She wandered back into my house one warm day in November. I don’t remember what year it was. She picked up the cigarette that she had discarded upon leaving, from where it waited, smouldering patiently in the ash tray. She put it to her lips and I felt the familiar warmth against my cheek as she inhaled and restored it to life. Her hair was still dark and wild but she seemed taller. Perhaps it was just that she stood taller. Her eyes may have changed colour a little. This time she had brought with her a faded canvas bag which she dropped onto the floor, leaving it to slump there like a dead animal. She stubbed out the cigarette eventually, before smiling half-heartedly at me and walking into the bedroom. She closed the door behind her and slept for two days without moving. I went in only occasionally, to confirm that she was still breathing.
While she slept I quietly emptied her bag and set about washing all of her clothes and leafing through her collection of paperbacks, searching for sections that she had underlined. Absorbing the words that she had taken into herself seemed an act far more daring and intimate than handling the underwear she had worn. There was a personal journal in amongst the books, but there I drew the line. It was not a matter of respecting privacy, but rather that I was terrified by what I might read.
When she finally awoke she swung the bedroom door open and walked past me naked, across the floorboards and into the shower. I heard the water splashing over her body and her gentle humming of a tune I vaguely recognised. When she emerged she stood and dressed methodically in front of me. It was only then that I realised I had never really seen her naked before.
When she was fully clothed she reached into her skirt pocket and magically extracted another single cigarette. She looked over suspiciously at the pile of her books that I had arranged on the table, her journal sitting on the top. She exhaled a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling before looking across to study me carefully. “I’ve been thinking of giving up,” she announced, though it was not obvious, at the time, what she might have meant. We just stood there gazing at each other for a minute or two, or until I could take it no more.
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked at last. She fiddled nervously with a few strands of wet hair that refused to remain in position behind her ears. She smiled at me sweetly before she spoke. “I was about to ask you the same question.”
*
And now, in reference to the poorly chosen title of this post, I cannot resist but finish on a silly note, the way all things are best finished. I should point out, in closing, that it is me who constantly finds himself as the butt of all jokes, and so always keeps his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
She left a piece of her behind A little trace that I might find Out of mind, but not forgotten Memories of her gorgeous bottom We shared a moment, shed a tear My eyes fixated on her rear A target far beyond my class But what a lovely piece of ass
As I reported a week or so back (so most of you have quite understandably forgotten) I somehow squeezed into the 2nd round of the NYC Midnight Micro Fiction Competition, though well back in the field.
For those of you who are not aware, the word limit is 100 – which is fairly crazy. But anyway ….
For me, this time, the requirement was for a Horror story about ‘hatching from an egg’ and including, somewhere in the 100, the word ‘confuse’.
The obvious way to go might be a story about opening the fridge one morning and discovering that half a dozen eggs had hatched overnight and given birth to an angry flock of man-eating poultry. That would probably have worked best with the judges, I suspect.
Instead, though, I decided to suggest that the greatest horror story of all might be life itself. I tried to create an egg/womb/sleep analogy alongside one of life/death/afterlife/rebirth. I was trying to suggest that sleep was a form of afterlife – a sort of transition period – a brief holiday from the horror which is life ….before doing it all over again (and again and again). A quick debrief from God before being shot back out through the birth canal.
I think it may have been a bit ambitious in 100 words. It’s taken more words that that to try to explain myself. But this is it …
Here we go again. After only a brief respite in the afterlife; before-life; temporarily enclosed within the egg. Warm, dark, and misleadingly comfortable. Soon to be forcibly reunited with the calamity of self-awareness; coerced down the tunnel, back towards the blinding blue light. Birth? Or death in reverse? Where one’s first confused screams of terror will be only briefly audible in the looming chaos of existence. A tiny fracture forming upon the surface of the shell precedes reincarnation. Not a miracle, but a curse. The first hints of dawn glow menacingly on the horizon. As it ends. So it begins.
Here’s another thought.
As you are probably aware, the suicide rate is much much higher within affluent society, where everything is pretty good, compared to struggling societies, where everything seems pretty terrible. Even with the constant threat of war, disease, rape, murder, starvation and so, even when things seemingly couldn’t get any worse, people tend to go on and on and on – even when things actually do get worse. We lucky ones, on the other hand, are ready to call an end to it all if 3 instagram posts in a row don’t get a like.
So it stands to reason that the suicide rate in heaven must be very high and, in hell, virtually non-existent. Suicide is a mortal sin, and therefore most likely an immortal sin as well … so there’s only one place to send the offenders.
So … unless we are all doomed to revisit this mortal coil over and over again (not just until it kills us) we are all bound for hell.
To continue on the same theme, the first round of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction competition was last weekend and, with my usual masochistic zeal I entered. It’s only 1000 words, which isn’t much. The story I came up with isn’t much either but, who knows? Everyone else in my heat may have been unwell last weekend. Has anybody else heard of Australian Ice Skating icon Steve Bradbury?
One can always live in hope.
But not much hope.
The required prompts were Historical Fiction/A smokehouse/A hammock.
