Tag: family

CHAPTER ONE.

You have an itch, to grab the pack of razors off your bed stand and swallow them. You are unsure why you feel like this, but you do. What’s the worst that could happen? You grab a handful and toss them into your mouth like a fresh packet of paracetamol after a night out. They rip through your body and you smile.

You are everything they wanted from you, yet you feel so fucking wrong. You are spinning- and your eye starts to twitch. You remember when you were hit in the eye with a croquet bat and had a big bruise. And once it healed you ended up with a nervous twitch for a year.

“Almost”, He says looming over you.

Your doctor pulls the last razor blade from your belly. He looks at you like you are insane. You want to grab his face and kiss him- something about a man standing over you that makes you submit.

“Swallow this glue once a day”, He tells you.

You try to speak but the air hurls through the holes in your throat and you cough blood onto the tiles. 

“It’ll (probably) fix you”, He says 

You swallow it every night for six weeks, and at first, it’s sad, and you feel so miserable and so broken down. But, it starts becoming easier, like brushing your teeth. And suddenly, after six weeks, you can speak again. The holes have been filled. 

The metallic reflections of the city shimmer in the rain. You hurry through the puddles, wiping the drowning from your eyes. Spiders crawl up your legs, but you keep running. You are holding him in your hands as you run. You slam inside and stand in the doorway. The rain swooshes against the neon pink signs. You take the cloth off him and wipe the rain from his face. You are late.

“Are you okay?” He knows you’re not.

“I will be” You lie.

You tug on the fag, and it fills the void. The smoke entering you like a delivery of good things in fine packages. In the corner of the room, your cow costume hangs on a bent metal rail.

You are a dancing cow in the background of a Japanese milk commercial.

“The best milk ever created” He spits. 

You have worked together for five months, he is frail and weak just like you. And even though you have just met- you are sure that you love him. You must, otherwise why is it that you feel like jumping off the roof of the building for? Obviously that’s the definition of lust.

“Milk to make you move” He shouts louder. 

He pulls your fake udders and splashes your fake milk on his perfectly crisp jawline.

After the shoot, you rise from the sweaty head and catch real air. There is a madness in the art of commercials. Everything is blurry, like the way the mist crept out from the beach water when you were just a kid. The seashells twinkling at your feet. The terrible patches of dirt that clog your mind, seeping nearer and nearer. And then the mist bursts, like maggots out from the still heart of a decrepit old corpse. And the reality kicks heavy like a jazz drum. The snare and the kick.

When you see his dead body hanging from the bent metal, you hate that your first thought is- ‘It’s not fair’.

You blink and try and understand the weight of death. The swing of a human body. The bent toes of limp feet. You hurry, with a hope of saving him. You are dressed as a cow, with fake udders, and you are holding a dead Japanese man in your arms, with your robot brother watching. But you have hope, hope that slowly dwindles. 

“Is he dead?” Your brother seems scared.

Your mouth is sticky, and when you speak it crashes and pulls and you feel alive. You want to start dating again, but lately, you have become a glory hole for leftovers. You used to be full, and now you are empty. You picture your ex as you eat a pop tart naked on your kitchen floor while listening to sad music. He left you alone, that’s what you keep telling yourself. You find it so hard to say the words out loud. You are so afraid of yourself. You want to die, but you also want to live. You want to cry and you also want to dance. You want to fuck and you also want to fall in love and die in the arms of someone who knows your middle name. But you find it so hard to admit, that you are in so much pain. 

You remember his huge hands and his cold eyes. The way he would grind his teeth at night, and the way his mum would always text funny cat pictures. And his dad’s bowel cancer. You wonder if his dad survived. For a moment you hope he didn’t, but then you feel bad, and you do that thing in your head where you say ‘I didn’t mean that, that was stupid’ and you don’t ever think of it again. But he was nice, and sometimes you miss him. 

And as you stare at the dead body- you wonder if you are cursed. And one thing is for sure- it’s time to go.

