writing for the fun of it

The Ones That Took The Long Way Cry

2006-06-22T19:20:00.000+10:00

This story is down for "maintenance" and will be up again once I have taken aboard some comments from my lecturer.

:) Please enjoy the other stories

Smoke and Mirrors

2005-09-26T11:35:00.000+10:00

There are dead people in cupboards in the house, and I am too scared to walk past them because they are inside so well preserved and lifelike that they might be disturbed from their slumber even if I tiptoe softly past. They are everywhere – all the dead ancestors of my husband - hidden in closets I didn’t know existed, hidden beneath the floorboards, hidden behind mirrors, grinning behind my reflection.

An echo reverberates in a still room, blue and black in the moonlit background as my eye cracks open. My scream still hangs in the air, but gradually a heated thumping climbs from my heart to my ears, obscuring the hollow sound. My eyes shut and when I open them again, a soft light seeps into the room.

The bedroom door slides open, and my silent child tiptoes into the room, glancing down at the soft carpet pushing through her toes. The silver bell around her ankle tinkles softly as she approaches my bed and dolefully stares at me.

It’s just the two of us here.

My husband took some samples and has gone to the city to see a colleague, another doctor. All day my child’s eyes glisten strangely and move as though she is following flying dust in the air. Her mouth is mute and refuses to curl into the slightest smile as I run my fingers through her fine black hair and pinch her sides playfully.

Even the house, although it stands like a solid fortress, cannot bear his absence. It sighs throughout the day, dreaming of his return, and moans as though taken by a chill. The cracks in the walls run through the house, along the walls, and on the floor, making spidery lines in the cool tiles in the bathroom and kitchen, loosening dark teak floorboards. By the evening, lamps flicker and glow in sullen moods, resenting his absence.

A massive furnace stands alone in the centre of a white-walled temple compound. I walk up the stairs with a white lotus in my hand, to throw into the flames. I wonder whose funeral it is. At the top of the stairs I see that the way to the furnace is lined with sepia portraits of men who look like my husband, but some are older, and some are younger. They are the paintings in the living room. A pile of dolls lies in front of the furnace, and one by one, the men step from the paintings and each of them pick up a doll and throw it in the fire. A stream of blood runs down my legs, and I throw the white flower in the red that spreads at my feet.

It is the second day he is gone. At the break of dawn, my child stands so close I can hear her fast breath. Her hair hangs straight down, unruffled by sleep. Her eyes are wide, accusing and red-rimmed. She pierces my head, looking for an answer to a question she cannot form.

Today the rain falls in loud walls that crash against the roof. I try to leave my child napping in the afternoon, but the lights flicker on and off in the living room where she sleeps and her scared wails come scampering after me. Sepia prints of her forefathers drop off walls, and the sounds echo through the house, accompanied by thunder. I straddle her mass from a white sling around my neck, and she is silent throughout the day, but I can see her eyes are open through every reflection. I’ve never seen them so wide before, and so focused – she follows something with her eyes.

I am stepping into an elevator with my husband, the white crowns of our marriage still joined together with rope, our hands still dripping with holy water.
-We’ll have a son, he says. A smile on his lips, he kisses me.
But the elevator doesn’t go up. It shakes turbulently, and I can see that it’s made of glass and that a giant shakes it from the outside, listening to the sound I make as my white heels click against the walls. Then it stops, and I’m standing outside the elevator next to my husband as the door opens. I look at myself on steely ground. My white gown is streaked in red and a little doll with long black hair – sprawled next to my head - stares at me with sullen eyes.

It’s the morning now and there is my daughter, standing next to my pillow. The pillow is wet with tears, saliva, and drops of blood. I must have bitten my tongue in my sleep.

I drift to sleep, slumber having evaded me through the night. I wake wondering of my daughter’s whereabouts. The house makes sure I stay far from her – cups fly off shelves. Plates fall from the table. Shelves in bookcases collapse when I hear the silver bell tinkling from room to room in the halls of the house.

I can’t find her. I sit in the living room, defeated. The forefathers smirk down at me from their frames.

I look down at my belly. To my left a silver line of smoke, sharp as a knife, curves into the room from a hole behind a portrait. It runs down the wall, advancing to the floor, climbing over a table leg, then ducking behind the sofa I lie on. To my right, a black-haired doll enters the room, suspended in the air by strings. My husband follows, emerging from the darkness of the next room, and I see it is he who holds the strings. They move toward me until the puppet is suspended in front of me. Her wooden eyes spin wildly around my head, and all I see is a grey haze around my eyes. I shut them. When I open them, my husband has let the puppet collapse to the ground.

I hear a silver bell. My little girl stares at my belly, her eyes wet.
-I can’t stay. Daddy says there’s a boy inside.

Nok’s Flight

2005-05-25T00:29:00.000+10:00

He still needs a guide. He still needs me. I stand, holding my breath, more out of habit than necessity. I clutch a camera in my hand. I have taken twenty-three pictures, and one remains.

Nok ceremoniously removes the clothes he wears. I watch him as he, with intense deliberation, first strips his tight, neon shirt. Then he unfastens a dog-collar around his neck. He piles these on the floor. He stumbles while removing baggy red pants.

Nok stares at himself in the full-length mirror of the bedroom, solemnly regarding his well toned body. He is naked, except for his boxers.

He reaches for a suit lying on his bed, immaculately ironed and new, tailor-made. This he dons eagerly, seemingly delighted at the new countenance he finds in the mirror.

A hat lies on the table, its edges crisp and sharp. Nok lifts the hat off the table and places it on his head, admiring it from different angles in the mirror.

'It's time for a new life', he says, winking at himself. 'I'm Mafia, now'. He playfully cocks a finger at himself in the mirror, and says 'bang'.

'Gotcha.'

A whirring of winding film accompanies me as I walk out onto the street. Sukhumvit road is, despite being straight, also a maze. The walls of the labyrinth are the crowds that walk down the footpath. They are lost when they stare at the food and wares that are spread about the road on bamboo mats, stalls, and staircases leading into air-conditioned buildings. The cars are a noisy moat - few venture to wade through the fog of exhaust fumes. Most cross to the other side on strategically placed bridges. Some of the street hawkers see me. They stare long and hard, and then caught by a scent of burning squid or chicken, return to their grilling with a slight shudder. Some beggars look straight past me. Some recoil from asking alms and eye me suspiciously, words hanging midway between their jagged teeth and the street.

I died one year ago. At my cremation Nok looked shattered. The drone of monks chanting coaxed my soul from my body under the whirring of a ceiling fan. 'Namo Tasa Pakawatto Alahatto Sammaa Samputh Thassa.' Nok and my mother sat side by side, and prayed for my spirit to be delivered into a new body with swiftness. Both wept into their palms. Later, my body went up in flames, but I could not leave my heartbroken fiancée to find himself again, so I stayed.

When I found him, Nok was an abused soul. I had seen him take on a new personage with each changing season, the hot, the rainy and the mild season. With each new character he sought to entreat as his own, he changed his friends, deleting old contacts, searching for new. Only I remained permanent to him. My heart was the beacon he followed, and through it, he was led to his own self, and gradually, he stopped searching for an escape.

***

I walk down a small alley, until at length, I pass a temple. Stopping to gaze at the ancient granite and rotten wood of the old edifice, I am still for a moment. I raise my two palms together to my face in respect. A fireback rooster approaches the red gateway of the temple, pausing for a moment, then turns its bright-blue tail feathers to me as though beckoning me to follow. I walk on. At the end of the path stands an unobtrusive warehouse with no windows. On the white door, carved roughly, is 'The Guild'.

The size of the hall amazes me, as it always does. The walls, the chairs, everything is soft white. The tables that stretch from end to end of the hall glow colourless. Multitudes of ghosts, somberly in black, sit in those rows of benches - some talking, some eating. A line of vendors, also in black, stretching as far as the hall, make their business in this strange setting. I adjust the turtleneck of my envious green sweater.

At the very end of the hall, there is one office. Everyone is here to seek assistance from 'The Management', but there is never a line. I walk in without knocking.

To the whitewashed walls of the empty room, I say 'I have a roll'.

***

I sit outside the hall, on the balcony of 'The Guild'. The tables here are rough, grey and deep-grooved from years of weather. On the other bench, closer to the door, sit a man and a woman, heads nodding in animated conversation. The last scorching rays of the late-summer sunset catch the outline of my long hair and stencil it on the coarse wood in front of me. I hold a black leather folder.

