Where the Wind Will Take Us
This short has been published in Gold Dust magazine
Issue 5 - December 2005
http://www.golddustmagazine.co.uk
Stare at my father.
In my teenage years he chased a boyfriend out of the house. He ran down the road with a rolled up newspaper. Glasses hung around his neck and slippers slapped against the tarmac. It was almost vaudeville. Was it so long ago?
Stare at my father.
He blew up my paddling pool in the summer or tickled me when I thought I was being funny. He’s shrivelled now and silent. His hands are placed on his lap. His skin is the same colour as the inside of the casket.
I’m a black dress, chipped nail varnish and tears. My brother comes up beside me and says nothing. We don’t get on. He looks like my father, so today I can forgive him for the way he treats me. Arms are lowered, he has learnt to shut up, at least until this is over. The quiet is everywhere. The sniffles and organ music cannot drown it.
“Everything happens for a reason,” said Gloria the Christian who lives next door. I wanted to take her gardening shears and snip her head off.
“How’s that for a reason?”
This was on the day we learnt my father was going to die. He was in recovery. Hope came back into our lives with a flush of health. We believed our father would get better, even when he said. “I’m not going to survive this.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I’d say and really mean it this time.
This was after the chemotherapy finished, when the skin stopped being grey. After his stomach was cut open. After tumours were removed and after the first phone call that turned my knuckles white. My eyes could not look at Gloria. A floral print begged for my attention and the shears were waiting. The clang of a dustbin lid was the only real answer. The chances of survival equalised before they dwindled. Despite the tumour’s malignancy or the number of lymph node glands it touched. My father could have come back. Who decided that he shouldn’t?
So I leave Gloria in her garden with her God.
My brother stands next to me in the funeral parlour. He doesn’t have to say anything. We both know we took him for granted, let our own lives get in the way. When the illness came we paid attention, but I guess it was too late by then.
Father always held onto our balloons despite the helium that pushed him away. We didn’t know that one day he would let go and leave them to the wind.
Photograph
This short has been published at the KEZINE website:
Issue 11. October 5 -17 2006
http://www.kezine.com/archives_iss_11.html
There’s evidence of another time, a perfect square of remembrance. Start in a palace of old toys and bad furnishing and turn the pages. You will get bigger. You will get older in every picture. Family holidays, birthday parties and weddings, this is your life as it’s told in the book, from childhood to adolescence you were the one standing at the back with funny hair, scowling amongst parental smiles.
And what happened to the photo-booth lovers? Ghosts framed in front of a ragged curtain, they smirked and gave themselves away. They would never look at you that way again; they would never look that way again for anyone.
The images will stop one day, but before they end you will get smaller just like the people that were bigger before you. You will shrivel and shrink. The eyes will dim and the smiles will no longer be there if you look hard enough. You will stand at the back with funny hair and a scowl that is there for a different reason. You will look at those photographs and notice you’ve already gone.
My Little Story Machine
This short has been published in The Broken City Magazine
Issue 2 - September 2008
http://www.geocities.com/thebrokencitymag/
There’s someone new in the group. A new hairstyle amongst the heads stands in the kitchen at your party. If we move a little closer, maybe get near to him we might hear some of his words.
This was the same person who climbed into the backseat of your taxi. They pushed you up towards the door handle until it embedded in your side. The driver would only take four but the extra passenger was persuasive and he changed his mind. That new dimension to the group, that additional amount of space, those few extra pounds forced you into union with a car door.
He’s leaning on your fridge freezer now playing with the label on his beer bottle. He’ll wonder where to put the soggy paper in a couple of seconds; it has already played out in your head. You lift the dustbin lid like you never noticed.
It’s a big gathering. Away from the kitchen people you know are sitting in the lotus position, on the floorboards, waiting for an empty chair. There’s somebody in the bathroom every thirty seconds. The toilet flushes and the people talk. There’s music on the stereo and there are words. Those little stories are recurring again.
In the collective mainframe of us there’s an archive of stories. Some reveal who we are and some try and reveal who we are. Some are more entertaining to the teller than the subject and are only told for the benefit of their own amusement. You wonder what is really being communicated here when those familiar tales appear once more.
Your own stories, you are sick of telling them, but given the right stimulus you can’t help yourself. It’s a reflexive action. It’s part of you now. An affliction ignited from an unknown place; you only know it is happening once it’s started and by then it is too late. The story has to be told. It doesn’t help that there’s a new person here, a fresh quarry to excite us, one that hasn’t yet been ruined by our continuous narratives.
One of your friends walks up to the fridge freezer and introduces himself.
“Hi I’m Mr Anecdote from the Yarn family.”
“Hi I’m Mr Fridge Freezer.”
Your ears are burning. In the atmosphere above the clouds of cigarette smoke and repeated sagas there’s an original conversation to be had. Mr Anecdote learns that he’s the new boyfriend of Ms Fable one of our oldest friends.
“How did you meet her then?” He says. It is the question on everybody’s lips.
Mr Fridge Freezer smiles and his eyes go all misty. “Well actually, it’s a funny story...”
You pour yourself another glass of wine and listen.
Charm Offensive
This story has been published in The Broken City Magazine
Issue 3 - Winter 2008
http://www.geocities.com/thebrokencitymag/
Jake was always over-friendly. He was the sort of person that addressed you by your first name in the most arbitrary of conversations. He made everyone feel at ease, or at least the centre of his attention. Jake had no problem with physical contact, a tap on the shoulder or a handshake was like a blink for him, and thanks to Jake we could maintain the most tedious of conversations, the sort of exchange I would go out of my way to avoid outside of the office.
“It’s Clare without the ‘i’”, said the new Temp.
“Really?” Said Jake.
“It’s not that unusual.”
“I know, I’m just used to writing it with the ‘i’”
“There’s thousands of Clare’s in this world Jake, some of them don’t even have an ‘e’.”
“Thankfully there’s only three of them in this office,” Jake said.
