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WEIRDMONGER
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Born From Night

"Nothing to suck."

The voice filled the room, despite being no more than an infant's - or so it seemed. The darkness hid the true identity. In fact, he imagined he was dreaming. Maybe he dreamed he was imagining. Whatever the case, he slapped his head back into the pillow as if that were the secret of sleep.

"I can't suck straight."

This time, a mistake was impossible. He sat propped against the headboard, listening with more than half an ear. In fact, even his heart had heard - beating twenty to the dozen, as it was. Yet the lungs were quiet, daring not to disrupt any possibility of silence - for which their owner yearned - with the faux pas of breath.

If only an untimely dawn would now soak the curtains in a spillage of orange light. He might have excused this mistake in the course of nature, in order to camouflage an even greater and more frightful hitch such as the voice which spoke of sucking as well as sounding as if the words themselves were syphonned up from a sump that had sucking as its second nature.

He could have felt for the light switch as second best. But manmade illumination was far from dependable. He did not know that. There was little else, however, in the midst of night. Even if the lamp broke into that yellow incontinence which was its shade's habit of casting after the dull click of the switch, it owed him nothing and, furthermore, felt no need to have truck with a ghost. He had sensed many such facts following the arrival in his new home. In any case, the ghost (or whatever it was) might be a chameleon and only the changing hues of daylight could throw up any figment of its presence...

He had no purchase on such considerations. He dabbed at the switch in his side and recognised the dull pin-click with a sigh.

"And now my teeth are cast crooked."

There, etched against the wallpaper, were two swelling tusks of black light, snagged one upon the other.

Silence was deeper than the empty space that quickly filled with a crumpled edge of cot-blanket.

Only with a blotted moon, of course, and the least tenable permutation of nature's secondary quirks, could vampires strut and stalk - freshly born from teething babies such as him.


Published 'Roisin Dubh' 1994


Posted by augusthog at 7:53 AM EDT
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Talkback

He stored up words for future use. Relished insults aimed at himself. Nurtured slips of the tongue. Incubated resentments in the actual shape of glib sound-bites.

And then, at the optimum moment, he would tighten the key and take careful aim at the unsuspecting victim, a victim who, more often than not, had earlier acted as the very source of the barb's power.

Until, one day, there was a ricochet.

And the poisoned dart he had himself blowpiped did pierce his vocal screen-bytes with a bit of his own viral medicine.


Published 'Braquemard' 1996


Posted by augusthog at 7:51 AM EDT
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Culture Vultures

The bookshelves were stacked with cassette tapes. Earfuls of them.

The body must have been left lying there for ages, since the high stench had literally sprayed from the letter-box into a kid's prying face, one who was delivering a free newspaper, despite the sign on the garden gate expressly forbidding such delivery.

When I was finally alerted, as head of paupers' funerals in the local authority, the police work had been carried out. They had decided that the dead body had been left lying for some weeks, if a successful suicide could be blamed for such dilatoriness - which I doubted. Still, a dead body has got broad shoulders, in more senses than one - bones tending to spread out with the grain of decay. There was a desultory investigation by the autopsy man, where, on peering over his shoulder, I saw that there was very little differentiation between the congealed blood and the flesh proper.

There being no family to pick over the bones, as it were, I had my beady eye on the cassette tapes. From a cursory glance of the scrawled labels on the narrow side of each unpliable cuboid, the dead body had been a great lover of classical music. He and I had at least that in common. Even, the autopsy man, a philistine at the best of times, whistled with some bemused amazement, claiming that he didn't mind "a bit of that philharmonic stuff like that big fat geezer who sung the World Cup theme tune and, yes, of course, Mantovani".

"Mantovani?" I pretended I was not old enough to remember.

"Yes, Mantovani. Haven't you heard his 'Charmaine'? And, who else? Semprini. He played nice stuff on the piano. Geraldo. I reckon a lot of that dance music is even better than some philharmonic stuff."

The autopsy man did a mock jig round the dead body's living-room, as if reliving a romance of his youth when he danced the night away with his loved one to the sounds of some godawful Max Jaffa palm court rave or a Victor Sylvester jamming session!