CHAPTER 2.

Your eyes are pinned to that grey sky as he pulls every last breath from your lungs. Your ears slowly pop and your feet tingle and he pulls harder and harder.  You want to feel more like this- this half-formed thing. 

When it’s over your body feels fresh, and your hand has a new home on his sleeping chest. You have forgotten everything about his face, it’s all but blank shapes now. You wish to remember better things than this, but you do not control your thoughts. 

His chest hairs are tangled, and you place your head on ‘em. You slowly and softly say:

“I don’t want this”

But he is fast asleep. 

The tree in the middle of the lake glows in the night. You wash the cuts on your arms with the water and some old rags you found in the back of the van. Your brother is running diagnostics for your location, and his screen flashes with random sequences of numbers and codes. The van is full of odd parts and boxes, some curdled milk bottles warming in the metal-trapped back. You tipple the bottles over and watch the curd droop.

“Looks like we entered an anomaly” He says.

“So it just spat us out at random?”

“Looks like it”

“I was afraid this would happen”

The sparkle of the cold water makes your eyes whimper as you edge closer to the lake. You are stuck in limbo, a mad and whirling game, one where the stick is on fire and the old people playing along are singing ‘how low can you go’ but off-key and out of tune. Nothing like damn near human moments in a different space dimension. 

“There’s a beam fifty miles out,” Your brother says.

“If they see us we’re dead”

“Then we try not to die”

“Easy for you to say” 

You stand in a puddle of your blood as the cut on your ankle is exploding. You are holding the pink razor blade in your teeth as you scurry to roll toilet paper with one hand while applying pressure to the wound with the other. Your body is shaped like a made-up letter created by a kid.

Your eyes are pear-shaped as you catch your drooping face in the mirror. Half of your left leg is shaven, and the top half is covered in shaving foam. You bend down and wield the blade and you watch the blood fountain, and you know it’s stupid, and you know you really shouldn’t, but you keep shaving. The hairs fall into the blood, like leaves into cold wet rainwater. 

You are cut open like a bad peach, and the mirror is a picture of a child you don’t know and you run the hot tap and you dry your toes. You push your penis behind your legs, and you stand tall and you look down at your broken and beautiful half-self. 
Why do you keep writing this, she said it would fix you, that it would make you understand, but you are so far from that, why do you keep writing this? 

The next day your legs sting, and you rip your pants off to be sure there aren’t bees living inside your skin. You have red pimples all over your thighs and the holes have clotted over and your legs are shining. And your penis looks at you, and it speaks: 

“I am still right here”, It taunts you.

You slowly pull up tights, they are the wrong thing to be wearing just after shaving, but you want to prove your penis wrong. You meet a cute girl for a walk and she talks about babies she has in little test tubes and how there are three kids on the way, three of her offspring in other bellies, three kids swimming in womb juice, three half things, three mad animals.

And in a faraway place, there’s a mother with blood running down her leg as she squeezes and pushes, and the lights are steaming and the doctors are dressed in blue and white. She is just a woman, but a head slides into the world and now she’s a god. Her wife holds this new thing in her hands, and she doesn’t say it out loud, but she thinks it to herself, she thinks ‘Now this is magic’. This child will not need to shave for a long time, and for that it is lucky. And when the kid is finally taken home to its new house, and placed into the new crib for the first time, it won’t know it yet, but one day it will, that this is the room where they one day need to escape from. This beautiful little room where every bad thing will happen. 

CHAPTER 3.

It is dark and the glass of the van is frosting. The headlights burn into the black, like fireflies in a jar. The stretching void seems to keep going. If you turn back now, you risk being lost forever. You don’t want to be a sad kid on the side of a milk carton. Little pictures you could enjoy while having your morning coffee.

Out of nowhere, your earthbound body hurls forward, as an object smashes against the front wheels. You quickly slam the brakes and you come to an abrupt stop. The void stays silent and your throat tenses and closes. You feel droplets fill inside your mouth. The milk bottles rattle back and forth. Your brother wants to say something, you can sense it, but he keeps quiet. 

