The Slow Burn

February 28, 2018 Chris Theo

My goal with The Slow Burn was to explore the idea that a seemingly innocuous, everyday event, can have far reaching implications on the psyche of a maturing boy (or girl). The protagonist’s perceptions are changed and with them, his world.

The Slow Burn

Repeated mental probing would eventually lead Seb to some kind of personal truth. One he’d buried under years of cumulative neuroses so thoroughly, that each session with Mary, his exceptionally well-qualified psychotherapist, was a battle through labyrinthine pathways—beasts littered within, snarls and hot breath around each corner. Together they would chip away, Mary arming Seb like Jason to his Theseus, to face something horned, dark and familiar. Each weekly therapy session like a war to reclaim and understand the past, one memory at a time, peeling back beast-flesh to reveal those forgotten things around which muscle, skin and teeth had formed. On and on this would go, week in week out, Seb squirming and sweating, interchangeably acquiescent and resistant when confronted with each gnarled mnemonic; driven by Mary’s desire to lead him to the genesis of his persistent dysthymia. He’d put in the hard work, he’d scarred shirts with brackish residue, he’d cried, mostly out of a sense of relief or realisation above any real trauma, hell, he’d shown up, even on days when he’d rather have been in bed, front door bolted, mobile off, duvet right up there over ears and eyes, hopelessly inviting sleep to take hold and never let him go, as though light itself were the agent of his pain.

There were no guarantees that isolating this switch, petrified within folds of grey matter, would unburden him, but he’d summoned his last measures of hope, years’ worth rationed and accrued for a final plunge. Like a human cannonball hooking one leg after another into a wide, light-swallowing barrel-mouth, he could imagine no future beyond the muffled hiss of the fuse or the rush of blue towards him. For there to be some future, he would unearth the past…

… It was two twenty-six PM and a fourteen year-old Seb was fighting that post-lunch, carbohydrate funk, mustering his last reserves to maintain the appearance of studiousness in Mr. Dodd’s physics class. He looked around, well placed as he was in the far right corner to take it all in, but saw nothing of interest. His pencil was now blunt. He’d scrawled and sketched his way through the last half an hour, his attention flitting between Mr. Dodd’s attempts to summon enthusiasm in a period that gets passed between teachers like a hot turd come scheduling at term’s commencement, and the large, flaccid penis he’d drawn on graph paper between the two neatly labelled axes, Energy and Time. Seb lightly etched a drip of semen at the bell’s end and then another mid-air, below it. Finally, he made playful use of two-dimensional space by pooling the already-dripped semen on and over the horizontal axis (Time). It made sense, he thought, that this cock be in a post-coital state given its exact positioning on these axes.

“…the word for this is entropy.” Mr. Dodd’s voice rises briefly above the apathy. “That is to say that the universe is entropic. It will age and decay until it reaches its terminus, inert. What is known as ‘heat death’. Everything is subject to entropy, everything moves from a state of order to disorder, from one of complexity to simplicity…”

“Except Brian, sir!”

“Why’s that Timothy?” Very obviously sardonic in tone.

“Cuz he can’t get any more simple, sir!”

Raucous laughter from the group of boys (primarily) whose sense of humour seems almost ectropic, formed entirely out of the wasted dead mass of those whose physiognomy or character thought not to cut mustard. The beginnings of a sociopathic, almost cyclical, shadenfreude at play, where the pain and suffering inflicted upon the pimpled swot, or athletically inferior teen, or Daisy, whose body claimed all hope of a happy childhood when it decided the optimal time for expulsion of menstruum would be in the communal girls showers and since then, when they all pointed and went “urgghhhhhhh, gross!”, she’s been deemed unworthy of inclusion in said group—well, that pain and suffering fuels the cackle. And the cackle’s raucous laughter, that hurts Brian all the more. Really, Brian’s done nothing to deserve being singled out, except maybe he’s just flavour of the month, and maybe Timothy spotted that Brian wasn’t listening in class and figured that Brian would come off a complete dunce if his head snapped up with ears pricked to find everyone laughing at him. Well, it’s worked, and Brian’s cheeks have reddened in some fist-clenched mix of anger and embarrassment. Timothy’s trailing laughter is renewed as he points at Brian and feigns constipation to bring his entire face to a rosy hue in imitation of the poor boy. The class erupts and even Mr. Dodd struggles to maintain a straight face—the ultimate bollock-kicking for Brian here: the beginnings of a smirk from the one adult in the room.

Seb looked on and realised that today’s lesson was effectively over… Order to disorder, he thought. Yep.

And that was it. That was the moment everything changed, when class appeared to descend into feeding-time at the primate enclosure.

In Seb’s bag, an uneaten banana, promised an end to his lassitude. It’ll have to wait until break, he thought, assuming it hasn’t blackened by then of course. Warm classroom; his bag, partially filled with still-sodden gym clothes—given enough time decay might be possible. He peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth and tasted sock-sweat, cotton. Gross. And then the bell rang. Class was over.

While he waits for mum at the gates, to pull in and take him to Coding Dojo, his phone begins vibrating. It’s June and the late afternoon dry heat makes pink crackling of schoolchildren with tardy parents. ‘Stuffier than Minnie’s cleavage on Sports Day’, as Timothy’s been heard to say, and it gets played on repeat in Seb’s head every time it pushes 40C. Minnie, incidentally, is a year younger than Seb, yet fully-developed enough to engender a no-guilt response when it comes to sexual thoughts in which she might feature. But Minnie and his sister are classmates, and that’s always tainted things for Seb. Back pressed hard against the school wall, under a six-inch band of diminishing shade, he imagines one of his classmates rubbing one off to the image of his dear sibling. A classmate who, unlike Seb, had been picked up on time and was home already, tummy full of tea, dick in hand, the idea of semen emerging from prick still new enough to be novel. No-guilt quickly becomes so-much-guilt. It’s mum on the phone, and Seb has answered with his not-uncommon “What?!”—a prayer that his sister’s suitor’s willy might just entropy and drop off pre wank’s-apex cut short. Mum wasn’t going to make it—the car’s engine had failed to start. He’d never make it to Coding Dojo now.

Seb began the long walk home, the sun at his back becoming slowly neutered by cloud. He’d only walked the three miles home once before, when dad had ensconced with the family Volvo estate one afternoon and thenceforth vanished. It dawned on him that as a passenger in mum’s car he’d failed to absorb much in way of street names or building facades, and his frustration at having his plans dissolve hollowed his abdomen. The sky was overcast and to his right cars were trailing dust in both lanes. Some had engaged their headlights, illuminating the interplay of tail and headwinds. Miniature dust devils came in and out of existence, flashbacks of a sandstorm that had passed through town last week.

Angular cumulonimbus darkened and promised rain. Soon the dirt would wash from the cracked streets, packing and blocking the subdrains, leaving the roadsides arroyos, running fast and opaque. The rains were a great thing here, infrequent but monstrous, and Seb’s heart would still dance when lightning cracked. He’d count in threes tracing the storm’s approach—one of the few nuggets that Mr. Dodd had managed to impart. The dry air brought attention to his thirst and he swallowed an absence of saliva. Seb was tired, his glutes burned from the morning’s game and his shoulder ached from the strap of his bag. He had no choice but to keep moving…

Seb had walked two-thousand strides or thereabouts, unsure as to whether he was closer or farther away from home: that decaying place that lay fealty to his father’s phantom, still, years later. Choked by incessant fumes and dust clouds, which seemed to intensify as he approached a vaguely familiar intersection, Seb veered away from the pavement into an adjoining field and cut across its diagonal, parting the noxious air one rasping cough at a time. A handful of side roads had to be traversed but there were enough clearings between them to fuel him with a sense of progress.

He trudged for a whole hour at roughly the same pace, seeking refuge in his calculations: he’d walked almost three miles, his gait being what it was. He hoped some vestigial inkling of home remained by the time he returned; the home within home. Mum was likely sat in the kitchen, swirling a dully-clinking iced gin in decaying orbits while she waited for a mechanic or tow. The image of her smoking a cigarette, legs crossed, smoke rising into the room, wrenched at him. Waiting, as she had done for so long, for the uneven purr of the Volvo in the drive to terminate with a croak of handbrake.

Seb took the time on his walk-come-trek to absorb his environment. Almost meditatively he’d try and match the thing upon which his gaze was fixed to a memory. Maybe he’d been here before somehow, on his bike, or maybe it had washed passed his eyeline as he sat in a car’s passenger seat, but beyond recognition there was also distraction. Seb was a ponderer, a dreamer, and something even fans of his art failed to understand, was that he did his best thinking when capturing the light-play on tributaries of a veiny shaft, or when rendering shadow within configurations of clitoral hood and labia minora with a freshly sharpened 2B. Distraction was a pastime for him, and he found he could get some real quality rumination done when investing in a good set of genitals. He’d tried faces but they required a degree of concentration in their execution that detracted from his Zen. So he’d stuck with reproductive organs in their endless variegation, too oft maligned in adolescent abstraction: etched into cubicle walls of the boys’ loo or scribbled in thick permanent marker on Brian’s textbooks.