With him thus preoccupied, I was further scrutinising the cassettes. A lot of classy sounds. Ranging from Monteverdi to Boulez. All the Bartok string quartets (my favourite). Tippett. Mahler. Schoenberg. And some composers even I had never encountered before. Hugh Wood. Ruders. Glass. Steve Reich. Havergal Brian. The Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead?

They weren't particularly classical. Weren't they a flower power pop group from the late sixties? I seemed to remember a friend of mine (in his forties, now) saying they were the best thing since sliced bread. And why sliced bread was such a good thing to be the best thing since ... well, I had never, till today, questioned.

Meanwhile, the autopsy man was acting turvy.

He had grabbed a cushion and was waltzing it around the room.

No, I was wrong, because I couldn't believe my eyes.

The cushion was not a cushion at all. It only looked like a cushion. In truth, it was a part of the dead body's body, lace-trimmed with a tripe-like fatty gristle, tinged pink. Goodness knows what he would have done if he had real music to jab his legs to. Most of it was in his head. Yet, I suddenly heard the imperceptible 'it is, it is, it is' sound that one often hears from others' personal hi-fi sets: an irritating habit of live bodies when they travel on trains these days. But, no, the autopsy man's ears did not wield such a spider-headclamp...

Unnoticed by both of us (and presumably likewise by the policemen), the dead body's head possessed a sprung device consisting of a shiny black half-hoop embedded in the white skull bone like a cinemascopic rodent ulcer trying, not to escape, but to enter a sinking ship - each extension of the hoop bearing a sanitary lug-pad stained with yellow wax. The interminable it-is emanated thence.

We then heard the sound of something coming through the letter box. No doubt this month's 'Good Music Guide', but we had scrammed through the back way, without bothering to investigate. Paupers' funeral arrangements are not always such avant garde affairs, I hasten to add. Yet, sometimes, paupers kindly end up burying themselves, as eventually turned out to be the case with today's stiff. Saves on council money. A lot to be said for it. Anyway, my friend the autopsy-turvy man - I've managed to get him into Stockhausen and Frank Zappa, but only after I promised to accompany him to a Richard Clayderman gig next week. He'll be doing our packed lunch.


Published 'Sivullinen' 1994


Posted by augusthog at 7:47 AM EDT
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Friday, 22 June 2007
Gender On Mars
Published 'The Weirdmonger's Tales' (Wyrd Press) 1994   

                Those that are as near to human as near-humans can possibly be did not know that their planet was called Mars by real humans on a planet close by called Earth but which they, the near-humans, called something else.  Neither humans nor near-humans of course knew about each other, but certain chosen gods knew of both.

  

                Mars was transformed (by a series of carefully positioned dark mirrors, hanging from literally nothing in those miracles of prestidigitation learned from divine boudoirs, which, with their corrupt perpetuation of false reflections, trip-switched other more fanciful geometric impossibilities) from its true nature as a fruitful slaughterhouse of red rivers [that intertwined the still sensual crawling flesh of mountainous seething land] into what the real humans could only see as a huge and long-corroded boulder of becrusted carbuncles.

  

                One real human on Earth would have none of it.  He did not believe the hard evidence of the scientists' telescopes.  But that did not prove anything, for he did not believe in the all-seeing gods, either.

  

                His name was Tryout Cogan, brother of the late lamented Alma.

  

                The nature and condition of Mars was not Tryout's only obsession (if his preoccupations could indeed be called such), since he often mused on the real non-existence of Jupiter, on the relationship (that Astrologers had evidently ignored for their own nefarious purposes) of Venus and Neptune both of "whom" had overcome great difficulties of logistics to further their romance and, thirdly but not last, on the planet BEYOND Pluto he believed was in fact Uranus which had been correctly named but falsely positioned between Neptune and Saturn by Hershchel for HIS own nefarious purposes (about which Tryout would never be persuaded to elaborate).

  

                However, being myself one of the gods in whom he chose not to believe, I did not feel able to do Tryout any favours by placing my divine support behind ALL his small-minded theories.  I am merely penning this for my own amusement, little dreaming that it will ever be read by other than my fellow gods in moments of ennui and deshabille.  So, by describing Tryout's theory on Mars, I do not necessarily champion it.

