ALL THE COLOURS OF DEATH

• Notes

  All The Colours Of Death begins in perhaps the simplest way of any of my stories.

  You send the bucket down the well and you write what you find.

  I am in pain.

  All the time.

  All the time, I am in pain.

  I know I’m not the only one. You send the bucket down, and you get to work as honestly as you can. You find that honesty, and then you try and take somebody else with you.

  The inspiration for cutting the pain out of your mind comes from my own life of struggle with OCD. In the back seat on a long car journey I closed my eyes and tried to picture the looping painful thoughts and imagined sawing them out with a serrated edge.

  Over the years I’ve found less dramatic ways to deal with that part of my daily life, and one of them is feeling it through writing stories like this.
  
  I love that All The Colours Of Death was my first published story. Reading that letter from literary journal The Ear in California was something I’ll never forget.

  RJ

I am in pain.

All the time.

All the time, I am in pain.

Somehow saying it under my breath under my duvet under my ceiling stars brought me relief. Somehow, admitting it felt like a comfort.

I saw a late night commercial once where an old man with long hair and a badly-fitting sweater looked straight into the camera and talked about ‘the power of the mantra’. It caught my attention the first time it came on because of how slowly he was talking compared to everything else on TV. His room was lit by warm orange spotlights that made lines in smoke and a yellow phone number flashed up at the bottom of the screen. The man explained that by repeating certain lines over and over again we could find relief from anxiety. A twenty-first century pandemic, he asserted in his deep, Texan accent.

“Now’s about time for you to start your journey to inner peace,” he said. “Turns out I’ve done the hard work for you. Say the words, make your surroundings a little simpler. All you have to do is repeat after me, and then just maybe you’ll dial the number and join me on a little year-long adventure.”

I’d seen the advert so many times I knew every beat. He’d shuffle to the centre of the screen, close his eyes and then I’d repeat the mantra along with him from under my cosy sheets.

“Life is made from many colours,

But see - only green in the trees.

Get a whole year of mantras straight to your door,

For only ten easy payments of $8.99 a month plus shipping fees.”

I even knew the number by heart. That old mantra-selling Texan was the only reason I left the shopping channel on all night, on that old TV that I found behind the post office the week after I moved in. It flickered and buzzed and had a broken yellow tint that matched the stars on the ceiling.

Back then I’d sit, hidden and exhausted in the yellow-edged darkness after a day stripping mattresses at the Trucker’s Motel, a tired old bundle of walls on Route 80 between Lexington and Elm Creek. It was like a beacon of safety, that bright buzzing screen. Eight hours of ricocheting elastic cornered bedsheets, flicking up skin flakes and rubbing against wet spots. Eight hours of avoiding leering guests with X-ray eyes and a thirty minute break in the office listening to Dina Morello complain about the noise from the vending machine complain about the smell of the radiators complain about the sticky telephone buttons complain about the cold.

But when I got home and locked the door, behind the glow of that broken yellow TV screen, I could try and breathe a little easier. I could make my world simpler like the old man said. I saw those late night commercials like the flickering lights I’ve seen in big corporate kitchens, the ones that attract flies and then burn them up. I imagined anything nasty in the world becoming attracted to that screen and not getting any closer.

Yellow for stars, yellow for comfort. Yellow for vaporising the day in a raging furnace.

I’d whisper it aloud to help me make sense of the world. I figured I could start with the colours and everything else would fall into place.

The power of the mantra.

I remember those nights so clearly now, through the haze. I remember thinking a breadknife would be the right way to do it. I remember the thoughts inside my mind like a bee sting I couldn’t comfort. I remember it all now. I remember that man standing in reception. I remember when the mantras failed. I remember when the yellow light didn’t work its magic anymore.

• • •

The carpets in the Trucker’s motel were dark red. At least, at the edges. The middle section all the way from the front door to the vending machine to the lift to the staircase up the stairs to the bedrooms was threadbare and grey like scar tissue over an old wound.

Red for warmth, red for class. Red for easy to clean after a violent crime.

I’d describe the rooms but first I need to tell you a bit more about Dina Morello. Dina was the owner of the Interstate Motel on I-20, 80km from Dallas. On Mondays through Thursdays she wore war-torn jeans and t-shirts with large slogans like ‘can’t a bitch catch a break’ and ‘bad-assitude’. On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays she switched to formal mode, power-dressing in black suits with open collars. She also wore heavy eyeliner, district red lipstick and switched to a British accent. Dina Morello hired me on a Tuesday afternoon, so I had plenty of time to get used to her regular steakhouse attitude before the cultural whiplash of her weekend persona hit me like a London bus.

Dina never left reception. That was her driving seat and she had everything she needed. Room keys, security monitors, a telephone, and an ashtray so compacted with a quarter century’s worth of sediment layers that you could spend weeks with a rock hammer and fossil brush making all kinds of discoveries. But of all the objects scattered around her desk, there was one she barely put down. The Motel intercom.

She was a brash, humourless old motor with a 24/7 coughing-up-lung-tissue-rattle but I loved Dina Morello from the moment I met her. The one part of her character that never changed from jeans to trousers, Van Halen t-shirts to padded shoulders, was her unrelenting lack of bullshit.

I still remember walking into the reception that day. She was standing behind her chair with her intercom in hand. She took one look at my summer dress and sandals and had me all figured out. She barked into the microphone:

“Crystal, Crystal my darling. Leave the first floor for this new girl who just walked in. Let Jesse know you will be there after all.”

She tossed the joystick-shaped microphone and speaker onto the desk and took a long drag of her cigarette. She needn’t have aimed her pursed lips; just being in the smoke-filled room was enough to start a lifelong habit. A grateful noise mumbled through the intercom and then Dina gave me her full attention.

“Start at 7, leave at 7, three bucks an hour and free coffee from the machine but only on your break ok hun.”

And since that was the most successful job interview I’d ever had, that was how I ended up cleaning rooms at the Interstate Motel in the summer of ’96.

Red for lipstick, red for buses. Red spilled on the carpet under the yellow light of my old TV.

• • •

Despite Dina’s odd little efforts to make it classy, the Trucker’s Motel was exactly how you’d imagine. Nobody’s paying premium rates for a mattress as thin as the Bible in the drawer. Those long-haul drivers expected nothing more than a hassle free arrangement - a hot shower, eggs and coffee in the morning. The rooms were decorated to match the price. Bed, bedside table, trash can, single plug socket. There was also a framed picture of a different US president in each room. Every room, except room 39 which had Robin Williams dressed as Mork with a big smile on his face. When I asked Dina about this, she said, “It’s for the Canadians.”

Anyway the rooms were so sparse that it was always immediately obvious when a guest left something behind. Usually a razor, or a dirty pair of socks kicked under the bed. Once there was a little hand-drawn map of Disneyland on the back of a pile of signed divorce papers. Someone had scribbled and scratched it in navy ink using one of the plastic biros from reception. I probably should have let someone know but like most other things I found, I took it home.

The one day that sticks in my mind, and became a turning point for everything that happened afterwards, was the day someone left behind a little A5 booklet. Right there by the door. A dog-eared instruction manual on sky blue paper with the title Prosthetics And You: You’re Still In One Piece.

It was 6:45 on a Friday and the last room before I was done for the night. Dina had been quiet on the intercom so was probably busy elsewhere, so I sat on the newly made bed and flicked the thin pages, a little out of curiosity, mostly to waste time.

It was full of first-hand stories from people who had, for a while, struggled with a life-changing event, but who were now apparently getting on just fine. The next few pages were step-by-step fitting and removal instructions, and then some FAQ’s on the last page. The thing that always stayed with me, from those few minutes of quiet, was a story about phantom limb syndrome. It explained how patients who had experienced an amputation might still feel the presence of what was taken for years afterwards. In really bad cases it said, it could be horribly painful. The idea that you have an itch you can’t scratch seemed unbearable enough, but to be in agony in a place that doesn’t even exist - that hit me, and it caught me off guard. I sat on the bed looking at the words in that thin blue booklet and I started to cry.

I think the reason that story hit me so powerfully was because it just struck me as hopeless and lonely. Nobody can see it, some people won’t even believe it in the same way they don’t believe in ghosts, and you can’t take a pain killer for a torture that’s hanging in thin air.

Blue for biro scratched maps, blue for cheap paper. Blue for depression and blue for my tired, end of the day tears.

• • •

I am in pain,

All the time.

All the time, I am in pain.