I am in Bangkok, but the air from the balcony is not like that of the city. There is no hint of hawkers shouting their wares. Sporadic honks of cars stuck in afternoon traffic do not invade the atmosphere. The air here is like the ocean, and, I realise, that is what I see. 'The Guild' is gone. The hue of the water is made electric by the setting sun. It reminds me of the blue-tailed rooster at the crimson gates of the temple. I will throw the folder into the waves. I will scatter his dreams where he scattered my ashes. A feather like a glint of sapphire blows past me on the sea breeze. I will.

I take a deep breath and apprehensively open the folder. It contains a neat row of pockets on either side. The edges of pictures protrude from each, twelve to a side. After my death, Nok again began morphing at each opportunity. The year had seen a new mask for each calendar month.

I reach my hands slowly to pull out the first, but I am interrupted by a voice at the other table, breaking the unobtrusive rhythm of the conversation between the man and woman who I had forgotten were there. The intruder wears a suit. I stare. It's as though I know him.

The sun is behind me and he squints hard from underneath a tattered hat. Recognising me, he approaches. I am too stunned to close the folder in time.

I sit silent.

'You won't find him there. Come, sit here with these two.'

He takes the folder from me, and I, still reaching for words, follow him to the other table. I look at the man and woman, failing to find the animation of the earlier conversation on their faces. They stare at me, blankly. The old ones lose their way, gradually, when they are on the earth for many years. The white hall is behind them. It is filled with ghostly diners - an unrelenting assembly line of mouths and spoons.

'The pictures. I know. He's there. He needs me. I'll find him in each picture. I can guide him.'

He sighs, a gradual smile on his face. His hands move to loosen his bright orange tie.

'See these two here? He gestures at the two pale spirits. 'They've been dead for over fifty years. They died around the same time. But they haven't yet realised the other is dead. Both of them haunt the same place, thinking they are somehow looking out for the other. In their minds, the other still lives in that house. Each believes the other is overcome with grief at the death of their lover. In truth, that house lies unused, and the family can not sell it. It's haunted, after all. The irony of it is that here, they do not know each other. But they invariably find each other day after day. It's the arrangement ‘The Management’ has made.’

I look at him, still unsure how I know him. And then I see. The hat he was wearing is gone. His head is shaven and he wears an orange robe, that of a monk.

Tears find my eyes, and I take the folder from his hands. The pictures inside are not the ones I have taken. I spread them before me, looking for the 12 escapes that Nok flew through in a year. The pilot, the raver, the rapper, the chef. They are not there. Yet, the face in all the photos, the bodies, they are all unmistakably him.

In the first picture, my mother stands beside him, in the pitch-black of the first month in mourning. She watches Nok's head as his hair is being shorn off by an elder monk.

All the pictures are of him in the ancient temple I passed earlier. It is the same one in which I was freed from my body, but not from the world.

In the second photo, he is alone. The old temple looms behind him, and he leans against a jasmine tree, reading a ragged book. His face is worn, but serene.

The final photo shows him cross-legged, in a line of sitting monks, each with their eyes shut in meditation, chanting. Namo Tasa Pakawatto Alahatto Sammaa Samputh Thassa. Only he is looking straight at me.

Now, his eyes are deeper than the ocean that surrounds us. They are his, yet they are not the eyes I remember. A picture is picked up in a gust of wind, and I watch it fall into the waves. My fingertips trail the surface of the water as I watch the memory sink into the engulfing blue. Nok takes my hand in his. 'Let go.'

Paranoia

2005-04-18T04:28:00.000+10:00

Brett ran a finger down Jo’s naked belly.

“Jo’s so paranoid – I can’t believe what he did a while back.”

“What did he do?” Noi reached for the cut straw in Brett’s hand and handed it to Jo. Light had been seeping through the Venetian blinds, slowly, and now it cast spears on Brett’s cream carpet. “Fucking hell – he turned my place upside down. I don’t think you should smoke base anymore, Jo. He’s been convinced, for the past few weeks that the police are after him – why the hell would they be following you around, man?”

Jo scooped up white powder from a small Ziploc bag and ‘bumped’ it, holding the cocaine to his nose and snorting it from the straw. Quick. Efficient. He passed it to Noi, and she did the same.

“Fucking hell, he taped all the curtains together and stuffed these pillows under the door. Then, he turned the volume on the music down to about two decibels.” He looked at Jo. “We didn’t notice anything until you switched off all the lights and were like ‘Shut the fuck up, assholes, they are listening behind the door – do you want to get me arrested or something?’ We all cracked up like hell. I shoved a few Zanax down your throat to knock you out until the morning.”

Brett bumped a couple, too, and then reached over to have a sip at his regular – Blue label and soda. “Damn, that guy would be so much fun to freak out.” He winked at Noi. Seeing a streak of white powder on the black sheets, she casually picked it up with her fingertip, rubbing it absent-mindedly on her gums. “Good girl – not wasting any.”

Noi smiled, “I learned from the best.”

Jo and Noi were the regulars, and they often brought along other friends. They came, crashed and went to work as they pleased, helping themselves to Brett’s vast array of drugs and bringing their own to add to the collection. Noi had never tried cocaine before meeting Jo, just a few months ago on board a flight from Singapore to Bangkok. Thanks to Brett’s expertise at chemical engineering, she’d been smoking freebase for the past three months. Now, she could hold the sharp smoke in her lungs for longer than either of the two guys. Brett had also taught her how to ‘cook’, and her adeptness at manning the test tubes impressed him. One puff to kick off the night would turn into several, and the dealer would be called on for the night’s ‘last’ delivery of ‘baking powder’ every three hours. The rush of had their hearts beating like snare drums, oblivious to other sound. It rendered them placid, then, had them reaching for the pipe again.

She’d called her mother, and told her she’d found a new investment in Singapore, and hadn’t left Brett’s place for a week. The three of them were taking a break now, though, and hadn’t smoked base in a few hours, sticking to powder. None of them were certain what day it was, but probably hadn’t been sleeping for a few, at least.

“Jo lives right across from me, you know, Noi, but this dope-head hasn’t been home for longer than you’ve been here.” Brett got up, moving to the window. Raising the blinds so that the tops of neighboring towers were visible over the hazy layers of Bangkok pollution, he pointed to a window across the smog. “Next time you get your ass home and you are out on your balcony, I’ll take some shots and send them over in an unmarked brown envelope. Maybe you’ll just turn yourself in to the police.” Jo laughed.

The two of them had taken to inviting Noi around whenever they found each other’s company too ingrown. She was a new body to explore, and was still fresh enough to cocaine and free-base to be blatantly egotistical and irrational, which greatly amused the pair.

Noi tried ‘Special K’ for the first time two nights ago. She’d decided to sit on Brett’s balcony’s rail and dangle her feet off the heights, to watch the buildings turn into stacks of cars. Brett had rushed out, pulling her back onto the balcony. “Bloody hell, if you want to kill yourself, don’t do it from my fucking balcony. No more K for you.” He prepared her a line on a hot plate. “Here, snort this and sober up.”

Jo and Brett had been watching each other in silence for some time, and Noi took this to be her cue to get dressed and leave the apartment. It was a week before she came back to Bangkok again. All the lights were off in Brett’s apartment, and his eyes were wild as he bumped a line from one of the many open bags strewn around the apartment. The sun was setting, the shadows whispering ghosts across the walls. Noi knelt down beside him on the kitchen floor.

Brett dipped a straw into a bag and jerked it at Noi’s nose. “Bump.” She obeyed. Brett moved to her, swaying unstably, his breath heavy with alcohol. She didn’t say anything as he bit at her breasts through her uniform. He’d soon torn them off and was kissing her bare body urgently. Taken by the raw emotion of the moment, Noi tugged at his clothes, strewing them on the marble kitchen floor. As Brett climaxed, a wail, not of delight, but of despair, passed through his lips. The sun set, and Noi, unnerved by his raw emotion, held his head to her chest as he sobbed.

Jo had been holed up in his apartment, smoking base alone for two weeks when Brett took the initiative to go and check up on him. He could hear the clang of cutlery from inside as he stood outside the door. Jo opened the door, pointing a huge butcher knife at his face, as though he didn’t recognize Brett. He’d stared at him for about a minute, while Brett stood frozen, unsure how to react. Then, he threw the knife aside, sending it smashing into a fruit bowl, before jumping onto the balcony and hurling himself over the railing. On the wooden kitchen counter were several photos of Jo standing on his balcony. Each one was pinned down by a knife.

