Wrap it in Words

People smile strangely when I tell them I am haunted. They laugh, or ignore it entirely, dismissing my confession as a joke, an oddity of character. I ask them the silent question - are you not too? I have never asked you.

Each turn of a page speaks of the page before and the one before and the one before. I lift an arm, and behind it trail the movements of days passed; a wave, a strech, a fist. I am haunted, haunted by those that I have touched and those that have touched me, and I cannot exorcise myself. I am made up of others, I can claim no true existance for my own, rotting body.

Your words haunt me, your face, your hands, your thoughts. But so do those of the man who asked me the time three years ago. My ghosts are do not discriminate. All are welcome. Each action, each thought is merely the result of all the ghosts that have gone before, the volcano that has been rising, pushed upwards, brimming until it overflows, burning, scorching, searing.

I stand on the shoulders of giants. No, not giants. Of ordinary people, of strangers and friends and those ficional and famous, of chance meetings and disembodied pain. My ghosts are not malicious ones. Nor are they kindly. They behave exactly how they did in life. Some are unimportant - the ghost of a shower once taken in a motel room, but some lurk with intensity; the ghost of a relationship, an idea, a moment. I am haunted by the honking of a car horn as I sat too slow at the lights, by the touch of a breeze, by a scream in the night. I am haunted by a life lived, 

My ghosts batter at my windows, little wings soft in the night. They crawl out and show themselves through me, possessing my fingers, my tongue, my feet. I am driven by them, driven through them. Shadows chase shadows, echos rise and swell and twist and shatter.

A black cat follows me. You will not remember it. I do not speak of that ancient omen of death, that beast who is stoned and cast out, who sours milk and sickens the cattle. This one was not truly black; grey and ash and blotches. 

I found it on the road. A car had taken its ribs; its body bent awkwardly, leaking on the hot tarmac. I reached towards it, instinctively, hoping perhaps to scoop its insides back in, to stroke it, to selfishly ease my own soul with its soft fur.

It tried to hiss at me, but it spat blood instead. It looked at me in surprise; in pain and terror and loss. I have heard tell that the last thing a man sees is imprinted on his pupils. I wonder if that held true for cats, and if a miniature version of my outstretched arm had seared itself into this cat’s eyes; his last moments wasted on my useless gesture.

Its mouth filled up with blood and it was still.

‘Just a cat’, you said. 

And I thought of a lonely widow who would call at the back door for hours.

‘Probably a stray.’

A birthday present, I thought, an only child; a gift to fend off the sound of the midnight arguments. 

‘Stop worrying about it.’

A bowl, dark blue perhaps, with a carefully chosen name picked out in black.

You said I was soft; I thought too much. I thought you didn’t think enough. You let life pass you by, you drifted and floated. I fought, I caught every passing stick, I pushed my life away.

Days and days and days and days. 

I grew up beside you. I got my period. I fell in love; I gave you my love. I left, for a time, and came back. I settled down. I had your son. Then lost him again. My father died. I had your daughter. My mother died.

But hese things happened on the surface, where people swirl and live and die. They never touched the deep. The deep was where the terror was.

 I moved home. You followed.

The trees outside 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 after my father died, you 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.

I kept your words with me. ‘Too soft,’ you said. I was soft. I see it now. My words were soft, my head was soft. My love was softest of all. Push it, test it, and it would shatter. I was tested, again and again, and I failed. But it never seemed to matter.

Nothing but days and days and days, days void of love but filled with words on a stained and torn napkin. I kept the terror with me too.

The terror was the trees. The terror was the tap-tap-tap of the crow. The terror was the cat, spitting blood and spitting hate. 

I don’t hate you, even now. I’m sure I did, in wine and confessions and scribbled words. But they were fleeting, never lasted.

You are waiting for me now in our bedroom. It is yours, no matter how you protest; you take my things that I have so idly strewn and fold them and place them away, out of sight. You have grazed my shoulders with your hands and whispered in my ear. 

‘Come’, you said. ‘Follow me’. 

You will take my dress and slip it from my shoulders. You will twist my skin and suck my lips. You will open my legs and give to me, but truly you will take.

I will die inside, like a thousand deaths before. But never true deaths, because I knew my true end would come like the grey cat’s; spitting blood and defiance. Hating the hand that reached out in selfishness, hoping to sooth their own unease. Claiming my death as my own and fighting till the end. 