I don’t know much about the mind. I was hardly a girl with a bright future - cleaning motel rooms for a living and stealing lost property - so it wasn’t likely I’d know anything at all about the human body. But I’ve always wondered what’s happening when you have a pain in your thoughts. Just like those stories from the blue manual, suffering somewhere you can’t hold, somewhere you can’t bandage, somewhere you can’t cool with ice or heat with water.

It seems so far away, somehow so unreachable.

At least that was the pain I felt when six months after becoming good friends with Dina Morello I walked into the reception to see her standing on the wrong side of the desk. She was standing in front of a tall man in a black t-shirt, blocking him from walking towards the rooms.

“This ain't about you,” he said. Or something like it. And then he shouted Crystal’s name over and over again and stamped his feet and punched the desk.

I remember Dina’s face, in fact I remember her whole body. She was in her weekend black suit with smart shoes and her eyes were wide as a wheel. She managed half a sentence.

“Jesse, listen she isn’t-“

And then there was an awful sound as he hit her.

I made a horrified noise and the man, Jesse, he turned around to look at me. He had a small pocket knife in his hand and his black t-shirt was shiny with grease.

I’ll never know how Dina stood up, but she did. As he turned back around and walked towards the stairs, she grabbed his arm and yelled for him to stop, but he was much bigger than her and he barged her up against the wall. In the same movement, he hit her again and again, and I realised, that was the hand that was holding the knife. He wasn’t hitting her. I was watching my friend being murdered.

Two minutes, it can’t have been more. He had panicked, and he had gone. Two minutes and the only sound was a ringing telephone and the hum of traffic from the road.

I don’t remember calling anybody, I don’t remember acting at all. From that moment, I felt like there was a black rotten patch in my mind that could never be cured. It was swollen and bruised and pressed against every other thought at every minute of the day.

And this would be selfish. Talking about my pain. Talking about how much I was hurt by seeing Dina’s death. Talking about how I was never the same again. But this isn’t the story about how Dina Morello died, this is my story. This is the story of death, this is the story of mine.

Black for a dirty t-shirt, black for Saturday’s formal dress. Black for my irreparable damage and black for my broken heart.

• • •

Phantom pain. Agony you can’t comfort. Pain in a place that doesn’t exist. I can’t help thinking that’s the whole problem with that idea - it does exist - it exists in your head, right? Grief, shock and memory. From that day on my body was surrounded in new limbs. A new set of aching arms above my head waving from the middle of a raging ocean. Exhausted legs, ghosts alongside my own. Frantic like trying to run in a dream. Two more hands trying to hide my face from a crowd while my own hung limp at my side. And a memory of my friend branded into the top right space in my mind. I knew it was there. Just a thought, just a moment in time, but that’s where it was. I could put my hand on it and press down and the memory moved.

I could almost feel it with my fingers. But I could never shift it. It just went deeper.

I stood, staring at my tired, tear-stained face in the mirror. Home in the darkness. Home in my yellow light. I wanted to focus on my face. I wanted to bring myself home, but my eyes kept drifting up. Up and right. To the unresolved pain. To the part of my mind that tortured me and intruded on my every thought.

One night I cut my hair to see it.

I took a fistful of my curls right above the thought and cut as close to my skin as I could manage. I put my fingers against the spiky square inch and felt closer to the pain. At the top. To the right. Like it was right under my fingertips. Dina. The reception. The ringing phone.

I took the scissors in my hand and pressed them into my skin until something was released. A line of blood and a small part of the memory, into thin air.

The man. The sound as he hit her.

Wherever. It could go anywhere.

Just out of me.

I burst into tears. Out of shock, maybe. Or because I was back in the motel. It was like I could see it more clearly than ever.

The knife in his hand. Yellow handle, small chipped blade. Keyring and keys rattling on the end.

His dirty black t-shirt with the outline of a red muscle car on the front.

His shoes. Blue trainers with black laces.

In the same way that I could feel the top of the memory in my mind, I could also feel where it ended. It was the size of a tennis ball, just under my skin. If I could get it out. All of it, then it would all be over. Feeling like this. It would be over.

I wiped the lines of blood from my eyes and stumbled to the kitchen. I was certain.

I couldn’t stab around and make a mess. It had to be quick.

I picked up an old breadknife from the kitchen counter and walked back to the mirror. I swung it at my sticky blood matted hair and chopped it away from my eyes. I held it in a closed and confident fist and tore it across the top of my head in a single swipe.

My eyes rattled like wheels on a cattle grid. I could see my reflection but it was like the mirror was smashed into pieces. I had six wide eyes, half a blood covered nose and three splintered mouths, showing teeth and determination. I felt pain, I remember feeling pain, but it was nothing compared to what was underneath.

I couldn’t hesitate. If I was too slow I’d lose my nerve, and I knew I could pass out. So I held the long jagged edge up against the hairless patch again and this time, I didn’t stop.

I kept a rhythm. Sawing up, catching on bone.

Sawing down. Taking a layer of curly hair.

Sawing up. Sawing. Sawing. Cutting. Tearing. Knees buckling. Balanced against the sink. Arms exhausted. Call on the ghosts to take over. Apparition, stop waving for help and hold the knife for me. Legs, stop trying to run and keep me here until this is done. Eyes keep seeing. Mouth keep breathing. Eyes keep seeing. Heart keep pumping.

The paramedics would tell you I got an inch deep before I collapsed.

They would tell you I held the knife so tightly that my nails pierced into my palm.

And they would tell you that I was dead long before they found me.

What they won’t tell you is that it worked. The girl they carried out of that tiny apartment in the middle of the night, she was free from grief, free from memories, free from pain. They don’t know that her mind reached out for comfort in the final moments and heard the voice of a late night Texan telling her to speak out the mantras. This girl, she started with the colours and built her world from there, this girl had one more. One that formed in the torn apart jumble of wires in her mind.

Colours of death, colours of me, colours in carpets and late night TV. Now I can’t breathe,

She thought,

Now I can’t breathe, finally, I think I can breathe.

THE END

HOW TO DISMANTLE YOURSELF

• Notes

  Another regular little occurrence in my stories is the ‘big voice’.

  The one that leans back from the story and speaks not as narrator but as a choir.

  In Gold In The Abraham, it’s still the angry protagonist talking, and the same with All The Colours Of Death. Here it’s less clear.

  All I do know is it’s the emotional heart of the story.

  When I wrote:

  “Sometimes the world is so ugly that your heart cowers in the darkest corner it can find. It covers its face and weeps.”

  It truly felt like I was at the centre of why I was showing up for this story. Why I was there in the first place.

  Which brings us to the ending. A space for the reader to write their own reason for living. If this was printed in a book you could scribble your own lines with a leaky pen.

  What would I write? I would write my own calling -

  To make art that helps other people feel less alone. 

  And less absolutely terrified of the world, even for a moment.

  RJ

Make notes in the margins as you read.

Dog ear the corners.

Leave breadcrumbs in those impossibly small spaces where the pages meet, because you’ll want to find your way back.

• • •

We used to visit our father on the last Sunday of every month, before his Alzheimer's convinced him we were strangers. Old margarine tubs full of tulips and cracked dirt were lined up on the window ledges and it would become spring, even on the darkest of days.

Most of the things I learned about the world were from those Sunday afternoons of rolling news channels, where loud dusty men spoke in proverbs and set things alight. I remember groups of people holding homemade signs amongst dozens of collapsing buildings. It turned out to be only one but they played the footage so many times I thought the world had ended.

I sat on the button-backed armchair for hours eating biscuits and drinking my father’s cement shaded Earl Grey under the re-framed portraits of my mother. Visiting him in our family home always reminded me of being young, when his mountain range hands gripped our fingers so tightly it hurt until bedtime. He used to take us out for walks in the ever-rainy moors and we’d trek over to the steam engines at Dawlish Warren. We’d walk for a while, and when we got too tired he’d put us on his shoulders and we’d dig our fists into his raincoat and hang on for dear life. He was a cathedral of a man with the heart of a chapel, and I loved him.

And we were all there when he died. Right up until he closed his eyes there was a strength that reached out as though caught in a burning building. An alive soul in a collapsing body. Fighting to breathe. A desperation to fly upwards and away from the flames. A dream, that after an evening of bright hospital lights and praying relatives, eventually arrived.

• • •

Mark the lines that trouble you.

Bend back the spine until it cracks and fits in your back pocket.