In My Grandfather’s Name

2005-04-13T23:35:00.000+10:00

A demographic analogy:

At night the pyramids

Lit by floodlights

Reassure the busy whirlwinds of sand

Mirroring the curve of Orion’s Belt

Themselves as unbuckled by time

Ghosts of children

Never born

Corrode away the top

Corrode away the sides

Until

All that is left is a pyramid again

Grotesquely upside-down

The summit in the sand

Has pierced my grandfather’s heart

My grandfather has firm hands, but they are soft and gentle. These hands taught me to drive a nail through a block of wood. They taught me to shakily wield a paintbrush, dripping in black paint. That paint-brush coloured rain-shelters for my three dogs. His hands painted loving scenes of idyllic Finland – scenes of the quiet streams and sunbathing summer forests where he was born. His hands held onto the railing as he boarded the train that bore him into Helsinki as a student, then as a working father. His hands worked for his country. His hands willingly gave of his earnings so that his nation might care for him when his hands could no longer catch him.

I called my grandfather yesterday. He was happy to hear his grand-daughter tell him of her future. My dad speaks briefly to him, loudly, because grand-father doesn’t like to use his hearing aid.

“He’s coming to your graduation party tomorrow,” says my father.

My father walks briskly up the pine stairs, his eyebrows furrowed with worry. Later on, I speak to his sister. She’s drunk – her small graphic design enterprise ruined by larger companies. She and her husband now take solace in state-funded wine. She sobs – “Your grandfather has cancer”.

I want to look after my grandfather and hold those hands that held me as I cried many years before. My dad is shocked at my proposal. I wonder for a moment if it could be that he doesn’t know yet, but the look on his face isn’t one of question or surprise. His eyes are deep and sad.

My grandfather was born on a farm in rural Finland right after the First World War, during which Finland became independent. He held a gun and guarded the Finnish military hangars during the second. A country deeply proud of their underdog identity after centuries of shifting between Russian and Swedish rule, they set out to allow all the citizens an equal opportunity in education. A socialist state was born, democratic in ideal. The citizens willingly gave what they could to secure the future of the “common man”.

The country was as much crafted out of envy as ideal. The Finns are deeply jealous, and jealousy inspires violence. The people of the nation inflict pain on themselves before their neighbours. My aunt once related a story to me about her own mother.

“After your father’s and my mother died of cancer when I was 21, I began to search through her past. One thing that always struck me was the photos – countless black and white photos of her holding three little children and beaming. I didn’t know who those children were. And I hardly ever saw her smile all my life. She was always so cold to me, and so cold to your father, too. She never was much of a mother. She never neglected us, but she was never really there. Finding those photos shocked me. I didn’t recognise her as my mother in those photos. Your father doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know.

“I searched through the old town records to find any other family she might have had – see, she never really spoke of her past, and we didn’t think to ask. But she had a brother.

“When she married your grandfather, her brother had been married for some years and had three small children. One was five, the other three, and the youngest not yet two. His wife had been her classmate in school. Now, the family lived only two kilometres away, and regularly visited each other.

“Bad things happened when she became pregnant with your father. Her brother started seeing a mistress. A dark gypsy woman. Somehow, in his mind, he found it acceptable to live within the family. His wife was not able to accept this, and, grabbing her two older children (the youngest was asleep in the crib), she set off running to your grandfather’s house.

“It was the middle of winter, and she couldn’t run very fast through the deep snow. Her husband had time to find a rifle, drink several shots of vodka, hitch a horse to a sleigh and set off following her. She hadn’t even gone half-way when he caught up with his wife and two screaming children. He shot them all there, loaded them into the sleigh, and rode back home. There, he went upstairs to his youngest son’s room and shot him, asleep peacefully in the crib. After that, he took the whole family out to a barn in the middle of the field, and finally, shot himself, too.”

Now, my grandfather’s hands are spotted with age but still soft. In his old age, nobody looks after him but his old wife. He’s a simple country man, unwilling to lock himself into the confines of the old-age provisions, desperately short of rooms and nurses, set up by the government. Even so, there is no space for a proud old man who will not ask for help, or admit that he is sick. A nurse comes once a fortnight to deliver medication.

“Your grandfather hasn’t told anyone of his condition. He expects none of his relatives to look after him, and he doesn’t want to impose himself on anyone in the family,” my father says. “But everybody knows.”

Only one year ago, he taught me the Finnish tango. He didn’t let go even when my feet collapsed beneath. He comes to my graduation party and mutters an excuse to leave shortly, rushing his goodbyes and hurrying to the car, irate. I worry that he won’t make the long drive home safely.

Time passes. A whirlwind happens before my eyes. Social change happens, unhindered, yet I don’t dare say anything. Nobody says anything, when the change trickles through, one grain at a time. I watch it change, yet still, I wake up surprised at the change.

When I call him, he can not hear my words. He thanks me for calling after he’s managed to identify who I am only after I have repeatedly shouted my name into the phone (he still refuses to use his hearing aid) and clicks the phone down. I wonder if he simply didn’t hear me and wanted an end to the conversation.

Sometimes I speak with my grandmother, who has become quite forgetful, and complains of back and ankle pains. The nurse still comes only once a fortnight. It’s been three years since anyone in the family has seen them, and they don’t want visitors.

My grandfather’s name means “Hope”. I hold his soft hands in mine again. They are cold.

By Fon Krairiksh (a.k.a. Valisa Sipila)

12/04/05

Eulogy

2005-04-13T01:28:00.000+10:00

Grandmother – you came to me in a dream like a black and white photo. You were young and balanced a frilly parasol on your slim frame. You wore the three white smears of wedlock on your forehead. The wreath that would later join you to my grandfather hung precariously from one finger. You beamed proudly in your long white dress, a smiling bride-to-be. But – then, dropping the holy circle from your hand, you hid your face behind your umbrella as you wiped away an errant tear.

Ever conscious of causing wrinkles in your wedding dress, you smoothed the sides of your gown as you knelt down, hiding your face behind the parasol. It became the short pedestal on which you and my grandfather rested your praying hands. Both of you wore that jasmine wreath around your heads, connected by the rope that would bind you to each other. With a shaky hand, you fixed your short curled hair.

Your mother was a princess of the north. His father was the closest advisor to the king, following a centuries-old succession of the oldest sons in the family. When the king poured the holy water on your hands, from a large shell with platinum ornamentation, everyone bowed their heads to the ground in respect. The first king of Thailand had named the family you now belonged to. The name means “long reaching good fortune”. You were breathing hard, nervous, your face a solemn rock.

Grandmother. I want to know if the last years of life provided you with the solace you lacked in life. I remember looking at your perplexed face, wondering whether you may have been happier not remembering your life. You were a bitter, scowling woman when I was a child. When you no longer remembered any of us, you beamed. You held my brother’s first-born son, instinctively clutching him to your self, and looking at him in wonder. You looked at the baby, looked around the room, and back at your great-grandson, your eyes as wide in awe as his.

Not long before your last child was born, your husband began keeping several mistresses. He squandered his fortune, as well as yours, on buying them houses and cars. The weight of your royal pride, and the responsibility of keeping up appearances for your husband – the younger brother of the of the king’s personal advisor – kept your mouth firmly clasped. It could not be the role of any woman to question her husband’s actions. It was your duty to support, in silence, your husband’s decisions. My mother’s first husband had a similar belief in patriarchy, but nobody said anything when she walked away. All but one of your four daughters left their first husbands. The oldest never got remarried. The sisters are known to their generation as strong-willed women.

You gave the engagement rings of your own design to my mother to keep. They are made of the finest strands of platinum, and she promised me that I could use them when I am ready. The strands weave around each other like the Milky Way, studded with a hundred fine diamonds. As the years of your unhappy marriage passed, you comforted yourself creating hundreds of necklaces, brooches, rings, bracelets, now treasured by your fourteen granddaughters.

The family whispered of your reclusive nature, and the anger of your middle age. My brother lived in your care for several years, and they say that is why he has never been able to become gentle. Two cousins lived with you almost all their lives, and that is why – they say – that they were never married. My half-American cousin dug a hole into your life and called you a sick, twisted woman, torturing yourself by keeping yourself in a cell of your own creation.

Yes, grandmother, you were cruel, even to me, the very youngest of your grandchildren. But you always stayed up nights to make sure the freezer was well stocked with custard-apple coconut ice cream. You scolded me for being disrespectful, but then handed my mother a 500 baht note to spend on me.

During the final five years of silence, when your husband’s body had degenerated, and his children to longer allowed him beer, you had your revenge. Your worries fell away from you, one at a time, with every passing day. First, seeing your children and grandchildren much older than you last remembered them confused you. Then, you became childishly elated at any person you could remember. You smiled when your nursemaid tickled you, and enjoyed the simple joys of a healthy body.