Has anybody heard of a significant historical event occurring in a smokehouse? No? Me either. Nevertheless there was this radical group of hippies who may well have been in the market for something to smoke in a section of realestate in West Pittsburg back in the 70s and 80s. Look up ‘The MOVE Bombing’
The most alarming part for me is that I’m claiming the time of my own youth as ‘historical’.
Angus Scott and I attended West Philadelphia High School until 1974 when, at the age of fourteen, circumstantial evidence connected us to a string of inappropriately suggestive graffiti on the walls of the girls’ restrooms.
“That’s not my work,” insisted Angus, when confronted, “anatomical accuracy has never been my strong suit.”
“I don’t even understand the joke,” was my defence.
We were both expelled.
During the following decade we supplemented occasional part-time employment with regular petty crime. We spoke on the phone whenever another nefarious idea came to Angus’s head. He rang one morning during the first week of May 1985. “I’ve got something going. You want in?”
“Draw me a picture.”
“A picture?” he laughed, “Remember what happened last time? Nah. This one’s all about property investment. And a smokehouse. Twenty grand and you’re in for ten percent.”
“A smokehouse?” I enquired, “we’re venturing into smallgoods? Chicken, fish, cheese … that sort of thing?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Drop by my office later and I’ll fill you in.” Angus had never worked from an office.
*
But I arrived at the address he supplied, on Osage Ave, that afternoon. The street was a minefield of broken bottles and discarded shopping trolleys. A man in a filthy overcoat was screaming unintelligibly at a burnt-out car. There was a terrible stench in the air.
The townhouse I found was essentially derelict, but a rectangle of cardboard had been nailed over the front door with the word ‘SmokeHaus’ roughly scrawled upon it. The door was open and I walked in. The ‘office’ contained only a hammock strung between two exposed beams, four bulging garbage bags, and a milk crate. I could see a set of toes poking out from one end of the hammock and plumes of smoke rising from the other.
“Jeeez, Angus.” I said, “could you have been any more obvious?” His smiling face appeared from the smoking end of the hammock and he beckoned me over to sit on the milk crate. “Don’t worry about that,” he assured me, “the dope business is just a cover. The real money is in the real estate.”
He passed me the joint and, leaning casually over the side of the hammock, began to explain the whole thing.
*
“Are you familiar with my notorious neighbours?” he began by asking.
“No,” I said.
“MOVE,” he continued cryptically, pointing to his left, “one block that way. A pathetic bunch of wackos led by a certifiable lunatic going by the name of John Africa ….. an apparently charismatic, fundamentalist, anti-technology dickhead who’s attracted a bunch of young disciples clinging to his every word.”
“M-O-V-E? What does that even stand for?”
“Nothing. This idiot can’t read or write, let alone come up with decent acronym. MOVE just means move. As most people around here have done. To a better suburb. There’s only so much unintelligible quasi-religious bullshit played over loudspeakers at three in the morning that your average mom and dad can take. Never mind the rabid dogs and stench of rotting garbage. The authorities have been willing to turn a blind eye, until now. But he’s begun waving guns around and raving about overthrowing governments. So, he’s got to go.”
It was uncharacteristic of Angus to express such a community spirit. “I don’t get it. Where does The SmokeHaus fit into all of this?”
“That’s just a happy coincidence. The same confused, impressionable, disenfranchised teenagers that Africa attracts also happen to be enthusiastic consumers of the very merchandise I have recently acquired.” He pointed to the garbage bags. “John Africa and I are both in the ‘escape from reality’ business. But that’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“It’s all about property values. The world is in recession. Property prices are plummeting. But nowhere more so than around here. The MOVE circus has managed to drive local prices down below those experienced even in the more impoverished regions of the continent he named himself after. And I have some inside knowledge.”
I was, initially, disappointed. “So the pissy little dope operation is a coverup for an insider trading property scam? That’s it? You’ve bought this shithole in the hope of turning a small profit if and when your insider information proves correct?”
“Not just this shithole,” he grinned, “twelve shitholes. I own the whole block. And it’s not a matter of if and when. I can absolutely guarantee a property boom around here this time next week.”
*
He then furnished me with the remainder of the details. What can I say? He’d done his research. And I had twenty grand to spare. He climbed out of the hammock and shook my hand. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” he reminded me, as we parted.
*
There was a property ‘boom’ all right. History records that the Philadelphia Police Department, having declared MOVE a ‘terrorist organisation,’ warned local residents and then set off explosives on the site of #6221 Osage Ave on May 13, 1985. Due to an apparent gross miscalculation, 61 surrounding residential properties were destroyed in the resultant firestorm. The SmokeHaus was probably one of the first to go.
The SmokeHaus, and the properties in the block that surrounded it, were suspected to have been ridiculously over-insured. But such was the extent of the damage that questioning of claims was rendered pointless. The government, highly embarrassed by the whole incident, embraced a major new development project and vacant property prices skyrocketed as a direct result. That’s almost forty years ago now.
*
A recent call from Angus came only last week from his beachside villa in Tahiti. “There’s a couple of opportunities coming up here on the islands that I’d like to share with you,” he said, “And the girls. You need to see the girls….”
“Yeah?” I responded, “Why don’t you paint me a picture?”
There was a thoughtful pause on the line. “Nah,” he said at last., “you’d better just pop over. Anatomical accuracy has never been my strong suit.”
Richmond Road 