• • •

We volunteered to live in our parents’ empty house for a few weeks and spend the days packing boxes. We got to explore the drawers and cupboards nobody gets to explore. My brother and I, we got to eavesdrop on fifty years of secrets, all hidden away safely for as long as their keepers were alive. Eras and seasons that lined each and every drawer like blotting paper, and memories I could instantly recall, hidden in every hoarded pile.

It took three days to pack up my old bedroom. I kept sitting in silence just looking at the walls and turning the pages of illustrated encyclopedias and crumpled comics. I remember getting home after school one day, I must have been thirteen or fourteen. My mother had decided to tidy my bedroom.

I remember knowing that meant the gap behind the bottom drawer. The space between the pine and the dented carpet. I remember checking when I got home to find cobwebs where my magazines used to be.

In our family, secrets never got discussed. Family meetings were for pro-life lectures and anti-smoking propaganda. We never got around to debating my filthy habits.

And then, years later, we got to flick through every private closet and find out who our parents really were. I got to open drawers and read everything I found.

We found sort-of-love letters, written with red pen and surrounded in hearts, but we were disappointed to find them speaking of ordinary things. We found newspaper clippings of articles we couldn’t fathom and bundles of cassette tapes with no cases, wrapped in elastic bands. One was labelled on both sides, Side A with my name in capital letters and ’Tommy Cooper At The Palladium’ on Side B. I would have played it but the tape was twisted and tangled. I wondered for a moment what it could have been.

We found an old record player with a broken stylus held to the cabinet with garden wire. Faded boxes of board games and brown paper bags full of chess pieces and monopoly money. Everything smelled of distant bonfires and musty wooden cabinets.

• • •

Towards the end of the third day we were poking around in the attic. We found a book crumpled up between the Christmas tree and the bags of tinsel. It looked different to the others so we bought it downstairs. We left the packing unfinished and turned its old pages with no idea how it was to change us.

The living room was scattered with open boxes in the places we used to curl up and watch cartoons. Stanley knives and sticky tape. Piles of newspapers for curling around the ornaments. Bubble wrap with all the bubbles popped.

We flicked through the printed pages over steaming hot chocolate. There were two sentences scribbled inside the back cover. In faded pencil lines one of them said, “To Make The Weary Laugh.”

My brother read them both aloud, the way a newsreader handles headlines.

“To Build A Resting Place,” he announced.

“Looks like mum & dad’s handwriting,” I said.

“Yeah probably meant something at the time.”

He put the book down and walked into the kitchen. He turned the radio on and I heard him open the refrigerator and rummage around. I picked up the book and turned to the first page.

When regarding Honnet Latches & Heartstrings, the author began, We must realise the magnitude of our discovery. Our purpose in life is woven into our bodies from the tips of our eyelashes to the soles of our feet.

Every now and then there were drawings, printed on slightly thicker pages. The first was of a woman’s back and it curved around her body. It showed the slight outline of her spine and muscle lines, and about halfway up, there was something like a door in her side. The drawings looked older than the book itself, and the captions were in Japanese, so it was only my best guess as to what everything meant.

My brother turned off the kitchen light and sat down at the table with a carton of juice. He tore the top open and flicked the soggy cardboard into my lap. He took a sip and orange rivers ran down his chin.

The book talked about magic and romance, and by the end of the first chapter he was going on about holding our hearts in our hands and we giggled at the strange sentimental language. But the more we read, the less we laughed and the stranger the book became.

Only the blessed know of love the writer said, and only the loved will find their latches.

We didn’t know that soon, we would see the world differently.

As we read, the writer seemed to be talking about the door in the woman’s side as if it were real. He called it a Honnet Latch and explained how we could unlock ours.

Not with a fist of sharp keys or a belt of burglar’s tools, the book explained, but through the acceptance of darkened years.

My brother put his hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Why?”

I didn’t know what to say. He sighed and moved away.

The only light in the room was from the blue dials on the old hi-fi and the security light which flickered on and off outside the window. There was a TV on in the neighbour’s living room. Somebody was being interviewed.

“I’m…I’m just sorry I wasn’t around when mum died,” I said.

“We could have used you,” said my brother quietly.

The radio was playing a sad piano melody in the kitchen.

I closed the book and put it down on the table. “Please don’t forgive me.”

He picked up the carton and drained the last of the juice. Then stood up and walked through the archway into the kitchen. I heard the trash compactor’s squeals and then he went upstairs.

I sat in silence for a moment. Outside there was the quietest rumble of traffic and a beat played 6/8 from the bar down the road on Garrett Parkway.

• • •

My mother was a God-fearing lady with a wonderful sense of humour. I still smile whenever I take communion. While the silent pews before her pinched out a thumbnail of bread as it was passed around, she would tear off a burger bun sized chunk from the body of Christ and chew it slowly though the final hymn. The disapproving looks from the congregation were only beaten on the day she added cheese.

She made us laugh when Aunt Minnie, my father’s sister passed away. In the car on the way to the memorial service we were all still and quiet, but she was in the passenger seat doing cartoonish impressions of Minnie’s deep, masculine voice, often joining in with songs on the radio in her gravelly chords.

When you’re growing up you think your parents will live forever. When you get older you prepare yourself for cancers and heart attacks. The phone call I answered during my first year of college sounded like a breathless version of my brother and he told me she’d been struck by a lorry on her way to the newsagents. It took me weeks to get over the feeling in my stomach that we could go back and change it. That it was somehow reversible. I started having dreams of groceries rolling down gutters. Of apples with friction burns. Of torn-apart morning editions and plastic bags in the wind.

After a few weeks the dreams changed. They became her standing in the middle of the road with her eyes closed. The sunlight shone on her skin in infinite streaks and the eighteen-wheeler thumped down the high street. It smashed into her frame and exploded into grey confetti and a spray of shredded metal and glass which wrapped around her invincible bones. She would stand on the white lines and look at the sun. She would still be holding the shopping bags while the back end of the truck flipped into the clouds of asphalt and exhaust and crashed back down into the pavement.

The dreams soon gave way to panic attacks and they led to a breakdown. I stopped calling home and I didn’t go to the funeral. I decided that if I didn’t go to the house where I grew up I wouldn’t have to see her empty chair. Her blue apron still hanging in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have to listen to the silent spaces she would have filled and I wouldn’t have to see her silver counter left in the box of the board game while we played.

• • •

Sometimes the world is so ugly that your heart cowers in the darkest corner it can find. It covers its face and weeps.

Circle the words you fall for.

Underline everything you want to remember.

• • •

I opened the book at the next chapter. There was another drawing, this time of a man reaching through the door in his side and holding his heart in his hand. All four fingers and thumb of his right hand were wrapped around it and his eyes were closed.

Through tragedy, pain, even minor set-backs we find ourselves minimised. Said the book. Perhaps, through the untangling of our heartstrings we will find our true purpose.

I drained the last of my lukewarm chocolate. I could feel how my father must have felt when I stopped returning his calls. He lost his childhood sweetheart and his eldest son in the same day. An ache in my side bent my body over double as I thought of how much I abandoned him when she died.

I held my hand over the pain and put my empty mug on the floor.

I pushed harder and harder into my side as I felt the tension growing and the pain get sharper until my nails scraped against the side of a piece of metal.

It was small and I could barely grab it with the tips of my fingers.

I grabbed at it and gave it a pull but it felt as if it was bolted to my bones. I gasped and fell to my knees. I couldn’t hear the TV next door, I couldn’t hear the bar down the street or the radio in the kitchen. My pulse thumped through my eardrums like that murderous truck and I tugged at the small lock until it shifted across my rib cage and my hand disappeared into an opening in my side. I yelled out in agony and I could hear the words of the book shouting even louder in my ears.

Darkened years..honnet..burglar…honnet…latches.

I was crumpled on the floor with my back against the couch.

… sharp keys…tools….

There it was, as clear as the carpet I was sitting on. A door in my side, completely open. I tried to catch my breath but the book was screaming at me.

Untangle…untangle…tragedy….heartstrings…honnet…untangle.

I reached up and pulled the paperback from the tabletop. I held it in my shaking hands and followed the instructions until I reached the point of no return.

With your dirty palms clinging for dear life to your own beating heart and your fingers tangled up in your arteries you have two choices. Keep reading or squeeze until it’s over.

The next diagram showed an old man’s neatly trimmed nails discovering something labelled Superior vena cava and the reader was instructed to move past a collection of small woven chords until they felt two raised parallel lines.

There they were.

I ran my fingers over the lines, and felt my mouth moving.

But I wasn’t saying anything. I felt the lines again and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I started to panic.