Your husband retained all his senses, and witnessed the plague of his own body. He alone bears the burden of his expensive infidelity. Where he once would have silenced you, he now sees you happily silent. He has been sitting beside your quiet smile for the past five years in the meager house his dwindling funds and the family can afford him. He cries for sweets, for beer, and his nursemaid sternly shakes her head.

Grandmother – you have given to me until your final morning. You passed away suddenly in the shower, smiling at the flow of water around your body. You collapsed into the arms of the nurse, your spirit leaving you in an instant. At that moment, I was swinging my body from the rail of a balcony to a rooftop. Thank-you for catching me then.

I didn’t cry when the monks chanted for your safe journey into the next life. I didn’t cry as I threw the cane lily onto the flames. They eluded me still as your urn sunk into the Chao-Phraya River.

This is why: In that black and white dream, you took my hand tenderly, and told me not to.

Pirates

2005-03-23T21:54:00.000+11:00

**note** this is my first stream of consciousness writing that I did in class today... never written in this style before... please comment!!**

She walks out of class. First, stopping to inform a student. And another one. Then, a pensive silence. I wonder what my brain can produce. A giggle, “this is ridiculous.” I wrote my first story when I was around 12. It was about Pepper, and my friend’s cat, Cookies. Pepper was a happy-go-lucky pirate, his tongue lolling and a grin always stretching to his floppy ears. Slobber flying along with his high spirits. Cookies. Cookies the sly sidekick with a French accent and advisor to an otherwise reckless pirate at sea. My mother complained that I never let her read it. I heard the dart of jealousy in her voice, because I let the little children of her friend read it. And her friend read it and said her children loved it. It’s gone now, I tell her. It’s a shame, says my mother – I’ve never read anything you’ve written. I’ve also never sung her a song, even though I used to sing in nightclubs. The trouble started when I was thirteen. That year I wrote a twenty page story about cockroaches and insanity. My father asked if I was on drugs. I wasn’t. My mother lay crying on the narrow bathroom floor of our pink seashell house on a hill in Almaty. What happened? Cold tiles answer. I drunk some vodka, she says. She never drinks. She weeps. I’ve never seen her weep before. My father sits, cross with the living room, dismissing me with folded arms. Later, I am to go away from home. I’m fourteen. I’m elated. My parents will be on the other side of the world. In Vietnam. My mother slapped me once. Then she ripped out the phone-line when I locked myself in my room. Then I was alone in Finland, in a two bedroom apartment in Westend. Pepper wasn’t happy with me. He shed hair all over the apartment. He was lonely when I went to school all day and howled until the neighbors complained. So I went to Hanoi to let Pepper be closer to my parents. He’d never been alone all his life. He always had a big garden to run in. My parents in Haiphong. Perhaps I missed them, too. But then I am stalked. I walk into my apartment, alone and everyday the phone rings at just that moment. I hate the screeching monkeys in the big cage just outside my kitchen window. They shriek and they piss and they smell bad and nobody cleans the cage very often. At night I am lonely so I go and sit with the guards of the compound. They teach me to smoke Vietnamese tobacco from a dragon-etched water-bong. A face of a smiling man on the clear packet of tobacco. And a phone number. When I walk into my apartment every day, a smirking voice with a thick accent. I know where you live. I know where you go to school. I will pick you up tomorrow. On the weekend my mother and Pepper come down from Haiphong. Mother cooks in the kitchen. There is a balcony from my room where I hide and smoke. I drop the cigarette but down onto excess roof-sheets that are red and waiting purpose in a pile two stories below me. My mother walks in thirty seconds after I walk in from the balcony. It smells like cigarettes in here she says. It must have gotten stuck in the aircon, I say. So bad – why did they smoke inside before? She frowns. I take care not to breathe in her direction. My dad picks me up from school one day. I see his face and I know that sometimes things shatter to pieces even when it wasn’t me that dropped them. We’d been gone for just one day on the weekend and left Pepper in the backyard in Haiphong. The scenery of the bay with green jutting rocks like rotten teeth from blue gums but beautiful and majestic with sea wind. I stood on the roof of the boat. When we got back, Pepper is sick. By the fourth day he is so so thin. He can’t move, even wagging his tail is an effort, but he drags himself across the floor and tries to fetch the tennis ball I gently roll two meters on the ground, but can not even stimulate his haunches to heave. He’s exhausted from the strain and I embrace him and he is too weak to whimper. My dad is standing outside my school on a Tuesday. Why isn’t he two hours away at work? The neighbors in Haiphong say a ghost called his spirit away so that the bones could be returned home because when we dug his grave we found a skeleton from the war. The soul was impatient, they say. The vet said rat poison. My dad joined me crying as we buried Pepper. I wept when I felt the stiffness of his ears. My mother was away in Thailand. I know you smoke he said, and offered me a cigarette. It’s been our secret ever since. I cried and cried and finally told my parents I need to get away from here, I told them I was stalked, I told them about the motorcyclist that sometimes drove past and knocked me over and how the guards just watched. They let me go. I’m not safe here I’m scared.

Lucy Lang's version of events in 'The Lang Women' by Olga Masters + Exergesis

2005-03-23T19:34:00.000+11:00

“What do you all do after tea?” Arthur asked.

I looked up at him, not comprehending why he was so insistent about coming over after tea and why he asked the question as though he thought ma and granny were doing something naughty.

I stared back at him a moment, and thinking of my doll, lying naked, discarded on the floor with the promise of a new one, I ran home.

“The three Lang Women,” he had said, “or are there four?” when he brought the quinces.

I discarded the image of the doll with the lacy collar that in my dreams so resembled ma. When I ran inside, I found my old doll, her remaining arm stiff with grime and age, unmovable, the white lace from ma’s collar and sleeves wound around her body, a python choking the prey.

I tugged at it frantically, willing it to come off, until I felt the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. Ma came from the field, after what to me seemed too long. Seeing my distress at the lace which I’d managed to pull so that now it shackled the dolls feet, she picked me up and sat me up on the crumb-encrusted table. “Wait here,” she said, and left me there on my pedestal.

I looked around the kitchen, as though seeing it in a whole new light, noticing the dirt, the neglect, that surrounded the old stove and table long ago past the peeling of paint, but still retaining a few white streaks here and there. I felt exhilarated as I encountered these objects and more – all in an equally dilapidated condition, as though for the first time. They were our life.

When ma returned to the kitchen with a pair of scissors, I knew what to do with them. My eyes widened in effort as I slid the dull blade of the scissors under the tightly wound lace bond, and mustered my little strength to clamp the dull blades down on each other.

Granny, worrying what had happened, came in the door just as I finally managed to agitate the lace enough for it to slide off the dolls foot and into my grubby palm.

I slid down from the table, trailing some errant breadcrumbs to the floor, and turning to the stove, threw the lace into the fire.

*** *** *** ***

Lucy Lang is a child who reaches an epiphany at the end of the story, “The Lang Women”. I feel that this epiphany was reached well before the end of the story, but is not elaborated on – when Lucy feels the urge to protect her mother and grandmother from their nakedness against Arthur Mann. We are led from this scene directly into the scene at night, where the women are, for the first time Lucy can remember, not walking around naked, for the first time self-conscious. I think that before this, there is a scene where Lucy realises that she doesn’t want the doll after all, and at the same time, recognises the social stigmas that both keep them in poverty and liberate them. The original story is told by a limited omniscient narrator, who does touch upon the thoughts of each individual character, but only one at the time.

We are told some of Lucy’s thoughts, but not in depth. I am taking the opportunity to show, in more depth, the thought process of a six or seven year old child. The reader of this short story should be familiar with “The Lang Women.” However, the story can stand on its own, as it contains an introduction, a conflict and a resolution to the scene.

It is no accident that in the story, the surname “Mann” is chosen. I have not chosen to refer to him simply as ‘the man’ because at no point in the original story does Lucy receive a formal introduction to Arthur Mann, and engages in very little conversation with him throughout the short story. Arthur represents, in ‘The Lang Women’ the idea of a man, and is, in the end, bound by his mother, who, I would argue, represents the constraints of society that are imposed upon him. Lucy realises, in my narrative, where these boundaries lie, and in the process, chooses to return into her own constraints. In the end, when she tells him she knows why they can’t talk ‘because your mother won’t let you’, she is, in fact, referring to the fact that she knows that they are from different social settings, and by accepting his visits and his gifts, the three Langs may be jeopardising themselves. To show this, I am characterising ‘the man’ as a sleazy type, slinking around for his port of entry.

