Wrap it in Words

She’s heard about corsets, heard how some women wore them to death. Shape and define, squeeze and tuck. Never been for her. She’d never seen the appeal.

She’s heard about those snakes, deep in those jungles that she’ll never get to visit. They can snatch a mouse, a boar, a child. Squeeze them, define them, give them a new shape as a pile of sinew and fat dissolving gently in the acid pit of a snake’s stomach.

She’s heard about vices, about compacters and presses, but she doesn’t see the point.

Because nothing, nothing can compare to that original squeeze, that ultimate squeeze. She remembers it, even though they all said it was impossible. Couldn’t be done. Scientifically impossible. Created by her imagination. Watched too many soap operas. Paid too close attention in biology.

But she can remember it. She can remember that place. No warmth, for how could she know warmth until she felt cold. No contentment, because there was no discomfort. No time, no pain, no grazed knees, no grazed souls.

And then the light, and the spasms, and the churning, and the – oh agony, agony – the squeeze, and the glint of stainless steel, the first glimpse of alien colour, of suffering and destruction. The pincers had come for her; she had not yet learnt that such things were to be avoided. They had caught her at one end – and right then she discovered there was an end to her – and they squeezed, too, along with the shuddering walls and she was drowning.

She had a pointed head for a month afterwards, they told her. Difficulties, blockages, inversions – they meant nothing to her. Just as they meant nothing to her now, with her belly and its phantom swell, the swell that should be there to betray her, to teach her that this was real and true and fair.

She carries that first squeeze with her. She feels it every day; a full body pressure cooker that she wore under her clothes, a squeeze of guilt and shame and pain.

Her mother had squeezed her only once after that, that she could remember.  Grabbed her shoulders as she left for school one day. No words, just a short, sharp squeeze.

Then the squeeze of the knotted tie, the squeeze that coaxed the eyes out of their sockets and told  the face to darken, the blood to clot, the life to leave.

She felt that too, sometimes, in sympathy, or perhaps empathy; she could never remember the difference. Feel for you, feel with you. Feel and feel and feel. Her mother had never cared too much for either one, though.

            She lit a cigarette, daring the passers-by to look at her in disgust, daring them to tut and tut and tut again under their breath, begging them to notice and see and judge her.

She got on the bus when it came. It was late, she had known it would be. The lights on the bus stop roof had spelled it out in gold and black. That night, she took a grey shard of guilt and stabbed and stabbed at herself until she bled hard and deep and true. She bled to death, but not to her own.

Her own came later, but not much later, and she finally felt the lifting of the pressure, the end of the squeeze.

And it was known as Bally-something, from the Irish báile, which means town. There were hundreds, thousands of Bally-somethings dotted around the country, for the Irish people were not ones to change a wheel that was not broken. Closer to the Pale, to those areas that had been invaded and re-invaded so many times that they had become broken, there were fewer of them; more fords, and pools and bays that had lost their old names and had taken on new ones. 

And in this town, in this báile beag, there were many people. There were those that had lived around the creek and up the hill and over the road for generations, until their names had merged with their settings. And there were those who had blown-in, five, ten or fifteen years ago, but would always be the newcomers. They were part of the town too, more so when the estate agents came with their measuring tapes and the trucks came loaded with plaster. They were hastily welcomed into the bosom of the town as the buildings grew tall and proud, signs urging passers-by to invest, to believe, to bring prosperity and peace to the town. Now they stood still, looming over the one roundabout and sheparding  the road away to Dublin. They stood empty and grey, with only faded for sale signs and the occasional discarded yellow helmet as witness. 

The bees were the pride of the town. Only a few families knew the knack, of knowing when the bees would swarm; the new queen searching for a home, a place to build anew. Come swarming season, the Burkes and the Flahertys and some few others would be posted around the village, armed with sugar-water and bee boxes. The town at that time would be filled with an almost constant low moan, a subterranean buzz. A sound that got in behind your teeth and stayed in your ears even after you moved away. An everyday noise, one that was mimicked by traffic and washing machines and cattle lowing; an anxious noise, not quite alarming, just one that set your nerves on fishhooks and left them there, waiting for the pressure that would bring true pain. And so the bees came, and the honey was sweet.