  

                In short, Tryout Cogan believed that the so-called near-humans on Mars possessed no gender.

  

                Like the planet itself, they needed transforming badly.  With characterless bodies, merely human-like by virtue of having the correct number of limbs, feet, hands, heads and boring mind, they could not even hope, he felt, to lead truly fulfilled lives.  True, they spent idle, luxurious, heady days bathing by the red rivers under the hot gaze of the complacent sun, the fleshy surface of the planet tingling beneath them with the arcane rhythms of its eternal sexual foreplay, as its own moving parts indeed moved gently and tentacularly against gravity as well as each other.

  

                Mars was the geography of masturbation made flesh.

  

                But, those who lived off its back like life-size pink dolls with human appendages, could not participate in such physical joy, despite their comparative nudity (comparative inasmuch as their skin was more akin to a body stocking than anything else)  -  no nodules, no lumps, no endings, no nothing, or so thought Tryout.

  

                He'd make a bomb selling gender to them.

  

                He'd take the cleverest dick of a surgeon from Earth, take him in a spaceship and...  Maybe he didn't even need the surgeon, Tryout continued in the random way his daydreams usually rambled.  They would not believe him, for a start, since most real humans knew Mars was nothing but a dead carbuncle of a planet.

  

                Then, Tryout had his brainwave.  His sister Alma would have been proud of him.  He'd teach the Martians how to adapt each end of their alimentary canal.  Surely, there must be a way to bring erotic excitement to such orifices, despite the shortcomings of the rest of their bodies.

  

                It would not be exactly merchandising gender, which had been his original business concept, but the next best thing.  It would also avoid the necessity of sorting the Martian population into males and females...

  

                Well, needless to say, so I won't.

  

                Tryout Cogan soon went on to other easier projects, like building new churches all over America to house the many different religions that now flourished there.  It proved to be a huge money-spinner, for he only really built one  -  the rest were mere reflections which untrammelled faith underpinned to such a degree even the rest of the population believed they existed and worshipped their own brand of gods, in shivering groups, beneath the empty roofs.

  

                It is time to come clean, if that is not a contradiction in terms.  I can no longer pass this off as a bedtime tale for young gods, let alone old ones.  I've come to live with Tryout, for anything's better than immortality.  In a peculiar way, I feel he's actually responsible for my very existence as a god, I suppose.  Indeed, he says he can make me into a star like Anne Shelton or Joan Regan or Connie Francis or, even, his sister Alma used to be ... as long as I can get the right clothes to hide what I've got underneath, for us gods are usually not too well-endowed.  But I draw a line at falsies...

                  I didn't want to go on Wogan, anyway.  Or is the damn programme called Cogan?  God Knows!      

Posted by augusthog at 2:33 PM EDT
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Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Demolition Derby
DEMOLITION DERBY

Published 'The Dark Fantasy Newsletter' 2000


The row of derelict chicken sheds had open hatches three-quarters of the way up to the ramshackle roofs - ready to launch squawking squatter-rats in further spurts of Olympian endeavour. I slept in the house nearby, being one of those toffs whom the squatter-rats so loathed and would really liked to have raced against - thus to diminish their competitive bloodlust rather than do it between themselves in running skirmishes of hand-to-hand brawling (to which they eventually resorted as “better” than racing). Sorry, the whole thing was a bit too complicated to tell, anyway.

As for me, I preached taking-part-is-as-important-as-winning from my open window. But the finishing-line came too late.

I recall that particular evening, with the sun low in the sky casting doubts as well as twirling girders of translucent gold. First one gnarled head, then another, poked from the chicken hatches, tousled mops coiffured into coxcombs. With jabbing glances to either side, I was soon to be treated with the sight of their knees for ears and scrawny thighs clambering out in piecemeal contortions.

Eventually, they scuttled across the allotment, repeater guns like knobbled elbows ratchetting out in skewed angles, rehearsals of bullets rattling into my fence. I waved a fist at them from my bedroom window, only to discover they were already doing likewise to me, in unison, wishfully thinking I would come out to have the race to end all races, a beatable customer for their cut-throat athletics. My principles did not, of course, extend to jeopardising my own preservation to provide a catharsis that would in turn prevent an even bloodier competitive edge. I limbered up, though, in my bedroom - just in case.

