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i wrote a few pages of something last night, totally unrelated to the novel i'm writing (and should have been working on!) but then i kinda ran out of ideas and have really no idea why i wrote it or what i should do - short story? novella? abandon? which ideas do i keep exploring?
anyway, here it is - comments?
[no title yet]
The sound of black rubber gripping bitumen as it screams to be still, heating up to searing temperatures and giving off puffs of seemingly contradictory white smoke, is always a prelude. Often, one is thankful to one’s observed deity, the ejaculation of a thud is absent. Though absent, this anti-climax might be replaced by something more cruel; more serious. Imagine you are depressing a brake pedal, your car slowing from speed, its bonnet dipping under the force exerted, horizon teetering up from its plane at eye level and blood quickly draining from your face. I want you to feel like it is all under controlled circumstances, a clear patch of car park or an industrial estate at Christmas. And the summer is ended but the days are yet warm and you can swim, naked, in the river. A long way from a city street.
Polished wheels rolled freely across the smooth tarmac, spokes and reflectors a blur beneath the steady geometry of frame. Occasionally a rut skipped their beats, or a thicker road marking, an indent from too many trucks. They had picked up a good speed from the hill a block or so back and were pedalling gently over level ground in a high gear to maintain momentum. It wasn’t tiring and they were side by side, talking. He wore his helmet high over his long tied-up hair – both were white.
An albino, his bike too was the same transparent white of polar purity. Only the sticker of the maker, unsubtle blue, and smoky glass inside wide white frames protruded into the slick uncoloured machine flowing across the suburb. He had a rasp in his voice, suiting his face.
“… and the next evening we had to go back to get it. You would have painted the look on that poor bloke’s face!” His knees rose toward his white-gloved hands, then demurred; again and again. She was several colours: green pants and shoes, yellow and blue shirt, with a pink scarf tied at her neck. A lived-in look she effected, though a vitality too in the constant round of pedals. She wore no helmet and her auburn hair was short cut near her skull, almost bald.
“You should never have subjected the poor man to that. Shame, Potato.” She leaned into the wind and her face was turned up towards him. He was starting to steal ahead with his greater mass, they approached a slight incline. A bit forced now as she let herself be released, “Hey, did Erin get back to you about next month?” She noticed herself for a moment in a plate glass window that stood between her and a discounted range of new furniture.
“No.” He bent his neck to twist his answer back across his shoulder, the slow windmill of his calves ceased into an idle roll. “Yeah y’know, I was thinking last night she hadn’t. Thought I’d see her at Mal’s, but didn’t get t…” The screaming of tyres withdrew the next words from his mouth’s grasp. Instinct began to lean his bike across her path, but where else to go? Until the second law dispensed with his input and installed for him, this unforgiving fluid machine, a new trajectory above the road and frantic into the path of other traffic.
The vehicle inflicting the blow blocked her path now, her own wheels trying their ineffectual voice as she swirled undainty across the intersection they had ventured into, slipping now letting go falling sliding stopping at last against the driver’s door. He looked petrified. It was her final thought.
The ruckus of foreign substances grating against one another under the pressure of movement all stilled at once, like the circuitry in her silent brain. There existed then a space of intangible length, a marshmallow quiet stretched through flickering fields of images streaming infinitely into black and speckled eventually with motes teeming fractals of light across the retina that swallowed only the dull transparency of capillaries swilling the flesh with its fluids, eyelids: closed to the ensuing cause of hub-bub that cascaded from first the single notes of feet clacking on concrete, sustained by a chorus of sighs drawing breath in disbelief, into calls and wails and questions and confusion, so much confusion.
Potato wasn’t well, but his brain was active. He was become impure, gravel blackening his bleeding flesh through gaping tears in his white façade. So much impact, so little pain. Yet. A smile almost drifted across his lips, perhaps in search of water. Suddenly, he was thirsty. It was a warm afternoon, they said it would be 29 but it had felt hotter. No breeze, huh? If there were flags, they’d not show much, just colour. So much colour, really. White was a mask, what was behind his mask was Potato. And he wasn’t well at all.
The next eleven years, four months, three weeks and one day are passed over now. Inside that span, of arbitrary genesis, trillions of trillions of atoms collided, their constituent parts splintered, fused and broke apart again and again. Events occurred, collations of parts constituted into wholes like melodies coagulating around a rhythm then sliding away into forgotten tracts and replaced ever by new tunes, more music, atomic quintessence of sounds of harmony of discord of lies of truths of words of secrets of games and grind, meaning and intent, decisions and happenstance, accord and unanswered screams for help. All excised, unexplained; inexplicable. Where should I start?
“… to ask him where she was. He was in Tahlia’s room.”
The nurse at the desk was typing on a keypad of a laptop, her reports were coming along and it was quiet, usually utterly still at this time. Winter, outside the dark glass beyond the utilitarian interior of the ward, was soft and cold. Snow didn’t fall here often but she wondered, coming in to work a few hours ago, if maybe she’d see flakes sometime tonight or tomorrow. The clouds looked promising. She grew happier and stepped almost jauntily into the elevator, lighting up the button inscribed ‘14’ and watched the doors reach wuthering heights for one another. She was early again.
Now, from the dim shadows and ghostly luminance of monitor screens and cold fluourescence where an inert body lay, had lain for longer than her children had been, something drew her. A prescience of movement, an intuition? The heart was steady, the breath constant, and then, a voice; fine sandpaper over mahogany, and milky. Pink eyes opened.
Echoes are a phenomenon of sound, waves crashing into hard surfaces and rebounding resonant with the textures of their collision. Mythically, the calling of a duck, that squelching tremor of harsh urgency, does not play the same game, will not echo. But a thought, a past laid to rest long ago, a sliver of clarity inside a confused jumble of uncertainty, can echo. After instinct, we pick up the threads again and keep embroidering ourselves into more existence.
“Hello, Oliver. Who was in Tahlia’s room?” Catherine was placid, in white, cooing to an albino she watched over every night, like a mother hen. Wore soft soled white shoes, moving them so she could reach his hand. “Do you know where you are?”
Her hand touched his, still on the sheet, and another reached across and raised the level of light. His eyes peering into hers, then closing once more. She softened the light and drew her hands away. Catherine had news to broadcast.
“Dr Holbrook? I know it’s very early.” It was not yet four o’clock and, if either of them had been outside instead of cocooned inside an artificial warmth they would have felt the crystals of frost slowly encrusting them. It still might snow. “Oliver Murphy just woke up.” |
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