And if I were to tell you that the day would end, as all other days did, in closed shutters and bedtime tuck-ins, in nightlights and sweet dreams, in another day lived, you would have laughed at me. Because you knew it wouldn’t end that way. You knew what you knew, and what you knew was too much to know.

Your mother still cries for you. Did you know that? Even though they paint her door red and smash her car windows, all in your name, she still cries. I  visit her sometimes, and we talk of nothing, but drink endless cups of tea and take turns avoiding each other’s gaze. I think she is pleased that I still visit.

Your father couldn’t take it, you know. Put that big old .42 up in his mouth, kissed the world goodbye and pulled the trigger. Splat, it went. Splat. I wasn’t there, I don’t know, but they say that his eyes were the last to go, even though the bullet lodged in the back of his brain, right up there where the visual cortex lives. They say he died with them open, not at peace, though, but staring; furious. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t see your mother find him, or hear her climb back up the basement stairs to make a cup of tea. I didn’t hear her call the ambulance, as calm as could be, telling them not to rush, that the dead could wait, that Jesus had space for them all.

The doors had closed, the lights had been flickered. The drink poured itself into a river; a pathway home. They left together, wending their way along narrow streets and shortcuts of the heart.

One spoke:

‘That’s no’ his room anymore. Nah, he’s long gone. Gone away, d’youknow? Fucked off like the rest of them.’

Others nodded.

The darkness was kind to their stumbling, grumbling forms. They passed from dark to dark, in their journey towards oblivion.

One said:

‘Tinking of headin’ meself, d’youknow? Somewhere, anywhere.’

They agreed with each other, bouncing their hopes around, letting them ricochet of the high walls of the flats, letting them loose in the darkness. Letting them drift without fear of all those traps that are oft set beneath the traveler’s foot.

But then, a solitary streetlight appeared to block their way. To shed light, oh yes, to guide the wanderers home. But to banish their hopes to the far corners of the world.

Perhaps, in the days before humankind took over the earth, the dark had a different purpose. But now, in the domination of mankind, it has been banished to the corners; the dark buildings, the bedroom cupboards, the shadows that are but reflections of what was. It is the unwilling understudy to the light. Now, it has but one part to play in that great theatre that is humanity. It hides, it softens, it cherishes.

So as they walked under the streetlights, they saw themselves; saw themselves true and despaired. 

‘I’m headin’ home. No stomach for this anymore. Me bed’s calling.’ 

Dying is easy. I practice it, sometimes. Do you want to try? Think. Find your centre. You have to seperate the mind from the meat. Fuck Descartes; he got it right but didn’t even realise it. If you do it right, you can be a bundle of pure thought, controlling a slab of meat. But it takes practice.

I dont mean any of that breathe-in-breathe-out-find-inner-peace stuff. Me mam tried that for a while; went to classes in with the french lady in block 44. She’d come home and tell me about downward dog and leaping lion and some other shite. Sounded like an orgy to me, but I didn’t tell her that. It made her happy for a while, and sure isn’t that what matters. She stopped going when her back gave out, but she still tried to keep it up. I’d find her frozen in some stupid pose in the kitchen, arms stretched out and legs splayed like a new-born foal. And then one day I came back an hour later and she was back in her usual one, curled up in a ball under the table, shivering. Took me longer than usual to coax her out that time, but I put her in the shower for an hour or so with a bottle of wine and she seemed ok after.

Dying. I’ve done it loads of times. It happened a few times by accident before I learned to control it. The first time time was at the beach when I went out too far, dived under and got confused about which way was up. I panicked and tried to swim to the surface, but it turned out it was the ground. Hit me head bad. I was seven when I died that time.

Then there was the time when I bet myself that I could beat the trains coming out of the tunnel near the canal. I’d leave it til the last moment and duck across the tracks. Their horns where the best part, and the horrified glimpse of the driver I’d get. I always beat them. Except one time, I ran too fast and could’t stop and I fell off the wall and broke my back over a railing. I looked like a half open book, except backwards; with the leather spine bent the wrong way.