You graze the flood of blood with your shoes. And the limp body kicks your toes. Its beak is cracked in half from the impact, and the strike has sliced the middle of its head open. You sink your eyes low at the dead animal. A duck. And then in the intense silence, you hear a noise. A tiny crying. You see its twig legs tumbling towards the accident and its glistening big eyes glancing up at you. The duckling warbled to its mother. 

You drive through the void for hours. The duckling sitting on your lap. The darkness bursts light. A sunset inside of an eclipse. 

The duckling has golden glazed eyeballs that give it a fumbling innocence, a kind of child playing hide-and-seek. The destruction of the mother by the milk van was human nature at work, and it was this interconnection of vehicles and animals that made life worth living. 

You are nursing the last drops of your only bottle of Becks. You have been peeling your eyelids back watching a pixelated screen. You have the look of an angel awaiting a hand job from Jesus. Curiously on edge to find out if his hands are soft, or if they are callous from all his time carrying that heavy cross.

 With an eagerness to get it done, you proceed to count the remaining seconds before he enters the room. This makes you nervously laugh, and the longer it goes on, the more it humours you. You purse your lips trying to hold it in, desperately afraid to cackle in the face of the divine lamb, worried that if he enters the room to see you spitting on the floor in tears, he will be horribly disappointed.

So, you gulp the air and compose yourself, hoping that time will somehow reward you with an entrance from the prince. But the awkward lull continues, your laughter has vanished and now you are just chewing thought after thought, anxiously twiddling scenarios in your mind. I should have shaved, you mutter as if you are telling your mum that you love her. But nobody is there to listen and there’s not enough time to run off and do it now. You sit listlessly and hairy, your nails look like the carvings on stone-age caves, and your teeth spear out of your gummy lips like the Giant’s Causeway.  

You twist the two strings of your grey track bottoms and let them twirl back out, and you repeat this many times because your therapist said that repetition can keep you calm when you feel uneasy. 

You repeat the phrases you learnt from doing daily YouTube meditation videos, but now your mind can’t stop thinking about her big red ass, and now it’s baboons, and the band Blue, and it’s why there are so many words but so few letters and finally your mind rests on a still picture from a moment in your childhood. 

You are little and your dad is pushing you on a swing, by a pebbly beach and the windy water trembles. Your mum watches. You are swirling in the air like a balloon full of happiness. But in the picture, the one you are now highly focused on, it is still, and you are halfway smiling. Your dad looks at your mum. There is nothing special about this still image, and you are not sure why your mind has decided this be the final thought you have.

You don’t remember it, you were too young, but something important must have happened. Why was your dad looking at your mum like that, why were you out in the blistering cold? But then as you almost start remembering it, the door slowly opens. But it’s not Jesus. It’s someone else, they take a seat and barely look away from the floor when they talk. 

“You’ve been in here all-day” They say.

It’s weird when they say it, the words find it difficult to come out, and there’s a shrillness in their voice too, one that makes you uncomfortable, like you did something wrong. And they look at your crude notepad, but it’s too quick to read anything, they are telling you something in that glance, but you ignore it, and you wait. 

“Your dinner is in the microwave.” They say.

And then they leave. And even though you’re hungry, you’ll leave that dinner turn to mould, because the thought of leaving here is too much for you to handle. 

The light blinks as you return to a solid road. You stare into the fizzing sun, two brilliant gold eyes.  

“I killed your mother.” You look at the duckling.

She bites down on your finger. And now you have been imprinted. You have become a mother. 

CHAPTER 4.

Your body watches a projection of yourself, the real you, sitting fiddling with paperwork in tired hands. A woman with a smiley face waiting.

“I need to be real,” You say.

This is new. You are not the type to blow your life in a stranger’s face. It is the first day of a new job and here you are crying to the HR Manager. The paper remaining empty next to the pen. You tell her what happened. 