What I am showing with my passage is the change that occurs in Lucy – the realisation of social boundaries – coincides with the change that occurs within the two women. The two women, who previously were not perturbed by the town’s perceptions of them, realise the isolation that they have been drawn into, and take steps toward re-integrating with society. The original story shows that crossing one boundary only presents one with another, just as Lucy’s narrative shows that Lucy has seen, and chosen to accept the boundary that she is placed into, no longer yearning for the lacy doll, which she never dreamed of until the rich Arthur Mann entered the life of the Langs.

Collapse

2005-03-16T20:23:00.000+11:00

An insistent rapping on the door of his 22nd floor apartment on 14th street failed to induce the longhaired Thai boy to roll over in his sleep. “Mmm” - and then silence. The white Venetian blinds heated up as the vigilant sun marched across the sky outside.

At four p.m., the young artist’s alarm clock sounds, a honking like a traffic jam. It doesn’t cause a stir in his languorous sleep. He stretches for a moment and wraps himself around his blanket, a bead of sweat forming on his forehead.

With the late afternoon sun seeping through the blinds, colouring the room in red, and with the alarm honking consistently, the studio apartment resembles an earthquake or war scene from a videogame. Paintings of anime characters and prim paintbrushes are propped haphazardly against the walls and large computer table. Smiling, angry, serious, fierce, scared and other faces of characters he has designed lay on pieces of white paper like bodies strewn across the carpet. They are motionless, waiting to be rescued and used in a new design for a game or cartoon series. The cord of an iron, extra long, runs across scattered official looking papers on the floor. A toppling pile of brochures props up a small Ikea ironing board, two legs missing.

At five p.m., the rapping on his door starts up again. The artist slowly opens his eyes.

“Wake up, man, the World Trade Centre is gone!”

He ignores this intrusion and glances at his alarm and only then realises it has been going off for the past hour. 5:02 p.m., Tuesday, September 11, 2001 – the time and date flash as he silences the honking of the alarm.

“Shit,” he mutters, and quickly springs out of bed and pulls on his wrinkled clothes from yesterday, and ties up his hair with a red rubber band that was around his wrist. He reaches for glasses, next to his mattress on the floor, placing them on his head. He scans the room until he encounters a clear artwork folder, “Character Design Assignment” scribbled on it in bold red. He shakes boxes of cigarettes littering his apartment until he encounters one that yields a cigarette. He lights it with a quick flick of his wrist and pockets the Zippo, rubbing one eye under his eyeglasses with the back of his middle finger as the cigarette dangles loosely from his mouth. A loud sucking sound fills the room as he draws his first breath.

He stands over his mattress to pull the blinds up, allowing a sickly yellow light to fill his studio.

The window transfixes him. “Fuck,” he says, and slowly places the large folder on the ground, and reaches for his mobile, quickly pressing a few keys, then, after repeatedly raising the phone to his ears, and repeating the process of pressing buttons, tosses the phone aside, too.

He stands, staring out at the window, ash falling to the ground from his cigarette. He takes another puff, and finds the overflowing ashtray from underneath a character like a warrior. Meticulously, he puts out his cigarette, then, slumps cross-legged onto his mattress.

**writer's note**

This story is roughly true. It's how I imagine the scene to have occurred when my brother found out the towers collapsed. But this is fiction. What happened is that after he said "Shit", he let his friend in, and he was told the building collapsed before he got a chance to look out his window.

Then, they went to play pool, since there wasn't any uni on that evening and they had nothing better to do.

Around three people from their circle of friends should have been in that building at 9 a.m. Fortunately, they were all artsy types and were, as usual, late for work.

The beat goes on

2005-03-16T02:15:00.000+11:00

You observe the pool of blood on the ground, feeling as though you are intruding on a scene you are not meant to witness.

The girl in white dances in front of you. You are mesmerised by her long black hair and startling green eyes, cold emeralds flashing as she glances at you, the strobe light and her mascara holding you captive. Her hair hangs down in daggers and frames a face punctuated by round ‘why’ lips. Her long sleeved white shirt clings tightly around a slender frame and loosely suggests feminine arms beneath flowing sleeves. Her skirt reaches to the ground and sways along with her body. She gives you the impression of being a cat disguised as an angel.

The hard beat carries her in a way that you can tell she is swept by the rhythm. She doesn’t think, she just moves. You are finding it hard to find the beat, intrigued as you are by the creature before you, pulsating to the beat coursing through the floor.

But you are happy. So happy you don’t mind the waves of nausea sweeping over you as you stagger, eyes half shut where you are on the dance floor. The interior is intimate in shades of clean white and cream, and the lights are soft. The smell is the clean smell of a venue that draws only the ‘right’ kinds of people, and maintains a well-polished pine floor. Your attention wanders for a moment to the wall that is a fish tank. Silver and gold fish move up and down amongst the bubbles, unaffected by the beats, and by the cocktail sippers leaning against the glass. Blues, greens and reds of diffused spotlights shine through and colour the crowd.

You turn back to see her staring straight at you – you wonder why. You smile at her, at a moment where the music swells and those on the floor can’t help but smile – at each other, or to themselves. She smiles back, and turns to face the DJ, who also smiles at her between tracks. They must know each other, judging by the way she makes faces at him and gestures to him.

Her eyes are open wide, and blood drips from her mouth and her nose, onto the cool pine floor. A moment ago, you say her turn around to survey the crowd behind her, and you saw her eyes roll into her head. You saw her legs twist around each other and turn to white flags as she lost consciousness. This all moved in a slow caricature, like a shot of a cat twisting around in mid-air preparing to land on all fours. Except from there, her head slammed into the ground in front of your feet. A halo of black hair floated on the floor, and you knelt down to turn her face away from the floor.

You are watching her, detached, now. The pool of blood grows at a slow pace, and you hardly noticed the music stopped. Silence fills the venue for a few startled minutes, as a crowd around her collectively observes, as you do. A clock passes a few stunned silences with resonating ticks. The trickle of blood becomes a pool, and you wonder if she is breathing.

The sound of sirens fills the venue. The girl is gone. The crimson stain has been erased. The fish-wall is an undisturbed green and red and blue. The beat fills the dance floor again. You turn and smile at the DJ. There is nothing between you and the beat now.

ghosts

2005-03-15T02:02:00.000+11:00

I am nine years old now and the ticking of the wall clock in the hall is preventing me from closing my eyes. My eyes are shut, but not really shut. My eyes could be shut for ten hours, yet I would not be able to sleep. Tick. I’m waiting for the electricity to return, or for sleep to release me from the darkness.

I am two years old, and I am put, grudgingly obedient, to bed – but in their bed. I am on my father’s side. I close my eyes for a second and when I open them it is light again, and I feel rested although I know that I didn’t sleep, and that daytime snuck around while my eyes were shut.

Sleep. The more I crave sleep, the more it eludes me – a waning moon that slices my palm as I try to grasp it.

The sickle in the sky dimply lights up, with the help of the streetlamps, my shutters, from the outside. I can sense them conspiring. I am fourteen years old. I have been living alone for two months now. I am a child, scared, woken in the middle of the night by the peeking moonlight. I am fully awake, but I can’t open my eyes. I can sense, but I cannot move my toes in the darkness. I can feel the tips of my fingers that have slipped out of the protection of my sheets as a cold winder draft curls around them. The wall clock ticks… ticks… ticks.

I spring from my bed, gasping for breath as I hurl myself towards the light switch on the other end of the dark room, tripping as my ears and eyes struggle to follow my racing body and heart. My mind. My mind worked from the moment I was awake, and yet had been unable to will any other part of my body into motion.

I am nine again. In five years I shall move away from home. My mother walks into my room and tosses a book onto my bed, then leaves, silently. I voraciously read through all I can lay my hands on. In this case, a book on the reproduction of living things, beginning with flowers, passing through bees, and ending in a pair of human beings. Later that evening, she collects it from my room as I sit listening to my brother tell stories of ghosts, paying special attention to the ways in which I could best escape them. “If you hear a strange sound – one you know should not be heard, or if you catch something from the corner of your eye – a sight that probably wasn’t natural – NEVER turn your head. Ignore it. Don’t let the ghosts know that you’ve acknowledged them. That’s how you’ll draw them to you.”

I’m two again. I’ll leave home in just 12 years. I howl and scream in front of the bathroom door, scared. So terrified. I stare, my eyes fixed on a door, visible from where I have my back pressed against the bathroom door. I’m begging my mother to let me into the safety of the bathroom, the safety of her company. She’s very practical about these things. I need to learn to be alone. But soon I won’t be alone. I know. And that’s why I howl and scream. I’m scared of that door and what it contains.