Now I can do it whenever I want. I just think in, and find the places that matter. Lungs, heart, brain. The liver is another good one. And the spleen. They get ignored sometimes, but they can do the trick as easy as the others. The hardest one is the muscles. Did you know that every muscle has the strenght to crush bone, if the brain lets them off their leash? So you have to trawl through the brain, try and find that bunch of nerves and convince them that it’s ok, they can take a break and go out for a smoke. The hard part is to make it all happen at once, one giant convulsion where every single muscle cramps violently and shatters the bone it was meant to protect. There’s not much of you left after that one. Just a pinky bag of flesh and tendons and bile and organs.

But that’s not really the hard part. The hard part is putting it back together.

I climbed the garden wall, fingers searching for crumbling handholds, climbing even as the world sank. I reached the top and it was but a short leap to the ground, and I was not hurt. I found the giant, who wept, his tears lashing the flowers and weeds alike. I took his hand and asked him if he had forgotten all that he had learned. He nodded and I smiled, and left my hands in his, for I had no further need of them. 

I passed through the wild and I found the lion. I asked him if he had forgotten how to be brave and he snarled, but his teeth slit his own gums and he tore his mouth to shreds.

I passed through the rows of corn and found the raven. She cawed and cawed at me, but I did not speak to her, because she was death, and to teach her otherwise was cruel. And so I left my voice behind.

I crossed the stream, ignoring the stones laid down by my fathers; they would twist and turn underfoot. The fish beneath sang of lust, of a drive, of a relentless pull that forced them upstream to their deaths.

I walked to the woods, but I would look for no shelter among the trees; their arms were clutching and would tear at my skin. I found the stag, in all his pride, and he knelt before me. I rode on his back, and I left my feet behind, for I had no further need of them. 

His antlers crumbled first, fell to ash and were gone in the wind. Then his ears, and fur and tail until he was skeleton alone, and still he crumbled. And yet the stag said nothing to me, for I was rot and decay and we left the scent of death in our wake.

And when I left you behind, I knew I would come back to you, or I wouldn’t. We would embrace and tell and retell the bits of each other’s lives that we had missed. Or we would not. I left my tears behind, for I had no further need of them.

The roofs were only slightly slanted, like a giant hand had pressed firmly down against this skyward intrusion. The monsoon rains would find no hold there; gutters and pipes were unknown and the street would swallow the puddles in the end. When the rains came, they came like the Americans who had swarmed like ‘crazed devils’, pounding on slates and chasing people towards shelter, any shelter.

The sky was dark, the streets were bright. There seemed no in-between; the human luminescence did not, could not bleed into the starless sky. Beside a noodle stand, a dog crawled under an overhang. Its spine was broken, its two back legs hung uselessly and were scarred by the touch of the cracked streets. It whined, and was ignored.

The women would start upwards as a could-be-customer walked by, their speech rehearsed and well-used. Hello lady, man, you look, you buy. After their broken english was expelled from their bodies like so much dirt, they would sag down again, like wind-up dolls with rusted springs. 

Fires burned at the side of the road. Each day’s rubbish was confined to a pile outside the shop or home, and a careful match was applied once the sun went down. Each little bonfire ate up the day’s efforts at order, turned left-overs into never-weres. They were the true stars, the fires that burnt without fear of reprimand, of the westerner’s regard. 

Too-pale figures haunted the store windows. Bleach is a constant here; a cleanser, a whitener. Models glare down on the children, telling them they are too dark, unclean.

But it is whitewash, like so much else has been whitewashed. The past cannot be obscured - the wounds will still scar underneath their crude coverings, and this country will remember the past it cannot forget.

Have you heard the world growing? I have walked the sacred aisles of the green things and listened as they put out their feelers, tasted the air.

I have seen them shrivel back in fear, in fear, when the cold wind comes. I have watched them leap skywards on a hot day, racing eachother to the heavens. I have seen them dessicated and dusty, crying out for a drink, a mist, a drop.

And I have known them.

And I have known you, in your dark days and your light. I have seen the sun rise and set on your tears. I have watched you cringe from the light, cower in the cold.

