Once

Once, as a child, I was lost.

I don’t remember my exact age. Time has never been kind to my memories and my recall of events – dates, details – has always been a vague and untrustworthy thing. But I remember a sibling in the baby seat of the shopping trolley and as I was old enough to walk and wander by myself this must have been my brother and I must have been in the region of five.

It was in a supermarket. I was following my father and I turned away, just for a moment. What caught my five year old attention in the vegetable aisle of Safeway I do not know, but for a moment I turned away and I slipped into another place where I was lost.

I didn’t know I was lost until I turned back; mind still elsewhere, dreaming the day gone, and I put my hand into my father’s and then, at a jolt from him, dragged my gaze along that hand and the arm and looked up into the face of a man who was most definitely not my father.

He must, I think, have been a nice enough man. His puzzled smile is kind in my mind; his amused ‘hello?’ is gentle.

He almost certainly did not deserve the look of horror I bestowed on him, or for me to scrabble, cringing, away; heart tripping with mortified shame at having touched a stranger so casually with a trust that did not belong to him, and with the panic of being alone, alone – no parents, no sisters to be seen and the sudden, absolute, nightmarish conviction that they would not be found again, ever, and my throat clamped down with fear –

And there, down the next aisle, was my father; one hand on the trolley, frowning down at a packet of pasta. I rushed to him and clung, to his confusion. Bemused, he asked me what was wrong and so I learned he hadn’t even known that – for a moment – I had been lost.

Five things I like (and a bonus)

1) Ethnic supermarkets 

The ones you wander round in a happy bemusement of childish glee, picking up products and wondering what they are.

There will be packets covered in a language you do not speak, with pictures that seem to have no relation to food at all - or which you hope don’t. A small child may feature, or a cartoon panda. Or a small child dressed up as a cartoon panda. Is it panda flavoured? Small child flavoured? How do they know what small children taste like?

You will buy it and it will sit in the cupboard until you unearth it again and learn from the one piece of information you can understand, the sell by date, that whatever the child-panda food is it is now sadly past its prime. It doesn’t matter. You have consumed all the possibilities it contained. You can throw it away now.


2) Proper second hand bookshops

It should have nooks and crannies and precarious, avalanche ready piles of paperbacks leaning against the one shelf you are trying to get to. It should have the smell of books; their yellowed pages and crumbling, Penguin-orange spines and the dry, faintly-vanilla dust scent of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of much loved words.

It should have at least one cat and if possible the owner should have a beard. Even if they’re female.


3) Snow

Or the moment, first thing in the morning, when you step into freshly fallen snow.

Or the moment right before you step into the snow, the moment just before your foot places down.

The virgin moment just before you raise your foot and take that first explorer’s step.


4) Reading something new

Reading a poem or piece of prose and coming across the first, startling line or turn of phrase that hits right underneath your heart and makes you want to gasp. That makes you want to stroke the page and lift your fingertips to your mouth afterwards as if you could taste the words.

They would taste dark and roughly sweet.

They would taste clean and fresh and prickle your tongue with their lightness.

You want to find someone now and press your mouth to theirs and open up so they can lick the tang of the words from your tongue and savour your amazement with you.


5) Inspiration

The flash when inspiration strikes and the words start filling your head and you hurry home, cupping the words carefully, in dry-throated terror that they will spill and trickle out from between your fingers and leak away before you can capture them safely.

All the way back you are holding back part of your breath and the people on the bus only see your far-away look and don’t realise that you are a tightrope walker, a circus act; balancing wonder and performing miracles above their heads.


And a bonus 6) You

I like you.

(Keep it secret, but really you are my favourite.)

This is a safe space

We’d been planning it out for days but of course when it comes down to it Alex manages to fuck up the timing. So we aren’t quite ready for Dave coming home and we’re all caught out. He stands in the doorway and looks at us. We stare back, looking kind of guilty. Then Fiona coughs and says, Dave. She says, Dave, we all care for you. You know that, right? She’s got the air of someone who’s cleared her evening for this bullshit, damn it, and is going to see it through.

Dave drops down into the armchair, carefully positioned so it faced the group but the placing of it wasn’t intimidating, and he says oh, come on, in this weary voice. Didn’t we do this already?

Fiona forges on. She likes to see things through. We want you to know we care about you, Dave, she says, it’s just that there are things about your behaviour we’re concerned about.

The late nights, Alex says. The stains on your clothing, says Bethany, and the rate you’re going through the drain cleaner; you claim you’ve got it under control but—You’re taking risks, man, Malcolm says bluntly, interrupting. You’re going to end up getting caught. It’s not as if it’s hurting anyone, says Dave. Well, says Malcolm, it kinda is. If you think about it. Malcolm’s always been a stickler for accuracy. Dave rolls his eyes. Ok, he says, it’s not hurting any of you. Is that better?