As he walked deeper through this unknown suburb, worms wriggled through his nervous system. He rubbed his upper arms to relieve them of gooseflesh, aware that the sky’s darkening could no longer be attributed entirely to cloud. It was getting late. Around him, Seb took in the array of off-white buildings smattering his periphery: the occasional low-rise apartment block, the odd shop whose metal-framed doors were closed, windows thick with dust. More prevalent were the one- or sometimes two-story houses that could almost be heard to sigh in relief as Seb walked by. Here, unlike the busier strip of his original route, the sense of defeat was pervasive, as if the entire neighbourhood had capitulated to the desert winds and taken in lungfuls of sand. Only the scratchy, abrasive quality of his steps on the dirt challenged the silence between breath-like flurries. Lengthened, ill-defined shadows overlapped like hazy Venn diagrams and the world took on a dim, dusk-blue iridescence that tugged at his tangled viscera. The gapped, inconsistent grin of the horizon teased no end to the alternating misery of decrepitude and voided lots. Distraction was in short order in this part of town. Everything had this eerie homogeneity that lent it an irrepressible futility and absence of meaning; and at that moment Seb believed that he would be always lost. He would become a vagrant, forever wandering back-streets, penniless, mouth full of decay, teeth simply plinking to the ground as he walked, trailing these macabre enamel breadcrumbs, too few and far between to be of any use.

Seb’s laced, soft-leather moccasins were pooling dirt in their recesses and he’d taken to shuffling, almost carving through the dry, weed-rippled earth. At the brink of immobilising fatigue, Seb caught sight of an intact, but no doubt brittle, snake-skin. Some part of him felt very much like that honeycombed skin, hollow, prone to breaking, a memory of a former, younger self.

Then the sky flashed white.

Before Seb’s learned response could fire in the neurons up there to start the count, a jowl-shaking crack rattled his chest, and he palmed his ears shut at the riotous peal that fractured the air. To his left he caught the trailing of sparks in the middle distance. Mouth agape, almost stupefied, he watched something glow pale blue and angry. Heartbeats were spasming in his chest. He stepped forward, with hesitation at first but then with purpose, eyes sanpaku-wide, fixed on this column-like shape that spun a haunting effulgence in the wind. That one crisp burst of white blindness had cleaved reality in two: from a dusty, haunted, cerulean-washed suburb to a featureless Prussian-blue nightmare, a spectral reality with Seb its sole inhabitant. His mind was ablaze with terror—the kind one only ever experiences in a dream, because only the mind in its REM-induced malice can invoke with such precision the architecture of dread.

This was not the world he knew, its purgatorial vacuity broken only by that middle-distant flaming sapphire, a beacon in the ever-darkening twilight. With each step closer to this brilliant thing his stride lengthened, harried by the gloom at his back and seeking refuge from its villainy. His pace quickened, fuelled by the fear he was being chased. Seb knew he was being irrational, but a subdural surge drove him forward on legs whose lactic-acid sting had somehow remitted. He was running, faster than he could ever remember running, and yet that crepuscular menace, invisible, inescapable, hung in the air. It gnawed at the buildings leaving their fascias bubbled and paint-chipped; it left timber frames porous and brittle, good for nothing but tinder; in driveways it wormed into car engines; and at home it yellowed mum’s fingernails, it siphoned her of joy and calcified her melancholia. It was everywhere. Except maybe whatever this thing that Seb was running towards, maybe it wasn’t there. And maybe, just maybe he could outrun the blight and find aegis within its penumbra. If only his legs could sustain this frenzied pace, feet thrumming the earth, heart promising to burst.

It loomed larger in his view now, trailing hazy phosphorescence with each shuddering footstrike. As the distance between Seb and the light narrowed, he noticed its blue was streaked with sulphurous yellow. It was starting to take shape, this thing. He was able to make out its hard boundaries for the first time, and as he barrelled down upon it, his mind raced toward cognisance. But then, a moment of doubt as the form became less vague; what he saw, what he might see if he stopped running and eyed it more carefully, was no saviour. It was altogether mundane. Too real to be any relief from the malevolent soup the air had become, now thick and deoxygenated in his lungs. He could hear it too, it was emitting a sound, loud enough to be audible over the shock waves rumbling his inner ear as he dashed through the night: a noise, persistent yet unrepeating—intense as an ocean. Fire. The scent of smoke had begun to coat Seb’s nasal cavity. In some unobserved recess of Seb’s mind he knew the origins of what shone—what burned—but he could not access or understand it. The surge within him, and the dying at his back drove him on; his mind void of reason and alight with adrenaline alone.

… A stone’s throw away and closing. Reality would not wait. Even if Seb chose to stop right that second, inertia would carry him beyond the point at which denial was an option. In a neural sub-routine somewhere that very thought popped and fizzled just as he blasted through it—no return.

… Flames two-stories high, or so it seemed to Seb, though he had no context for the fire’s size against this pelagic night. Sparks washed the sky in turbulent, striated arcs, in existence for the briefest of moments before they were gone, as though they’d never even existed at all, birthed from some sprawling, upturned parabola of rippling citrine and white gold, converging down into an angular, white-hot column that terminated deep in the ground like a gnarled trident.

… The air roared and steeped his head in pink noise. His eyes stung, the smoke opaque and rich with glowing wisps, drawn up in whorls by the heat until they opened out like ferns and became lost beyond the fiery ceiling under which Seb now found himself.

No longer running. No memory at having slowed or stopped. Just there, at this terminus, a trailing cloud of dust at his feet catching up to obscure everything below the knee. He stared at this hellish Disneyland, where the suspension of disbelief in the fantastic was somehow inverted—the curtain pulled, the veil lifted, a sudden, terrible loss only ever hinted at and altogether, until then, concealed.

The air was charged, a scorching ion vortex of bone-dry convection that billowed his shorts and shirt; his hair was tousled with static. He perceived a deep sadness here, and immediately recognised a universal truth—it was as if the fire’s intent was not to destroy, as if it mourned what it devoured, knowing that the death of what burned signalled its own demise to carbon and smoke. Yet it could not stop, ensnared by its own tragic rage.

Seb shielded his eyes from the blinding canopy and drew his gaze downward. He recognised it, this tree, despite the trunk’s molten craquelure. It was the towering, ancient olive tree he’d cycled past before (on one of those occasions where he’d been compelled to leave the house and go precisely nowhere as fast as his hairless, skinny legs could manage). The angle of its trunk was unmistakable, tapering up and to the left at an acute angle from the ground, terminating at a vertex, the point of creation, an umbrella of foliage and bitter fruits spilling up, out and around. It struck him as painfully familiar, this tree’s trunk, but beyond the memory of a lost, sunny afternoon and the clicking of pawls there was nothing. Deep ridges in the bark’s patterning had become gulches to flame, infernal blue and pale yellow rapids, rising like a double helix and blossoming into the tree’s fiery crown.

There was no safety here. Seb knew that now. The fire was one with the night, and there was nothing to do but watch it burn.

“So how did you get home, then?”

“Once it was light… I found my way back. It was a whole production really, mum’d called the police, had my uncle prowling the streets in his Toyota flat-bed all night. Fog lights on, shouting my name… Later that summer, he died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“On your father’s side?”

“Yea, dad’s. Andrew. Mum had got her hopes up for the funeral y’know, to corner dad. That’s how ill she was. Wasn’t to be. Missed the funeral, didn’t even bother to come back to get the truck that Andrew left him… What are you smiling at?”

“You, Seb! I’m happy for you. I think you’ve done well. Made progress as we say.”

“Well, it doesn’t feel like it. Honestly, it feels pointless now.”

“I think you should give yourself more credit. You’ve stuck with it.”

“I was scared, so what? Mum liked the odd tipple, so what? About the tree? Just a tree. I don’t care about the tree.”

“Don’t you? Didn’t you?”

“Hmm, I don’t think so. If I had I would have tried to put the fire out or something. But I think I just didn’t want to.”

“The tree sounded old.”

“Yeah, no doubt.”

“And you watched it burn.”

“Mm. All night.”

“Until it went out.”

“Ummyea.”

“It sounds like perhaps… you enjoyed it?”

“…”

“Perhaps just a little?”

“…”

“Fire can be beautiful.”

“I don’t know why I stayed. I think I regret that. Not leaving sooner.”

“Before it burned out, you mean?”

“Mm.”

“I remember Guy Fawkes’ when I was young, I loved watching the fire in the back garden. I’d beg my parents to keep it going and going. I think if I’d had my way I would have grown up in a house with no furniture. Something primal about fire, don’t you think? Our ancestors even sought divinity in the flames.”

“I think I threw my pencil case in there, before it went out completely, when all that was left were the fiery embers. Pretty sure.”

“…”

“Huh! Don’t think I’ve really drawn since then if I think about it y’know. Not sure why even, guess it just seems, seemed, pointless.”