I have no car to take my ribs from me and spill my innards onto the hot tarmac on a summer’s day. I have you, and only you, and I have years. I weigh them in my hands, I judge their worth. You never took my heart, no never, you took my lips and hands and feet and womb. But my heart remains my own, and here it ends.

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.

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.

Give me a twisted ankle, a six inch gash. They will heal. And I can bath them, and stitch them, and keep them clean. If I am unlucky, they may fester, and no witchcraft in the world will keep my flesh from fading off my bones. But the pain will pass. Eventually. But lonliness will never fade, only settle in the gut for a time and then burst into cold, dead life again.

I walked up the main street tonight. It wasn’t empty; in my city no street is truly empty. But it was quiet. Only a few stumblers and trouble-makers, the clean shoes and briefcases were long home for the night.

I turned left onto the street. And my feet seemed to call a song out of the stones itself. My homeland has the sweetest songs; songs of loss and heartbreak and empty rooms. A tin whistle, I dreamed. I had one once, a blue-tipped treasure that spat out shattered tones. But not like this. This one dipped and called and hit high flats, held them sweetly, oh so sweetly, and dropped in broken arpeggios before dancing back to the top of the scale.

I dreamed a dream of hearts blue and raw with the cold, of pain so ground in no wash would bring it out. I dreamed a dream of tears and love so fierce it set the world alight.

I walked, and listened, and loved and lived and died.

And all around me, life went on. This song went unnoticed. I found the player, at last, perched on a stoop under a streetlight that turned his beard to fire and his eyes to coals. He was so wrapped in blankets I wondered how his fingers could find their way out to the whistle. He had laid out a hat for pennies. He would be there all night, playing his song for all the lonely in the world.

I gave him nothing, and walked home alone.

Have you ever heard a red fox cry, deep in the night?

It is something unearthly. People past took it for the cry of that herald of death, the banshee, and locked their doors and prayed all night for deliverance. I do not blame them. It is not unlike the scream of a severed hand, or a mother who has left a child alone in the bath too long. It is a shriek, if ever there was a shriek. It will freeze your marrow and you become fixated by the silence that follows; eardrums pounding.  Unable to move or breathe. And it comes out of the dark.

It is terror.

When we heard it the cry, we knew it was no banshee, but it brought death all the same. We knew we would find bloody feathers strewn across the field and there would be no eggs for dinner.

The cattle would spook and try to run somewhere, anywhere. One, a mottled cow, broke its leg on a twisting rock and bellowed its agony until morning. My father shot it at dawn. Another time, one tried to escape through the barbed wire by the shore and managed to slit its own throat. The blood was dark and thick and the crows had already eaten out its eyes by the time we found it.

The worst were the lambs. We would often find one mauled in the field; wool clotted with dirt and blood. I would cry, because I would name each and every lamb that was born to us, and knew them all well.

My father set out poisoned chunks of meat for the fox and nailed shut every gap and tear in the fence, but it was no use. All we found was a couple of dead rats and, once, the sheepdog foaming and convulsing beside a chunk of half-eaten meat.

So it was. All things died, and all for a cry in the night. The red fox gives tongue to death for all the small things of this world.

The fox didn’t scare us during the day; it was only at night that his shrieks left us cowering.

In the sun, we would go hunting with our stick-swords and stick-arrows to find him. No bush or earth was safe from us. Once, we even wandered down to the sea shore, but all we found there was a crab with one claw. We pulled the other claws off, one by one, and watched it die before going inside for tea. And so the hunt went on.

When the snows came and the early lambs died under frozen drifts, my father assured us that the fox had frozen too. We would cheer, but a part of me remained uneasy. Who could we fight, with our stick-swords, if not the fox? Who could we blame for the stolen eggs, the broken fences, the missing calves?

And so it was that winter was a time of suspicion, a time to watch the neighbours from a curtained window, to count their herd each day and leave a lit lamp in the barn all night.

But come the melt, the smiles and the handshakes returned. The fox was surely the culprit, once more, and grudges were put away for a season.

But one of the grudges festered, an ancient one.

For generations, the farm next door had been both our closest neighbours and our worst enemies. Our grandfathers had fought, and our great-great-grandfathers had bickered, and we were no different. Arguments would swell and soften, swell and soften, and sometimes burst like a ripe old boil.