Trigger warning

She’s heard about corsets, heard how some women wore them to death. Shape and define, squeeze and tuck. Never been for her. She’d never seen the appeal.

She’s heard about those snakes, deep in those jungles that she’ll never get to visit. They can snatch a mouse, a boar, a child. Squeeze them, define them, give them a new shape as a pile of sinew and fat dissolving gently in the acid pit of a snake’s stomach.

She’s heard about vices, about compacters and presses, but she doesn’t see the point.

Because nothing, nothing can compare to that original squeeze, that ultimate squeeze. She remembers it, even though they all said it was impossible. Couldn’t be done. Scientifically impossible. Created by her imagination. Watched too many soap operas. Paid too close attention in biology.

But she can remember it. She can remember that place. No warmth, for how could she know warmth until she felt cold. No contentment, because there was no discomfort. No time, no pain, no grazed knees, no grazed souls.

And then the light, and the spasms, and the churning, and the – oh agony, agony – the squeeze, and the glint of stainless steel, the first glimpse of alien colour, of suffering and destruction. The pincers had come for her; she had not yet learnt that such things were to be avoided. They had caught her at one end – and right then she discovered there was an end to her – and they squeezed, too, along with the shuddering walls and she was drowning.

She had a pointed head for a month afterwards, they told her. Difficulties, blockages, inversions – they meant nothing to her. Just as they meant nothing to her now, with her belly and its phantom swell, the swell that should be there but wasn’t, to betray her, to teach her that this was real and true and fair.

She carries that first squeeze with her. She feels it every day; a full body pressure cooker that she wears under her clothes, a squeeze of guilt and shame and pain.

Her mother had squeezed her only once after that, that she could remember.  Grabbed her shoulders as she left for school one day. No words, just a short, sharp squeeze. Then the squeeze of the knotted tie, the squeeze that coaxed the eyes out of their sockets and told  the face to darken, the blood to clot, the life to leave. She felt that too, sometimes, in sympathy, or perhaps empathy; she could never remember the difference. Feel for you, feel with you. Feel and feel and feel. Her mother had never cared too much for either one, though.

She lit a cigarette, daring the passers-by to look at her in disgust, daring them to tut and tut and tut again under their breath, begging them to notice and see and judge her.

She got on the bus when it came. It was late, she had known it would be. The lights on the bus stop roof had spelled it out in gold and black. That night, she took a grey shard of guilt and stabbed and stabbed at herself until she bled hard and deep and true. She bled to death, but not to her own.

Her own came later, but not much later, and she finally felt the lifting of the pressure, the end of the squeeze.

Very unhappy with this. But it was the first thing I wrote in months, so I figure I shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, and just think about why I hate it and how I can get better.

This wasn’t where he wanted to be. He didn’t know where he wanted to be, but it wasn’t here. And that was the problem, really. When he thought like this, he would scrunch his eyes up tight and think where he most wanted to be in the world. It didn’t take him any closer to it, but it put a shape, a fist around his anxiety.

And now it was dark. Was that what he wanted? He could get up, walk over to the road and escape into the night. His car was nearby, and no matter how he tried to convince himself, he knew he has enough fuel to get home. He knew he hadn’t left the radio on. He knew his engine would splutter treacherously into life at the first twist of a key. He could leave, go home.

That would be for the best, and hadn’t he always done what was best? Held doors open, brushed his teeth, bandaged up hearts and minds and bodies. And kept his hands clean, oh so clean. Bleach and bleach and bleach. But there was no bleach for the soul, no bleach for the mind.

He refocused his eyes, tore his gaze away from the nothing, and came home to his head. The town was still below him, tucked under a hill and surrounded by miles and miles of open fields. It had been a hot summer, and the autumn had stretched longer than it should, outstayed its welcome. The fields were scorched, parched, calling out for a respite, or, failing that, for death. Funny that, that the farmer must come and chop the heads off his crops, else they would rot in the ground and grow back weaker; weedier.

It was still warm, and that wasn’t right. It should be cold, the night. Cold and lonely and empty.