“Hmm… think it’s important to remember what brought you here. When your mother passed away you took it hard, as is normal, as is right, grief is a process, I certainly believe in the need to properly grieve. By your logic would you say that grief is pointless also?”

“Yes! It is pointless. That’s my point, I think.”

“Your point is that it’s pointless?”

“Tsss.”

“You have resisted grieving.”

“Because … It’s pointless.”

“You may tell yourself that, but it’s your mother we’re discussing here. You wouldn’t be human if you were able to detach entirely from that. You need to grieve.”

“I grieved that night, the night of the fire. And I saw nothing divine. No visions in the flames.”

“Didn’t you think the fire was beautiful… on some level perhaps?”

“But it went out.”

“…”

“Seb, you told me the story yourself, even if you’d forgotten it for a time, it was there somewhere. You remembered it, right? That’s worth something. ‘Everything’s pointless, everything dies’, okay, I accept you might believe that, so but where does that get you? Transience is the very essence of beauty for some.”

“You’re asking a lot of questions.”

“Ha! That’s kind of what I do, Seb. And I’m trying to make a point.”

“Not sure I see it, ‘everything’s pointless’ remember?”

“Okay, Seb… What do you remember of your mother?”

“Ouf!”

“Indulge me. Please.”

“Not a lot. A lot of nothing, a lot of inaction, waiting, doing ‘mum things’, but never really moving. Even when I try to picture her, she’s like a painting, never in motion, like everything around her can move but she’s there immobile, statuesque. Like those moving waterfall pictures you get in crappy Chinese takeaways, alive but without… life.”

“She had her own struggles and you saw them as a child. Not easy for anyone, let alone a young boy.”

“She didn’t do anything with her life… and then she died.”

“But you remember her. Her life was not pointless, was it? Not fully realised perhaps—”

“Understatement.”

“—and you came here to avoid the same, uh, inactivity. But she loved you from what you’ve told me. You loved her.”

“And?”

“Everything’s fleeting. But you can still remember her. Doesn’t that make her life worth something?”

“Even memories fade, Mary.”

“Like your memory of the fire?”

Seb smiled.

“Mary?”

“Yes, Seb?”

“The fire…”

“Yes?”

“It was the last truly beautiful sight of my life.”

Keep The Fire Alight

October 7, 2015October 7, 2015 Chris Theo

A 500-word short story I entered for the September CultOfMe competition – I didn’t win. I know, scandal.

The brief was to write 500-words or less inspired by the accompanying image. I really enjoyed writing it, and it was a challenge to keep the word count down. I really recommend it as a great writing exercise, every word mattered and the result is, as you might expect from the picture it inspired, a dark and atmospheric story.

I hope you enjoy it.

Artwork: The Space Inbetween by Luciana Nadelea

Keep The Fire Alight

Marjorie’s thick hood protected her from the rain, but the soft thud of drops battering echoed within its dark aura. They let her know it was raining hard. Even with her face covered and her body cloaked, she knew that tonight was no night for adventuring. Yet she battled on through slicks of muddied, sloping moorland with graceless fervour, distancing herself from the sweeping torchlight at the old manor’s edge. She dragged a well-fed burlap sack behind her, carving the wet earth. It still smelled of old potatoes. To a girl of nine these hills were mountains, this storm a hurricane.

Gentle folds in her black, patchwork cagoule distorted the moonlight and she shone – a beacon of hope for the girls that crowded the manor’s frost-crept windows. They vied for clear lines-of-sight beyond the craggy perimeter, edging and shoving gently, with a respect that comes only through the marriage of shared hardship and malnourishment. These glassy-eyed girls had chosen Marjorie, the strongest of them. They’d sewn sheets of black polythene, liberated one strip at a time from a roll which was used to line the greenhouse floor, and made a garment to shield her from the elements. Bare skin on plastic, a collage of ether dreams, now crystallised. And as Marjorie’s form diffused the light, their eyes followed, up and down, tracing her fight with what seemed like endless peaks. But then their pinprick pupils dilated as the polythene torch became muddied and heavy.

“I can’t see her anymore.” A girl at the window said, it didn’t matter which, for they were as one.

Seconds passed before another offered kindling to the starved flame inside them all, “If we can’t see our Marjorie, then he won’t be able to find her!”

“Let’s pray for her.”

And they did, for it was all they could do – frail luminaries casting last bursts of incandescence into some skyward plea.

As Marjorie fought over the final peak, inhaling stabs of icy air, the clearing before the forest’s edge was revealed to her. Two saplings stood just ahead, in defiance of the ancient trees which marked the sharp forest line – the point at which nature had appeared to decide: nothing beyond here lives. We do, she thought looking back one last time. Knowing then what must be done she stepped toward the left-most sapling, opened the sack and reached into the dark with blistered hands, feeling for those hard, familiar reminders of their keeper’s wrath. Through the assortment of stale offerings her sibs had gone hungry for, she removed the first skull. Staring into the voided eye-sockets she began to cry, in sadness and profound relief. “Rosie…” She mouthed, weeping as she threaded it through the uppermost branch. Tears and names flowed as each skull was woven into these two young trees. All faced the manor.

“Watch over them for me a while, sisters.” She said.

And she fled into the forest, the torchlight dying at her back.

Spoiler

June 20, 2014August 16, 2017 Chris Theo

This story was inspired by Game of Thrones (the TV series). Specifically, a Facebook “friend” thought that spoiling revelations in the show was a just bit of fun, rather than the deadly serious matter that it in fact is. We are no longer Facebook “friends”…

[WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILER FOR SEASON ONE OF GAME OF THRONES]

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Spoiler

My name is Michael Harris (otherwise known as inmate number 44628) and its from here, my dank prison cell, that I intend to recount the exact set of circumstances which led to my incarceration. Just to be clear, this is no ordinary prison, this is a psychiatric facility for the criminally insane. While I write this I’m in the process of emerging from a twelve hour semi-catatonic state, courtesy of this facility’s pharmacy. I have a small window of about two hours to tell you my story before I’m sedated for the second time in twenty four hours. So I’d best get on with it. But first a title, something snappy, let’s see, “The Murder of Caden”. Too simple. How about “The Inevitable Murder of Caden Borwick”. It certainly has something, and let’s face it, if I didn’t kill him someone else would have got round to it eventually. He was a monumental git after all. Now, I’m a little conflicted about using the word “murder” in the title, after all I had no intention of killing Caden prior to my arrival at the office that morning but it makes for a better title. So for the purposes of this story, yes, I murdered the motherfucker.

I first met Caden Borwick formally in 2010 when he joined the company I worked for. Despite my workplace at the time being one comfortable with casual dress no one was prepared for what walked through the door that day. Caden was a goth. He was the kind of goth other goths would give funny looks to in the street. As he walked into the office on his first day, with a confidence inappropriate for a new hire, heads turned, jaws dropped and someone sat amongst the sea of open plan desks broke the silence with a “What the fuck?”. What the fuck, indeed. I stared at Caden, completely unable to look away, his corpse painted face and black lipstick like a slap in the face of normalcy. He wore black PVC trousers that reflected the fluorescent lights above him as he walked. His head was barely six inches from the ceiling thanks to the most enormous black platformed boots I’d ever seen. He was a monstrous black giraffe of death. In a cape. I was so torn on this point, I almost wanted to shake the guy’s hand for wearing a cape to work on his first day but there was a solemnity in his face that made me and every other person in the office wary. Caden approached Colin Schwartz, his new boss and the man responsible for hiring him, and said “Hello, Colin, I hope I’m not too late”. Colin spun around from his desk having been fully immersed in the same spreadsheet the whole morning. He found he needed to angle his head upwards to an unnatural degree just to make eye contact. Poor Colin, I thought, his first direct report ever is ninety minutes late on his first day and looks like that. I could have sworn I heard a squeak as his testes receded into his body. Poor Colin.

“I didn’t recognise him at all”, Colin told me over a cigarette later that day. “The guy wore a suit for his interview. He had olive skin and eyebrows!”

“Jesus,” I said confounded.

“Listen, he’s hot-desking right now but when Mike leaves your pod I’m going to have him sit there so you can keep a little eye on him for me.”

“You don’t need me to do that man, you’re his boss remember, you can keep an eye on him all by yourself.”

“Well, I’m hoping sitting near you will rub off on him.”

“Fine”, I said. I really didn’t mind, I always worked best with my headphones on anyway. I could just ignore him if I had to.

A week later and Mike was gone, the cleared desk opposite me beckoned Caden over and I formally introduced myself. “Hi Caden, I’m Michael. Let me know if you need anything.”

“I don’t need anything”, he said without hesitation. I couldn’t quite infer his meaning from the inflection but I thought it was odd. I let it pass.

I noticed he carried a very large book under his arm but I couldn’t see the title, out of curiosity I asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s a book”, he replied with disdain.

“Well yea, obviously, ‘what book?’ I mean.”