The fox got our chickens, and he somehow gained more eggs. We took a lamb or three from his fields in the night, and suckled them from bottles in the furthest barn. And so it went on, back and forth, back and forth.

Once, my father’s prize bull got loose and impregnated three of our neighbour’s cows. He said the gate had come lose, but my father was sure that it had been opened on purpose in the night. They fought for months, but my father managed to get the rights to any male calves born on our neighbour’s farm that year, so there was a form of peace, for a while longer.

The only true peace came in the spring and summer, the gentler halves of the year, when the red fox could be blamed for each and every wrong.

And so it was. And one November, when our neighbour dared to blame the fox for yet another missing chicken, my father took up his wood-axe and lodged it in his throat.

My mother saw it happen from the kitchen window. She screamed, a little, and clapped her hands to her mouth and stood there, panting. We ran to the window to see what had startled her so.

We saw my father, frozen still, and the neighbour, looking ridiculous with a wooden shaft sticking out at an impossible angle from his neck.

It was dusk, and growing dark, but when my father looked up, we all saw the flashing anger in his eyes which meant this was not our business. He gave us the same look when we were sent to fetch him from the pub, or when we tugged at his coat asking for penny-sweets while he talked to the priest after mass.

My mother pulled the curtains closed.

She went back to her range and stirred the stock so hard it spilled and hissed on the hot surface. She set us to chopping vegetables. I was in charge of the carrots; I liked to cut them a certain way and I would fuss and fret if one of my siblings was given the job. We worked in silence.

When the soup was done and simmering, my mother did not call my father in for supper, as she usually did. Instead we sat around the table and ate without him. She had set him a place, though, and his favourite chair seemed so wrong without him that we kept stealing glances at it to make sure he truly wasn’t there. The soup was burnt, that night. I remember. My carrots were perfect, as usual, but the rest had cooked too long. No one complained.

When my father came in, we were in bed, having gone without arguing this once. Our house was thin and creaky, and our rooms sat on top of the kitchen. The heat from the range wafted up and kept us warm at night, and the smell of eggs and fried bread would wake us every morning. That night, after he came in through the back kitchen door, all we could smell was whiskey, strong and earthy.

We saw no more of our neighbour, and spoke even less of him.

And so it was that the red fox was the death of more than just small things.

Brick by brick, I build this wall.

The other three walls tower above me already; dusty red and implacable. Their making was not hard; the work came easily at first. But it was slow, for I would leave the task time and time again and become distracted by other pursuits - building a chair, a crib, a home. But their cement was only made of love and they soon fell down to nothing and were swept away when the wind came strong from the west.

These walls will be stronger. I have made them so, crafted every brick with tears and mixed the cement with blood. I near completion.

Inside I have placed the things that must be locked away. Your sweat-smell, but not your fists. A scent of spring, but not the rains. The pitter-patter of feet, but not the screech of brakes. These things will live here, in the place I have made for them.

When this fourth wall is done, they will be safe from the scythes of memory; they will live on in their suspended moments. And I will not be able to touch them. This is best.

My back aches and the sweat stings my eyes, but the work must go on. My nails have long ago been worn away to nothing, not my fingertips are bloody and broken. But no matter. I am close to the end of bricks, the end of days.

You’ll break easily, too. Snap like a twig, when the time comes.

When it all becomes too much, this world, and you decide to not let anything define you. And then you’ll go after the big ones, the laws with a capital L, and you’ll think - why should gravity define you; hold you down? Believe me, I’ve been there. When you realise that this world is arbitrary and we can fly if only we let go of gravity; forget all that bullshit they fed us in school about apples falling from trees. It’s not for me, and one day, you’ll see it’s not for you.

Oh, you want to try? You like my story? You want to escape from the chains of physics?

Here. Let me show you. Look at your hands. Do they tremble? That’s good, that’s good. Now. Push down hard on the table for a few long seconds. A few more. See they way they rise up, all by themselves? That’s the idea. But you gotta do that with your whole body. Try it. Push down with every part of you, push and push and push with every tiny bone, every single cell, every lonesome hair on your body.

And release.

See?

