succulent juices of some noirish nectar, the dark spirit you had drank with unfailing alacrity.
Visitors passed in the following weeks, but nobody noticed. It was only I who heard those ethereal noises, sounds which slipped through my brain with a strange familiarity. Yet all the while I could not puzzle nor sew them together; they were nonsensical, constantly crackling, as unwanted as the seeds of raspberries curdled in jam. Your voice stuck in my teeth, so I could not speak.
And even if I took all your pieces, if I burned you bit by bit in the fire of my grate, would that actually destroy you? I suspect you’d live on, sparkling in the air of the apartment; your thoughts as slippery as the mysterious synths which the house spirits play in the fragments of glitter-tinged dust. God, how I wanted to just stick a fork in your flesh. How I longed for the scrawl of your hand, the curls and flourishes of lust. Now I have every perfect fragment, is it possible to believe that this is not love?
mariaology 