“Here”, he thrust the book at me. It was a weighty tome called Helliconia, thirteen hundred pages long but technically three books in one volume. I had read them a few years ago.

“What do you think of it?”

He glared at me and snatched the book out of my hand.

“Whatever, man” was all he said before he sat down and stared at the screen of his already booting laptop. I guess he thought I had never read it and was just being patronising. Fine. Whatever yourself, Caden.

Sitting across from Caden was very unsettling. He was slumped low in his chair and he stared at me from across the desk, his gaze finding it’s way through the panoply of crap I’d accumulated on my desk during my tenure at the company. I found that after a couple of months I’d strategically moved most of the items on my desk as to obstruct his penetrating glare. One day I went to drink from the bottle of water on my desk and one black eye was staring out back at me. I lost it. I jumped up from my desk and looked down on him “What’s your deal man?”, I said, loudly enough for others in the office to turn around. He ignored me. “Hey, Caden!”, he looked up, “yeah I’m talking to you – what are you fucking staring at?!” He looked back down at his screen. I wanted to scream but resisted, “Listen you cape-wearing fuck. Keep your eyes to yourself, if you have something to say, say it. Otherwise don’t look at me.” He just kept looking forward, tapping at his keys with his pointy nails.

As you can imagine I got a stern warning from my manager later that day but the whole thing was dropped in lieu of “keeping the peace”. I was made to apologise to Caden and then shake his hand, my stomach knotted as I was reminded of having to do the same thing at school with one of the resident bullies many years earlier. Caden was a man-child and I’d been brought down to his level. I felt like a complete idiot for having let him win in such a way. So I vowed not to lose my temper again.

Over the course of the next few months I kept my interactions with Caden to a bare minimum. During that time Colin would give me the inside scoop on Caden’s work performance, he’d received a couple of verbal warnings but was doing just enough to get by. It didn’t look like he’d be going anywhere any time soon. There was a growing undercurrent of dread that carpeted each moment of every day and I had to force myself to keep it under control. The best days were the ones where Caden was sick at home, I could stretch my legs out under my desk without accidentally kicking him. I could talk with other colleagues without his oppressive eavesdropping. Most importantly I could take my time on “Cake Tuesdays” without having to rush my selection before Caden started fingering all the pastries. This, only moments after I’d spied him picking his nose at his desk. Personally, I would have thought the pointy fingernails would dissuade him from pursuing such an activity but perhaps he valued precision over safety. I found myself dwelling on many of his flaws and I spent a lot of time, an unhealthy amount of time, pondering over the ones that bothered me the most. I guess the item that topped the list for me would be, let’s see, his entire fucking personality. And I wasn’t alone. In fact many of my colleagues bonded over this shared hatred and it was a source of comfort in an otherwise hostile environment, like a complimentary hand-fan handed out at the gates of hell.

It’s at this point in my story where I feel I should mention the catalyst that led to Caden’s inevitable death. A casually arranged work gathering at the local pub was getting messy, I was on my sixth whiskey and Colin was on his fourth pint. Mike was also with us, telling us about his new job and reminiscing about times gone by. I put my arms around both of them and pulled them close, “Fuck, I miss this!” I said enthusiastically. I turned to Mike, “Mike, mate, come back man, I’m fucking lost without you son. I’m sitting opposite this fucker now” I motioned towards Caden who was sat in the corner alone staring into space. A straw was planted between his lips and he sucked periodically from a pint of Guinness. I guess he didn’t want to smudge his black lipstick.

“Which fucker?” Mike replied.

I motioned with my head to Caden again, more vigorously this time, “The one in the PVC man, that’s Caden!”

“Shiiiiit, that’s Caden? I thought Col was exaggerating.”

“No man, how can you exaggerate that?!” I said.

“True”, Mike nodded thoughtfully.

Colin jumped in, “He could be carrying a sword, he loves his fantasy doesn’t he. He’s always got a massive book under his arm.”

“Well, let’s be thankful for small mercies, that’s all we need, a seven and a half foot, black PVC clad, sword carrying misanthrope with a personality disorder.”

Mike took pity on him, “Ah, I’m sure he’s not that bad! Each to their own and all that.”

“Nah, I forgot to tell you what happened,” Colin said, about to refute Mike’s statement. “He gave away the ending to Game of Thrones. We were having our monthly one to one, it used to be weekly but it was like getting blood out of a stone, and anyway I guess he was pissed at me for having given him some extra work, and he must have heard us talking about the show, and the bastard told me what happened.”

“What the fuck!” I said.

“Yeah, I guess he’s read the books and he was trying to get back at me.”

Mike and I looked at each other and in unison said “Motherfucker”.

“Well don’t tell me anything”, I said “I’m only up to episode five, got two to watch this weekend.”

“Nice, don’t worry, I won’t say a word but man, I wanted to knock him out when he told me. Literally as he was walking out the meeting room he turns around and tells me, before it could even register he was gone.”

“This guy sounds like a complete cunt”, Mike said sympathetically.

Colin and I looked at each other and said as one “He is!”.

The next morning I rolled into work a half hour late with a moderate-to-severe hangover. I figured that the others must have had a messier night than me as the office was practically deserted. Armed with a bacon sandwich in my pocket I sought out the first available dispenser of caffeinated beverages and jabbed at the buttons like a primate. The coffee machine clicked and buzzed and began to pour black nectar into a paper cup. Caden sidled up to me and looked down at me with towering contempt, his mouth a half-formed snarl.

“I hear you and your mates were slagging me off last night…”

The small, intimate, but non consensual orgy between small mammals taking place in my head prevented me from forming a cogent response. “Huh? You mean… What? In the pub?”

“Yes in the pub, you and Colin and that other guy. Slagging me off.”

“But, who? Who told you that?”

“All three of you were casting evils at me all night!”

Rumbled. “Caden, honestly, sit down man, I can’t have this conversation… I think… I might be sick.” I squatted to the floor having already broken into a sweat and steadied myself on the coffee machine.

“Pussy.” He kicked me with his massive boot like he was checking a car tire. “Oh, and Ned Stark gets his head chopped off by Joffrey!”

The nail in the coffin. I began to retch as he walked back to his desk, his cape trailing behind him.

“Oh my God”, I mumbled to myself. Saliva dripped from my mouth as I continued to fight the vice like grip that had taken hold of my stomach. Thank fuck it was Friday.

I gathered my strength and made my way to my desk. I was hunched over with my hand clutching at my abdomen. By the time I sat down the cold sweat had subsided and I was now experiencing a hot flush, rage had conspired with the hangover to trigger the male menopause. The fan behind my desk was blowing gently and I cranked the knob to maximum. Heaving a sigh of relief I entered my password on my computer and set to work. A loud tutting noise struck me from Caden’s direction, I peeked over my screen and caught his eye. Again I saw and felt his schizophrenic gaze upon me.

“The fan”, he said.

“What about it?”

“Turn it off.”

“Man, I’m hot, let me cool down.”

“It’s not my problem if you can’t handle your drink”, he looked away from me dismissively.

“Says the bloke who sipped a single Guinness through a bloody straw the whole night!” The thought of Guinness made my stomach heave and bile squeezed its way to the back of my throat.

“What I do is none of your business!” His tone was getting more aggressive and I was not thinking clearly enough to try and bring the intensity of this most ridiculous of conversations down.

“It is my business when it affects me! And why the hell would you choose to act like such a dick to me and everyone around you? ALL THE TIME.”

“D’you call me a dick?!” He stood up thrusting his chair backwards and it rolled away before tipping over. I was incensed. I was as angry with him as my digestive system was with me.

“Yes, Caden. You are a dick. A mammoth, dripping, syphilitic penis.”

Caden’s fists clenched and his cheeks reddened. At that very moment I knew I’d crossed a line and I regretted my actions immediately. But part of me was immensely proud that I’d managed to spur a reaction so strong that it was visible through layers of corpse paint. For the briefest of moments I revelled in ambivalence but was quickly forced into adrenaline induced readiness. Caden was coming for me. He made his way around the desk with resolute purpose. The unrelenting roar of the fan on its maximum setting had his cape billowing and flapping behind him. Before I could catch my breath and decide on a counter move to his inevitable attack he was upon me. Like the demented bastard child of a super-villain and dominatrix he pounced, bringing me to the ground with such force that I thought I heard a car backfiring. The first thought to enter my mind as he straddled my pelvis and throttled me was that his dominatrix mother would be ashamed of him, for there had been no mention of a safe word. I felt my tensed neck muscles weakening as I flailed and clutched at his face, the white paint rubbed off on my hands leaving his face smeared. He moved his head left to right reactively and managed to dodge my aimless attacks. I was starting to lose consciousness. Through the muddled, swirling colours beginning to overwhelm my eyesight I glimpsed haggard and pale-faced Colin careering towards us – that brilliant bastard had made it in! A moment later Caden’s head whipped backwards as the collar of his cape lodged underneath his Adam’s apple. Colin was pulling Caden off me by his cape. I felt Caden’s grip on my throat loosen and I managed to take a stunted half-breath. The psychedelic blotches in my vision began to give way to the real world. I can only imagine how ridiculous we looked; Colin garroting Caden via cape and Caden desperately trying to strangle me. All of our faces a different red-ish hue. I took advantage of the reprieve and brought my arms under Caden’s which were still gripping at my throat. I used all my strength and simultaneously thrust both my arms into the soft skin of his inner elbows. He buckled slightly and I heard a tearing sound as Caden’s cape began to rip from the tug-of-war Colin was engaged in. Suddenly Caden let go of my throat and reached quickly for the cape at the base of his neck. He moved with panic and desperation but managed to grip it tightly. He pulled forward and moved his body with it. The cape ripped completely and the immediate loss of tension brought his head down on mine. I turned to the right and he smashed his nose just above my left temple. There was a squelching and crunching accompanied with a fine red spray of blood as his nose exploded against me. I pushed a disoriented Caden off me and saw Colin slumped on the floor a few meters away. He must have hit his head after the cape tore.

