Sunday 29 August 2010

Big Terrible Collage

I’m not sure what to do with this or why I made it in the first place. It’s fucking huge, too. I might set it on fire.

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Monday 23 August 2010

The Bad Bastard Ghost Gang

 

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(Or “Sky Bastards”)

The Lone Ranger

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Once there was a forest,

where a man pulled out his brain.

Now his head is full of soil

and leaves and mice and rain.

Monday 16 August 2010

A Short Story Called "Blood"

BLOOD.

The first time I noticed it, we were in the kitchen. My wife stood at the window chopping carrots for soup. She was hypnotized by the boring landscape outside, sheet rain and grey hills, and ignored my repeated requests to bring me my fucking pipe. I tore a page from my newspaper, screwed it up, and threw it at her head to disrupt her reverie. I succeeded in attracting her attention but also caused her to plunge the knife into her index finger. She jerked it up the air and I watched blood arch out of the wound in the surprising form of a tiny steam train, which briefly held its shape in mid-air before spattering onto the counter, dangerously close to my pipe. I hastily wrote down the train’s serial number next to the crossword, and congratulated myself on remembering to wear my vari-focal glasses. While she bandaged her finger and quietly sobbed, I retired to my library and took down an old photograph album, acting on a hunch. In a photograph taken when I was a younger man, I found a train with a matching serial number to the one written in haste on my newspaper. My interest piqued, I wandered back through to the kitchen. My wife hovered nervously around the fridge as I inspected the stains on the counter. Doubtlessly she expected me to be angry at her for not yet having cleaned them up, but my mind was elsewhere. At first glance, they looked like ordinary smears of human blood. Closer inspection revealed complex series of fine lines, illustrations rendered in the impenetrable hand of a madman. This one depicted the house where I had grown up, and the overgrown grass surrounding it.




Time went by, and I would furtively inspect my wife’s bloodied tampons, the occasional discarded plaster, seeking further hidden images which I would sketch in a private journal. The more impressive specimens - like the bandage from when she stood on a broken milk bottle, which I had snuck down in the night to retrieve from the bins - I kept in a large stamp album which I had never come close to filling with stamps. Occasionally I would tear a page from my newspaper while she chopped vegetables and throw it at her head. If she cut herself, I would inspect the blood and disappear into my study to update the records. Over time she not only found this increasingly irritating, but became much better at withstanding the attacks.



I hatched various plans to obtain more samples. I staged an elaborate romantic picnic in a rowboat for the sole purpose of attempting to catch her on the back of the head with an oar. I spent all day roasting an enormous ham, in order to slip with the carving knife and jab it into her wrist, or anywhere with a lot of veins. This all proved monstrously impractical, and yielded very little success. Eventually, I struck upon a perfect scheme. I would grind up sleeping pills and put them in her food, so that she would fall easily into a deep sleep. I would then extract her blood using a syringe which I could spray onto blotting paper at my leisure. The patternations in the bloodstains were of the same type, and this method gave me a much more effective means of cataloguing them. I would explain the blotches and red marks as insect bites, usually, and offer to rub cream on them. She had become paler, and weak, and I suggested we try cutting wheat from her diet.



In her increasingly soporific state she barely noticed that I was spending my every waking hour alone in my study, behind closed doors, poring over my now gargantuan collection. Each stain, when looked at carefully, would reveal to me a long-since forgotten memory. Some from my childhood, others the forgettable minutae of my recent life. The important thing was that when they were collected together and observed in this manner, the patterns of life seemed tantalisingly close to my grasp. I had spent my useless existence blundering from one thing to the next, ignoring the important things, forgetting the painful things where possible, generally doing everything I could to obscure the narrative of my life from myself. It wasn’t really the life I had wanted, after all. I hated the countryside, I hated my wife. I hated our house and our stupid fucking dog. I hated soup. If there was any reason for my being in this mess, it was contained within this archive of darkening maroon patches on cream paper. While she failed to notice my absence, I too failed to notice her faltering health. Now and again I would see her in a certain light, the sharp contours of her bones newly visible beneath sagging, grey skin. Her eyes bulged from their sockets in a frozen expression of bloodshot apathy. With each fresh pang of guilt, I would disappear into my research, but increasingly found myself drawn to the same conclusions. I was not yet seeing the full picture. I was trying to complete a jigsaw with half the pieces. The other half were still dragging themselves through her veins and arteries.



The harsh wail of police sirens alerted me to the fact that I had become indiscreet in my pursuit of answers. At 2am or thereabouts I had awoken with a new idea, one which I determined warranted immediate execution. I hurled all the white beds linen from the airing cupboard out of the bathroom window and onto the front lawn, where I carried my wife’s sleeping body and laid it down in the grass. It was extremely light. Next, I arranged the sheets to cover the lawn completely, and stitched them together lightly at the edges. Finally, I bound her hands and feet, and hung her upside down from an overhanging branch. I covered her mouth with duct tape, even though she remained sound asleep, and slit her throat with a kitchen knife. The blood gushed in steam trains, umbrellas, smiling faces, rainclouds, sad old dogs, rotting flowers, rope-swings, bras, cigarettes. It began assembling itself on my prepared canvas as an illustration of byzantine complexity. I had been staring at it for hours, long after the sun had gone up, and of course a neighbour eventually noticed. I had to admit that from their point of view, it could be considered quite a disturbing tableau.



I saw enough then, and during the trial, to commit it the vast network of images to my memory, and daub it into the walls of my cell in red ink provided by a kind guard. Other inmates now remark upon my upbeat nature - I am no longer dour, irascible. I live amongst the contours of my life, I lie on my narrow bed and let my mind wander amongst them, unencumbered by distraction. I am finally, terribly free.

 
the end