“I am in the sandbox” Is what you come up with. Always the poet.

You spent all of yesterday in bed. Under the covers. Swiping on dating apps, and sending messages: 

“Wanna come to mine?”

And when they grab your body, you hurl in circles like a sad ride with every seat empty. They push you against the wall. With their fingers inside you. And their other hand wraps around your neck. They pull out and grab you. They gaze into your eyes like they are peeking into the microwave to see when their hot pocket will be done. They finish you off and you grab the packet of wet wipes. Then they lay on your bed naked, out of energy. You tell them how you are starting a new job. You tell them about your ex, how you hated him.

You wait for the bus together. And when they get on the bus you can’t help but remember how many times you’ve been here. Watching a stranger leave you and never coming back.

Your walk home is familiar. Your bed is messy and even though you have just fooled around for four hours, you are still restless and needy. Like something’s wrong.

You’re sent home. You call your mom on Oxford Street, avoiding rushing London-town ants. You tell her to shut up and listen. You tell her everything, how you have been lying about how you are feeling and that she was right. You are feeling fucking shit. But you feel positive about it like you are sick of the assembled pattern you have been falling into for years now. You are ready to properly address things and make a change. Like, what if Arthur just dug up the stone with the sword inside it, would Merlin be impressed or disappointed? 

“How’s the milk book coming along?” She asks.

“Like a cow on aggressive steroids” You joke.

She laughs and you stop and turn the video on. You look at your mum, and even though the connection is bad and her video keeps stuttering- it’s like seeing her face makes you feel safe.

“I am going to get better.” You promise.

Your battery is dying, so you say goodbye. You make your way back to the Oxford Street tube. You know that your life is at another vital moment, a chaos point. The people in the city have no idea what you are chewing inside your mind.

She sends you a message:

“We should do that again sometime”

You message them afterwards and you tell them how they actually make you feel and that you can’t see them anymore because it hurts too much. 

In the reelection, they see your cracks, the open wounds that their nails carved. You are as white as a ghost. You realise that this isn’t love, it is a pattern. You never like to look away, and your hands always touch, and you chuckle, out of nervousness and because you need the silence to stop, or maybe you just want to let them know, that even though this is still just two people after many glasses of wine, that you liked them. And, you needed to tell them this because you are afraid they didn’t like you, which sounds mad, because you just shared skins, your breasts in their face, and your lips like magnets, but still you needed something else.

So, as your mind burns like a fire and your chest scratches sting, you unfurl their fingers out from yours and you look away. They check the bus times, and it is only five minutes away, so you get dressed in a hurry, almost as fast as you undressed. 

If you ever feel confused, unable or estranged, don’t panic. You may feel lost or drunk or high above all things, but that’s okay, you are broken, but that’s your mind playing follies. A broken human is just a human.

CHAPTER 5.

The duckling plods behind you. Your jacket is tied in a knot around your waist and take interval breaks to rest your arms. The golden sun dips and the sky turns dark. Far in the distant, blurred but beautiful, the yellow lights of the Beam. You put your brother down and you fall to the ground in exhaustion and relief. You take the pack of fags out and inside only one fag remains. You put it in your mouth and spark it up. You inhale like it’s medicine and your knees twitch.

It is beyond fundamental to address your and your brother’s relationship before the accident. You were always a bratty kid, you had a big personality and wide cheeks – so you could always keep more words in the barrel which gave you an advantage over all the shy kids.

Your brother was the complete opposite, he liked puzzles and organisation and numbers. He was a crystal clear window that looked out into scientific perfection. Your windows were smashed and groggy and full of grime. You were bird spit in a lollipop jar.

When he was 12 you gave him his first drink. You sat him down on the kitchen table and it was well in the night after your parents were asleep. He knocked it back and squeezed his nose, curling the folds in his mouth. The slow burn of fresh lips to dank beer. The next one was a lot smoother. He was still turning by the sour taste, but with each sip, he gained confidence in himself, like he was making you happier, and that was worth the suffering.