With Jake it felt good to have a dialogue like this, it was as if a gentle breeze divided the stolid office air and caressed my temples. This in itself was a tiny miracle. His place in the dynamic of our work made us sometimes forget the barrage of daily resentments that surfaced because we weren’t anywhere any of us wanted to be. The air conditioning would pipe out a mundane atmosphere regardless, and amongst the carpet tiles and strip lighting we were all damaged by the petty affects of middle management. But not Jake, he would genuinely smile at least once a minute for the whole day. It was always, “No problem,” or “I’ll do it right away,” with him. His influence was universal He was a rare breed under a shirt and tie.
I was employed with Jake in a typical office, the sort of place that is in the collective memory of everyone that has ever worked for a living. At some point in your life you will step into an office like this. To the general public it was civil service department, to us who worked here it was just an area where documents were delivered and stored. Like most of the other departments under the same governmental umbrella we prayed for the boredom to evaporate. And our section had Jake.
“How are you today?” He would say and I would rumble my generic non-committal answer. As easy as it was to keep the smile off my face there was a part of me that grinned. He was the answer to our prayers. Propped up with his veneer of optimism, had he constructed a convincing Eden outside of this office? Was he elevated on a menu of mood pills? Or was he constructed by our masters and wound up every morning like a clockwork toy to wheel himself between our desks?
What began as a curiosity stemmed by Jake’s apparent divinity, in relation to the company he kept, soon developed into uncertainty. We were all infected. Each of us in our own way grew a little smile inside of us because of him. I began to question this charity of character. It was inconceivable that he existed in the working environment he roamed, nay even in the city.
I began to look for the cracks that would lead to fissures and the eventual fault-line. A singular clue that he belonged to the same race as the rest of us. Me, I, the other more regular type of guy, regular in the fact that I couldn’t think of anything good about myself without having to sit down and really think about it.
For a brief spell I walked behind him. It wasn’t following, just hanging around after he left work. Short bursts of activity and over a minimal amount of distance, I’d chicken out when he got near public transport. It was difficult for me to keep up this pretence, acting in such a deliberate way without revealing myself. On occasion he’d notice my presence lagging behind him and look back jovially.
“Going my way tonight?” He’d shout back without a hint of suspicion.
Jake knew I lived on the other side of town, the side that we were both walking away from, but still his demeanour kept its permanence. I wasn’t made to be a stalker, so the delights of camouflage and night-vision goggles were suspended. But echoing another’s footsteps made me paranoid. Deviant behaviour wasn’t my speciality, at least not in such an outright manner and I clearly lacked the expertise to be successful. So I gave it up.
But I was still a curious about Jake. Given our working environment how could he sustain his level of super-human exuberance? When I woke, the first legible phrase that entered my mind was, “Oh no,” particularly on a weekday and then I would think about Jake. Considering that in those early pre-employment morning hours I’d sometimes think about masturbation, I attempted to ignore him. He got in the way of the way I liked to get my heart started and that didn’t make me happy. At the bedroom ceiling I’d shout, “Why don’t you go away?” and then in turn glance down towards my inert penis as if it was waiting for the right moment for him to leave. It never came.
What is fascinating about a man that is happy? It wasn’t such a perverse notion that an individual could be overly cheerful. But he carried his personality with such an impenetrable conviction that you’d suspect it wasn’t his persona after all. I would have drunk his bath water to find out how he did it. Instead he was handed to me on a plate along with silver service and a cake trolley.
Katherine, “Katherine with a K” as she was called, was a fairly recent addition to the workplace. She actually had the enthusiasm for her job that most of the interviewee’s lied about. She used phrases like “You Guys,” when referring to us all and everyone was a, “Darling,” on their own. Naturally our hero Jake gravitated towards her. We could all see the simulacra of character unfolding as she settled in. Both Jake and Katherine were animals of a rare breed. Their kind was maybe close to extinction but in the zoo of our work we were lucky enough to have two of them. Soon our office could open up into a world of fluffy pink bunnies and magical rainbows as they attacked the hegemony of work on two fronts. But this was to do with imagination, not reality. This parallel was mistaken as a rapport and was based on the familiarity of an office romance. Granted, they were similar animals and they had a mutual interest in one another but Jake didn’t latch onto her because he’d found a kindred spirit, in fact he discovered the very opposite. Katherine with a K had entered his territory as a rival.
Battle commenced. We were fooled because the conflict was never overt; it was conducted in the same polite good-humoured manner that had afflicted them from the start, but there was an undercurrent of malice. I noticed it first of course.
When Katherine said, “Hello darling,” the bayonets were drawn.
When Jake said, “How are you Katherine?” his cannons were loaded.
The fuses were lit with a “Are you coping with all that work?”
And her troops moved into position with an, “Of course.”
All questions answered without a single tone of defensiveness.
“Do you want me to help you with anything?”
“No I think I’m doing just fine here.”
“Good, just making sure you’re settling in alright.”
“Why thank you Jake, you’re so considerate.”
“No problem.”
Exchanges like this, these little stabbing motions were disguised with a mannered language, the sort of language that existed out of the context of Katherine and Jake as a pleasant conversation. They conducted themselves in pleasantries such as these many times before clocking off and observing the minutiae of these exchanges it was apparent to me that their words were nothing other than the ingredients of a war.
Jake sometimes offered Katherine a coffee and she was wise to refuse. He would have got her a cup of the brown liquid that belched out of the machine in the corridor that has probably been there since 1972, the same machine with faded ink symbols that were supposed to represent what was inside but didn’t even resemble the selection of muck that fell into your cup. Katherine knew what he was up to, even if the coffee machine company had re-branded the product and placed the word ‘SHIT’ in bold letters on the front of it. Jake couldn’t make her drink shit, not with sugar, lemon or milk.
Katherine offered to photocopy files for Jake, but every time she fed his sheets into the apparatus they came back smudged and wonky. “I don’t know what went wrong there,” she’d say and he would have to accept them. “Don’t worry, I’ll try again later,” he said, knowing how to return the favour with the franking machine.
Everyone else in the office was too absorbed to notice the combat in their midst. My companions were hidden away behind a pile of imminent tasks that only they could imagine. But then Jake’s campaign mounted a surprise attack. He crossed the boundaries that both he and the enemy had set with a smiles and kind words.
