Wrap it in Words

The cover is bright - unbearably so - slashes of colour that spin and intersect in ways that hurts the eye to follow. The title is illegible, in stark dark red, hidden behind the joyous loops and swirls of the blues and greens and yellows. They seek to bury it, bury it alive, drown it in saccharine sweetness.

The dedication page is blank, but the reviews are good, sliding into their quotation marks like obedient dogs, slinking home to look up at you beatifically. You do not notice their bloodstained gums.

The first page does not disturb, simple random strings of words; amino acids creating endless chains of DNA. But a pulsing behind the eyes begins. Barely noticeable, surely not worth throwing two ether-drops into a glass to sizzle and melt. An itch even.

By the end of chapter one, the words have passed straight through the mind and left but a faint residue. But the itch has become a scratch. And so you scratch, and the pain swells twofold for every fingernail you claw across your raw and tearless brow.

To continue: For you are not one to leave a book unfinished. They are only words, and words are your friend, and friends are your words.

You fly through chapters two, three, four, five, skimming over the paragraphs, for that vague sense of unease you began with has become not-so-vague at all. Your gorge rises. Swallowing will not clear this tightness. You scratch at your eyes again; the throbbing is not easing.

A break, your body cries, take a break! Leave this behind. Close the covers, leave no bookmark. Leave it under the bed to gather dust with the rest, with the words that were not remarkable enough to endure. Put it away.

Yet you persevere. Why not? A book can cause no stir, no ripple in the wider scheme of things. Yet you do ripple. Waves of blood wash up from your feet to rest on the top of your brain, to join the rest and add to the weight. Scratch.

The next few chapters are hard, the pressure builds and builds, but you must finish. Ink begins to bleed from between your fingers. Yet it is red, not black. Curious. Scratch. The pressure builds. Everything is frantic, frantic, no time to pause, to consider, just scratch, and go, and run, and -

Relief. Sweet relief. The final chapter is here, and it is but a page long. You gaze at the chapter as a whole, unwilling to begin dissecting the words just yet; revel in the moment of success. Scratch. Something pops - a bursting balloon, releasing the steam and screams that had been building up since the very first sentence. There is a whistling in your ears. How distracting. The words have vanished too, washed off the page by a sea of blood. Vexsome, vexsome. So close. But perhaps the darkness is better.

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.

Raise a hand and watch it move through space and time. See how it gathers the seconds and stirs the molecules in one fell sweep? The world has changed.

I have changed the universe. I have caused ripples and splashes that have changed the course of my being, that have connected with those of others, that have formed and reformed into something beautiful, something terrible.

I have been told that this is a wonderful thing. That my actions will go on long after I have passed. That I am not insignificant in this vast and throat-closing world. My life has an echo. How far will it travel? How many will it reach? Who will it affect? I watch my ripples flow out.

I am chaos, I am that horror in the dark that strips away the known and ushers in the unknown.

I flap my wings, and the storm spreads. 

That’s the thing about open spaces, though.

When you have walls and angles and facts all around, it keeps your thoughts penned in, and they stay tame, they lick your hand and wag their tails and they trust you. And you trust them.

In the open spaces, their eyes start shining red in the night. And you don’t want to believe it at first, that your tame thoughts have gone sour. You ignore the yellow teeth and block out the spittle dripping from their chops. They would never hurt you.

But if you take away the bricks and mortar, they start to creep. Not menacingly at first, just differently. Maybe they take a sidestep every now and then, or slowly turn in a circle.

And if you duck back into your safe place, they might slink back to their normal routines. But if you stay where the horizon bends and the stars ache, and you can’t tell where you end and the world begins, those thoughts will turn rapid. They will shred and tear until your mind is in tatters, infected with the grime and pus of unease.

And you can take your shotgun; find your sense, and put them down, in the backyard of your brain, but you can’t put them out. They will howl outside your windowsills, steal the sweetest meat from your table, and wait for that right moment to pounce once more and finish what they began.