Caden managed to make it to his feet and he steadied himself on the nearest desk. He wiped the blood from his nose and mouth with his hand and then looked up at me. Any remaining disorientation had lifted and his stare was now seeped in malice. He was about to make his move and I was still helplessly sprawled across the floor. With very little forethought I crawled backwards on my elbows as fast as I could, but within a few strokes I’d hit my head on the far wall. I was trapped. Caden exploded into motion. He roared at me with his arms in the air like an angry Scot going into battle and I scrunched my eyes closed. I was sure that I was done for. But nothing happened. One, two, three… I started counting, I got all the way up to ten and still nothing. Was I dead? I could still hear the commotion around Colin, I heard a mechanical whirring, some tearing and in the distance the repetitive clunking of our office printer. I couldn’t be dead, not unless I’d made my way directly to Hell. The thought of an eternity of office work forced my eyes open. Caden had not moved, it was as if he’d entered suspended animation the moment I closed my eyes. But then his towering stare faded into one of confusion because despite all efforts to cross the small distance between us he was actually moving backwards – one shuffled mis-step at a time. His outstretched arms which only a moment ago were flailing for a place on my neck were now clutching at his own. His red complexion gave way to purple and his head began to tilt backwards. He took one more half step backwards but in doing so scraped his platformed heel against some grey office equipment. It was an industrial shredder and his cape was already two-thirds swallowed. He tried to drop to his knees but there wasn’t enough slack in his cape, instead his neck was forced farther backwards and he let out an almost inaudible choking sound. It was only once his back had arched to an impossibly acute angle that I realised I was out finally out of danger. Caden, however, was not and within moments his cape had disappeared completely. The back of his neck was pulled tight against the shredder and his collar was successfully asphyxiating him. I sat and watched while my stomach rumbled. Note to self: a fight to the death really works up an appetite.

I noticed a small smattering of my colleagues had amassed around Colin and they had just succeeded in bringing him round. Just as the sales guys, Alan and Nicolai, pulled Colin to his feet they spotted Caden’s predicament. They rushed over to free him but immediately began to panic. They shouted for help and frantically tried to switch the shredder into reverse but instead of spitting out the chewed cape the power died leaving Caden anchored at the neck and without breath. Panic descended into hysteria as others huddled round the unresponsive shredder. Even Harry the perverted IT guy was getting stuck in. The only other time I’d seen him in the vicinity of a piece of office equipment was when Nicolai swore on his brother’s life there was a dick shaped hole in the finance printer. Caden disappeared from view as more people moved in to try and help. I angled my head left and right trying to spot him through a sea of legs but gave up almost as soon as I’d tried. My stomach rumbled again and I smelt bacon. The sandwich! I knew that once my stomach had settled the salty meat and fat soaked bread would cure all ills. I heard someone shouting for a pair of scissors but my attention wouldn’t be swayed. I’d earned this. Carefully I removed the still warm sandwich from my pocket and unwrapped it from the foil-lined paper. I began to salivate. I tried to take a bite but opening my mouth was agonising. Caden had inflicted some serious damage to my neck and throat. Without thinking I licked the bread. Admittedly, it wasn’t entirely satisfying but it was better than nothing. There was a lot of shouting but I only picked up a few words… “ambulance”… “scissors”… “help”… “suffocating”… “hurry”… “dead”. I licked the bread again, almost convinced that I could polish the whole sandwich off in this manner. Then as quickly as they had amassed, my colleagues dispersed and formed a wide broken circle around Caden’s sprawled body. By now I’d moistened the bread enough to pull some off with my teeth. I swallowed but the piece of saliva and fat soaked bread became lodged in my throat. Panic broke my stupor and I hacked up the obstruction in one sharp exhalation. The mushy ball of bread was airborne, it arched beautifully and came down with a wet slap upon Caden’s crotch. All heads swung towards me, mouths agape while police and paramedics piled through the office door. Caden was declared dead on arrival and I never got to finish my bacon sandwich.

The rest of what happened was a blur, a collection of images and sounds. The click of the handcuffs. The looks of disbelief as I’m hauled away. A feint trail of HP sauce connecting my shoe with the lonely bacon sandwich, my thinning tether to reality. The slam of the police car doors. The smell of urine in the interrogation room. My lawyer’s face as the police explain to him the state in which I was found. I’ll never forget that face because I knew then that I was completely, utterly, royally fucked. Apparently, nonchalantly licking bread while the man whose nose you just obliterated chokes to death doesn’t go down well with a jury of your peers. And that, ultimately, is what let me down. I’ve got to hand it to the prosecution, they took the facts and painted a fantastically macabre picture of what made me tick. By the time I was called to testify they’d made it look like nothing I said could be trusted. My attempts to convince the judge and jury that the whole thing was self-defence were blown apart by opposing counsel’s secret weapon: Caden’s diary. This warped tale littered with expletives was a rich fabrication. Every interaction we’d had over the course of the year was twisted to make me look like a psychopath and him like a victim. Of course, I wasn’t the only character to feature in his diary, Colin was there too, referred to as an “epochal wanker”. Nicolai and Alan were described as “a pair of masectomised tits floating down a congealed river of protoplasm” and the girls from human resources were, well, they were just “sluts”. Ever the charmer. But he saved the best for me. There were many, many insults that I won’t drone on about but my two favourites are worthy of mention. One: “Michael talking was like watching someone gargle the contents of a colostomy bag”. Two: “His fat fucking cunt of a face continues to squawk incessantly”. Not sure why I like that second one so much, but it’s probably to do with the imagery it conjures up. For me it’s Igor from Disney’s Aladdin genetically fused with a vagina.My lawyer did his best to get the diary removed from evidence, stating that it presented a biased view of me. But he failed. It seems that people put a lot of credence in the words of a dead man. Even Colin’s testimony couldn’t help me, his was a lone dissenting voice in stark contradiction to the already cemented opinion that pervaded the courtroom. When asked to describe me almost all of the other witnesses said that they really didn’t know me well enough, that I kept to myself and that I was generally a bit of a loner. My lawyer was over his head and despite his efforts to regain some control of the courtroom and shift the jury’s perceptions I think deep down he knew he’d been dealt a losing hand. By nine-thirty AM on most trial days he was already dripping in sweat and I can’t count the number of times he asked for recess. Those requests were usually preceded by bouts of the most putrid silent-but-deadlies. These five days were some of the most important in my life and my hopes rested on a man that was literally shitting himself throughout the proceedings. So I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that the whole self-defence angle didn’t pan out.

My lawyer was the dumbest smart person I’d ever met. His education was impeccable for a public defender, he had a strong chiselled jaw and the white wig all the lawyers wore in court looked fantastic on him. Everyone else looked like a imbecile but Gordon Letts, my lawyer, looked like he was born to be in the courtroom. Within the first minute of meeting him I had thought to myself ‘this isn’t the kind of bloke who has a father, this man has lineage’. I thought he was a class act. For the first time since my arrest I felt safe and the knot in my stomach eased. I should have known better. He was the guy that showed up because I couldn’t get someone good. He’d always been that guy and that safety I felt was drained from me each time the buffoon opened his mouth in court. And every time he broke wind. By twenty passed nine on the first day of my trial I’d abandoned all hope so you can only imagine my state of mind on my trial’s penultimate day when, during afternoon recess, my lawyer sat me down to “have a word”.

“What is it, Gordon?” I said. I was (justifiably) irritable.

“Michael, allow me to be honest with you here.”

“I’m listening.”

“I must admit what initially appeared to be a simple case of self defence has spiralled into something I was not prepared for. Not in the least.” No shit! “Let’s review the facts briefly. First and foremost, we have a history of tension and disagreements between yourself and Caden. Now, regardless of whether Caden’s diary does indeed paint a biased view of those interactions is, at this stage, wholly irrelevant. The man is dead, he cannot be questioned and the validity of his assertions in the diary cannot be challenged. The jury will always side with the victim in these circumstances. Secondly, there are the character witnesses. Colin was the only one of these whose testimony was actually convincing, and it would have done you some good had Colin not been involved in the altercation, but as it stands the prosecution have done a marvellous job of casting doubt on his integrity. Thirdly, and finally, there is the matter of the bacon sandwich. You eating a bacon sandwich as a man died in front of you has… has made you appear a callous sociopath. If we do not deviate from this path, tomorrow you will be found guilty of murder.”