I’ve never seen Jake act in a clumsy way ever; his nimble fingers were meticulous and his limbs were in all the correct positions. He could have moonlighted as a waiter at the most congested of restaurants. On countless occasions he’d carry more coffee mugs or paper folders than the average man in a suit and never was an item dropped. That was until a Friday when the last battle took place in the few minutes before the workers left for the weekend.
Katherine had re-arranged her make up with some of the other women in the office. The collective snap of the metal clasps, of handbags and of make-up bags, would always resound at this time. Of course Jake had timed the incident perfectly. Walking towards her with a mug of coffee, as if passing, he lodged a foot under a protruding chair leg, tripped and fell right down in front of Katherine with a K just as she was applying her mascara. Her eyes were locked into her little mirror, her defences were down and she was unprepared.
“What the…”
Jake didn’t touch her but the contents of the mug did. Her blouse turned into a stained and transparent piece of wet fabric and her hair became a birds-nest holding dirty raindrops. The mascara brush was far away enough from her eye as he fell, but the accident could have been worse. To Katherine with a K it was bad enough. She was drenched.
“I’m so sorry,” Jake said.
Then I saw it. In an instant they both looked at each other with the correct amount of venom. Hate was behind the face and it twinkled in their eyes. It was the singular moment of truth in all of this, when animal reaction overtook the sophistication of personality. But it was a mere moment and in another instant their features switched back to their default modes. They both were too aware of the lucid.
“I really didn’t mean to..”
Jake started a mock mopping action. In silence Katherine got up from her chair and walked towards the bathroom. It was over.
We stood around like freeze framed statues in an aftermath and watched Jake dab her desk with the most pathetic of tissues. Brains whirred like faulty alarm clocks and something passed between my workmates and me. To the ones without the awareness it was simply the shock of an incident, to others it was the presentation of Jake as a normal human being and one who made mistakes. That in itself was shocking. In the end, to most of the employees it was just a clumsy accident like all the other numerous calamities that peppered our occupation.
After the Friday soaking incident Katherine became like the rest of us. Gathering the standard amount of adjectives to describe her profession she metamorphosed into the bored and jaded Katherine with a K that we all came to know and understand.
Jake resumed his former role. He fed off of her dwindling enthusiasm and like a jovial parasite and she gave him the power he needed for free when she couldn’t avoid him. I guess his behaviour haunted Katherine with a K. Maybe it reminded her of the former person she used to be.
But did Jake really win? This episode revealed more about him than he would have liked, to the workers his employers and even to himself, but still he continued to wear that familiar face. After the drenching we all began to notice it, maybe the mask had slipped a little, enough for us to see the straps holding it in place? But in the realm of a hollow victory, Jake continued as if nothing had happened.
It could have been seen as a superfluous affair, as meaningless as the bland incidents that occurred in every office hour. The death of Katherine with a K’s was consistent with the demise of spirit we had all witnessed. An accident can sometimes be just an accident but in watching Jake I could no longer take him at face value. I saw the mask that pleased everyone so much that his real face was long forgotten.
This story has been published in The Broken City Magazine
Issue 3 - Winter 2008
http://www.geocities.com/thebrokencitymag/
Jake was always over-friendly. He was the sort of person that addressed you by your first name in the most arbitrary of conversations. He made everyone feel at ease, or at least the centre of his attention. Jake had no problem with physical contact, a tap on the shoulder or a handshake was like a blink for him, and thanks to Jake we could maintain the most tedious of conversations, the sort of exchange I would go out of my way to avoid outside of the office.
“It’s Clare without the ‘i’”, said the new Temp.
“Really?” Said Jake.
“It’s not that unusual.”
“I know, I’m just used to writing it with the ‘i’”
“There’s thousands of Clare’s in this world Jake, some of them don’t even have an ‘e’.”
“Thankfully there’s only three of them in this office,” Jake said.
With Jake it felt good to have a dialogue like this, it was as if a gentle breeze divided the stolid office air and caressed my temples. This in itself was a tiny miracle. His place in the dynamic of our work made us sometimes forget the barrage of daily resentments that surfaced because we weren’t anywhere any of us wanted to be. The air conditioning would pipe out a mundane atmosphere regardless, and amongst the carpet tiles and strip lighting we were all damaged by the petty affects of middle management. But not Jake, he would genuinely smile at least once a minute for the whole day. It was always, “No problem,” or “I’ll do it right away,” with him. His influence was universal He was a rare breed under a shirt and tie.
I was employed with Jake in a typical office, the sort of place that is in the collective memory of everyone that has ever worked for a living. At some point in your life you will step into an office like this. To the general public it was civil service department, to us who worked here it was just an area where documents were delivered and stored. Like most of the other departments under the same governmental umbrella we prayed for the boredom to evaporate. And our section had Jake.
“How are you today?” He would say and I would rumble my generic non-committal answer. As easy as it was to keep the smile off my face there was a part of me that grinned. He was the answer to our prayers. Propped up with his veneer of optimism, had he constructed a convincing Eden outside of this office? Was he elevated on a menu of mood pills? Or was he constructed by our masters and wound up every morning like a clockwork toy to wheel himself between our desks?
What began as a curiosity stemmed by Jake’s apparent divinity, in relation to the company he kept, soon developed into uncertainty. We were all infected. Each of us in our own way grew a little smile inside of us because of him. I began to question this charity of character. It was inconceivable that he existed in the working environment he roamed, nay even in the city.
I began to look for the cracks that would lead to fissures and the eventual fault-line. A singular clue that he belonged to the same race as the rest of us. Me, I, the other more regular type of guy, regular in the fact that I couldn’t think of anything good about myself without having to sit down and really think about it.
For a brief spell I walked behind him. It wasn’t following, just hanging around after he left work. Short bursts of activity and over a minimal amount of distance, I’d chicken out when he got near public transport. It was difficult for me to keep up this pretence, acting in such a deliberate way without revealing myself. On occasion he’d notice my presence lagging behind him and look back jovially.
“Going my way tonight?” He’d shout back without a hint of suspicion.
Jake knew I lived on the other side of town, the side that we were both walking away from, but still his demeanour kept its permanence. I wasn’t made to be a stalker, so the delights of camouflage and night-vision goggles were suspended. But echoing another’s footsteps made me paranoid. Deviant behaviour wasn’t my speciality, at least not in such an outright manner and I clearly lacked the expertise to be successful. So I gave it up.
