Wrap it in Words

draft 2 - thanks for all the feedback, let me know what you think!

We are made up of the ghosts of moments, I believe. We clutch them to us and steal parts of them to make ourselves more whole. My own ghosts are not malicious ones, but nor are they kindly. They behave exactly how they did in life. Some are unimportant - the ghost of a shower once taken in a hotel room, a brief conversation about nothing, the honking of a car horn as I sat too slow at the lights - but some lurk with intensity; the ghost of a relationship, an idea, a single moment. 

When I was younger, my grand-aunt would tell us stories, of Badhbh, the crow-goddess, omen of chaos and death; of Queen Medb and her pride and the battle for the Tain; the De Danann, that ancient and kingly race; of  Fionn MacCumhaill and his lost son Oisin, and all those others that float blearily from the past up to the surface of the present, remembered only in words and songs.

The trees outside my home were crinkled, like wrapping paper. Their branches would frighten me as a child, black and twisted and straining sky-wards in supplication. The crows would perch 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 home was built on the top of a hill, over an ancient 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 woods had a champion. A monstrous hooded crow, as long as a man’s forearm. It seemed a thousand years old and one, that crow, and was Badhbh herself come to life. Every morning the crow would come with the rising sun to dash its head against our window panes. It would perch on a rafter, and beat against the glass with its beak and skull, tap-tap-tap. If we chased it away, it would sit on the telephone wires and caw at us, always taunting, and would be back on its crusade as soon as the door was closed. I knew it was trying to break down the house. Make it crumble to dust, piece by piece until the earth could reclaim what was hers, till chaos returned and no trace of our presence was left.

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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 would perch 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 home was built on the top of a hill, over an ancient 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 woods had a champion. A monstrous hooded crow, as long as a man’s forearm. It seemed a thousand years old and one, that crow, and brought to my mind the stories our grand-aunt would tell us, of Badhbh, the crow-goddess, and Queen Medb and the Tain, and the De Danann, and Fionn MacCumhaill, and his son Oisin, and all those others that float blearily from the past up to the surface of the present.

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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.

I’m not the most prolific, or the most talented, or the most friendly, or the most anything, really. 

But I am trying to put a collection of short stories together for publication. What I really need to work on is my confidence, and getting feedback and constantly trying to improve is the best way to do that.

So… Read something, and please tell me what you think!

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.

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.

I get confused, sometimes. My eyes unfocus and all I can see are blocks of colour. My bed, the walls, the passing cars - they all break down into shapes that grind together to create a whole. Things are clearer, then, but more obscured.

Sometimes, I….

I just get confused.

It’s hard, hard to put the pieces back together. My brain used to do it for me, but now I have to gather them up, shard by shard, and glue them back with sticky lines of effort. They cut me, sometimes.

Sharp. Yes… Yes.

And why, why, why are you here, with your sharp questions that poke and tear open every crevice of me; every inch, every pore? Do you rape me with your words? Do you defile me with your explorations, do you torment me with your lies? Do you? Do….?

Do, or do not. I always thought that was stupid. There’s always a middle ground. You can push the boulder all the way up the mountain, but if you don’t shove it that final distance over the cliff, then the job isn’t done? No. It’s all about the doing. I’ve always been doing.

Doing the wrong thing, the right thing, the best thing, the worst thing, the every thing. I just want to rest, and stop the doing. But it keeps happening.

My body is a machine; it clicks and whirrs at me, beeping in protest, or maybe in satisfaction. I cant understand its messages. I let it get on with it, most of the time. When they fill me with acids and posions and morphines it protests, at first. But it succumbs to their warmth. It always does. I do.

I…. just get confused, sometimes.

Dying is easy. I practice it, sometimes. Do you want to try? Think. Find your centre. You have to separate the mind from the meat. Ever hear of Descartes? I read about him once, all about the mind controlling the body and the body controlling the mind. He got it right but didn’t even realise what he’d got. If you do it right, you can be a bundle of pure thought, controlling a slab of meat. But it takes practice.

I don’t 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 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 isn’t that what matters. She stopped going when her back gave out, but she still tried to keep it up at home. 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 okay after.

But yeah, dying. I’ve practiced it loads of times. It happened a few times by accident before I learned to control it. The first 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 my head bad off some rocks, bit down on my tongue and passed out. I was seven when I died that time. I think that was the first time, the first time my meat died but my mind said no. There could have been other times, but I can’t remember so good before that.

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 till 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 couldn’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 control it. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve met my end, and come back. What people don’t get is that the meat can be cut, bruised, can fall away and rot, but the mind is the one that chooses to let go.

Mam tries it sometimes. But she just can’t. She can’t cut that tiny thread of her-ness that keeps her anchored to her body. She acts like she wants to die, like she wants it all to end, but that little bit of her always gulps a last breath, sicks up the poison.

But 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 strength to crush bone, to pulverise it, if the brain lets them off their leash?

But most people can’t do it. It’s like that time Mister Gregory got his fingers caught in the hinge of the swinging metal door. I was there, I saw the tendons on his arm stick up and his face turn pale. He pulled and he pulled as he howled, pulled away from the door, closing the vice and shattering three fingers. His brain knew what to do – if he’d stood still and stepped towards the pain, he would have got them out. But he listened to the meat and not the mind, and now he can’t use his hand so good. Practice, though, and you’ll get it.

Here. Let me show you. Look at your hands. Are the trembling? 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. Basically, you have to trawl through the brain, try and find that bunch of nerves that holds you together and convince them that it’s okay, 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 and organ 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 might teach you about that sometime.

Sometimes, I want to put my fist through a window, stick my head out and shriek until I vomit my voicebox out and it dangles from my mouth, a bloody mess of smothered screams.

Sometimes, I feel like a rubber band, vibrating to the tune of others around me, twanging in time with their pain and joy and lives.

Sometimes, my hands shake, and shake, and shake, and my face twitches like a swarm of insects has hatched under my skin and they are crawling, burrrowing down, trying to find a way out.

Sometimes, I want to run into walls, bounce off them and run at them again, and again, and again.

Sometimes, I get so angry that I punch things, people, myself, but it doesn’t help.

Sometimes, I am so full of energy that I want to claw my own skin off, shred myself down to the bone, so the fire can bleed out, and I can rest.

I just want to rest