A third time and I felt myself breathe in.

And then I shouted.

As I shouted I knew exactly what those sentences in the back cover were. I could see both my parents smiling excitedly as they scribbled down what they were discovering.

Their reason for being alive. Curled up inside their chest just waiting to be found.

As I shouted my own line, my own life’s purpose through the walls of this old house, I could feel the dust from my childhood being shaken from the door frames and window ledges. Everything that could hear my voice was vibrating in celebration as if the very walls were finding a new energy.

I stopped shouting and realised I’d let go. My hand was resting against my closed-up side with no signs of hinges, doors or latches.

I scrambled for a pen and opened the inside back cover of the book.

Find the old scribbled lines.

Make the book your own.

‘To Make The Weary Laugh.”

“To Build A Resting Place.”

“___ ______ _ _____ ___.”

GOLD IN THE ABRAHAM

• Notes

  For years, I thought of this as my best story. The one I would direct people to if I wanted to show my best work so far.

  It’s an angry story, and as I’ve mentioned in other story notes it became clear to me over time that all of my stories were about loss, love and deep anger.

  I can link the anger I was feeling to a very specific time in my life, where I experienced something being stolen, and I channelled it into the protagonist’s desperate anger at losing his brother.

  Writing these notes, more than a decade after writing the story, makes me feel the way I did when I was screaming through the forest with him, knowing why he chose to eat the ashes, and being right behind him as he started his tale of revenge.

  I began turning this story into a novel, because I felt the character had more to say. I only got as far as the beginnings of a new chapter, but I enjoyed continuing the story even just a little.

  You can read the abandoned chapter here

  RJ

Before you read any further, you must agree to the following. 

     1) I will abandon my ambition.

     2) I will not carry my brother.

     3) I will follow, where others lead.

     4) I will not show charity.

     5) I will pass on my pain to my children.

     ☐ I agree to the terms and conditions. 

Now read those again. Read them out loud. Write them down. 

     Congratulations. You’re a nobody. 

     Now panic. 

     I am the man who kills nobodies. 

•••

     Let me tell you how that works. 

     You’ll be in a queue, gripping your heavy basket with white knuckles. You’ll be leaving the aeroplane after arriving on holiday. You’ll be walking across the hot tarmac.

     And you’ll be gone. 

     You’d probably be so engrossed in the free newspapers that your final thought would be about cheap flights to Tokyo. How embarrassing. 

     Imagine. 75 years of biting your fingernails, picking the shell out of your scrambled egg, changing the channel. An entire life of trimmed lawns, greenhouses and inside out rubber gloves. 

•••

     I grew up in Forthspring, Idaho. Back then we had a ranch by the River Abraham on a plot of land which stretched three miles south to the forest and across to the clay mines. We had warped pantry shelves which were always full, my mother always used to say, “As long as you’re workin’.” 

     With shelves of plates looking for all the world like the local bakery, looking back I have no idea how she kept it from going stale. Homemade treacle tart, sitting out for just long enough that the filling had a chance to soak into the crust. Cakes, biscuits, jam. Bags of sugar, bags of flour. 

     As long as we kept ourselves busy we were allowed to eat whatever we liked.

     We chopped up the fallen trees into firewood for hours on end. We would have to use the axe with the worn down wooden handle which had a grain running along the sides in small ridges, giving us blisters the size of dimes. When we couldn’t hold the axe any more we fixed fences, fed the livestock and most afternoons my father and I would go hunting for dinner. 

     Sometimes he would even let me hold the rifle. I was young back then, and though I practised on the bird feeders in the yard when he wasn’t around, I didn’t find it easy. The pea-sized dents in the shutters and the embedded pellets in the bark of the oak tree were enough to show that. When I got older I was good enough to be able to hit something that was completely still, but as soon as it was a moving target I had as much hope of hitting it as I did of reaching puberty before Mary Elizabeth got home from Summer camp. 

     You’d better keep moving.  

•••

     On the first warm day of the summer my brother Danny and I were panning for gold in the Abraham. It was always the first thing we would do when the chores were done. Danny had this big metal pan which he’d scored marks into with his penknife. He said it was his secret to always finding more gold than me. We’d found our usual spot along the riverbank and already had flakes of colour in the big glass collecting jar.

     So Danny, he turns to me and he says, “When I’m a grown up,” oh and by the way he’s standing knee-deep in the river, gold pan in hand when he says this, “I’m going to be rich.” 

     I don’t know if it was the smile in the corner of his mouth or the fact that he didn’t take his eyes off the rubble in his pan, but as I looked over from the shallow water, I believed him. 

     Danny was my older brother by a year. He was first to kill a deer, first to break a bone, and was the first person I could ever imagine moving away from Forthspring and making a life somewhere else. He was my hero. He was so confident for every moment I was timid and where I wobbled on the stones across the river, he leapt two to three at a time. He would fall in, of course, but being cold and wet-through was, according to Danny, “what being alive felt like.”

     He sat by my bedside when I had glandular fever. He would cheer me up by reading telegrams from our father’s desk in funny voices. We laughed so much that day that it hurt more than my swollen tonsils. 

     When I stepped out of line, Danny corrected me. I feared disappointing him more than anybody else.

     And then came the day I walked home from hunting with my father to see my brother’s body being carried out through the back door of the kitchen. 

     My brother Danny. 

     Later I’d find out about the Pollard brothers who had been working on the roof of the farmhouse. I’d hear how they found a large glass jar in the master bedroom of the house and how they tried to steal it. I’d be told how Danny had stood in their way. 

     I’d learn of my brother’s plans to leave Forthspring. How he’d been collecting in the river to leave something behind for my parents. So that they could finally retire. He’d filled that jar with every speck of gold dust he had found over the years we’d spent sifting through the still waters of the Abraham. 

•••

     You’ll be at home on a Saturday night flicking through the free ads. 

     You’ll be sending the waiter back with the wine. 

     You’ll be the deer in the woods and if you’re not moving, I’ll kill you. 

     After Danny’s funeral, my father and I went home. We didn’t have the energy to lift our voices above the rain hitting the windshield, so we sat in silence. My father held the steering wheel with wide arms, as though he was wrestling a bear. I held Danny’s ashes in the jar from my mother’s bedroom. 

     I held it tightly against my chest. The same jar I’d carried to the river and back so many times. The Abraham was so rich with gold back then it made it so much harder to carry home. But now it carried my brother and it was heavier still. Now it carried more gold than when it was full to the brim on my mother’s nightstand. 

     I had never felt more alone. Danny’s ashes were inches from my nose and I swear I could smell his breath. He was right there but he couldn’t answer me back. I felt like a nobody. 

     I reached into the jar and buried my hand in the warm grey dust. I ran my fingers through what felt like icing sugar mixed with sand and dirt. It surprised me how big some of the pieces were, but I figured, not everything burns. 

     There was something of him there. But nothing that felt real. 

     I knew that the ash sticking to my sweating palm was his body and bone, but it wasn’t my brother. 

     I needed him now. My mother hadn’t left her bed since that night and my father didn’t think I’d noticed the empty bottles of Kansas in his study. 

     When he drank, we would go down to the river. 

     I was making a mess of Danny’s ashes. My tears were making them stick together and my hand was completely covered in his useless, dead body. I wanted him alive. I wanted him close. I lifted my fist to my mouth and licked the back of my hand. 

     He felt closer. 

     I opened my hand and swallowed a fistful of his burnt skin and bone. 

     He felt closer. 

     I started frantically feeding myself the dry contents of the jar and I choked as I tried to give my brother a new lease of life. I scooped handful after handful into my mouth. I was chewing on tiny pieces of bone and crunching on broken teeth, all hidden amongst the dusty ash. I needed to empty that jar. 

     My mouth became too dry to swallow and I looked around for some water. There was a bottle next to my father but I knew that wouldn’t help. 

     I was struggling to breathe, fearing that my brother’s death would be the thing that killed me too. I wound down the window of the pickup, which was broken and only opened half way so I held the half empty jar between my legs and lifted myself out of my seat. That night I held my head as far out of the window as I could manage and opened my mouth to drink the rain. All the pieces of ash were washed from my face and I caught enough water to quench my thirst. We were driving through the Isaac Forest on the freeway which led to the turnoff for the ranch just a few miles down the road. I’ll never know how fast my father was driving but with the heavy rain beating down it felt like we were flying.

     And then I screamed. 

     I shouted my brother’s name into the storm and into the forest. 

     I screamed until my voice gave in and I had to open my mouth wide to the rain again. 