In any event, as I say, the finishing-line came too late.

When things got a bit quieter, with the squatter-rats off on their practice jaunts, I did venture into my garden which was next door to that allotment with the now empty chicken sheds. The wood of the leaning gap-toothed fences and of the tumbledown sheds themselves and of the nearby goose-run and of many of the makeshift trees had all been blackened by the recent climatic changes. If I did not know better, I would think I was in a particularly bizarre dream.

One of the more chickenish squatter-rats, previously concealed from my view by his own shadow, jumped out and started squawking so frantically about the final race, it was difficult for me to pick out any words other than ‘race’. The creature’s knees and elbows were somehow conjoined like outlandish lips with his elongated neck plus narrow head the tongue.

“They’ve gone off to train for the last race.”

At last his gabble had separated out.

“How do you know it’s the last race?” I asked.

“Because... because there are no real competitors left to race against.” The squatter surveyed me quizzically as if sizing me up for sacrifice in the very last dash of all.

Deciding to tack against the natural drift of the dialogue, I asked for his name.

“None-of-your-business.”

‘Nonefer Yerbizniz? That’s an interesting name.”

He knew the game was up. I’d blown his cover. The rest came out in a rush, each word racing the next: -

“Mama Yerbizniz, Dada Yerbizniz, Cousin Yerbiznizes, they’ve all gone off... I’m just a sad critter compared to them, left here to guard nothing but the ruins of a track.”

“You’re squawking again, Nonefer ... what’s the point of speaking when he to whom you speak cannot make head nor tail of your gibber?”

Whatever was said, there was indeed an argument for saying the finishing-line had come too early. Nonefer was the real victim of the racing, the only one left alive to compete again.

In the distance, we heard the grumbling hills, much like the thunderheads bubbling up in the olden days before the climate changed, with clouds now clashing more in the mode of tongues clucking than lightning flashes sparking off Heavenly removal men’s clumsy attempts at preventing the ricochet of angels’ furniture in spur-of-the-moment elopements to Hell. Phewl It was a good job I wouldn’t be called to write all this down. I can simply call it a Demolition Derby, by rumour if not by hard fact. That’s all.

That night, I heard Nonefer’s squawking plaintive crooning about the way death was only sad for those left behind. He envied his Cousin Yerbiznizes their races - in Heaven or Hell, he wasn’t sure.

And it was morning by the time I truly fell into a sufficiently peaceful slumber, thus blotting out Nonefer’s plangent wails. I hope I don’t wake up till much later, or I won’t be in a fit state for digging or putting a sad critter out of its misery. A rat race apart. Other than that, perhaps the whole point of telling this was to prove that having-no-point is the point.

Posted by augusthog at 9:12 AM EDT
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Monday, 9 April 2007
Max Haze

The village people, when Max Haze came upon them, had already come to terms with the fact that, one day, they could be drowned or, at best, marooned by the encroaching creeks. For years now, come high water, Packhorse street would be awash and the landlord of the Bridge Arms on its corner would evacuate his regulars to the meeting room upstairs.

“Come on, Toby, it’s no good sitting there - even my bar stools are not high enough to keep your little pinnies from getting soggy.”

The old man, in the dirty flat-cap, would eventually follow the rest, mumbling to himself of what his late wife would have thought of such goings on, up the teetering stairs of salt- seasoned wood. There, they would gather, in a cosy group, talking tall of the old days when, some claimed, they had to climb even as high as the sloping roof to clear the rising waters.

However, they all had to come round to admitting that it was now beginning to get as bad as the tales they told. They accepted it, with equanimity, sitting as they did on sandbags along Church Avenue, mulling away the day by instructing each other how to husband fish and grow seaweed in window boxes. He will always remember the sight of all the locals, pipes burning like bonfires, as they talked into the night of how they might fare, come the Storm that God promised them every Sunday.

Why did Max Haze go there in the first place? He supposed he should blame his agent, who had told him to get the “feel” of the place.