Fiona raises her eyebrows at me but I just shrug. What? I mouth at her. I’d been going to make the point about the drain cleaner before Bethany stole my thunder. Fiona glares and I sigh. I knew we shouldn’t have voted for her as chair.

Mate, I say, the thing is that it is hurting us. You’re going to start bringing down attention we don’t need and you—Hang on, says Alex, aren’t we meant to be using ‘I’ statements? ‘I’ statements and no generalisations, remember? All this ‘you’ stuff is very confrontational.

Fine, I say, I think that you need to stop shitting where we all have to eat, Dave. I feel that you using this area for your ‘episodes’ is going to affect us all and I think that you should keep your habits at a safe distance, like we do. Is that ok, Alex? I ask. There’s no need to be snide, says Alex.

We’re getting off topic, says Fiona. What we want from you tonight, Dave, she says, is an acknowledgment that there’s a problem and an agreement to deal with it. She pats his hand. We’ll help you if you need it.

And if I don’t agree there’s a problem? asks Dave.

John’s been quiet so far but now he leans forward to say his piece. Then the bottom line is, he says, that we start looking at other ways of remedying the situation. He smiles at Dave. Kill or cure, Dave. You know how it is.

Idle Hands

The institute is fairly pleasant. An old fashioned building set in grounds that they are allowed out into under watchful, armed supervision.

He gets bored very quickly.

* *

He cannot play as much as he wants to. Not with all the eyes watching everything he does all the time. Not when these people will have access to his files and know what he’s done elsewhere.

He had managed one quick game soon after he was transferred; something that did the double duty of taking the edge off his nerves and underlining to the rest of the patients who he was. What he was capable of.

He hadn’t been overly punished for it. No matter what he’d done before, this was obviously an accident. Self defence.

Because no one would have been able to calculate the angle of a shove to deliberately crack the soft egg-shell of the temple against that sharp table corner, would they? Especially injured, trailing a broken limb like a surrender flag of helplessness.

(And that had been harder than he thought to manage: bracing his forearm between the fixed table and the wall, letting his body fall heavy forward and hearing, feeling that painful snap.)

There was slight surprise as Fuller had never attacked another inmate before. First time for every first offence, though, and Fuller had favoured the young, innocent look in his victims before being caught, hadn’t he? (As he had known from the man’s first lingering glance at him. It had made him so easy to trap.)

A medical examination after he’d been found in the room with the body – huddled in a corner, trembling – had shown bruises along with the broken arm: contusions, damage… tearing. He could not be blamed for fighting back.

(After being taken back to his new ward he had clenched his inner muscles and felt that delicious ache of rough use and thought of Fuller panting, hook-caught, after him into the storage room. Allowed the dead, dark smile to come into his eyes where only his fellow prisoners could see and saw them shrink back from him as he had known they would.)

* *

The others know him after that. Knew what it was they were locked up. Like recognises like, and predators always prefer to go after prey rather than kin.

They see his weapons, the others. The doctors, even the guards, are soon taken in by the wide eyes, the slight stature; the breath of innocence. But the others see beneath to the teeth and claws and stay away, affording him little opportunity for fun.

With the lack of easy companions he doesn’t dare play very often. If caught that would mean a loss of the privileges he has so reluctantly been granted. But not all of the gamekeepers are as blind to the wolf under his lambskin as the rest, and that does give him some room to amuse himself. And to have something to talk about.

* *

His calls are watched – privilege does not extend to privacy – but he and his correspondent are old hands at this dance of subtext now. He settles himself into the bolted-down chair set in front of the caged monitor screen and smiles at the face waiting there.

“My friend, it is good to see you again. I hope you are well?”

Dark eyes meet his and the other inclines his head. “Yes, I am in good health. I trust you are the same?”

The familiar opening move, showing none of himself. No offering to betray weakness. He is sometimes very sorry he never got to play chess with this man when he was still free of these walls.

He nods but lets his smile dim a little. “Yes, I am. Although…” lets the smile fall away completely now “Something unfortunate happened here at the institute the other day”

“Oh?”

It is like watching a grandmaster. No-one else would be able to see the eager spark in that cold gaze; know how much his friend wants to hear what he has to say. He looks down and lets a tiny tremor into his voice “Yes. One of the orderlies here. There was a commotion with one of the other – the other patients. They were upset and it was on the second floor, out on the corridor, on the landing by the stairs, and the orderly he didn’t look where he was stepping and he fell. He tripped and fell down the stairs”

He looks back up, eyes wide “I saw him. He broke his neck. A terrible accident”

And it had taken so little to achieve.

Just making sure the other patient had his fit in that particular spot, when the cleaning had left the floor still slick and shiny. Meeting the orderly’s eyes from several careful paces away and suddenly letting all that he was, all that he wanted loose into his eyes and his smile.