     And then I screamed some more. 

     When my legs grew tired from holding me up I sat back down and closed the window. My father didn’t say a word. 

     For the rest of the journey I sat, staring out into the forest, finishing the ashes. Fistful at a time, until the jar was empty.  

     He would have been an ornament, and I rescued him.  

•••

     If you’re not out there in the world, sifting through the gravel to find the gold.

     If you’re not shivering from the freezing river. 

     If you’re not driving through the forest at a hundred miles an hour. 

     Me and my brother Danny, we’ll kill you. 

     My mother never spoke to me again, after my father told her what I did. That big glass jar was thrown in the trash. 

     That night I sat in my bedroom and felt sick in my stomach. I could hear the wireless coming from the front room. There was a health programme on about the mentally ill and severely disabled, and it sounded like there was a debate going on about who has the right to choose when somebody else dies. 

     Since they can’t make a decision, somebody more capable has to. 

     Perhaps they’re in a coma, never to wake up. 

     Or awake, but unable to move. 

     I came to a conclusion that night. Death is best for everybody. For the one in pain, and for those who look on. Both helpless and powerless. 

     I started thinking about the Pollard brothers. Stealing somebody else’s gold instead of finding their own. 

     I thought about my father and his ambition for collecting empty bottles. 

     And so I started finding the nobodies. Those wasting the chance Danny will never have. 

     Those in a coma. 

     I went down to the pantry in the middle of the night and filled a bag with all the food I could find. I picked the big glass jar out of the trash and used some garden wire to tie it to my rucksack. I took a box of matches and some lighter fluid. I stole the key to the shed, slung my father’s rifle over my arm and started the long walk to the freeway. 

     You’ll be doing as you’re told. 

     Happy in your rows of houses. 

     You’ll be subscribing. Stockpiling. Collecting. Upgrading. 

     You’ll be giving a speech about your rights when it happens. 

     I’ll be watching you play it safe. 

     Watching you fold on every hand. 

     I am the man who rescues the ornaments. 

     I am the man who kills nobodies. 

THE END

THAT’S WHERE THE MONSTER IS

• Notes

  Everything from To my lost love, to

  Let me tell you a story, because I can’t deal with the silence. I’m going to talk to you and if you can hear me, blink that star over there. The one that looks a little blue.

  I’m going to talk until you blink.

  Is my favourite thing I’ve ever written. And it isn’t even close. If I wanted to sum up a few paragraphs that really feel like me, and that make me feel complete. It’s this.

  I adore this character, and her loss, and her journey to face the monster through overwhelming grief.

  RJ

⭐︎     ☾

1. Blink

⭐︎

The biggest lie we’re ever told is that perfect love drives away all fear.

A little 6x4 summer meadow and my first life lesson, taped above the oven. Cardboard, steam-bent edges, faded colours among the postcards and life quotes my mother used to make her nest. Dirty little rectangles where the yellowing tape had peeled off and had to be replaced.

Perfect love drives away all fear. A sentence of six words in curly letters that became a voice of constant comfort every time I walked into the kitchen. Sometimes I’d get close up just to hear its voice:

Listen, kid. I know you’re confused and in pain but know this: the worst the world has to offer will one day be eclipsed. All of your panic and anxiety will soon be swallowed up in some aching euphoria and you’ll forget what it’s like to be afraid.

Here’s the problem. Nobody who has ever been in love would ever decide to print that on a meadow. Once I left home and lived in the wide open world, love created the most perfect fear. The fear of endings. The fear of this person I found. This wonderful being who patched my imperfections. That they will one day be gone. That if it was this good, then I had to face what it would be like when it was all taken away.

Perfect love drives away all fear. I’m sure it’s true somewhere. Maybe there’s another universe, or a planet buried among the distant stars. Maybe people live there too. Maybe around every corner you find endless fields of simmering embers and tall beacons of light just waiting to overcome the darkness. Maybe that exists, but it’s a different world to mine.

My simple, broken world. I’ve heard it said that we’re nothing but the sum of our experiences, and if that’s true I’m just a bundle of sorrow and broken hearts.

Sorrow, broken hearts and perfectly cooked toaster waffles.

• • •

Back then, being out in the world filled me to the brim. I’ll always remember the long walks after work, balancing on tired feet, trying not to overflow until I got home. Home with the green door, home with the arch of jasmine. Home where you knew how to unplug me from the day. From every exhausting minute out in the big wide world that filled me up like a bathtub.

The man with the ragged fingernails who reached for the elevator button just as I did. The woman holding her husband’s car keys telling me I didn’t work hard enough. It all spiralled down the plughole when I was with you.

When the 17:03 arrived at 17:05 and I missed the next connection. When the electric meter needed a dollar and all we had were dimes and matches. When the neighbours bickered and blared and we had to close the living room windows in the middle of summer. All of it drained away when I was with you.

But I always knew my handmade fear was waiting. I could see it. It was crafted together over years of laughing at your funny faces and missing you when you brushed your teeth. It was hiding inside a tiny wooden box, maybe crossed with a yellow ribbon, waiting for the right moment. An intricately designed, masterfully created heartbreak.

I learned all this in the café on Fifth when you got your test results, when my hips wrestled the seat and I couldn’t decide if I should chase you out the door. Even when you came back and I was allowed close enough to hold you.

When you sang half a second out of sync to a song you didn’t know, or made up your own lyrics to Mahler’s Symphony Number 5 on late night radio. Even during those nights under the sheets where we became a whirlwind of paper hearts, still I’d be waiting for the knock on the door. I’d be handed a tiny wooden box with a note inside telling me it’s over. Telling me I was right all along.

To my lost love.

My hair is your favourite colour.

You used to say my eyes were pocket bonfires and my freckles were flickers of ash. I used to say if I could choose to live anywhere, I’d build a pillow fort under your collar and fall asleep to the sound of your voice.

But recently I haven’t been able to sleep at all.

We used to tell each other of our vivid, world-saving dreams, but during the heaviness of my new real-life I can’t even breathe without a soundtrack. When the music comes on, I know what to tell you.

Mahler, and I love you.

Let me tell you a story, because I can’t deal with the silence. I’m going to talk to you and if you can hear me, blink that star over there. The one that looks a little blue.

I’m going to talk until you blink.

☾⭐︎

2. The Illusion Cottage

This is the story of the day I left our old house and got lost in the Akaishi Mountains. The hills were covered with cherry blossom to rival my mother’s Sunday desserts and the paths were snowed under with icing sugar alpine plants. I walked all the way to the foot of Mount Kita in canvas shoes and an overcoat with a broken zip to overcome my fear of a world without you.

I packed my camera, though the shutter would stick and let in too much light. Every photo came out blurry but I thought, perhaps, if I was careful, I’d capture one clear shot. I decided even if I ended up with a collection of washed white and crimson watercolours I’d still have something to remember.

The guidebook told me to head towards The Illusion Cottage, at the lake where the Daisekkei Valley meets the river. I walked fast, making good time, stopping only to talk to a breathless old fellow who was trying to keep up with his dogs.

I held up my bottle of water.

“You’re kind,” he said, “but my home is just over the hill.”

He was wearing pitch-black waterproof trousers which slid into heavy walking boots with bright red laces. His white t-shirt had long black stains from the strap of his rifle.

“How did you know I speak English?” I asked.

The man looked up the road and flicked a tiny silver whistle between his fingers.

“It's obvious.”

I looked at my reflection in the black screen of my camera.

“Where are you heading?” he asked.

I wondered if I should tell him the truth. “I’m heading towards the lake.”

“That’s where the monster is,” he said with the whistle in his mouth. He blew into the end of it and a flock of nickel-sized birds scattered from the blossom. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. The man stood up and shifted his hips to make the rifle swing around into his arms. He looked disapprovingly at my camera. “Sun-down soon. You’d better get inside.”

I didn’t want to overstay this short meeting on the mountain pass so I decided to move on. He was right, after all, the day was almost over and I had to get moving.

⭐︎     ☾⭐︎

If I could choose to live anywhere, I’d curl into your palm and travel to your lips at the weekends.

      ⭐︎

The blue Ōkanbazawa River was a cursive line through the steady hand of the valley. It autographed the mountainside in inky blue verse and as I followed it to the southern side I tried to take a photograph. I clicked the shutter but all I managed to capture was a turquoise swell of the grass and water. Around every river bend I quickly scanned the horizon for the outline of anything moving, fearful of what I might see, but for most of the journey the banks flourished so heavily with reeds and vines that I saw nothing.