But I was still a curious about Jake. Given our working environment how could he sustain his level of super-human exuberance? When I woke, the first legible phrase that entered my mind was, “Oh no,” particularly on a weekday and then I would think about Jake. Considering that in those early pre-employment morning hours I’d sometimes think about masturbation, I attempted to ignore him. He got in the way of the way I liked to get my heart started and that didn’t make me happy. At the bedroom ceiling I’d shout, “Why don’t you go away?” and then in turn glance down towards my inert penis as if it was waiting for the right moment for him to leave. It never came.
What is fascinating about a man that is happy? It wasn’t such a perverse notion that an individual could be overly cheerful. But he carried his personality with such an impenetrable conviction that you’d suspect it wasn’t his persona after all. I would have drunk his bath water to find out how he did it. Instead he was handed to me on a plate along with silver service and a cake trolley.
Katherine, “Katherine with a K” as she was called, was a fairly recent addition to the workplace. She actually had the enthusiasm for her job that most of the interviewee’s lied about. She used phrases like “You Guys,” when referring to us all and everyone was a, “Darling,” on their own. Naturally our hero Jake gravitated towards her. We could all see the simulacra of character unfolding as she settled in. Both Jake and Katherine were animals of a rare breed. Their kind was maybe close to extinction but in the zoo of our work we were lucky enough to have two of them. Soon our office could open up into a world of fluffy pink bunnies and magical rainbows as they attacked the hegemony of work on two fronts. But this was to do with imagination, not reality. This parallel was mistaken as a rapport and was based on the familiarity of an office romance. Granted, they were similar animals and they had a mutual interest in one another but Jake didn’t latch onto her because he’d found a kindred spirit, in fact he discovered the very opposite. Katherine with a K had entered his territory as a rival.
Battle commenced. We were fooled because the conflict was never overt; it was conducted in the same polite good-humoured manner that had afflicted them from the start, but there was an undercurrent of malice. I noticed it first of course.
When Katherine said, “Hello darling,” the bayonets were drawn.
When Jake said, “How are you Katherine?” his cannons were loaded.
The fuses were lit with a “Are you coping with all that work?”
And her troops moved into position with an, “Of course.”
All questions answered without a single tone of defensiveness.
“Do you want me to help you with anything?”
“No I think I’m doing just fine here.”
“Good, just making sure you’re settling in alright.”
“Why thank you Jake, you’re so considerate.”
“No problem.”
Exchanges like this, these little stabbing motions were disguised with a mannered language, the sort of language that existed out of the context of Katherine and Jake as a pleasant conversation. They conducted themselves in pleasantries such as these many times before clocking off and observing the minutiae of these exchanges it was apparent to me that their words were nothing other than the ingredients of a war.
Jake sometimes offered Katherine a coffee and she was wise to refuse. He would have got her a cup of the brown liquid that belched out of the machine in the corridor that has probably been there since 1972, the same machine with faded ink symbols that were supposed to represent what was inside but didn’t even resemble the selection of muck that fell into your cup. Katherine knew what he was up to, even if the coffee machine company had re-branded the product and placed the word ‘SHIT’ in bold letters on the front of it. Jake couldn’t make her drink shit, not with sugar, lemon or milk.
Katherine offered to photocopy files for Jake, but every time she fed his sheets into the apparatus they came back smudged and wonky. “I don’t know what went wrong there,” she’d say and he would have to accept them. “Don’t worry, I’ll try again later,” he said, knowing how to return the favour with the franking machine.
Everyone else in the office was too absorbed to notice the combat in their midst. My companions were hidden away behind a pile of imminent tasks that only they could imagine. But then Jake’s campaign mounted a surprise attack. He crossed the boundaries that both he and the enemy had set with a smiles and kind words.
I’ve never seen Jake act in a clumsy way ever; his nimble fingers were meticulous and his limbs were in all the correct positions. He could have moonlighted as a waiter at the most congested of restaurants. On countless occasions he’d carry more coffee mugs or paper folders than the average man in a suit and never was an item dropped. That was until a Friday when the last battle took place in the few minutes before the workers left for the weekend.
Katherine had re-arranged her make up with some of the other women in the office. The collective snap of the metal clasps, of handbags and of make-up bags, would always resound at this time. Of course Jake had timed the incident perfectly. Walking towards her with a mug of coffee, as if passing, he lodged a foot under a protruding chair leg, tripped and fell right down in front of Katherine with a K just as she was applying her mascara. Her eyes were locked into her little mirror, her defences were down and she was unprepared.
“What the…”
Jake didn’t touch her but the contents of the mug did. Her blouse turned into a stained and transparent piece of wet fabric and her hair became a birds-nest holding dirty raindrops. The mascara brush was far away enough from her eye as he fell, but the accident could have been worse. To Katherine with a K it was bad enough. She was drenched.
“I’m so sorry,” Jake said.
Then I saw it. In an instant they both looked at each other with the correct amount of venom. Hate was behind the face and it twinkled in their eyes. It was the singular moment of truth in all of this, when animal reaction overtook the sophistication of personality. But it was a mere moment and in another instant their features switched back to their default modes. They both were too aware of the lucid.
“I really didn’t mean to..”
Jake started a mock mopping action. In silence Katherine got up from her chair and walked towards the bathroom. It was over.
We stood around like freeze framed statues in an aftermath and watched Jake dab her desk with the most pathetic of tissues. Brains whirred like faulty alarm clocks and something passed between my workmates and me. To the ones without the awareness it was simply the shock of an incident, to others it was the presentation of Jake as a normal human being and one who made mistakes. That in itself was shocking. In the end, to most of the employees it was just a clumsy accident like all the other numerous calamities that peppered our occupation.
After the Friday soaking incident Katherine became like the rest of us. Gathering the standard amount of adjectives to describe her profession she metamorphosed into the bored and jaded Katherine with a K that we all came to know and understand.
Jake resumed his former role. He fed off of her dwindling enthusiasm and like a jovial parasite and she gave him the power he needed for free when she couldn’t avoid him. I guess his behaviour haunted Katherine with a K. Maybe it reminded her of the former person she used to be.