“But…?”

“There are no ‘buts’ I’m afraid, you will be found guilty and you will spend a decade, at the very least, banged up.” I found it strange that he’d used that colloquialism. Almost immediately my mind conjured up a prison rape scenario and just as quickly I suppressed it. “The best we can hope for now is damage control…”

Gordon had been speaking to opposing counsel for about fifteen minutes and I’d been left in a holding cell gasping for news. When he finally returned he was beaming. His smile was ear to ear and he looked supremely chuffed with himself.

“Brilliant news lad!” He was trembling with joy.

“What! What!? Tell me!”

“We’ve made a deal, Michael. We will change your plea to guilty by reason of insanity and the prosecution will be lenient with sentencing. They’ve agreed to 5 years in a state-run facility.”

“What are you so happy about then?”

“It’s a good result, Michael. We couldn’t have done any better.”

“You mean you couldn’t do any better.”

“Now, Michael, you know I’ve worked my damnedest to get you off. Considering the circumstances you’ve… well let’s just say there’s a good chance you’ll get out sooner than that and these places… they’re not that bad. You’ll have your own shower, en suite. Three squares a day. Regular visitation privileges. You can’t say fairer than that!”

I was just about to protest but the buzzer sounded indicating that my trial was due to resume. My time was up. The guard’s keys jangled as he unlocked the cell door. I was escorted out and in a moment of absolute resignation I looked back at Gordon and let out an unconvincing, “Fine.”

I realise now I had no choice but to go with Gordon’s advice, but there was a time, probably the first six months of my incarceration, where I looked back at the trial and felt nothing but rage. Surely I could have done something. I could have fired Gordon or represented myself or thrown fecal matter at the judge and jury. I could have done anything. I should have done something. But what gets me now, more than the anger, is the regret. If I had to spend the next few years in semi-catatonic isolation for murder I should have at least given myself the pleasure of choking Caden to death rather than letting a piece of office equipment do it for me. But it becomes hard to hold on to the hate and the regret when you’re in a place like this. Everyone who works here is on a personal mission to calm you down. One wrong word is all it takes. Even less, a right word delivered badly can get you put you on the ‘naughty list’. And there’s one thing you do a lot of when you’re on the ‘naughty list’. Sleep. I still dream though. Sometimes I dream of Caden, his face, the fight, the blood. But more often than not I relive those final moments in the office, a lone bacon sandwich staring back at me as I’m dragged off by the pigs.

THE END

The Grudge

November 16, 2013December 9, 2014 Chris Theo

This is an old story I wrote back in late 2001. Over a decade ago! Reading it now there are things I’d change. It’s certainly flawed but I still like it. It’s completely and unashamedly inspired by the song of the same name by Tool. “Let go!” screams Maynard (the inimitable front man) towards the end of the song, and that’s how I chose to begin the story. It’s a dark tale of the search for redemption, originally posted on DeviantArt, it won an award for “Most original prose”.

Enjoy.

The Grudge

“Let go”, said the voice from his dreams, it was feminine, warm, yet disturbing enough to wake him. Shivering in his own spit and sweat and tears he contemplated his fate, for in his mind there was no return from the path he had chosen. Unable to take the daily rape, the constant sodomy of his regret, he set about mending the past. In the hope it would secure his future.

He pulled the bed sheets away as he muttered the same words repeatedly under his stale morning breath, “Today will be the day”. These words were familiar to him, but as each day passed they became harder to say and even harder to mean. He walked towards the kitchen, his bare feet slapping against the Spanish marble. He unscrewed the bottles of pills that were lined regimentally on the work surface, always within reach. When it came to taking the pills he was perhaps a little more regimental than necessary and he placed a few more on his tongue for good measure helping them down with water that tasted stagnant. No doubt it would taste worse tomorrow.

There was a knock on the door that echoed through his mansion. He knew who it was.

“Hello James!” Dr Jonsons usual greeting. As always replied with silence.

James was tired of the daily visits, what was their purpose? To tell him his cancer, the cancer his body is riddled with has advanced a little more? He knew this already, he felt it. Every day he would wake up later and go to bed earlier, take more pills and have more dreams that would penetrate his thoughts. He wanted closure, physically and emotionally, and his greatest fear was that one could not be done without the other.

James began a conversation.

“I was thinking of talking to Harvey”. ‘Was that a question?’ he thought to himself.
“You think thats a good idea? It’s been so long.”
“But I can’t leave it any longer, it’s killing me.”
“Your cancer is what’s killing you.” James was pretty sure the two were inextricably linked.
“Can I have some water?” asked James’ doctor, changing the tone of the conversation.
“Hang on.”

Dr Jonson, or Steve as James knew him was the only ‘friend’ James had left, but James questioned whether his friendship was strictly part of the doctor-patient relationship. With good reason too, James had not been friends to anyone in a long time.

“Here you go Doc”, said James in a light hearted way, handing Steve the glass, coming as close to being friendly as he had been in a good long while. “Sorry if it tastes bad, I think my filter’s broken.”

The doctor took a sip.

“Tastes fine to me.”

The doctor’s visit was quick, it’s main purpose to ensure James had been taking his tablets. When he saw that he’d almost run out Steve gave James a look of disappointment tinged with severity.

“Steve, for God’s sake, I’m dead anyway”, replied James to the question Steve was about to ask. The visit ended quickly and the house returned to it’s empty self soon enough.

Everything in James’ life had become a chore, each task so laborious it would remind him that as the days passed he was one step closer to his grave. The one thing James wanted to know was how many steps were left.

He’d walked this path in his dreams, narrow and never ending, storm clouds shadowing its twisted form. He pictured the end, filled with light, as he walked through some sort of gate or Gothic arch, healing him. But deep inside he knew that the chances of such a place existing outside his mind were remote.

He picked up the phone and dialled Harvey’s number. A woman picked up on the other end. This was not Harvey. “Harvey? Who’s Harvey?” the voice asked, the sound of children in the background. Harvey had moved. James sighed when he realised that this was going to be harder than expected. He decided that his only course of action (well as close as a man with a few weeks to live could come to action) was to get in touch with Dorothy, Harvey’s sister. The likelihood of Dorothy wanting to see James however was non-existent, but it was his only chance of finding Harvey before time ran out. He didn’t want to die knowing that the only person he could once turn to for anything hated him. James hoped that his pale, thin body rotting from the inside would buy him some sympathy from Dorothy, at least enough for an address. James should have known better. Not everyone could be bought.

James walked out of his house, his cold appearance poisoning the sunshine around him like a negative aura, pale blue and constant. He hadn’t been outside in a long time, his clothes confirmed this, hanging just like the skin that once held firm to his flesh. His trousers held up with a belt on its tightest adjustment, the material scrunching up and the edge of the belt irritating his skin. What he wouldn’t do for something with some elastic in it. Despite how uncomfortable he was, James got in his car and drove off.

He found himself standing at Dorothy’s door unable to ring the bell and certainly not ready to be bombarded with a barrage of insults. James knocked on the door lightly hoping he would not be heard so he would be able to walk off with a clear conscious and later be able to convince himself that he tried. Just as he was about to walk away, he heard the latch of the door unhook and then door open. He stood, his back facing the door, until he could find the courage to look into Dorothy’s eyes.

“Can I help you”, said the woman at the door, the voice sounding strangely familiar. He turned around.
“Hello Dorothy”, was all James managed to get out, his voice re-emphasising the fact that he had given up, as it was tainted with guilt.
“And you are?” James was lost for words. Had his appearance changed so much?
“It’s me. James.”
“James?” she said, trying to place the name. She gasped. “James! Is that really you? You look like shit.” James nodded. “Come in”

James was confused, had his looks changed so radically? Was she merely sympathetic? Or was she waiting to get him inside so she didn’t get the neighbours gossiping about some ‘guy’ Dorothy was shouting at on her own doorstep?

James sat down on one of the sofas, he felt his bones creak with the strain and he accepted Dorothy’s offer for some tea. He could have done with some scotch but his stomach ulcer would have not shared that decision.

James looked around the room, it was old, a little dusty, and the furniture was in need of a shampoo. He thought to himself that he was lucky to have such a nice house in such a nice area but then he realised that Dorothy was the lucky one, she had the home, she had people who cared for her and loved her. He felt envious and hated himself for it.

Very rarely are the wealthy the right people to have a lot of money, it was people like Dorothy who could have money and not be corrupted by it. James couldn’t even remember where he got all of his money, but he knew that most of it was obtained through the exploitation of others, including Harvey. He hoped that the fact that Dorothy was only affected indirectly by his idiocy (he saw it now) would make her a little more receptive to his pleas for forgiveness.