I soon found myself walking along the shoreline of the lake. There was a cottage in the centre of the still water. Bricks the colour of just-struck matches. Burnt orange with a flicker of red. What first looked like roots trailing down into the lake were actually just reflections of its windswept thatch, which was covered in hopping birds the size of cotton spools. It had a coconut brown front door there were no windows.

From the shoreline to the front door there was a dotted line of stepping stones, barely wide enough to tiptoe. I wrapped the camera strap around my wrist, held my arms out wide and and hopped across the stones. As I got closer I could make out more detail. The front door didn’t quite suit the rest of the cottage. It felt a bit too noble for its messy bedhead. Maybe in a former life it swung around the hinges of an old chapel, or a monastery’s snooker room. Here it was shifting and shimmering in the descending light of the valley, and I was creeping over the last of the stones towards it.

A gunshot in the distance nearly made me lose my footing but I committed to a final leap and made it to the ledge. I turned around to see the dotted line of stones I had just beaten but they were gone. Now there was only starlight, doubled up in the lake. If it wasn’t for Mount Kita looming at the edges of my vision I would have been easily convinced I was in the centre of some galaxy. Free falling. In orbit.

I turned around and gripped the thick iron handle. It turned with the heavy clunk of coupling carriages and then clicked lightly as the door swung open to a single room. The carpet was thick as grass, and it grew higher against the honey-toned wallpaper. Naked wooden beams with swirling knots swung across the ceiling from wall to wall, and the central beam was covered in a thousand scraps of paper.

White, yellow, pink. The yellow of your auntie’s dress during Christmas dinner last year and the pink of her shoes on your birthday.

Paper. Covered in words and sketches. Some with thin pencil lines, some with brushes. The room smelled faintly of acrylic paints and pencil shavings until I opened a wooden box from amongst the clutter on the table. Then all I could smell were pine cones.

⭐︎ ☾

If I could live anywhere, I’d live in the spaces between your fingers. I’d swing between your thumb and fingernails and write poetry on your knuckles.

⭐︎

I was close to making a nest in that thick carpet. I could have pulled some blankets down from the hooks by the door and made a cocoon, but that wasn’t why I was there. I wanted to see the monster.

When you died I shut the world away. All I could do was burrow. Now it was time to face what was outside.

I remember picking up the torch by the cottage door because it was the same one you used to have. It even had the same scuff marks from our weekend at Maroon Bells when you used it to hammer in the tent pegs. I twisted the end until the powerful beam shone out, then unfocused it to give me a wider view of the darkness. I closed the heavy door behind me, resting my hand on the latch for just a moment. I knew I could go back if I needed.

•••

I always knew when you were anxious or afraid. You’d fiddle with your fingers and pick at the skin around your nails. When the pain started in your stomach your fingers were so pitted and scratched we had to bandage them up with a patchwork of plasters.

But you were so brave. You used to tell me, when something came along that made me nervous or afraid, I should throw myself at it. Just clap my hands together once and walk towards it.

That night I hopped my way back to shore, swinging around the white beam to pick out each stone at a time. It was blind faith that they would keep appearing and I wouldn’t become stranded in the middle of all that water.

When I was just a few steps from the shoreline, I stopped. I could hear something breathing. It rumbled like a bear, threatening to growl, and I could hear light clicks of claws on gravel. My hands were shaking and I aimed the torch at my feet, too afraid to look up. He was there. In front of me in the darkness. The very thing I had come to face.

I stood, shivering on the last of the stepping stones until I plucked up the courage to look. I rested the torch under my arm, clapped my hands together once and walked forwards, throwing the light from the torch at the shore. There was nothing there but reeds and grass.

I often daydream about living without fear, but sometimes I can’t even breathe without a soundtrack. The music comes on and I know what to do.

Rachmaninov, and I imitate you.

⭐︎     ☾

☾   ⭐︎

3. The Two Figures

⭐︎

This is the story of the day I left our old home and got lost in the Akaishi Mountains. The hills were littered with evergreen forests and gravel paths, scribbling choruses across the mountainside. I walked all the way to the foot of Mount Kita with light brown hair in tangled ringlets, lightly strangled by a frayed scarf, to see if I could overcome my fear of being in a world without you.

I was following the guidebook, even though it got so wet that the ink smudged into a solid colour. Inside the back cover was a list of locations under the heading Reported Sightings, which I decided to follow until I could claim one of my own. It was daylight by the time I reached the next site on the list. The Two Figures.

I could see them for miles before the path wound around the mountainside for long enough to actually see them up close. Two tall, chalk-carved statues that overlooked the valley. The book said they were twenty feet tall but years of weather had worn them down so that now they were both barely taller than me. I ran my hand along the first chalky figure. It was cratered like old rock but the white dust made it smooth. The whole figure was scored with thick grooves from top to bottom and near the ground I noticed a small chiselled word in the chalk.

Tatemae.

I looked over at the second but whatever it said had worn away.

“It wasn't.”

It’d been so quiet on that cold morning hillside that the voice made me jump. I turned around to see who it was. A lady no bigger than a bedside table was feeding lychees to a ragged little bird on her shoulder.

“It wasn’t the rain that wore them down.”

She was standing next to a small wooden hut with a patchwork curtain flapping in the doorway.

“What are they?” I asked. The guidebook didn’t say.

The lady poked the bird until it ruffled its feathers and bit down on her finger. She shuffled towards the figures and stood perfectly still while her dirty white and dark red kimono rippled in the cliffside breeze.

She turned back towards me and said, “Both of these figures are you.”

I must have given her a blank stare because she looked at the sky and muttered something, then walked towards me and gestured for my hands.

“Let me see you,” she said, holding my hands in hers. She looked me in the eye and said nothing. Then nodded as if waiting for a response.

“Hello,” I said.

“Let me see you.”

“I’m here.” I shrugged, “and I’m enjoying the amazing view-”

The lady held up her hand and let mine go.

She gestured towards the first statue. “This is how you present your feelings to the world. We call her Tatemae.”

I looked at the figure. It was the taller of the two but still nowhere as impressive as the guidebook described.

“Your tatemae is fine,” she said, “but come to mention it, isn’t everyone’s?”

By the way the lady reminded me of your great grandma, the night of the Louisiana Primary. She was the only person in the room who truly understood what was happening on the television but she just sat in the corner making cryptic comments and spilling popcorn on the carpet.

Eventually the lady with the bird explained the two Japanese concepts of Tatemae and Honne - both represented by the mountainside statues. One, the part of yourself you display in public, the other, your true self. Hidden away but for when you’re in safe company.

“What did you mean, it wasn’t the rain?” I asked, holding the camera to my face, trying for a clear picture of the figures.

The lady whispered something I didn’t hear. I clicked the shutter but it jammed.

“I’m sorry?” I said, trying the button again.

“That’s what the monster does,” she said quietly, “he sharpens his teeth on the stone.”

I put the camera down and turned to face the lady, but she was gone.

⭐︎     ☾

If I could live anywhere I’d live in the weave of your Christmas jumper. I’d curl up in the darkness and listen to chatter of the radio.

I often daydream about saving the world but sometimes I can’t even stand up without you. The music comes on and I know what to do.

Mozart, and I clap my hands.

⭐︎ ☾

4. JL-5201 to Seoul

⭐︎

There’s no way you’d know this, but the night you died there was a thunderstorm. It shook the house so hard it tripped the downstairs fuse and turned the windows into rattlesnakes. I was curled up in the conservatory under a blanket, never feeling more alone. Nobody called, nobody visited. We didn’t even get any mail.

I remember looking out through the glass at the washed-out garden. The rain was battering the pool into permanent spikes and the trees were losing their branches in the gale. The whole house creaked and shook with the unending storm and I hated facing it alone. I needed company, I needed you. There was only one thing that wanted me, wanted my company, and it knocked at my door for three straight days.

Three days without a break. Hammers of lightning pounded the roof tiles until they came loose and crashed into the patio. The rain rose so high it leaked through the door frames and the carpets darkened in widening circles.

Three days of watching and hiding. And then I finally found the strength to stand up. I decided it was time to let it in.

I started with the sliding doors, pushing them back as far as they would go. The water poured over the step and across the tiles. It rushed against the cabinets and the stereo, turning the room into a muddy bath of sticks and snail shells and newspaper supplements. I opened the kitchen and dining room windows and the flood filled every cupboard and bottom drawer, every wall socket and switch. Pretty soon I was running around the house opening every door and window, turning the house into a stage of filthy rainwater while the world roared and flashed its bright citrus sparks through the darkness.