I’m 21. I’m at home. I put my parents to sleep. The familiar stairwell is dwarfed by time as I turn the brass doorknob to my room. My room. I haven’t seen it for fifteen years. We had moved away when I was six. To a land where I learned that black men do not live in trees, and where ghosts ceased to haunt me. The house – my room – doesn’t smell the way it did, of chilli, soy sauce, and musty pine when I was two. After 15 years of western tenants, the house smells of potatoes, dill, and raw salmon. It used to smell of my pet husky, too, if I sniffed around at corners carefully, where her hairs used to wander.

The little room without a door doesn’t smell of safety and incense under a serene statue of the lord Buddha anymore.

To the left, the door I once stood staring at is not there. It never was. It was a figment of my imagination. Although my mother remembers the night I howled outside the door of the bathroom well. There was never a trapdoor to the attic, either. Nor an attic for that matter, even though I had such distinct memories of seeing a man climb there once. I remember telling everyone we live in a four-storey house when I was young, because I counted the attic as one floor. I once even dreamed that I was that man in the attic, and I was with a woman there. We weren’t wearing any clothes.

I was found fast asleep on top of the washing machine in the basement-floor of the old house once, again, when I was about two. It was the last place they thought of looking, because the first closet I came across upon right at the foot of the stairs to the basement would send me hurtling back upstairs. That closet is there. But I still don’t know what is really in it. Back then, what was really in it was a dead body, to me, anyways. How I’d gotten past the closet in the middle of the dark night alone, when I never dared to even in the daytime chaperoned, was as large a mystery as how I had managed to open the forbidding metal door into the laundry room and still climb on to the top of the machine.

The brass doorknob turns gently, and I feel compelled to tiptoe into my old room, afraid to disturb the lingering memories. I leave my clothes in a pile on the ground and I watch a few slits of moonlight wrap my skin like silken bandages, falling across my eyes as a blindfold. I slip into the now dwarfed bed that had once threatened to engulf me.

Sleep creeps slowly up my nostrils from the closet-smelling sheets and fills my head, and it’s heavier and heavier. Then. Tick.

I am nine again. Being inside this house in my largest fear. This house has many ghosts. They didn’t follow me when I was two, or three. Or four, five or six. I always knew they were there. I never went anywhere in the house alone, even though they didn’t mind me. My nanny took me everywhere. I think she saw them, too. I am in my room alone, and the walk-in closet at the corner a moment ago, seemed innocuous – a small blue door with a handle of sticky metal. Now, it reached for me solemnly in the darkness. It was waiting for the moment to bend that protruding elbow of a doorknob and display to me all the concrete horrors of the past stored inside – unordered heaps accumulating grime.

I am two. I walk to the room of my sleeping mother and father, seeking to crawl between the sheets and find comfort in their gentle breathing. But I stop at the door. I am not looking up at the handle. I’m looking down.

This is ridiculous. I’m not nine. I’m not two. I’m twenty-one. My eyes are accustomed to the moonlight, and apprehensively, yet pretending to be angry with myself, I stumble my way to through the dark back into my room, feeling the blood rush to my head as the pace of my heart quickens and I open the closet door. The light switch is inside the door on the left, just as I remembered. Boxes. And a gorilla mask I was always more scared to wear than to see lay on top. Curious now, I opened a box, running my sharp fingernails down the aged plastic tape, which easily gave way. Dolls inside. I picked one up. A golden-curled baby with head, arm and legs attached to a cloth body. Her blue eyes always closed when she lay down. The doll stared back at me with her wide-open eyes. Then her head rolled off.

I’m fourteen again. I’ve never noticed my nanny was insane before. I was told that she became schizophrenic after we left the country. She got married when I was nine. We were gone most of the time, but came back for a month every year. She always seemed to know when we were back, and would call us before we called her.

I got lonely staying in my apartment alone, with my parents on the other side of the world. I sleep over at my former nanny’s place once. Just once. Her sons are big now – they are already 4 and 5. I sleep on the living room couch, quite soundly. In the middle of the night, a frantic muttering coming from the bent figure of P’Nim, huddled over the cassette deck, the digital numbers sending her into a frenzy, wakes me up. I sit on the ground next to her and she explains, “Khun Noo – this number – this is Jani’s birthday, and this – when it flashes - this is Janne’s. What are they trying to tell me? What are they trying to take now?” I try to tell her it’s ok – I try to say that she probably just needs a little sleep. But she refuses, saying she doesn’t sleep any more. “The voices keep my awake. I don’t sleep. Except when it gets bad and they send me to the hospital. When I come home, I sleep well for a few days. I don’t like being far from my family.” She looks at me.

Neither of us were born in this cold country. Neither of us like it here. She was only 19 when she became my nanny in Thailand. She was 21 when she came to Finland to continue her duties. We left the country – the government of Ethiopia would not allow for her to come with us, where the Finnish government had allowed her to enter as our employee. Why hadn’t we sent her back to Thailand?

I stand there with the doll in my hands, and before I can react, I hear the scream in my head. It’s so loud I can hear nothing else for it’s duration, and the scream ends in a sound like laughter, very faint.

I turn on all the lights on the way to my parent’s room. The closet is there again. The trapdoor had never been gone. For the first time in 15 years, I crawl between my parents and they are pleased and shocked to find me there in the morning.

Epiphany

2005-03-04T01:56:00.000+11:00

The mound of pillows engulfed the infant, always fearful of the wispy fingers of darkness, full of ghosts and historical remnants echoing in the sleeping household. She curled her blanket around her toes, protecting them from the intrusive dark air. She clutched her safety pillow between her legs and began struggling for breath beneath the tightly wrapped blanket, unable to sleep, but unable to uncover her face and dig her way from the tunnel her bed had become.

Even at the age of two, the child rationalised with herself, trying to convince herself that she would be safe as long as she remained under the sheets, convincing herself that as long as she was unable to see beyond her self-imposed wall of censorship, there could be nothing beyond that wall. She wanted desperately to understand the abnormalities occurring in the darkness surrounding her in the night, yet, was scared of anything she couldn't immediately fathom.

Her mind wandered for a moment, imagining in gruesome detail the flailing flight through the darkness that she would have in a desperate search for her mother and father should the sheets be torn from her clinging body. She wondered who she would find first, what language she would have to shout for help in - Finnish for her father, Thai for her mother. In the darkness, how would she know who was still tossing in half-sleep to hear her cries?

The phobias became claustrophobic in the darkness as they all jostled about, screaming to be heard, and the silence of the dark room was more than she could stand.

Her mother and father lay reading in bed, their night lamps casting a warm glow in the tranquillity of the bedroom. Her father turned a page of his newspaper and it rustled gently against the rainbow pattern on his white sheets. He thought, "Maybe she won't come running here in tears again tonight."

A little figure had entered the room silently, and stood grinning at finding both parents still awake, as though waiting for her arrival. She had found a bridge between two cultures, and uncovered the most closely guarded secret between her parents. "Hello." she said, "I speak English now".

Reflect

2005-01-31T11:25:00.000+11:00

< style="font-style: italic;"> I watched the cockroach climb up the wall. It climbed, climbed, climbed, its little legs scuttling around, not remaining still for the slightest moment. It met another cockroach on top, in the dark, obscure corner of my room. All the movements in their little legs stopped, as though they were greeting each other, nodding their empty heads to say hello. Another cockroach began its journey up the wall, heading to where the other two stood waiting, and where another appeared seemingly out of nowhere and also waited, as the climber reached the top. I moved closer, as more of the cockroaches crawled out of nowhere and moved closer, advancing steadily and cautiously through the darkness, sensing the owlish extent to which my eyes must have stretched, as my eyes adjusted to the arthropodan division advancing through the darkness like a mechanised army. The sight seemed to loom larger and larger as I moved closer, exponential in the rate of growth. I felt not as though the insects were out of proportion, advancing into my line of sight faster than they should, but rather that my space was being reduced dramatically, and that I was suddenly smaller than these creatures, the same ones I had often brought a swatter down on.

I was so close – or were they large? - My eyes conveyed mixed messages to my brain – that I could see the pale light of the waning moon reflected dully off the dark armour that had protected them faithfully over the centuries. The image shining in their beady eyes was that of my own eye, and suddenly, everything focused, and there was nothing left but a trail of inconsequential cockroaches. My brain, however, wouldn’t believe my eyes, and it dawned on me that I had neither eyes nor face. I had no body. The wall and ceiling moved closer and father away, rendering me a giant and a dwarf, all in the same second, as I fought to focus. A cockroach reached the ceiling and fell, landing on my nose, throwing me back into my body, which, I discovered, had been lying cold on the floor. My cheeks flushed as heat returned to them, and my fingers, immobile from the cold, struggled to find movement and heat from the sprawled position I found them from on the floor.