But did Jake really win? This episode revealed more about him than he would have liked, to the workers his employers and even to himself, but still he continued to wear that familiar face. After the drenching we all began to notice it, maybe the mask had slipped a little, enough for us to see the straps holding it in place? But in the realm of a hollow victory, Jake continued as if nothing had happened.
It could have been seen as a superfluous affair, as meaningless as the bland incidents that occurred in every office hour. The death of Katherine with a K’s was consistent with the demise of spirit we had all witnessed. An accident can sometimes be just an accident but in watching Jake I could no longer take him at face value. I saw the mask that pleased everyone so much that his real face was long forgotten.
Over Weight
This short story has been published in Scifantastic magazine
Issue 4 - Spring 2006
http://scifantasticmag.co.uk
I have to admit it to myself that I’m overweight. It’s obvious to everyone else. On occasion I catch a glimpse of my roly-poly frame reflected in windows - in the windows of cake shops and bakeries and fast food restaurants. When this happens it’s best to look away and focus on more pleasant things, like eating. I cannot ignore my physical presence and sometimes I have to go into a frenzy of consumption just to quell the tide of self-loathing. So in the end it all comes back to stuffing my face.
If I’m honest about it there’s no feeling of contentment after a large meal, in fact I feel quite morose when it’s all finished. It is the pure animal pleasure that I enjoy the most. To get lost in gratification when the motor functions work on automatic and the chomping and swallowing takes on its own rhythm. In this process there is no thought, the animal in me rises I black out, only later to wake again and in front of an empty plate. The problem is when I’m not eating I’m hungry and when it gets really bad and the desire to digest overtakes me I wish I could dislocate my jaw and just pile it all in without chewing.
Deep down under these folds of flesh there’s part of me that knows I am a porker. Deluded by the cut of my clothes I’m never to wear stripes and you’ll always see me in black. I can convince myself that that this body is losing weight and create little fictions based on well-known facts. The body burns up calories even when it is still apparently. It’s easy to persuade myself I’m burning calories, even when getting off my armchair to walk to the kitchen and walk back again with a sausage roll in my hand. In the bathroom mirror my eyes look for signs that don’t exist. Stretching my head upwards the rolls of fat unfold from under my neck and give me a more pleasing appearance. But in reality the mirror shows a fat face, not a fat face getting thinner.
So when did I become so aware? I used to bumble along quite happily in my own little world thinking about my next meal. It was simple for me to ignore the gibes and the looks and even accept the impossibility of an intimate relationship. The fat girls in town found me unattractive and they will continue to do so. They were big girls too, but they never let themselves go as much as I did. Anyway my desires were directed elsewhere, towards a place more within my reach, within the reach of my mouth. A thick hide had formed, both physically and mentally and despite the odd lapse nothing happened outright to change everything in such a definite way as it did later on.
The process was a gradual one. A small perception slipped in and then multiplied and in time spread over my mind. It’s not that I started to feel too big, rather that the space around me seemed to be getting smaller. The senses are cruel bastards and they should never be trusted but there was still a distinct change. The relationship between this bulk of mine and the exterior world altered and my insides moved about in ways I was not familiar with. My stomach squirmed in new cycles and spluttered like a self-conscious machine. Something had awoken in me.
For the first time I bought some bathroom scales. The truth lay in the digits found beneath my stumpy toes once the dial stopped whirring around and around. For all the wrong reasons the results were shocking. I was exactly the weight I thought I was.
Anticipating a heavier burden disappointment followed the instant my feet came off the contraption, but the numbers were clear to see. By the time my feet were squeezed back in their shoes I felt anxious and angry too. A whole gamut of emotions housed themselves within me. I felt different, this world felt different. This hulk still bumped into furniture and had trouble on a flight of stairs as it always did but there was a new sense of unease attached to tendencies I had long since learned to live with. This consciousness was evolving. However my exterior looked the same.
The inclination was to crush these emotions with a tidal wave of food. A tried and tested formula and the only answer at hand to someone of my experience. So I laid on a banquet fit for Elvis. The courses ran to double figures and stretched across the length of my heaving dining table. The food looked so ripe there sitting in its bowls. Every kind of potato from roasted to boiled to mashed sat with a fine collection of birds, they all sweated in their own fats. Hot meats with crackling, cold meats with seasoning; side dishes with sauces and boats full of gravy. And to finish a legion of puddings slopped in their dishes next to ice cream mountain ranges, sprinkled with chocolate rain and bordered between fields of sponge cake.
It was going to be a meal like no other.
But the delight lasted for a short time. As irrational as it seemed my pleasure was taken over by an invasion of apprehension. I felt as if I feared the food as if another person was looking out from behind my eyes. It was a rather large amount and these alien emotions were confusing, but why should I fear the food? There was only one left thing to do. I picked up a fork, stabbed at a chicken and tore off its greasy breast. Then I was gone, set adrift in gluttony.
The poultry took an hour to consume. An elephant’s graveyard of bird carcasses scattered themselves before the full plates like a sacrificial offering. My sausage shaped fingers stirred towards the sausages positioned at the end of the table and this caused me to move for the first time since opening my mouth but as I stretched forward my organs gurgled in an odd way. I sat back down and then I got up again, my hands paused before the salvation of a Cumberland ring. It was a small instance, a mere pause, but in retrospect an important one.
Later when the puddings made themselves aware to me the stomach revolutions picked up pace and they turned over so much I had to stop and sit back and I never ever stop when I get to dessert. Inside me an unwelcome interruptions moved independently of my gorging, but I continued to scoff like nothing was happening. Half way through the cakes my inner workings became a washing machine on a spin cycle and something happened to stop me eating altogether. My stomach spoke with a voice.
“Help me,” it said.
I looked around. I wiped some cream from the corner of my mouth.
“Please stop.”
The sound was quiet and muffled. The guts moved around in violent cycles, they tumbled and divided and made noises that no man should hear coming from his own body. Looking down at the even sphere masquerading as a waistline I realised the voice wasn’t coming from anywhere in the room or my head.
“Let me out,” the voice said.