But for once, I didn’t feel alone, and that’s when I decided to leave for the mountains. Standing there with my dressing gown draping in the foot-high waters, I reached down into the murky mess and found my camera next to the Honshü guidebook you borrowed from the library. I dug around in the top cabinets for the only clothes that were still dry, and left that night for Japan.

• • •

My tatemae is walking down the mountainside, worn down by the sharp edges of the world but happy to be in the fresh air. My honne misses you so much I can’t sleep. Something in me knows I need to meet the monster. To trace his footsteps until I find him. I can’t go home until I see him face to face because it’s either that or a lifetime of letting in the rain.

I followed the path towards the centre of the valley, where the wreckage of the JL-5201 to Seoul lay in the middle of a wide open field. It was clear as a broken bottle in the grass, and the third in the list of reported sightings. The still-legible pages of the guidebook told me the flight had crashed eleven years ago, but nobody had cleared it away. Apparently it was in such a remote location that it’d been forgotten about.

The sun was going down behind me, casting the shadow of Mount Kita over the wreckage. It was colder here and the spring-tinted leaves seemed to shiver with me as I walked closer to the first piece of debris. A huge broken tail stuck out of the ground, and though the details had faded, the sun-bleached words fly into tomorrow were still visible along the side.

Behind the tail was a runway of scorched dirt where the plane had hit the ground, and for half a mile or more it was a yard sale of burnt bushes and buckled metal boxes. In an eerie silence, I walked the whole length of that blackened dirt until I reached a line of tall dead trees. Their trunks were sticky with oil and filled the air with the dizzying smell of gasoline. Baggage straps and broken suitcases nested in the bare branches and in the fading light of the evening I even thought I saw a bundle of bones.

I took out my camera and held it tight, praying that it would take a clear picture. The treetops came into focus but as I took a step back to capture a better image, my heel sunk into a marshy patch of ground. A square of grass I’d walked over just seconds before. It smelled of old wine and trash cans and it burned my throat when I breathed. It was then I noticed, I was surrounded by small patches of drool-like pools, sticking like egg whites to my shoes.

I began to move away from the marshes but as I did, something made me freeze instantly in place. There was a clicking sound coming from directly above my head. Just a few feet up, in the trees. I looked straight ahead, terrified to move. I couldn’t move my hands or my feet. I could barely breathe.

In that same moment I saw the old man with the rifle. He was running towards me, still a way off at the edge of the valley. He was waving his arms over his head, and when he got close enough I could hear him shouting Don’t! Don't look up.

• • •

Are you even listening? Blink now, so I know I’m not just laying on the cold bonnet of your old car talking to myself. Maybe you don’t have access to the stars where you are. Maybe dying is like Christmas afternoon, that limbo state after a lavish meal where you’re full enough to fall asleep but awake enough to hear your family thanking you for their presents. Well, if that’s the case, I’ll keep talking. Damn I miss you.

The old man ran directly towards me, but stopped when he was about fifty yards away. He rested his rifle on a shoulder-high stone and I heard a click as he loaded the magazine. In that moment, a fear much more vast than the monster overtook me. I didn’t have my photograph. I needed to see him but I was too frightened. I couldn’t clap my hands.

The first of the shots buzzed past my head like a wasp and cracked loudly into the deadwood. Then a second, and a third. I held my arms up and yelled stop! but the man continued to fire.

Splinters of sun-bleached bark showered over my head and scattered across the muddy ground. The old man was a lousy shot. As he stopped to reload I heard a tremendous thump behind me and the ground shook beneath my feet. A long frantic leg stabbed the ground beside me and scuffed in the dirt before scurrying away. I caught a brief glimpse of the skinny limb, knuckled and covered in stubble. It made my head spin in sickening circles.

As I stood, paralysed, the monster sprinted away. Behind me his thunderous strides echoed across the valley until all I could hear was the old man cursing.

He was angry and short of breath. “I wasn’t firing at you!”

“I know.” I said, like a scolded child.

“Why were you waving your arms and asking me to stop?” he wheezed, “Didn’t you see it?”

I remember feeling so much anger, but I couldn’t release it because I didn’t know if I could explain it. He yelled at me a little more while I reached into my pockets for the guidebook. The fourth sighting on the list had been blurred out in the water, I couldn’t make any sense of it at all. I tried to hold it up towards the light to see if that would help but I was distracted by the man in the corner of my vision. He was rummaging around in his pockets.

“Have you lost something?” I asked.

“My whistle.” He said, looking back towards the edge of the valley, “I don’t know where my dogs are.” I breathed in to offer some help but he turned sharply back to me and asked, “Why didn’t you let me kill it?

“What?”

“The monster. I had a clear shot. Why didn’t you let me kill it?”

“I-”

“Don’t you know what it did?”

“I’m sorry.”

The old man paused. “Well it’s long gone now,” he said, clicking the safety on his rifle, “It’ll take weeks to track it down.”

I looked at the water-damaged book in my hands. “What if we look together?”

To Be Continued

FOR DAISY, AFTER SHE SAVED ME

• Notes

  Daisy was my third ever story, and I feel like it was when I started to find my way. Reading back now it’s tempting to rewrite a lot but in the spirit of sharing messy progress I’ve shared the original imperfect version!

  For a long time I thought my voice was going to be based around ‘impossible things happening’.

  My first story was about a girl finding a lever in the middle of a field that finally made the sun rise.

  The second was about a man who reached into the centre of the earth, wrapped his fist around the burning core and used it to heal everybody.

  And then I arrived at Daisy. Daisy who cries stars and planets and transports us all to new places entirely.

  RJ

There used to be a theme park just outside of town, between the railway line and the old canal. The park is long abandoned but the eager billboards still line the roads nearby, with thick outlined letters promising affordable family outings and death-defying corkscrew rides.

Only at Caído Del Cielo!

The huge signs would still be convincing if they weren’t so faded, but the slogans didn’t work so well without the fluorescent colours.

I was an engineer for the trackless rides at the park. You know the ones - where your feet dangle just inches above the fake sharks and canyons. It was my team’s job to make sure the ride didn’t collapse on you and your hotdog-filled family, but I also played a part in making it scary. Sure, the artists painted ocean backdrops and the lighting crew could turn an old rusting warehouse from jagged rivets and girders into a western saloon, but we were the only ones who knew how to make you really feel like something could go wrong. We could make you feel out of control, and our rides were always creaky enough to make you regret strapping yourself in.

This was before the days of regulations and monthly inspections, before the park was managed by boards and investors. We held that place together and put on a hell of a show. The false danger was the reason the punters came back. The overdramatic peril helped them forget about their daily lives and had them excited for a change.

•••

The night I met her, that was the last night I worked at the park. Back then my shifts ended with safety checks and maintenance. Only surface stuff, restraint systems, nobody takes the detail seriously anymore. The chances of you being badly hurt in a theme park are one in 25 million, yet people still pass out during the climax of OMG Bees! A ride for kids under ten.

The last check of the day was always The Leafy Lake, and that’s where I met her. A shoeless bundle, crumpled into the corner of the bench by the boathouse. All I had to do was make sure the boats were all properly attached to the long wooden jetty, it’s a ten minute job and I would have been out of there by sundown if I hadn’t have heard what I heard.

Have you ever noticed how you always hear your name even if it’s from the other side of the room? It ought to get tangled up in the other conversations but somehow it breaks through and gets your attention. It’s the same thing with despair. Through the xylophone sounds of the boats knocking against the jetty and the radio chatter from my walkie-talkie, I heard the tiniest sound.

Truth be told I hadn’t even seen her, and yet I’d walked right past to get to the gate. I remember looking around for somebody else to take responsibility. One more job and then I was home for the weekend. I had leftover shepherd’s pie. Half a bottle of Eerie Kansas. Ice fishing on Saturday, Mass on Sunday. Surely somebody else could deal with it.

They say that even fatal injuries in a theme park are mostly caused by previously undiagnosed brain conditions. That means, it’s not our fault, it’s yours. We give you the warnings, after that it’s up to you. I remember when a four year old boy once managed to sneak into Abattoir 3D. Hs parents complained for months afterwards saying that we were the cause of his nightmares and sleepless nights. And where were they while he was sneaking into the adult movie? In the gift shop.