Oh dear. Sorry. Did I forget to tell you? See, the thing about gravity is, the thing about it is that it doesn’t listen to you or I. It does change, though, it does. And it’s tempermental. And if you draw its attention on yourself, you never know what might happen. You can free yourself from your own personal gravity, but it has other plans with you. If you do it right, you can fly; persuade it to lay off you for a while.

But, if you do it wrong, it will crush you. Know how black holes get formed? Yeah. That’s a star who got too old and couldn’t keep gravity looking the other way. Much like you, except you waved a red flag in its face.

So I’ll leave you now, in your pile of juices. I imagine every one of your bones broke at once, every strand of cartilige snapped. Or else it started with your neck shattering and moved down your skeleton in a seismic wave of splintering bone. And now you are a slush pile; of reds and purples and little bits of dirty white. You’re leaking on the carpet. Try not to leave a stain.

I am sorry, you know. But you tried to fly, and you got crushed. That’s how it goes.

The crows croak and caw at each other; each trying to drown out the other, to respond before the question has been asked, to see who can listen the loudest. They flap their wings and preen and prod as they walk their own personal catwalk.

‘How’s your father?’

Wine is poured. Glasses clinked. Sláinte - to health - but whose?

‘Did you hear about Blanaid…’

Secrets and rumours flit from pocket to pocket, heart to heart and take root where ever they find a fertile tongue, and all the tongues are fertile here.

‘Shame, shame, terrible shame’.

Sympathy flows in rivers and fills up the room; there is no empathy here to sully the social waters.

Figure in a Landscape - Arthur Armstrong

Bones of the dead things bleached in the sun.

Some dawn, some monstrous scorching dawn an age ago, an instant ago, tore into the sky and forced the land and sky apart. A knife eased into the horizon, eviscerating, separating; oh agony.

A step forward, another, another, will reveal the yawning gap. The world ends at the edges. Ahead, the sky and land part company - oh I know, I know, oh - recoiling away from each other in disgust, into infinity. Logic’s anchor has dragged; corners flap loose here, in this place, in this time.

That dawn, the earth cracked and shivered, oh, cracked and shivered, and the abyss opened with a sigh. Dust and seas and souls alike swept down, down, down, caught in the flood of their own passing, until that was left was bones. Colour fled soon after, draining out in a shimmering swan song through the hole in the bottom of the world.

The long day began.  It reigns still.

Dusk will come, or it will not come. No matter, no matter

I stand sentinel.

I’m sick.

My body is rotting. My mind is rotting. Chunks of flesh and thought putrify and fall off; full of pus and hate and stale blood.

I feel it, I feel it happen. I feel my cells, my neurons dying. I feel every single one, every last one, gasp in pain. I hear their death-rattle echoing in my ears.

In the night, the night, they die. I am rotting.

I wonder if the end will come quickly, or if I will lose an ear, a finger, an emotion at a time. I think it is more likely that the poison is eating away at my connections. At the points where one bone meets another, where my thoughts converge. One day, soon or late, these connections will all snap at once, and I will fall into a pile of parts. My thoughts will be unlinked; flying free and solitary. They will waste away and die, too, for no thought can survive without another to sustain it, develop it.

I will be a pile of parts. Rotten. Flies will buzz and breed on my remains and maggots will flourish.

Let the wolves howl

                We’ll be in here

                           Tucked up in bed

                                        With our own wolves beneath

Deep in the woods, past the creek, around the boulder and under the tree, there was a grave. When the sun beat down in the scorching days of the indian summer and broke through the thick canopy, it managed to miss it by a foot or two. The forest floor caught the sun, lapped it up and grew. But the little grave got no sun, and so it remained in the shade; cold and bare.

It was not marked with a headstone, nor a cross, because there was no one to mark it, as such. Oh there were crows and worms and maggots who marked it well, but no one to remember. Some long dead time ago, someone knew who lay there, beneath the grey and rocky soil. Someone shed tears, surely. Someone dug a hole, 3 feet by 6, in the soil, someone toiled in the lashing rain, someone piled the earth high and dug and dug and dug. Someone filled the grave.

But someone had forgotten what they filled it with. Had it been a mother, a father, a son, a daughter? A stranger, chance met? A beloved family pet? A baby bird who flew too soon? No, none of these. Someone would remember who lay in the grave.

Someone would remember. Remember that every single someone must dig their own graves, at the end of the end of days.