“That place, buddy, will soon be big. And if we are first with the pre-story...”

Max shrugged. He knew old Luke’s pre-stories. He was famous for them. Max had fallen flat on his face several times, as a result of Luke’s “hunches”.

Anyway, that being said, Max had to say that he began to agree with Luke as he motored in from the west. The salt marshes stretched as far as the eye could see, even flatter in the distance than they were close up. Max reckoned God got the world record for horizon throwing when He was practising round here, a personal best in distances. At first, the atmosphere did not permeate into the cab where he, in all innocence, squatted behind the wheel. But, soon enough, he felt nuances of it through the windscreen - a feeling that his mind was lost in its own endless expanses (for you only use a small bit of your mind for most of your life). He imagined a creature of long thin bones straddling from horizon to horizon and honing its mandibles ready for Max’s eventual disembarkation like a winkle from its shell.

The most telling moment was freewheeling into the village itself, starting most of the inhabitants with the snorting juggernaut that he drove. He came into the village rather suddenly which, if supplied with the luxury of hindsight, is surprising seeing that the landscape was so rather flat. The houses were much like those terraced tunnel-backs you often find up north, with ginnels threading between the small backyards. The only difference was their being taller than the normal “2up2down”.

The main Street, if that is not a misnomer, was darkened by these leaning residences, where washing-lines strung between the roof-trees did not seem to have the space they needed to breathe. The kerbside gutters were almost swollen rivers, he thought, if he could be allowed to exaggerate just for a moment.

He cursed Luke for sending him on such a trip, up a creek without a paddle, as it were. How did Luke know that a story was about to break in this back of beyond? His sense of smell for a scoop had always stunk... Booking a room at the Bridge Arms was not easy. The landlord, who obviously did not like customers at all, gave Max Haze all the excuses in the world for why he could not let a room to the likes of him.

“I don’t hold truck with lorry drivers here.”

“I’m not a lorry driver, as such, I just happen to drive one,” Max replied with as much sense as he could muster. The landlord looked at him askance. Then at the regulars. Then back at Max.

“I’ve got a room on the ground floor. The rest higher up are all taken.”

“That’ll do nicely,” Max replied, much against his better judgement. 

*
Max rang Luke about 10.30 p.m.  Luke said he was in bed and why was Max ringing? Max tried to explain the bad vibes, but Luke seemed to be talking to somebody else for the whole of the conversation. So no joy there.

One for the road, Max thought. And he ordered a large honeydew whiskey at the bar-hatch, where the landlord was leaning along with the rest of the drinkers.

“We don’t serve just anybody after half past ten,” he muttered.

“I am a resident at this pub tonight, so I’m not just anybody,” Max retorted in as unfriendly a tone as he could manage.

He ended up being served a half-measure in a smeared glass and he took this off to his assigned room which was flush with the bar, behind what turned out to be a wall little better than a breakfast cereal-box.

It was difficult to sleep, it goes without saying: what with worrying about whether he had parked the articulated properly (had he left on its lights? was it on double yellow lines in the narrow street? would a crazy local let down its tyres or siphon out its battery acid?) and the nagging doubts about the whole affair (was Luke stringing him along? could he afford to continue paying wages to Max in view of the impending collapse of his newspaper?) and the rising indigestion as the pub-fare took on its true identity (now that it was out of sight among the stomach juices) and the incessant chatter of the locals into more than just the small hours (gradually seeping into his dreams as he dozed) and, finally, their clump clump up the wooden stairs as the wind and rain got up...

He would never forget his dreams that night. He was back out in the surrounding salt marshes, and the bony monster had become a reality rather than just a figment of his imagination. He could hear its clicking, above the roar of the lorry’s engine. He could see its jaw, yapping like Luke’s but without the flesh and much much bigger. He glimpsed its appetite, not for belly-fulfilment (for it did not seem to have a belly at all) but for something even more basic, as it thrashed a thickening tentacle that belied its spare ribs.

He woke before he could fathom the dream’s depth.

The bed was floating in what he could only describe as black jelly. His body felt so bad, he would have exchanged its metabolism for the direst seasickness known to man. He became closed in, for the bed had been taken up to the cracked ceiling, with the door somewhere below. He yearned for the endlessly open horizons which, earlier, a comparatively sane God had seen fit to grant the world.