•••

I walked over to the girl and asked her if she knew where her parents were, but all she could do was look at me and cry. Her tears rolled around her blushed cheeks like huge planets and they ran through her fingers. She’d had her hands over her face and the sleeves of her white cardigan were soaking wet. I asked her what her name was and she still didn’t answer.

Under the cardigan she was wearing a yellow dress. It looked like a uniform. I wondered if she’d become lost on a school trip and they just hadn’t noticed. As she moved slightly on the bench I saw that there was a dark grey scarf tied around her leg. All I remember thinking was Good God she’s hurt herself too. If it wasn’t one thing having living breathing lost property to deal with, now I had to play doctor?

And I had shepherd’s pie at home.

There was a small white label at the end of the scarf, and the name Daisy was written in blue marker pen. Somebody must be missing her, surely somebody is looking for her? I called into my radio. Had anybody called reception? Nobody answered.

I looked over at the jetty. Suddenly ice fishing seemed so far away.

It was now too dark to check the boats so I asked Daisy again, “Who were you with at the park today? Where do you live?”

She looked up at me for the first time. She looked exhausted and she wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

“Nobody and nowhere.”

That’s all she said. Nobody and nowhere. Her voice was shaking and the words seemed to catch in her throat as they battled their way through the sobs. I asked if she was hurt and she screwed her face up and hid behind her hands. The scarf around her leg slipped and I saw a blood smeared cut which ran right up to her knee.

Daisy reached down and tied the scarf tightly back around her leg.

She whispered, “I don’t think I landed very well.”

She was staring into her hands, as though seeing something in the distance. I watched one of her tears as it collected in a pool on her eyelashes. She blinked, and as it rolled down her face it followed the rivers down her cheek and landed on the peeled varnish.

It had been a long day. I was definitely tired and the only light was now coming from the old neon signs above the jetty. In the flickering light I could have sworn I saw her tear shatter as it landed on the bench. It seemed to crack and then break like a bead of glass.

As the next tear fell, I reached over to catch it without thinking. I held out my palm under her chin and waited until it rolled into my hand. It was perfectly smooth and light as a soapy bubble, but it was solid and I wrapped my hand around it. Tears were now cascading from Daisy’s cheeks and they crashed against each other as they smashed into tiny fragments and fell through the gaps in the bench. Some rolled around my feet and others bounced into the long grass. They became brighter with every passing second and surrounded us in spinning shadows.

As I watched, paralysed to the spot, I noticed my own tears. Normal, watery tears that seemed so dull and useless. It’d been years since I’d even come close to crying, but there I was, standing there in the freezing evening with stinging eyes and uncontrollable sobs.

I frantically began to pick up the glowing tears from around the bench and underneath the fence. I could only hold a small handful before I feared breaking them against each other so I filled my pockets. The shallow pockets inside my jacket were soon bulging so I emptied my jeans of loose keys and coins and filled those pockets too. I took off my shoes to gather more of her glowing teardrops inside them and I held any that remained in my shaking hands.

•••

Daisy was still sitting hunched up on the bench, and was holding her hands to the scarf on her leg. I remembered the first aid box on the jetty and I regained my composure to find some bandages there.

I laid her teardrops in the grass and walked to the jetty as quickly as I could with my bare feet scratching on the sharp gravel. Daisy let me carefully clean the cut and wrap some bandages around it, but didn’t say a word. I fastened it with two small safety pins and placed her scarf next to her on the bench.

The lights in my pocket flickered across the lake whenever I moved and made the evening fog seem thick and suffocating. As I stood back I saw something move behind her.

She seemed uncomfortable at first, but sat completely still as something pushed her away from the bench. She leant forward and I will never forget what I saw.

Two long, dark blue edges, which unwrapped into honeycomb hexagons of amber and silver. They were bright, but not so bright that I couldn’t see the porcelain-like vines that wrapped around the centre and disappeared into her clothes. She stood up on the bench and the edges flared as though taking a breath. She clenched her fists. As she did, the amber shell broke open and right in front of my eyes a pair of sugar-white wings unfolded which hummed as though full of an electric current.

Daisy stood completely still with her eyes closed.

“Thank you” she whispered, so quietly you’d have mistaken it for breathing.

Her white cardigan was torn and hanging from her body, so she pulled it from her shoulders and dropped it on the bench. The twisting vines weaved through those perfect white wings like veins, carrying the crackling energy from end to end and I could see that they wrapped around her waist.

In the night time fog, we stood there in silence. Lit up by the purple florescent lights above the jetty and even more by the teardrops in the grass, and in my pockets and shoes.

I wasn’t even thinking about going ice fishing.

The chances of a fatal injury in a theme park are one in 1.5 billion. You might think yourself brave, strapping into Crocodile’s Revenge after three stale hamburgers, but if I’d done my job properly, you’d be in no harm at all. You are more likely to be killed by a meteor than a roller coaster. I looked it up.

We have twenty-two boats on the lake, all shaped like curly leaves, which pretend they don’t run on tracks but they do. They’re connected to a rail by a short rope. That’s why I was involved, to give the riders the impression that they steer the boat when actually they have no choice which way they go. It’s all pre-programmed. None of the dangers in Caído Del Cielo were real. Even the hand dryers in the restrooms were cold.

But now I found myself standing at midnight with my unwashed pockets full of an angels tears.

Yesterday it was cigars and ticket stubs.

•••

Daisy stretched her arms out and her wings rippled like twenty-foot sails. They raised high up above her head and reflected the light from her tears across the entire lake. Her feet were lifted from the wooden bench as her wings moved through the air towards the long grass. In panic, I shouted. I stumbled for the lights in my pocket and held them up for her to take.   

She turned and flew silently over the lake. I ran along the fence and hurdled the turnstiles at the entrance to the leafy lake ride. They didn’t belong to me. She was half way across the lake by the time I reached the first boat and used my pocket knife to cut through the wrist-thick rope. With the small wooden paddle I splashed my way out to where Daisy was hovering, inches above the water.

I dropped the paddle and clutched the fake plastic stem of the boat. Daisy’s wings were dark and outstretched and she was looking right at me.

“I can’t keep these” I said, “I can’t keep them safe.”

I was holding two handfuls of the tears. Their light reflected in the lake and lit up our faces.

“I think,” she said, “stars are safest in the hands of the tired and broken.” She moved closer and whispered, “You need this galaxy more than I do.”

As she spoke, the tears became like fire in my hands. I flinched and let them all go but they stayed exactly where they were in the air between us. They spread out slowly into a spiral, each spinning with a heat that warmed the freezing night. I stood back in the rocking boat and watched as the spiral grew to cover the entire lake.

The teardrops, now burning as stars, formed into clusters and constellations, some tightly packed and others further apart. Gas and dust surrounded everything in thick clouds. There were red collapsing stars and white brand new stars, stars as big as marbles and some as small as sugar. As one of them passed closely by, I noticed eight darker spheres, surrounding the glowing centre.

I reached out and carefully held the star between my thumb and finger. It was hot and burned my skin, but I didn’t want to let go.

Daisy reached down and kissed me on the cheek. She touched her lips to my ear and whispered keep it safe before pulling the night sky around her like a blanket.

I was left staring at the sun in my hand and the planets that spun in circles around it.

That was the last I ever saw of Daisy.

A powerful feeling came over me. I was holding a brand new world, but all I could think about was the old one. The one I knew. As the tiny flames flickered, I held the star tight in my hand. As the fire made blisters on my skin, I held on tight. As solar flares erupted and burned into my palms, still I held on tight.

I knew what Daisy wanted to tell me.

As I looked out over the freezing, constellation-covered lake and felt the searing pain in my hand, knew what my life had been missing all along. I’d been so busy creating imitation adventure that I’d passed on having any of my own. I’d been so fixated on inventing counterfeit danger that I was far from at risk of it myself. Right there and then, standing in that tiny leaf-shaped boat, I promised myself that whatever I did from then onwards, I’d never let go of her star.

I wanted to crash into a wall. I wanted to build a house and get splinters in my hands. I wanted to dismantle the safety bars and cut the ropes.

I wanted real life exhilaration and real life danger, and I wanted to feel it all as it burned through my fingers, up my arms and into my lungs. I didn’t want the new galaxies that were spinning across the water, I wanted to swim back to shore and go home. I wanted to wake up the next morning with the star still in my hand.

I wanted to start again.

There used to be a theme park just outside of town, between the railway line and the old canal. The park is long abandoned but the eager billboards still line the roads nearby. I used to work there, years ago, until the night that I met Daisy, and through her ungraceful landing I found myself saved.

THE END