Lurching backwards with absolute panic the chair crumbled under my weight. Blood drained from my flabby face and wood snapped like kindling to make me an insect on its back. Scrambling for a better position my flesh got in the way of me finding my feet as it always did and I was close to the point of hyperventilation with one hand in a bowl of horseradish sauce and the other gripping a clump of cabbage. The tablecloth came with me on this journey, the floor was littered with half eaten stain making carcases, this alone was enough to upset me, but there wasn’t a chance to curse. The battle in my abdomen continued and picked up its pace. The organs were parting now, like the drawing of a curtain. Alarm increased along with the heavy breathing, hiccupping short machine gun breaths my heart told me about death. This was another sphere now away from the joy of digestion.
“Let me out,” the voice said again. It was louder, not as muffled as before. The guts took a fierce push; there was plenty of room in me for such a passage. Stumbling from the table I doubled over and fell into the adjoining lounge. With pain and dread punctuated by strange slithering sensations, the process took control. Once on my knees something pulled at my throat and I retched a thousand colours from mouth. A combination of meals spilled out onto the carpet before me. This body was making room.
A big lump climbed up from my stomach. It convulsed in an unnatural fashion and ascended. Skin stretched and folds straightened out. Something undulated upwards and I got one of my wishes. With a crack my mouth snapped open wide and dislocated itself from my jaw.
The pulling sensation increased and objects scratched around like fingers in my gullet. By the time the crawling reached my mouth something hooked itself around the outside my lips. It could have only been fingers. Coughing and choking I clamped my eyes shut and let my body continue. There was only the wait for this to end. Then in this interval as soft and unsettled objects climbed inside me I remembered. My body was doing as it had done before but at my own hand. It was compensating for my desires.
I wasn’t always fat. There was a time when my jacket didn’t look like a duvet or my legs weren’t housed in tent-like trousers. Back in my youth my attire had no aerodynamic properties, the fabric wasn’t stretched enough. Underneath my clothes I looked like everyone else. Limbs were slim and there was only one chin on my face. I was what skinny people called normal. But in this life my love affair with food has been constant. I was the infant that didn’t need choo choo noises or an aeroplane spoon to eat and later on I was the good boy that ate all his greens, much to the amazement of my vegetable hating friends. It all got wolfed down. Spoonful after spoonful went in but it didn’t cause me to become a tubby boy, maybe it was hyperactivity linked to a fast metabolism, a childhood of shouting and running and playing? The activity certainly burnt up the calories.
Then on the eve of adolescence the transformations began. Those cakes and sweets between meals never ruined my appetite, as mother’s always said they would, they started to ruin something else. At thirteen the first layer of extra flesh appeared hanging over a loosened belt. It was a surprise but then again so were the new delights of acne and body hair that sprung up at the same time. The next few years were not the best of times. Buttons popped and launched themselves into the air, zips were broken. I had to take control of this affliction before my shirts ripped in two. Diets seemed unreasonable but I found another way to manage this curse. I stuck my fingers down my throat.
Thus began the binge and purge cycle of my teens, too in love with food to stop eating but too aware to really let myself go. My skin was a strange land, unwanted gardens of hair appeared in places where there were deserts and a swelling hill rose from the flats. On this new terrain the only place that would accept my influence was my belly. Self image is important to a teenager, but my actions were conducted out of necessity not depression, not once did I feel sorry for myself, this wasn’t a case of bulimia just an act of compensation. My fellow classmates binged on drugs and alcohol and then vomited regularly, I had my face in the trough and my head on the porcelain, the product may have been different but the action was the same. Laxatives weren’t out of the question either or even enemas, the weight, the over weight, as such always ended up floating in the bottom of a toilet bowl.
As adulthood approached this routine of excessive ingestion an expulsion began to grow tiresome. Besides these evacuations can destroy the teeth and they were needed. The experience of years told me that this was a useless pursuit and as my energy levels waned so did my resolve. My new adult physicality established itself along with the contentment of maturity, given enough time I was sure I’d settle in equal measure to being overweight. This life of mine wasn’t meant to be spent on bathroom floors, it was meant for the dinner table. So at the age of eighteen my forced discharges concluded not with a fanfare but with the final flush of a lavatory. Naturally the eating continued and before long the slim version of me was lost forever, submerged into a rotund figure as if it was being eaten up by the enveloping flesh. I became overweight.
So there I was compensating again, hunched over and kneeling, choking and hacking, waiting for it all to come out. Except this time it was different, the surplus inside seemed capable of suffocating me, it felt large enough. The flesh expanded and contracted simultaneously, the adrenalin took care of the pain and my eyes shut under a spell of self inflicted darkness. I waited for the inevitable. My disjointed jaw got wider and wider as the breath got shorter and then the black came.
It wasn’t death because I awoke. The final pushes, the peak of the horror, the experience of internal contents crawling out of a dislocated jaw were distant, surrendered and assuaged by a shutdown. It was a brief moment but I was thankful for it. My body deflated like a loose sack; my consciousness stirred, the birth was over.
Arranged on the carpet like a corpse my eyes opened and my ears listened. Outside of me now there was a new sound quivering and squelching on the floor, one that was wet and alive. Focusing on an object near an armchair my eyes bulged in their sockets. A damp arm appeared clasping the material and a foot scuffed the tasselled hem, both appendages left an oily trail. The shape stretched itself out and limbs creaked and unfastened for the first time. A bulk of unrecognisable dimension, slim and evenly proportioned blinked under a film of glistening bodily fluids. Laying there quite helpless this figure produced a face and when it turned towards me I understood.
This is why I have become so self conscious and why I have to admit I’m overweight. There was ultimate proof. Not some half glanced reflection or a public snigger that could be denied. What rested before me was a creature with the same face as mine and the only difference between the two of us was the weight. It was very same person devoured by my flesh all those years ago. He was slender and I am obese. He was an inverted mirror to my past. Maybe inside every fat person there really is a thin one trying to get out?
And how did I deal with this great revelation? By disposing of the evidence of course. I might be fat but I didn’t need this constant reminder. My life had changed in ways that were irredeemable despite any compensation. So with new found skill I dislocated my jaw and opened my mouth wide. I ate him, or rather the other version me back up again.
