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Gentlefolk, any chance you could critique a wee piece I put together hastily for a uni application? Lemme know what you think-
It was a cold and unremarkable day in May when Charles Peter Welling realised he was in love. In all his short and unremarkable life he had never felt such elation. His every fibre burned with rich intensity and his heart leapt with the dawning of each new day.
In all truth, he had never bothered much with emotions at all: By some strange quirk of nature he had been born with no discernible personality. He was a charisma vacuum that could suck the energy from a room faster than a power cut.
As a child his parents had despaired. Endless pots of paint, a tricycle painted a smart cherry red and an expensive upright piano had all been bought to fire his creative urges. Charles instead preferred to spend his time alone in his room, poring over computer manuals and staring blankly at the walls. And yet, a docile nature and lack of charm had prepared him wonderfully for a life spent in the service of commerce. JJP and JP FastBuck had been swift to hire him out of Oxford and within a scarce few years he was tightly immersed among the cubicles and coffee machines, as uniform and anonymous as the pale blue shirt and grey suit in which he was always dressed.
Yet now, each morning was imbued with a new sense of purpose. The commute to work, once a weary trudge, had been redefined by an unparalleled sense of anticipation. While the faces that greeted him along the way had once been pitted and raw they now shone with a fantastic and angelic radiance. There was a beauty in the world to which he sensed he had long been blind: in the cold tarmac of car parks and the glistening tracks of escalator belts, the sterile emptiness of the air and the treacle-slow turning of the days. She was a beautiful creation, he mused, passing through the sliding doors and into the elevator: cold and firm, demanding of his time and short of speech. She ran his every waking moment, that was true, but in his heart he knew he could work no other way. There was no small grace in the carved elegance of her appearance or the simplicity of her control.
The lift opened with a ping and already he could see her across the office, waiting blank-face and patient on his desk. He straightened his tie and smoothed a stray lock of hair across his brow. She wouldn’t want him looking a mess, that was for sure. With a welcoming smile, he slipped into his cubicle and sat himself down beside her.
“Good morning, my darling” he whispered, leaning forward and pressing a hand against her cold, blank face, probing under her chin for the spot that brought her, purring, to life.
No response came.
Confused, he stared intently at her, desperately seeking out the source of her displeasure. In a moment he realised his mistake, reached down under the desk and with a calm flick switched on the power. A rasping whirr like a terrible intake of breath emanated from deep within. Humming, she awoke.
“Good morning, Welling C” she replied. His heart tossed and leapt in his chest.
“You have 4 messages. Read them please”, she commanded. He was pleased to oblige.
*****
He was working later and later, time pouring out of him like water from a punctured beaker. With no friends to speak of, no obligations outside those spent with her, he had woken more than once to find himself at his desk, mind having drifted off mid sentence into deep and obliging sleep. She breathed and insinuated herself into his every moment, whether waking or asleep. In his dreams he surrendered himself, delivered up to her hundreds of times over. Straying wires probed and kneaded his flesh: he was divided and split apart in a multitude of ways, consumed and inserted within her, lost and carried forth on a wave of pure energy.
*****
This morning as he woke he had no reason to believe that the day might pass unlike any other; the sun rose, pale and opaque in the sky, his train rolled in with familiar ease. The same passengers were there to people the carriage and share the journey with him. He made his way to work and stumbled into the office. The second he was inside he knew something had changed. His desk lay empty, stripped of essence: there was no trace of her to be found.
Heart in mouth, he rushed across the office and rapped on the manager’s door. His breath was fleeting and his pulse raced as never before: a sickness welled in the pit of his stomach, rose in gushing waves to burn the back of his throat. A round-faced man with a bushy moustache draped loosely over his top lip ushered Charles inside.
“Welling...is it?”
“I...”
“Oh, take a seat won’t you? T ea? Coffee?”
“That’s not what I..”
“ Calm down won’t you? You’re all out of sorts!... now, what’s the matter man?”
“I...uhm...where is she?”
“who?”
“My, uhm...she sits on my desk”
“Oh! Oh my! I see what you, uh, they’ve all gone as of today: out-dated, the lot of them. Boss has had them carted off to the dump.”
“Where?”
The dark was closing in by the time he found it, a valley cleaved deep into the face of the earth. Parking his car some way out, he opened and slammed the door behind him, running out from the car before the engine had even come to rest.
It was amongst the trees that he found her, perfect shell shattered and smeared with murky, anonymous muck. Her screen was cracked and broken, the wires and tubes beneath glistening with fresh fallen rain, stirring with insect life. She lay amidst a vast pile of debris that scarred the horizon a glittering and viscous black. Washing machines burst open and spilled mechanical guts, fridges lay with broken doors that lolled forth like flopping tongues. All about was the stench of loss and abandonment. In the distance an engine guttered and backfired, a flock of birds took flight at the sound. All else was silence.
He felt as if for a moment he had punctured through the map and fallen off the edge of the world. This was a place like no other, behind the scenes and through the looking glass. There was no graveyard here but a glistening, black monument to the rampaging advance of science, blind celebration of a runaway beast that tore apart and scattered all with impunity.
Brushing the tears from his eyes he marched forward.
As soon as was able he fell upon her, wrapping his arms about her and wiping what he could from her screen. Somehow, now, he felt something missing. In this new context she seemed absent, her power over him diminished. Suddenly, he was no longer in thrall to her but to the world, to time itself. In that moment he saw the skull beneath the skin, the fading of ages and the swelling of the oceans. Reflected in her screen no more was the unblinking presence that had bound his will and led him among the detritus, replaced by the all-seeing, all-conquering presence of nature itself. He felt its hand upon him and sensed, in the far distance, its slow approach.
Wiping the sadness from his face he lay on his back and placed himself, prostrate, pinioned beneath the sky. He gazed up at the stars, watching above with cold and yellow eyes. He wished that moment that he might be lost on the wind or swallowed beneath the mountains, written out of history altogether.
He pressed his head in his hands and with a sudden sense of great release, he wept as he had never wept before. The cold breath of the wind stirred and sighed in the middle distance, waving the trees all about him.
His tie plucked and buffeted about his neck in the breeze. |
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