For a moment I sat huddled against the side of my bed, rocking back and forth, staring at the corner of the room and the slowly amassing army. Then, incited by a sudden instinctive fury, I rose and launched myself at the wall, beating and flailing at it madly, subjecting it, and a few passing cockroaches, to all the resentment I harboured against the world. I searched frantically for an opening from which the insects were pouring forth, but found none. It was as though they simply materialised, and I, alone in my world, was subject alone to their mercy. It wasn’t as though they were actually doing anything. All that was happening was a great amassing of purple-black wings and beady eyes. Nothing dangerous – nothing dangerous at all, I kept repeating to myself, in a hushed whisper, immediately drowned by the escalating noise of cockroaches buzzing private musings and clicking against each other. One could go insane from the sound. And that is what I thought – that that is what they must be after – my sanity. They couldn’t do anything else to me. All the power they had would be in preventing me from sleep, from thinking logically. I screamed. I screamed for all the almond bitterness my eyes saw and had seen. I screamed for the lack of a more plausible solution. I screamed and crumpled to the floor in a heap. Meanwhile, the troops hung on my ceiling and wall, chittering at nothing, not having noted my passing, or even my presence at any point. They kept on, keeping at their subtle mechanisms, even as I fizzled into the ground, molten lava through cracks in the ground, taking no notice. They couldn’t hear.

I woke with a start to the loud ringing of my alarm clock. Saturday… Had I even set my alarm? Shivering, I crawled out of bed and performed my usual morning routines, the same customary motions, the same tired face glaring at me through the mirror as I foamed at the mouth brushing my teeth. I needed to get out of my apartment. I needed someone to look at, to see, to talk to. So much isolation, although I was accustomed to it, suddenly left me sweating with fear and had me turning my head swiftly at every sound and starting at the noise of my own breathing.

My psychiatrist was concerned the last time I visited. He said I should be admitted. But they are only taking serious cases. Serious. I’m not a serious case, I told myself. So what if last time I removed a slip of numbered paper from the machine I thought it was an insect and guiltily stuck it in my mouth, so that nobody would know that I produced it. I could buy things when I remembered. I could clean. My home was spotless. Rambling at myself on the street wouldn’t harm anyone. My psychiatrist didn’t think it was his job to take me to the public-pension.

I left my cat lying asleep in the corner, a night of prowl and hunt twitching in her tail. She’d probably returned about four in the morning. I looked at my watch – 8 a.m.

I watched clouds form and linger around my nose. The Helsinki streets were deserted, sad and cold, and the streetlights were flickering indecisively, as though concentrating on whether it was morning or night in the late dawn of a winter morning. It was below freezing, but it hadn’t snowed all through winter. All the stores were closed, giving me no place to run to, should I need shelter from the unyielding cold. Chilled, I pulled my coat around myself tighter and walked on, cutting across a park, speeding my steps to a brisk walk. I didn’t know where I was going or why, but I figured I’d find something or someone if I walked straight long enough.

I did find somebody in the end. An old beggar woman sat on her own huddled on a bench. I sat beside her, thinking of a way to start a conversation, staring at her. She looked grey and worn, frost covering her back, as if she’d been frozen. Was she? I tried nudging her shoulder, and not resisting, she keeled over and toppled off the bench, revealing drops of blood frozen beneath her nose on her dirty old face. I got up and kept on walking, shuddering from disgust. I was disgusted not at death, not from fear thereof, but at the thought of such loneliness. Such solitude as to slip off the pedestal of life, completely unnoticed, unlamented, and leaving not a grain of sand perturbed. Until now. One granule dislodged itself from the cliff-face and began falling, making a disquieting pilgrimage of my mind.

Nobody would care about the old woman, nobody at all. They would say she was a bum and, well, these things happen, that she had frozen to her death. That’s all her life would amount to in the end – to a black plastic bag, never revealed to the world again. How many, I wondered, had died in a similar manner, slighted by eyes that had scorned their pallid appearance in both death and life? The longer I thought, the more I came to believe that I was simply eluding the evidence plaguing the path so clearly in front of me. No one knew me, of my existence, but for on paper. I mourned my own life alone, weeping in silence, although there would have been no difference had I shared my grievances with the world. Words, like so many autumn leaves, were swept away and trodden on in the silent audience of sullen eyes and drained ears.

Finally, after walking for a while, I came to the town centre, which was just beginning to wake up. On such a persistently brooding day, the morning’s echoes answer the sharp banging of buildings and machinery groggily waking up. The murmur of movement and rustling leaves is whispers ghostly responses. The city puts on an air of being deep in thought. Small juts of rock and wooden boat pegs rise obtrusively from the frozen white water, a long deserted graveyard, its morbid inhabitants spaced far apart to avoid disturbing the deep slumber of their long quiescent neighbours. What a city would have been thinking on such a day was anyone’s guess. It seemed that the water must know, being so close to the city, and having kept company to the land long before the sprawling buildings rose. Perhaps…

Disturbing my reverie abruptly was a collision with a perfect stranger, a man I’d never met. He looked me over, up and down, and I did the same to him. Then we both walked by, not saying a word.

When I reached my home, it was 10:30, and the wind was picking up. I sat down in the kitchen cum dining room of my methodically clean apartment and slipped into subconscious over a cigarette and a cup of coffee and looked out the window into the tops of trees covered in frost. It was cold – so cold – like the echoing halls of my life. Nothing ever came near warming me. Nothing – and nobody – ever made anything right.

From behind I saw the old woman sit down on the park bench. It was a bright sunny day in my kitchen. That’s where the park bench suddenly stood. I had to warn her. I had to tell her not to sit too long, not to sleep, dream, as she would wake up to find herself somewhere darker, somewhere where she simply would cease to be. I rushed around to face her, so that I might look into her eyes and convey to her the urgent nature of my message, but there was no face to talk to. There were no eyes to see, nor ears to listen and not a mouth to reply with. In the place of her face was a swarm of cockroaches, walking in the air where her face should have been, chittering and clicking to signal their triumph over mankind. On her neck was a long gash, as if some monstrous being had attempted to rip it open. My cat, Ganzabil, lay in the corner, chewing with playful energy, on a rubbery eyeball.

I went out again that afternoon, hoping to bump into somebody I knew, but I knew those were fleeting fantasies, as there wasn’t anybody. Nobody had ever wanted to know me. It’s not as though I was unattractive. It just seemed that people shirked from my gaze, my words and my movements. People instinctively detect those that are truly different, and unknowingly avoid them, trying to shield themselves from the dangerous abnormalities of the world. I am like a pallid shadow that the world simply refuses to acknowledge. I grew up in silence, darkness and tears. I am a watery reflection of the lives of others, yet I’m unlike anything they have become accustomed to, a monster in their midst. I never knew why.

“What do you want, Ganzabil?”

“Miaow.”

“Why do you kill, Ganzabil? For pleasure? Who is the king you are selling your soul to? Is he your own passion?”

“Miaow.”

“Where’s your life, Ganzabil? Is all that you are simply lost in an empty jar somewhere, at the back of some filing cabinet? Can your soul be nothing but that of a bloodthirsty murderer Ganzabil? Do you have a body or a soul? Neither? Or both?”

“Miaow.”

It was still cold. The wind was unbearably fast and I stood there under a tree, trying to shelter myself, while leaves and plastic cups swirled and dipped around me. The wind died for a while, and I continued walking on the same path I had taken in the morning. The woman was there, still lying frozen on the park ground. The wind started up again, flanking me from behind, and I dragged her into safety under the bench. Annie – that’s what I’d call the old woman. Annie – the dead old bitch under the park bench. I lay down underneath the bench with her, cradling her still corpse in my arms. She deserved some warmth now, even though she had never had any before. Now it was her turn. Maybe I’d turn out the same. I’d turn out another Annie, dead and cold under a park bench. And who’d notice my passing in the morning?

Suddenly, the sun came out, and the wind died completely. I heaved Annie on to the bench, straining the muscles in my arms, so she could enjoy the sunshine. I stroked the frayed brown arm of her jacket. “That tickles, doesn’t it?” As I walked away, I looked back and thought I saw her smile at me. Or else, it was my own satisfaction at a good deed done.

I didn’t want to end up another Annie. Slipping away unnoticed was depressing. It was unrefined. Or, at least, if not maladroit in practice, was not what I had in mind. I wasn’t the great movie star Mommy had said I could be. I wasn’t the next president, like Daddy fervently wished, either. Fame. All that fame. But I didn’t want to be a failure, either. Somehow, though it seemed unavoidable.