Issue 4 - Spring 2006
http://scifantasticmag.co.uk
I have to admit it to myself that I’m overweight. It’s obvious to everyone else. On occasion I catch a glimpse of my roly-poly frame reflected in windows - in the windows of cake shops and bakeries and fast food restaurants. When this happens it’s best to look away and focus on more pleasant things, like eating. I cannot ignore my physical presence and sometimes I have to go into a frenzy of consumption just to quell the tide of self-loathing. So in the end it all comes back to stuffing my face.
If I’m honest about it there’s no feeling of contentment after a large meal, in fact I feel quite morose when it’s all finished. It is the pure animal pleasure that I enjoy the most. To get lost in gratification when the motor functions work on automatic and the chomping and swallowing takes on its own rhythm. In this process there is no thought, the animal in me rises I black out, only later to wake again and in front of an empty plate. The problem is when I’m not eating I’m hungry and when it gets really bad and the desire to digest overtakes me I wish I could dislocate my jaw and just pile it all in without chewing.
Deep down under these folds of flesh there’s part of me that knows I am a porker. Deluded by the cut of my clothes I’m never to wear stripes and you’ll always see me in black. I can convince myself that that this body is losing weight and create little fictions based on well-known facts. The body burns up calories even when it is still apparently. It’s easy to persuade myself I’m burning calories, even when getting off my armchair to walk to the kitchen and walk back again with a sausage roll in my hand. In the bathroom mirror my eyes look for signs that don’t exist. Stretching my head upwards the rolls of fat unfold from under my neck and give me a more pleasing appearance. But in reality the mirror shows a fat face, not a fat face getting thinner.
So when did I become so aware? I used to bumble along quite happily in my own little world thinking about my next meal. It was simple for me to ignore the gibes and the looks and even accept the impossibility of an intimate relationship. The fat girls in town found me unattractive and they will continue to do so. They were big girls too, but they never let themselves go as much as I did. Anyway my desires were directed elsewhere, towards a place more within my reach, within the reach of my mouth. A thick hide had formed, both physically and mentally and despite the odd lapse nothing happened outright to change everything in such a definite way as it did later on.
The process was a gradual one. A small perception slipped in and then multiplied and in time spread over my mind. It’s not that I started to feel too big, rather that the space around me seemed to be getting smaller. The senses are cruel bastards and they should never be trusted but there was still a distinct change. The relationship between this bulk of mine and the exterior world altered and my insides moved about in ways I was not familiar with. My stomach squirmed in new cycles and spluttered like a self-conscious machine. Something had awoken in me.
For the first time I bought some bathroom scales. The truth lay in the digits found beneath my stumpy toes once the dial stopped whirring around and around. For all the wrong reasons the results were shocking. I was exactly the weight I thought I was.
Anticipating a heavier burden disappointment followed the instant my feet came off the contraption, but the numbers were clear to see. By the time my feet were squeezed back in their shoes I felt anxious and angry too. A whole gamut of emotions housed themselves within me. I felt different, this world felt different. This hulk still bumped into furniture and had trouble on a flight of stairs as it always did but there was a new sense of unease attached to tendencies I had long since learned to live with. This consciousness was evolving. However my exterior looked the same.
The inclination was to crush these emotions with a tidal wave of food. A tried and tested formula and the only answer at hand to someone of my experience. So I laid on a banquet fit for Elvis. The courses ran to double figures and stretched across the length of my heaving dining table. The food looked so ripe there sitting in its bowls. Every kind of potato from roasted to boiled to mashed sat with a fine collection of birds, they all sweated in their own fats. Hot meats with crackling, cold meats with seasoning; side dishes with sauces and boats full of gravy. And to finish a legion of puddings slopped in their dishes next to ice cream mountain ranges, sprinkled with chocolate rain and bordered between fields of sponge cake.
It was going to be a meal like no other.
But the delight lasted for a short time. As irrational as it seemed my pleasure was taken over by an invasion of apprehension. I felt as if I feared the food as if another person was looking out from behind my eyes. It was a rather large amount and these alien emotions were confusing, but why should I fear the food? There was only one left thing to do. I picked up a fork, stabbed at a chicken and tore off its greasy breast. Then I was gone, set adrift in gluttony.
The poultry took an hour to consume. An elephant’s graveyard of bird carcasses scattered themselves before the full plates like a sacrificial offering. My sausage shaped fingers stirred towards the sausages positioned at the end of the table and this caused me to move for the first time since opening my mouth but as I stretched forward my organs gurgled in an odd way. I sat back down and then I got up again, my hands paused before the salvation of a Cumberland ring. It was a small instance, a mere pause, but in retrospect an important one.
Later when the puddings made themselves aware to me the stomach revolutions picked up pace and they turned over so much I had to stop and sit back and I never ever stop when I get to dessert. Inside me an unwelcome interruptions moved independently of my gorging, but I continued to scoff like nothing was happening. Half way through the cakes my inner workings became a washing machine on a spin cycle and something happened to stop me eating altogether. My stomach spoke with a voice.
“Help me,” it said.
I looked around. I wiped some cream from the corner of my mouth.
“Please stop.”
The sound was quiet and muffled. The guts moved around in violent cycles, they tumbled and divided and made noises that no man should hear coming from his own body. Looking down at the even sphere masquerading as a waistline I realised the voice wasn’t coming from anywhere in the room or my head.
“Let me out,” the voice said.
Lurching backwards with absolute panic the chair crumbled under my weight. Blood drained from my flabby face and wood snapped like kindling to make me an insect on its back. Scrambling for a better position my flesh got in the way of me finding my feet as it always did and I was close to the point of hyperventilation with one hand in a bowl of horseradish sauce and the other gripping a clump of cabbage. The tablecloth came with me on this journey, the floor was littered with half eaten stain making carcases, this alone was enough to upset me, but there wasn’t a chance to curse. The battle in my abdomen continued and picked up its pace. The organs were parting now, like the drawing of a curtain. Alarm increased along with the heavy breathing, hiccupping short machine gun breaths my heart told me about death. This was another sphere now away from the joy of digestion.
“Let me out,” the voice said again. It was louder, not as muffled as before. The guts took a fierce push; there was plenty of room in me for such a passage. Stumbling from the table I doubled over and fell into the adjoining lounge. With pain and dread punctuated by strange slithering sensations, the process took control. Once on my knees something pulled at my throat and I retched a thousand colours from mouth. A combination of meals spilled out onto the carpet before me. This body was making room.