I guess you weren’t the world’s best sibling, and probably more times than most you were an utter pea brain. You taught him the importance of dirt, how the monsters can live freakishly solemn in the mud but if they stepped on the shatterproof glass ceiling for even a millisecond, it would fall through, breaking it in one fell swoop. That prolonged pain was of the utmost importance. You had always seen pain as being peptic. The longer the digestion period the more numb you would become to future situations. And you taught this to your brother like you were a preacher. 

You were slowly becoming, bursting out of the chamber you had built yourself into. You had hairy legs and you used your mom’s fanny razor to shave them smooth. You covered the place in blood and it made you woozy, but afterwards, when you pulled your secret frilly white socks up and looked at your shiny legs in the mirror, your dick got hard. You were excited and you were so full of emotion. You were looking at yourself for the first time. You were halfway between, and you would fall into any crevice that presented itself to you.

Your body has the potential to absorb magic. Your therapist looks at you, and they see the cracks in your skin. ‘You are diabolically shaving the soul out of yourself’, is what they might say. You are problematic, and the damaged codes of other problem children will pretend that you are the evil that brainwashed them into thinking that they were once bad too. You want to be finite, to experience the exhilarated violent light. You would very much like to have never been born.

CHAPTER 6.

The motion sickness bubbles from the windpipe to the fingernail. Flimsy like a butterfly butchered on barbed wire. You yearn for tenderness. You are honeymooning. You haven’t eaten today. Your belly screams for food. You swipe at the hair of your pits and twist them cutely around your little finger.

The beam levitates your spaghetti body. You are drenching in the glitch of yellow light. Your brother in your arms and the duckling by your side. The beam bucks at you, smashing your feet into the floor. And just like that, you are whizzing through realms. Your brain feels like jelly wobbling on a one-pound dinner plate. Birthday candles slop out your ears like sad wieners.

The chaos catches you thinking. You see his prickly chest, the belly button and the road down to his left-turning penis. His inky black hands caress your milky ribcage. He cracks the bones and reaches towards your heart. You feel at home, with his hands squeezing the blood out of your organs. But as his lucid touch expires, you find yourself swerving.

You’re a child whooshing around a washing machine. You’re not alone. She is with you. Her orange pimpled face leans in to kiss you. Your friends used to call her pizza-girl. And as your cheeks crash against the pepperoni mountains, the ooze covers you both in liquid.

Out from the washer and into the dryer. You lose the bond to past lovers and instead, you begin to race through the fractures of your brother. You are exposed to the spinning wheels of the car. The smoke rising. You can make out the shapes of the two bodies in the front seats. Yours and his. You have this nightmare every night. The flavour of the nighttime moon and the noise of the blinkers going off. You remember it all so vividly. This was the last night you drank. But the lingering stab of whiskey remains in your mouth, even after all this time.

You have been tagged by the beam. Existing in an anomaly. Your brother explained the science to you as you were half asleep. From what you can remember, the way it works is simple. But to truly explain that you must go further back to before the worlds were all connected. 

You are five, kicking your feet in the backseat. Your mom tells you that you have to go get a special big boy shot.You half smile, because you are five and you don’t know what else to do. The doctor steadies the needle and stabs your bony arm hard. The microchip enters your bloodstream. You don’t feel any different, but you are excited when the doctor gives you a lollipop and a sticker. 

When the aliens arrived on Earth they came bearing gifts, marvels of technological advancement. You grew up with it, so it didn’t ever feel alien to you. The chip allowed travel between worlds, a way to keep your physical form from diluting. But it came at a cost. All the chips were tracked, and that meant that the beam always knew where you were, and if you were a threat. 

So, your brother had explained to you what had happened. You had been tagged. And now the beam was blasting you through a timeless anomaly. A loop of lost things. You were trapped in a spacetime limbo.

And it keeps getting more and more confusing. You look up from the pages and you sigh. It’s all too much. Now you know what the fuck it feels like.