*
By morning, he had slept it off. He skipped breakfast, even though he felt hungry.

His lorry, as it turned out, was neatly parked and, as Max cranked the ignition, its life-force tripped easily into stutter-free.

He drove steadily down Packhorse Street, wondering why some villagers were perched up on the roof-crests  along with the T.V. aerials.  He had to get back to London quick, to brief Luke as to the goings on. The telephones were out...and the tickertape no doubt.

The lean-to houses crowded him in, as if they were set on preventing his his egress to the salt marshes. One old lady villager, with slight chin beard, peered at him from her own particular tunnel-back house, her mouth opening and shutting on silent speech bubbles. Max Haze grounded his truck against the steepening wall of a tall terrace and tried to radio Luke, but could only get a completely fictitious weather forecast on Radio 4.

published 'Exuberance' DFL Showcase 1990

LAYING DOWN THE HAZE: http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1066&blog_ID=Simonymous

 


=============


Posted by augusthog at 4:36 PM EDT
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Sunday, 25 March 2007
Shadows of Sight

At the edge of the moment, I fell into a dream. But there was nobody around to catch me. . . and I continued falling straight into a strange darkness (which was neither sleep nor dream) where finally there were arms that gathered me together like a mother discovering her aged child for the very first time.

But all I could do was wriggle free and search through the dripping warmth for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Eventually, without any warning at all, I woke from the moment and entered the hopefully endless minutes that remained of my life.

But at my back was the night, and out of that night there reached the scrawny arms for light and became the shadows of my sight.


(published 'Cloth Ears' 1990)


Posted by augusthog at 3:10 PM EDT
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Friday, 16 March 2007
Bumpsadaisy

Donald was never in two minds about remaining neutral - having based a whole religion, as it were, upon balance and detachment: a passion, in short, for dispassion.

Until he met Daisy.  And she threw his caution to the wind - mainly because he fell in love with her, convinced that she was the most beautiful woman in the world and, certainly, more than he deserved.  Eventually, they became engaged to be married.

But the scales tipped and Daisy ran off with Donald's best friend.

(Published 'Purple Patch' 1997)


Posted by augusthog at 5:10 PM EDT
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Saturday, 10 March 2007
Threading The Night

I have a feeling, a strong feeling that the hallway is darker than yesterday and an even stronger feeling that tomorrow it will be darker still.

A door shuts elsewhere in the house, as I wait by the foot of the stairs, waiting to hear the patter of feet along the landing. I have waited so often, at this time of early evening, that I have almost forgotten the purpose of it all.

It’s very well and good having strong feelings about things: all my life, I have not exactly imposed my views on matters, but more or less waited for events to turn out the way I just knew they would - it comes to the same thing I suppose. But my Father used to wag his finger at me from behind his Times; and I, ceasing momentarily from staring at the armies of sparks marching at the back of the fire, would smile knowingly at him, at the same time as placing toasted slippers upon his curling toes.

Now, I’m older, of course, but Father’s not. I feel he’s still the same age, only a few years ahead of me now. Mother was a tall lady - and, if my memory serves me right, if she were standing here at the foot of the stairs like me, waiting, her head would almost reach the top of the landing.

But landings are peculiar places: lights flashing on and off as members of the family dodge in and out of each other’s rooms and, when the Great Clock chimes Midnight (the Father of the House plodding from the study to his bedroom), the unbroken darkness settles in for the duration. Then there are no landing-beacons (nor dinner gongs) to help them home in.

If it weren’t for my comings and goings, doings and undoings, not even mornings would bother to disturb the floating cities of dust.

So, I was positive I heard the pattering start from a distant part of the house at the closing of another door. It only took me a moment to take two breaths before I saw the tiny girl appear in the gloom at the head of the stairs. I could hardly see her open, innocent plate of a face ... and I knew I would only feel compassion if I actually could see the eyes. I’m certain, though, she will not come nearer, at least for a while, and a while is longer at this time of day than at any other.

“You’ve made it then?” I called up.