A big lump climbed up from my stomach. It convulsed in an unnatural fashion and ascended. Skin stretched and folds straightened out. Something undulated upwards and I got one of my wishes. With a crack my mouth snapped open wide and dislocated itself from my jaw.
The pulling sensation increased and objects scratched around like fingers in my gullet. By the time the crawling reached my mouth something hooked itself around the outside my lips. It could have only been fingers. Coughing and choking I clamped my eyes shut and let my body continue. There was only the wait for this to end. Then in this interval as soft and unsettled objects climbed inside me I remembered. My body was doing as it had done before but at my own hand. It was compensating for my desires.
I wasn’t always fat. There was a time when my jacket didn’t look like a duvet or my legs weren’t housed in tent-like trousers. Back in my youth my attire had no aerodynamic properties, the fabric wasn’t stretched enough. Underneath my clothes I looked like everyone else. Limbs were slim and there was only one chin on my face. I was what skinny people called normal. But in this life my love affair with food has been constant. I was the infant that didn’t need choo choo noises or an aeroplane spoon to eat and later on I was the good boy that ate all his greens, much to the amazement of my vegetable hating friends. It all got wolfed down. Spoonful after spoonful went in but it didn’t cause me to become a tubby boy, maybe it was hyperactivity linked to a fast metabolism, a childhood of shouting and running and playing? The activity certainly burnt up the calories.
Then on the eve of adolescence the transformations began. Those cakes and sweets between meals never ruined my appetite, as mother’s always said they would, they started to ruin something else. At thirteen the first layer of extra flesh appeared hanging over a loosened belt. It was a surprise but then again so were the new delights of acne and body hair that sprung up at the same time. The next few years were not the best of times. Buttons popped and launched themselves into the air, zips were broken. I had to take control of this affliction before my shirts ripped in two. Diets seemed unreasonable but I found another way to manage this curse. I stuck my fingers down my throat.
Thus began the binge and purge cycle of my teens, too in love with food to stop eating but too aware to really let myself go. My skin was a strange land, unwanted gardens of hair appeared in places where there were deserts and a swelling hill rose from the flats. On this new terrain the only place that would accept my influence was my belly. Self image is important to a teenager, but my actions were conducted out of necessity not depression, not once did I feel sorry for myself, this wasn’t a case of bulimia just an act of compensation. My fellow classmates binged on drugs and alcohol and then vomited regularly, I had my face in the trough and my head on the porcelain, the product may have been different but the action was the same. Laxatives weren’t out of the question either or even enemas, the weight, the over weight, as such always ended up floating in the bottom of a toilet bowl.
As adulthood approached this routine of excessive ingestion an expulsion began to grow tiresome. Besides these evacuations can destroy the teeth and they were needed. The experience of years told me that this was a useless pursuit and as my energy levels waned so did my resolve. My new adult physicality established itself along with the contentment of maturity, given enough time I was sure I’d settle in equal measure to being overweight. This life of mine wasn’t meant to be spent on bathroom floors, it was meant for the dinner table. So at the age of eighteen my forced discharges concluded not with a fanfare but with the final flush of a lavatory. Naturally the eating continued and before long the slim version of me was lost forever, submerged into a rotund figure as if it was being eaten up by the enveloping flesh. I became overweight.
So there I was compensating again, hunched over and kneeling, choking and hacking, waiting for it all to come out. Except this time it was different, the surplus inside seemed capable of suffocating me, it felt large enough. The flesh expanded and contracted simultaneously, the adrenalin took care of the pain and my eyes shut under a spell of self inflicted darkness. I waited for the inevitable. My disjointed jaw got wider and wider as the breath got shorter and then the black came.
It wasn’t death because I awoke. The final pushes, the peak of the horror, the experience of internal contents crawling out of a dislocated jaw were distant, surrendered and assuaged by a shutdown. It was a brief moment but I was thankful for it. My body deflated like a loose sack; my consciousness stirred, the birth was over.
Arranged on the carpet like a corpse my eyes opened and my ears listened. Outside of me now there was a new sound quivering and squelching on the floor, one that was wet and alive. Focusing on an object near an armchair my eyes bulged in their sockets. A damp arm appeared clasping the material and a foot scuffed the tasselled hem, both appendages left an oily trail. The shape stretched itself out and limbs creaked and unfastened for the first time. A bulk of unrecognisable dimension, slim and evenly proportioned blinked under a film of glistening bodily fluids. Laying there quite helpless this figure produced a face and when it turned towards me I understood.
This is why I have become so self conscious and why I have to admit I’m overweight. There was ultimate proof. Not some half glanced reflection or a public snigger that could be denied. What rested before me was a creature with the same face as mine and the only difference between the two of us was the weight. It was very same person devoured by my flesh all those years ago. He was slender and I am obese. He was an inverted mirror to my past. Maybe inside every fat person there really is a thin one trying to get out?
And how did I deal with this great revelation? By disposing of the evidence of course. I might be fat but I didn’t need this constant reminder. My life had changed in ways that were irredeemable despite any compensation. So with new found skill I dislocated my jaw and opened my mouth wide. I ate him, or rather the other version me back up again.
Karma
This short has been published in The Fold Zine Issue 1
When our former landlord returned later that day, well I’d have risked the wrath just to see his face, at that priceless moment between the key in the door and the first adjustment of his senses. Was it the smell or the sight that got him first?
I believe in karma. He only brought this destruction on himself, because he owed us money. He was a young man who never made eye contact. He’d stand there with his legs apart, like a soldier at ease and ask for his rent. He’s just stare into the patterns in his disgusting carpet, the same one that we had to live with.
There was violence beneath his skin, it throbbed through his veins and made him blush. It was easy to see. Anger was probably the emotion he could best understand, his default passion because the others were not to be trusted. I’d like to have seen his face on the day we ruined his house.
But even I wasn’t impervious to this karma. In the attic of that very same house precious items from my childhood were lost in cardboard supermarket boxes forever. Forgotten in my rush to leave they were my punishment for doing something bad.
My urinating ta