“There you go”, said Dorothy, handing James the tea. The thought came across his mind that she may have poisoned it, but then again she was nothing like him. There was silence for a few moments, as if Dorothy was waiting for James to make the first move.
“Dorothy…? I’m… I’m…” the words were stumbling out of his mouth. Saying sorry in his head was a lot easier than this.
“I know”, replied Dorothy. James gave a sigh of relief and smiled a little. “It’s not me you should be saying sorry to, is it?”
“I need his address.”
“I’ll get it for you.” Jackpot. “Harvey won’t be too pleased when he finds out I gave you this but if you ever sort this out he’ll get over it.” She scribbled something down on a torn piece of paper and put it in his coat pocket. James felt a weight come off his chest but he didn’t let himself get too excited, he knew Harvey was going to be harder to please.

Conversation ensued, uncomfortable at first. Baby steps. They talked about Harvey, the cancer. They talked about the past and the future, but not in any philosophical way, just pleasant conversation. James wanted more but it had been a long time since they were even remotely close and he felt that burdening Dorothy with his problems would not be appropriate. He felt the need to tread lightly, after all, if James was Dorothy he certainly wouldn’t have forgiven himself. Maybe his faults were at a genetic level and couldn’t be helped, or maybe he was just scared. Either way the chances of him getting better, both physically and mentally were diminishing in tandem with each other.

James felt a stabbing pain in his chest he collapsed to the floor. “Are you OK?” said Dorothy.
“I’ll be fine, can you help me up?”
Dorothy grabbed him from under his arms and hauled him to his feet, his frail frame on the verge of snapping.
“I had better go”, said James.

James walked out of Dorothy’s house in a daze, his vision overlapped with a painting by numbers picture animated and swirling, spiralling towards a pool of his own blood.

He lay on the floor, almost foetal in position, a position that seemed to seethe guilt out of every pore on his puny body. He bled, from his mouth and head, his arm outstretched to reach the gate to Dorothy’s house, short by a few inches.

All he was, was a body with an expiration date and a spirit with unfinished business. James knew the consequences of a trapped spirit from his dreams. Every night his body would die for a few hours and his mind would rule, his own thoughts and regrets festering and multiplying within him, defenceless. James had been given a sneak preview to his own personal hell.

Dorothy called an ambulance, as James’ body lay outside, unconscious and dying, his mind still very much alive…

Glimpses of reality pierced his mind intermittently, the ground, the ants (feeding from his blood?), the latch of the gate, light shining through the gate’s twisted metal structure… reassuringly out of reach. But when reality chose to be absent his dreams came back and his mind merged the gap between thoughts and reality.

James stood on the pier of Windmill Lake, a beautiful quiet part of the country where he spent many of his childhood summers with Harvey and Dorothy. Something was different though, everything was smaller, or was he bigger? The windmill, which sat majestic on the north bank of the lake, was no longer red and white; it was grey, brown and black, reminiscent of old oil paintings of the industrial revolution. The once vibrant colours of the flowers that lined the bank, the yellows, reds and purples had now disappeared. All that remained were withered stems, sucked dry of life. The petals floated on the water rotting and limp, their exquisite patterns no longer evident, just like mixed paint, everything had turned brown, charred and linear. Muffled splashes faded into existence and James looked down to see Harvey messing about in the water, he was smiling. James had missed that stupid grin. It was good to see him once again, James thought this image of Harvey had been lost forever and been replaced by that of a sad and lonely man.

James opened his eyes. He was in the hospital, the reassuring ‘beep’ of the heart monitor confirmed this.

“Hello James”, said a voice, James’s neck was too stiff to be able to turn and see who was talking. “It’s Harvey, you’re old buddy.” Harvey’s voice was tainted with anger. “You know, James, I thought I understood you, but it’s clear that I don’t. Can you tell me what the fuck I’m doing here? Did you put Dorothy up to this? You think after all these years you can put this right?”
James opened his mouth to speak. Nothing… He felt like his vocal chords were choosing to ignore the air he was feeding them.
“Don’t you have anything to say… WELL?”
James tried to force the air out. He blacked out again.

The splashes became louder, James was no longer playing. He was drowning.

“HELP ME!” screamed Harvey his screams accompanied by gurgling and choking sounds. Wild uninhibited thrashes in the water, violent kicking under the water, pure rage, screams that were loud enough to rip James’ eardrums all climaxed into a cacophony. Then the splashing stopped. Everything went dead silent. The water rippled into calm. The windmill stopped turning, only Harvey was left moving as he sunk silent into the water, his right arm outstretched to its fullest, eyes hopelessly staring right at James begging for help. James reached out over the edge of the pier, clutched Harvey’s hand tightly and tried to pull him to safety. He looked into Harvey’s eyes and saw that smile again. Euphoria. Forgiveness. “Let go”, said the voice of his dreams, he turned around, it was Dorothy, “LET GO!” she screamed. James quickly turned back to Harvey, the face of purity and forgiveness had turned on him, Harvey’s teeth grit and his soft gaze turned into a haunting stare of revenge. James could no longer see the whites of his eyes, just empty black holes. Harvey pulled James into the murky brown waters with all his might, grabbed him by the collar and pushed him under. James struggled but to no avail.

“FORGIVE ME!” he gurgled, and his eyes opened, Harvey still by his side, “FORGIVE ME!” he said again, choking on his own saliva and on his last breath.
“You wanna die with a clear conscience?” he stopped, pulled up close to his face. “Never.” The words echoed endlessly through James and his last breath was extinguished.

The heart monitor flat-lined.

James continued to walk the narrow, never-ending path of his dreams, of his reality, unprepared to face his misdeeds that were once so close to being forgiven.

He pictured the end, a gate or Gothic arch at the vanishing point. Now just filled with darkness.

“There was nothing you could do”, said the Doctor to Harvey. Harvey nodded unconvincingly, the consequences of his grudge beginning to take shape.

These words would plague him forever.

Another Star

November 15, 2013April 2, 2015 Chris Theo

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Another Star

Through wind swept plumes of cloud, a burning red sun loomed. Its light shone golden upon the faces of the many that stared at it, some looking through heavy tinted glasses and others through binoculars. On a nearby dune, an electronic telescope connected to a strange instrument took constant readings.

Would today be the day? Fraser didn’t know. He tried to tell himself he didn’t care, but as he looked to his left and saw his wife, a tear rolling down her cheek, and then to his right, where his daughter knelt playing in the sand, he burned with the most awful anger. Yet before it could give way to unbridled fury, a sadness washed over him and stole with it all his strength. It had to be today.

Still he gazed upon his daughter, transfixed, unwilling to speak even a word for fear that the dams of his heart would burst and with it flow a torrent of truth that would drain the light from her eyes. He turned away, staring once more at the sun, and gripped his wife’s hand a little tighter. Within moments she sank to her knees, his small unrehearsed show of affection enough to crumble her resolve. A single tear gave way to a dozen more and Fraser could do nothing but stoop down and hold her, all the while gritting his teeth so hard he thought he might never speak again. He scrunched his eyes shut and chose to remember simpler times…

Fraser had met his wife Bala only four years earlier, at a house party where the average age was about 6 years younger than either of them had expected. Bala had given up on merriment and was on her way out when Fraser came bursting in through the front door. She’d never seen anyone so drunk before, he swayed wildly and spoke with the strangest lisp.

“Hello beauthiful.”

“Uhm, I was just leavi…” She made a move for the door but he side-stepped in front of her.

“NO! You can’t go, it’s so early. Come on, it will be fun.” His left hand held an open container of drink which he was barely managing to keep from spilling, he moved in to touch Bala on the shoulder and she recoiled.

“You’re so drunk, I don’t even know you”, she said, annoyed. But he was quite attractive, for a blubbering idiot.

“I may be drunk, but I’m not nearly drunk enough, here, look at this!” He pulled the sides of his mouth apart and opened wide, the stability of his drink reliant almost solely on a wet pinky finger.

“Holy fuck!”, Bala exclaimed, both horrified at the sight of this stranger’s mouth, but also a little fascinated. Two gaping holes sewn shut were all that remained of his wisdom teeth.

“See I’m not just some drunk guy, I’m a man in pain.”

“And you handle it so modestly.” Bala nodded at his drink.

“Well, any excuse for a party. My name’s Fraser”, he downed the unknown liquid in less than two seconds, winced at the pain and held out his alcohol-soaked hand in front of Bala in preparation for a formal greeting.

“This is a huge mistake”, she thought to herself, but the words she spoke as her hand met his were quite different, “Hi, my name’s Bala… it looks like you need another drink.”

From that moment on their night was alive with conversation, laughter and dancing, only coming to a close once the light of the rising, angry sun signalled revelry’s end. They parted with a kiss, which failed spectacularly due to the pain Fraser was in, and a promise. To see each other again.