And then all he had to do was watch the man cringe. Flinch back and stagger and fall.

The hardest part had been closing his eyes to the delightful ruin , so nobody would see his pleasure shine through.

He lets it gleam now though. Locks eyes with his friend and knows the other man can read everything he’s left unsaid. The other man’s eyes go wide, then heavy lidded with satisfaction and the silence lasts just a beat too long before his friend says, low, “Terrible indeed. It seems we both have had… disagreeable things happen to those around us recently”

He hugs his glee to himself, makes his eyes go round to imitate sympathy and settles back to hear of the latest ‘accident’ at his friend’s workplace.

He does look forward to these little chats.

Rivalry

After several sessions the doctor at the hospital they were keeping you at told us it was called ‘Paranoid Body-dysmorphic Mutilation Syndrome’.

He said a horror of its involuntary movement was why you’d bitten your own tongue out. 

I waited till he left the room before pointing out to you that your left eye was twitching.

Just your typical Glasgow Fair Monday

I have a view of a hotel from my office window. It’s the hotel above the railway station, behind the car park, with a view of the motorway.

In the underpass ‘plaza’ directly below it, with its handful of small businesses, there is a lapdance club. And a café that will sell you things fried and wrapped in cheap white rolls as light and unreal as the cotton wool clouds on a children’s collage. It is not an upmarket hotel.

There is currently a man standing at one of the windows – four from the top, third from the left – and he is naked and masturbating. I’m struggling to imagine what it is that he could possibly be excited about in the view of the top storey of a 1980’s concrete-slabbed car park or the slightly grubby exterior of the ex-school building that houses the office I work in but, to be fair to him; he does not seem that passionate.

The curtain at the window is giving him bother. There seems to be a fault, as it keeps falling across the window – he can’t arrange it to his liking and has to keep stopping to push it back. Or possibly it’s the weather that’s troubling him. Dank and drizzling, with the sky the colour of grubby, sweat-stained sheets. That old Glasgow welcome.

Perhaps he is in town for some unwelcome task, or a boring meeting. Maybe it’s thoughts of quarterly figures and budgets that are making his hand listless, his enthusiasm limp.

Or, can he see us looking back at him? Are there more watching him from the other windows he can see? Is performing for a bored, disinterested audience not the pick-me-up he expected?

He’s turned away from the window now and the curtain, free from interference, creeps lankly down again, leaving a slight gap. I idly wonder if I would hear him sigh if I was in the room, and then go back to trying to decide what to have for lunch.

It's not stealing. It's 'being inspired'

I've been looking through the archives of the wonderful asofterworld recently and decided to do something similar with the little snippit fics I've been coming up with. Similar except mine will be a single photo instead of a 3-strip comic. And won't be as witty. Or as twisted. Or as well produced.

So, after that stunningly seductive intro, here you are: ragbonehair pictions. It’s like someone took your childhood dreams and brought them to crappy, poorly illustrated life! (And no, not the sweet shops and puppies dreams. The ones with the killer clowns that ate your fingers like they were lollipops and then killed your puppy in front of you. Those dreams)

Mushrooms

My fail is, as usual, epic

Well, my proposed 'post a mini-fic a day' resolution lasted precisely - wait for it - one day before crumbling to pieces like a cheap biscuit. That's impressive even for me.

Part of this was because I kept having an idea but then going 'Oh, but that would work much better as a longer story. And I could submit it somewhere' (I don't think fics can already have been published before you do this? Not 100% sure on that, actually)

Of course, most of it was because my work ethic spends most of its time skiving off round the back of the bike sheds, along with my self discipline and my single-mindedness.

I did tweet a small fic today though:

Dead pigeon in the gutter, your guts - all sticky, exploded red - look like they would taste of pomegranate

I did really see this on my way to work this morning - oddly enough whilst thinking about doing a short fic about a dead cat I saw in the gutter some months ago. From this it becomes clear that I have become a minor god and am able to physically manifest my thoughts.

At least if I'm thinking about dead animals.

In your sleep, I watch and grind my teeth..

Inspired by a combination of the Campaign for Real Fear and Kirsty Logan's posting of her NaPoWriMo signup I've decided to attempt a mashup of these.

Meaning I will be posting small, drabble like horror pieces during the month of April - old fashioned horror, general psychological nastiness, mildly creepy; if it's in that vein and under 500 words, I'll be posting it. (Hopefully be posting it, at least. I can forsee days when the spirit is more willing than the muse - who can be an obstructive bitch at times).

These pieces will be tagged with the label 'weecreepy' and here is the first -

* * *

Heft

You call me a sheep for circling round the same people - the same area. You don't seem to realise.

I'm not following. I'm tracking.

Knowing your prey makes the culling go smoother.