He knew he should be sleeping. In the morning, Big Kelly would need his dogs let out, and Mrs Tanner would need her ankle checked and her breakfast made, and the Martins would expect him to call by to weigh the baby, and that was only before noon. All those little things that helped the day slip by a little easier.

And they repaid him in secrets, secrets he didn’t want, secrets he couldn’t hold. No one could hold that much petty hate, ancient grudges, lost dreams. No one could wrap up the wounds of fear and loneliness and neglect.

He sometimes wondered if he wanted to die.

He had taken  care of an old woman once. Mrs Annen, eighty years young but a thousand years old. She was one in a hundred, one lost in a hundred.

She would gaze blankly at the television screen, seemingly engrossed in the news that he knew she couldn’t see without her glasses. He thought now, that when she did that, she was straining to break free from her body, straining to die. He never thought dying was hard. He thought it was the easiest thing in the world. You just told your body to shut down, fed toxins to your spleen and liver and heart and waited for the darkness. He thought living was the hard part. But when he watched her, sitting in her horrible paisley chair that was worn from years of monotony, he knew. he knew that she was yearning, calling, pleading with death. Shouting, screaming, begging to be heard.

But after hours of silent shrieks, no shadowy figure would enter the room; no scythe would swing and block out the lamps. Instead, the room would slowly fill up with the stench of human waste and it would begin again.

She died, eventually. He was glad when she did, and felt guilty for it, but he was also glad he felt guilty, so that was all right.

He tried to focus again on the lights below, but couldn’t shake the malaise from his eyes. It dragged him down, dragged his eyes down to his hand, where the match burned. It had almost burned half way; his fingers felt warm. He dropped it in the dry grass. From here, the dead hay fields stretched to the heart of the town. The houses had been built around the fields, not the other way ’round. He knew this time of year was dangerous; two boys had set a campfire one night a few years ago, not two miles off. The only thing that had stopped the flames from reaching the town when they fell asleep was the combination of the river and one lonely insomniac. And now the river had dried up and the insomniac was happily dead to the world, on prescription, of course.

Chop off the heads to let new growth begin. Build from the bottom up. The farmers knew how it worked, they did it with a bad crop or a bad breed all the time. He watched the match. The flame was fading; it had not yet found another host for its fury. He eased it closer to a crop of black-brown spikes with his boot.

All the sadness, the beatings, the empty bottles. All the loss, the despair, the hatred. All the sin, the shame, the fear. Dig it out, dig out the rot and let the heart beat again.

The match was a lone star in the sky at his feet; it danced a lonely and sombre waltz in his eyes.

It winked out. Night swept over him, vast and thick and choking. He staggered and felt himself shatter in the breeze; to a thousand pieces, to shards, each sharper than the last. The dark blew through him, knew him.

He found his glasses where he had left them. The car started on the first go. As he drove back to town he found himself planning the afternoon errands. Mr Shannon would be napping, so he’d call on the Clarke family first to see to the children’s flu, and then pop into the farm on his way back. And the enemy, chaos, was defeated once more, he thought, and then started at the sound of his own voice.

The trees were crinkled, like wrapping paper. Their branches would frighten me as a child, black and twisted and straining sky-wards in supplication. The crows perched on the highest branches, screaming derision down on us. They would take flight in flocks, wheeling around in a giant circle before settling in a tree that looked no different to the rest.

Our farm is built on a forest-bed. Centuries ago, they had dug out the roots and the trees and laid down soil and bricks and iron. Sometimes the trees would come creeping back in, spreading a toe or two across the boundaries, but we kept them in line with biting axes.

But the trees had a champion. A monstrous hooded crow, as large as a cat. Every morning he would come with the rising sun to dash his head against our window panes. He would perch on a rafter, and beat against the glass with his beak and skull, tap-tap-tap. If we chased him away, he would sit on the telephone wires and caw at us, taunting us, and would be back on his crusade as soon as the door was closed. He was trying to break down the house, I know this. Make it crumble to dust, piece by piece until the earth could reclaim what was hers. He was a thousand years old and one, that crow. He fought for chaos; to send our pretense at order tumbling down around our heads.