That’s where that knot of tension comes when you can see the world’s end, when there’s nothing between you and oblivion. I feel it each time I look up at the night sky, or out to sea; that ache of insignificance, that each time I have dipped my finger in the through of insanity and licked it off.

And I savoured the taste, I did, I did.

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.

I remember the very first dream I had that wasn’t a nightmare. I woke in shock and could not grasp what had happened. I had slept, and dreamed, and it had been pleasant. All this was new.

My nightmares came, and went, and came again. I would wake moaning, rocking, with half moons marked on my palms from my nails. I would walk often, and my mother would find me in strange places, curled up tight.

When she shook me awake, all she found was terror.

I would awake and that my limbs wouldn’t answer me. My eyes, oh the horror, my eyes. To move them from one side to the other carried the weight of the world. Picking myself up was easier than moving my eyes. I screamed, that time.

Once, my father sat me down in the bright light of day.

‘What is it you dream about that hurts you so?’

I opened my mouth. I tried, I really did. I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him, because I did not know.

There was… weight. And darkness. And fragility, such fragility that was about to be crushed by the darkness. There were furnaces, there were pipes. Deep, deep under the ground. Black and white, big and small, strong and weak. There was rushing, crushing weight.

But then again, there wasn’t. There wasn’t any of that. It was an essence, a scent wafting in the air rather than the pie itself. There was nothing true there, nothing but the fear.

And the fear took hold of my heart, and has made a place there ever since.

lonliness is a poison. not a swift one, or a violent one, but a posion all the same. it will gnaw and gnaw from the inside out.

and though i lived and died a thousand deaths; took two steps forward and two steps back, I knew that my true death would come of lonliness.

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.

(edited)

Have you ever seen a rat king? I suppose you haven’t. They aren’t very common, really. Some say they dont even exist; that they are only a tale told in the night, a story told to explain away the scratchings in the walls. But I have seen one, and I can tell you that they do. I never minded rats, before. But now they scratch at the insides of my skull.

But a rat king is hard to describe. Harder to live, I’d imagine. So I’ll tell you a story.

           Imagine you are born, blind and pink and squirming, in a hole in the dark, dark, dark. Your brothers and sisters are there, too, just as blind and squirming. Your mother has given birth to you and left. Perhaps she met a hungry dog, or a spinning black tyre, or left for brighter days.

And so you squirm, with your brothers and sisters, in the dark. You whip your tails and shit yourself and feed on tears. And you grow.

And one day, you lift your nose and smell a stray gust and decide it is time to stretch those four legs of yours, time to leave your den and face the world. So you move towards the light.

But no-

You are stuck. Your tail has wound its way around tail around tail around tail and around tail. The filth of the earth and the filth of your bodies has caked the knots, locking each tiny noose closed, creating a tangle that will not pull out. You are the Gordian knot.

You hiss and scratch at your brothers and sisters, hiss and scratch and they pull away. Each rat-link pulls in a different direction, straining to break free of the bundle of crazed, frothing animals. But you are trapped. You and all your brothers and sisters are trapped, alone in the dark. Writhing and screaming. You will turn on each other when the hunger becomes too much; tearing chunks of of your neighbour, yourself, the earth, anything to fill the void.

But you are trapped. In the dark. But not alone, never alone.

And that is a rat king.

           I found mine in the wood pile when I was sent to collect timber for the evening. It had been cold and my hands were raw with splinters and shards of dead-wood. I tore down towers of logs and forked mounds of hay, and filled my wheelbarrow too high.

I turned, when the farm cat began to his and spit from the barn rafters. I stroked her tail as it hung, but she whipped it out of my reach. I found the spot she stared at so, and kicked a pile of hay aside. And so I finally came on the squealing, squirming mass. The rat king.

Each rat was blind. Each rat screamed for death, for the end of suffering. I wondered, though, if they were truly seperate beings, or just one bundle of thought; with scores of legs and teeth and ears. Were they many, or were they one? I did not know.

The sun was setting. It was growing colder and the light had faded even in the few short minutes I stood idle. I picked up my pitchfork again.

I crowned my rat king with a halo of hay, took my wheelbarrow to the hill-crest, and went inside for dinner.