One year (and seven months pregnant) later Bala joked that they had over-delivered on that promise. Fraser chuckled and pressed his hand gently against her belly. They played out their futures together in their minds and sank warmly in the glow of their thoughts. Bala leaned in against Fraser on the sofa as they watched a repeat of their favourite comedy show. Eventually the late hour weighed heavily on their eyelids and they drifted to sleep, only to be awoken in the early hours by a news bulletin that interrupted the scheduled programming.

That night Fraser and Bala, along with the rest of the world, found out what had been successfully suppressed for years. “Five years”, the broadcast had said. Just five years before the wretched heart of their solar system undid the work of a thousand aeons with fervent callousness.

Fraser and Bala sat upright and with their eyes locked on the screen, its bright flickering painting the dark room with a cool blue hue. It stung the back of their eyes as they watched the broadcast, repeated over and over again, unable to move or speak. They awoke hours later in their bed with no recollection of how they got there, their memories engorged with the news in the same way a nightmare lingers intensely into waking thought.

In the weeks that followed it became clear that society would not self destruct. There were no riots, there was no chaos and no perceptible increase in crime. Instead the most bizarre and haunting placidity befell the lives of almost everyone. On the outside nothing really changed, people still went about their business, working, eating, raising families but now it was without zeal. People simply stopped trying to do anything beyond meet the daily requirements for survival. It was the reaction of a world that collectively realised, both suddenly and starkly, that there was no hope. With no foot on the accelerator, society was destined to coast to a complete stop.

It happened so slowly that only Fraser really noticed the life being stolen from Bala over the course of the five years that followed. He wanted to be unwavering for his young family, he couldn’t bear the thought of becoming a burden to his wife. Holly, their shy and unassuming daughter was now an inquisitive four year old but the world’s collective denial had protected her from the truth. Then the news came that they had tried to numb themselves to so completely. “Any day now”, the reports had said. A meagre crawl gave way to the inevitable stop.

There was no longer any point in clinging to vestiges of normality. It was in solemn whispers that they made the decision, they would make their way to the ocean every day without fail, for as long as it took. Little Holly could play in the sand while the sound of the waves and the salty air filled their senses. They would stare down their oppressor in some last, sublimely human defiance at the inevitable.

“We can’t tell her anything, she’s too young to understand.” His wife said one sleepless night, just days after the baleful reports came in.

“I know, Bala, but she’ll surely find out. At the very least she’ll sense it.”

“I can’t bear it, Fray.” Bala stared into the distance, a haunting resolve in her tired eyes, “The thought of this dread swallowing her up, we need to do whatever it takes. I want her last days to…”, at this admission she blinked, cracked and sobbed heavily, burying her head in Fraser’s lap.

“I know”, he said and he stroked her hair. “I know.”

At that moment Holly had bundled in to their bedroom trailing her ragged orange blanket behind her, “Mummy!”, there was concern in her voice but Bala’s sobbing only intensified at the sudden appearance of their daughter. Holly turned, looking up to her father, “Daddy, what’s wrong with mummy?”

“Nothing, baby, daddy upset mummy, but she’ll be OK. I promise.”

Lie number one.

The waves still crashed lightly but Fraser slowly became aware of voices from the other congregations on the beach. With his head in the nape of Bala’s neck and his eyes closed he listened closely and heard a few words scattered from all directions, “I love you”, “I’m sorry I couldn’t save us”, “It will all be over soon, my love”. He heard the quiet sobbing of the hopeless and the manic weeping of those whose anger and sadness had fused so hurtfully. But mostly he heard the ocean and the sound of Holly’s fingers scraping through wet sand.

Fraser opened his eyes and looked around, there were fewer people on the beach than before. Many were turning their backs to the sun and walking away, some with families in tow, others alone. One man walking close by caught Fraser’s eye, the man shook his head and mouthed “Not today”.

The rage gripped Fraser’s chest and he let out a tearing scream through gritted teeth. Somewhere in that moment, as the air escaped his lungs, he decided. He would not carry on. Day in and day out Fraser and Bala stared knowingly into the precipice beyond the vacuum of space, while Holly played in the sand, oblivious. He wouldn’t do it again and he wouldn’t do it to his family. They should all face their end on his terms.

It was at that moment that he came to a realisation – today would be the last time they’d see the ocean.

Bala had been startled by Fraser’s cry and quickly moved in to comfort him, Holly followed suit and hugged him as the last ounce of breath was pushed from his lungs. The sun was at his back, his wife to his right and his daughter to his left and they both clung to him tightly. He breathed the salty air in deeply and focused on the sound of the waves, the water was lapping more gently now. Rising from the sand he turned to Bala, “I’m sorry”. She nodded, her hazel eyes locked on his. He turned to Holly who looked up to him expectantly, “Time to go home Holly.”

“Ok daddy”, she replied deflated. “Will we back tomorrow?”

He shook imperceptibly and his heart thumped wildly in his chest as he spoke the words.

“Yes, sweetheart.”

Lie number two hundred and forty eight.

Jetfuel

October 29, 2013December 9, 2014 Chris Theo

Charles took his seat in the cylindrical cabin of the low cost airline’s flight back to blighty. Knees thrust into the seat in front accompanied muttered prayers, that the seats on either side of his allocated 22B would remain empty. He opened his legs as far as he could comfortably, in the region of 45 degrees to reduce the force being exerted on his patellas. To the other passengers he looked as if he was burdened with tennis ball sized testicles, the poor, poor fellow. Around him passengers shuffled and squeezed into their seats either thrusting their carry-ons down by their feet or forcibly ramming small suitcases at the bleeding edge of regulation dimensions into the overhead compartments.

A young couple approached and slowed by row 22, his row, looking left and right at the legends above the seats. “Keep walking, keep walking”, Charles mouthed to himself. The male half of the couple made eye contact with Charles and spoke, “Think we’re here”, while his finger pointed and oscillated between the seats either side of him. Charles narrowed his legs to a cool 25 degrees and began to extricate himself from the middle seat and into the aisle. “Do you want to sit together?”, “Thanks!” the baggy shirted male replied surprised, before turning his attention to the open overhead compartment. He began wrestling his bag into Charles’ as if re-enacting some kind of mating ritual, a pair of one ton bison were slamming themselves together for the good of their species. Charles winced at the imagery he’d conjured up just as a crunching sound emanating from his bag gave entry to the bison’s mediaeval courting. The young female companion followed the baggy shirted man to their seats. Charles piled in closely behind and carefully lowered himself on to his seat, making an effort not to free his knee-caps from their fleshy housing against the hinges of his tray table.

The plane was still relatively empty with the whole row behind him unburdened by posterior action. They had Charles’ name on them, and as soon as they were in the air he would maneuver into position and strike, glutes-first on to his target, 23A,B & C. Soon he’d be asleep and he’d be home, it was as close to luxury as he could hope for on this flight.

Quiet, followed by some kind of kerfuffle towards the front of the plane caught his attention. A man bounded down the otherwise empty aisle towards him, his rotund belly moved unpredictably beneath a tight red & white “prison stripe” t-shirt, his naval peeking out occasionally as if gasping for air. A pair of Ray Ban sunglasses, with the lenses swapped out for those accommodating short-sightedness, rested upon his now flustered cheeks. His grey hair flip-flopped with every clumsy step in his salmon coloured Toms and his record bag rapped the seats to his right, like a playing card in bicycle spokes. Charles imagined this is what hipsters would look like if you introduced them to a lifetime’s supply of organic vegan (and gluten-free) pies and gave them a solid 10 years to “tuck in”. Behind him followed a visibly stressed woman in a floral ankle length dress, her torso strapped to a baby that squirmed, teary-eyed in it’s rucksack-style carrier.

They zeroed in on the seats behind Charles with no regard for anyone but themselves. The mother all the while giving her child, who couldn’t have been more than a year old, a running commentary of what was happening. In the form of questions with child-talk inflections.

“Is daddy putting our bags in the overhead compartment?…
“Are we on a plane, teacup?…
“Has daddy remembered to pack your nappies?…”

“Yes, of course I bloody did”, the pie man snapped.

Charles closed his eyes and put his headphones in his ears, turning up the volume until the middle-aged woman’s nattering was drowned out. A deep breath followed by another and another finally resulted in some semblance of calm. Slowly a wave of tiredness swept over him and his head dropped to his chest. “Yes!”, he thought, “Let me sleep through this turgid journey and it will all be over soon.”

Then a gentle tap on my shoulder threatened to disrupt his peace, but he refused to let it. “I’m asleep. Yep, keep those eyes closed and whoever is tapping will bugger off.”

The tapping stopped!

It was only as a thick fog of fecal particles invaded his nostrils that he realised no sleep was to be had, no peace to be found. Charles was in no doubt that the baby had soiled itself thoroughly.

The tapping resumed, more forcefully this time and he could ignore it no longer. Charles ripped the headphones from his ears, which were immediately flooded with the sounds of shitty baby, and turned to face his tapper. It was a steward and Charles knew there and then what was coming as he had heard it many times, “Sir, please turn off all electronic devices as we prepare to take off.”

It was going to be a long flight.