No answer, as I knew there would be no answer. There can only be questions towards the end of dusk.

“Are your little feet curled up like casters?” I called up again, without thinking.

#

She is a Singer ... and, inevitably, with a needle that can only make extremely long hemming stitches. My great great grandmothers treadle away in the rooms beyond the broom cupboards, and the machines they treadle are living extensions of their bones. They’re all around me now, the forebears of the house, Father made of even taller shadow than Mother.

The xvaif whom I call Little Bobbin does start to descend the stairs, her arms stretched out sideways like a trapeze-pole; and her voice gradually becomes clear … a thin piping tune that I believe to be only one remove from weeping.

I have a strong feeling that tomorrow the hallway will be emptier than today ... empty like utter darkness is.


(Published 'Fantasy & Terror' 1992)


Posted by augusthog at 3:42 PM EST
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Saturday, 17 February 2007
The Thing of the Past
 

Every night, there was a monster in the road outside my house. I knew this because I was an insomniac and one night, upon impulse, I peered through my bedroom window. And there, dog-shaped in the gutter, was what I assumed to be a monster. It seemed the obvious thing to assume.

 

From time to time, the head reared on its neck and then flopped down again, as if it couldn’t be bothered to frighten anyone, even me.

 

Or was it too frightened itself to move?

 

So, every night since then, during those inevitable hours of sleeplessness, having had my fill of real dreams, I staggered over to the tattered curtains and, through a keyhole-shaped slit, fastened my cooling eyes upon that pulsing mound.

 

Each night a smidgeon larger than on the night before.

 

#

 

“Are you awake?”

 

Someone was making a hell of a row upon my bed­room door. I had fallen into a fitful sleep, which I usually managed to do Just before dawn.

 

“No! Go away!”

 

And whoever it was did.

 

The previous night had been the seventeenth time I had watched the monster. It was strange that I could recall the exact number of sightings, but not make comparisons of size between the first and the last of them - if, Indeed, it were the last sighting. Like all of life, finalities only emerge in retrospect. Middles unmea­sured. Beginnings often unanticipated and unrecognised.

 

That voice at the door began to haunt me. It was not familiar: a female one, but with undercurrents of masculine depth. Probably a passer-through. Squats are like that.

 

Eventually, I dragged my scrawny body from its pit. I frequently wish I could refer to myself without the use of the first person singular. I is so definitive. Makes escape impossible.

 

I needed breakfast. But the cupboard was noticeably bare. Whoever had disrupted my belated sleep had evidently filched a bellyful. And scarpered with it. With no bye or leave. In hindsight, the food must have been disappearing over a period and only today did I notice this since the cupboard was finally empty.

 

I needed a gulp of air. Tentatively, I opened the front door. Not even a tell-tale stain in the gutter where the monster had seeped its innards for most of the night.

 

The cleansing-cart came early to these parts during those most sleepful moments.

 

“Hey!”

 

On the other side of the road was that stranger who had earlier accosted my bedroom door. I waved curso­rily. I had been brought up to acknowledge people. Politeness bred to the very bottom bone.

 

He or she was crossing the road, apparently to have a talk with me close-up.

 

“Yes?” I asked, in the hope of getting at least one word in edgewise.

 

“Big news! The place is going under the hammer today.” He or she pointed at the squat whence I had just emerged. This was not exactly big news as bad. It foreboded the end of an era.

 

“How do you know?” I need not have worried about the allowances made by the stranger for normal conver­sation. In fact, the only reply to my question was a tap to his or her nose.

 

I shrugged. I had heard such stories before. People often delight in bringing bad news, even if the news isn’t true. Then, I recalled the bellyfuls of grub pilfered from my larder-cupboard.

 

“Hey! Did you pinch my food?”

 

The stranger smiled.

  

MUCH LATER:

I have forcibly dragged the cuplrit to my kitchen and prodded my longest finger as far down its throat as I could. What lies on the linoleum makes me think that there will not be an eighteenth sighting of the monster.

 

Sleepless nights are sure to be a thing of the past thankfully.

  

(Published ‘Carnal Chameleon’ 1993)

 

Posted by augusthog at 6:23 AM EST
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