I kept walking, increasing my pace as though trying to leave my thoughts lingering in the air. Once again, I bumped into the man in the city centre. This time, it was behind a clear glass bus stop, which I stumbled and knocked my head on.

A cockroach fell from the clear sky and landed on my nose, as I lay sprawled on the ground. He lit there for a moment before purposefully making his way down from my nose to my mouth, and then onto my tongue. He crawled down my throat, and down into my heart; there he fell asleep.

I woke to find myself laying on the ground, the man kneeling over me. I blinked in the bright sunlight and shivered. It was still cold.

“Are you all right? You’ve been out for about a minute,” he was looking at my forehead. I lifted my hand to the side to feel where a bump had formed to the right of middle of my head.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” my words sounded refreshing to me, even under the circumstances, after what seemed a forever of nobody to talk to.

“You’ve got quite a nasty bump there. Are you in a hurry to get anywhere?”

“No, I haven’t got anywhere to go,” I replied, and the truth seemed sad to me.

“How about a coffee then? There’s a café right here. It’ll make you feel better.”

So we sat, and we talked in the café. He did most of the talking. He must have thought I was still dizzy. I learned about his life, over countless cigarettes, and countless refills of coffee. While he spoke, I nodded occasionally and thought of my own life, something I hadn’t done in a long time.

“Mommy?” There was no reply. “Mommy, where are you?” I ran down the beach as it got darker, darker, and darker, “Mommy…” I sobbed on the ground, clenching fistfuls of sand between angry little fingers. I stood up again. I had to find Mommy. “Mommy, Mommy!” I screamed. “Mommy, don’t leave me!” I shrieked as I ran, tears wetting my smudged face in fear. I ran into a tall man, who grabbed hold of my shoulders and shook me. I looked up – my father.

“Where’s mommy?” I plainly asked.

“Mommy…” a tear formed in the corner of his eye. “Mommy left. She won’t be coming back anymore.” That was the first time I understood that she was gone. Yet, that was a thing that a three year-old-child couldn’t quite grasp. Didn’t Mommy love me? Didn’t she say that she always wanted me?

“How long is forever?”

I picked up my purse and took another cigarette from my pack. I brought the lighter to my face with the cigarette dangling from my lips. There was a sudden silence in his conversation. I lit the cigarette and inhaled.

“Those things will kill you, you know?” He said.

I put out the cigarette, crushing it in the ashtray already overcrowded by some fifteen butts, taking special care to extinguish it completely. He smiled at me and simply said “thank-you.” Nobody had ever told me to put out a cigarette.

“Waiter! Two cups of coffee, please?” He ordered.

“No, thanks, I don’t need another,” I put in hastily.

The waiter looked indecisive “So, that’ll be only one cup then?”

“Yes, thank you.”

After a long pause in the conversation, I said, “I’d better go home now, my cat will be waiting”. I hastily got up, scraping my chair loudly on the floor, throwing a few coins on the table, and left Him sitting there, a surprised expression making its beginnings, as the waiter poured him a cup of coffee.

“I’ll see you around,” He shouted after me.

I went around the park to avoid seeing Annie again. All I wanted to think about was getting home to sleep and rest – but thoughts of Him kept invading my unwilling head. I needed to get home to digest the day’s happenings.

At home, I found the box where I stored all sorts of relics from the past, locked and dusty from not being handled for years. I pulled out a gold bracelet from its little box – just plain with a little clasp at the end.

Sweet sixteen played on the stereo in the living room, but I didn’t want to go to my own party. Not that it was much of a party, but he tried. My father, in other words. My father, and nobody else. I didn’t want anybody, I never did, never anybody but my mother. The music stopped, and footsteps approached my room, as the approached every night. My father sat down on my bed, angry, like he was at night.

“Happy birthday,” he said, and dropped the bracelet on my lap.

“Mommy’s magic bracelet…” I choked.

Mommy used to tell me that the bracelet made all her wishes come true. I guess it was just her lucky charm or something. It scared me – the thought of making dreams come true. Why would anyone want to do such a thing? And now, the sight of that bracelet scared me more than it ever had. I was so close to forgetting. Had it perhaps not been for the reminder, perhaps Mommy would have slipped away gradually. From then on, I clung on to whatever I found of the past, determined to keep Mommy as much a part of my life in death as she was years ago, when her warm smile still loved me. And then I remembered it. Her smile. Unwittingly, my father had opened the gates to a path of determined escapism. From then, he could never again fathom where I had been lost. His nightly anger turned to resignation, as I no longer wept at his thrusts. I chuckled to myself, my motives unclear to my father, who perhaps believed at that moment that he may have brought me out from my reclusive world of tears. Perhaps, I thought, all things considered, it wasn’t such a horrid day after all. It was, in fact, better than most that I remembered in my life. I never cried again.

A book resurfaced somewhere underneath loose pieces of my past.

I looked at my mother’s dead body, cold and uncaring, staring at the ceiling. “Here, Mommy, I picked you some wild flowers. You said you like them and I got them just for you.” They would die, too, just like Mommy, but then I hadn’t really accepted that she could be dead. I knew that she had to come back soon to tuck me into bed again. She’d be back to bake me gingerbread cookies again. She’d return to read me stories. But Mommy never read the rest of Sleeping Beauty to me. My father came in and put the book away, placing it gently on the shelf. Page fourteen – that’s where mother was – fourteen. Why did he put the book away?

I looked further into the box, rummaging through all sorts of memorabilia I’d accumulated over the years – jewellery, mostly, but that didn’t mean much to me, I didn’t really have any memories attached to it. Near the bottom was a big, pink baby bonnet.

“We don’t think she will survive long with that condition. There is nothing to do but take her home,” said a cold voice, faking concern.

Mother sobbed, seeing the little premature runt that I was, even after months in incubation, knowing her firstborn had already died. She took me home and dressed me in puffy clothes that made me look bigger and stronger. She did her best to hide my small size, denying the truth even to herself. She devoted all her time to me, even quitting her job. Nothing mattered more in the world to her than me. Surprising everyone, I survived, but there was always a sad look in her eyes. I remember everything from the first moment I was ever held in Mommy’s arms, clinging to them and valuing them dearly for the scarce moments that they held me, before I was taken away. What stuck most in my mind were her real love, fake smile and melancholy eyes.

I looked at the bonnet, until my grip on it tightened, my knuckles white, and my fingernails drawing blood from my palm. I threw it in the ground, but I couldn’t discard the past like that. It would always be there to haunt me. I picked it up, and rather more civilly, placed it back into the large cardboard box.

Mommy gave birth to a brown cockroach, and then she died. The cockroach slipped through the liquid of the placenta and scuttled away hastily before astonished eyes, avoiding the possibility of being probed into and explored scientifically. It ran away so that nobody would call it the little monster that had killed a woman. It found a convenient little crack in the wall and climbed in. Then, it fell, fell, and fell. With a click, it landed on the back of another cockroach. Now, it was one in a thousand. It was just like the rest of the insects, living underneath a hospital, safe.

I watched Ganzabil stalk a large fly, unmoving but for the clockwork of her twitching tail. Her eyes remained fixed on it as it circled around the room until it landed half a meter from her nose. She pounced, her strong muscles propelling her forward with speed and accuracy. In a moment, the fly was dead. Ganzabil carefully picked up the fly and deposited it on my lap.

“Tick, tick, tick” the clock on the wall spoke to me. It said everything dragged on, and everything tortured my mind. “Tick, tick, tick.” Damn that clock. IT reminded me of the past. Why didn’t Mommy drag on like everything else? Why didn’t she stay in my life? She would have protected me. Why did she leave my tender young flesh an offering? And why the hell did I put that clock on the wall. “Bzzz.” A fly. Even a little fly flew around, not caring about a thing, not giving a damn about his life, and whether he ended up prey to Ganzabil, not about his dead parents who never gave a damn about him. Yet there he was, carefree, while the world’s burdens lay on my lap. There was the fly, like some demented piece of dirt. The next moment he was in my hand, buzzing helplessly; I crushed him. Nobody deserved life if Mommy didn’t. The best should survive. They deserve to – but how come they drop like flies anyway?

I’d often contemplated running a knife down my own throat, into my own stomach. I would sharpen the blade for hours. I would stare at the blade as it slowly sunk into my flesh, then withdraw at the first bead of blood. Why bother. I wasn’t so miserable. I simply wanted attention, but who would notice, anyway?

The next morning Annie was gone. I walked into town through the park again, but the old woman was gone. Who would I talk to now? I didn’t think I’d run into Him again – a thought that filled me with a mixture of both relief and fear – so my life was equally barren as a couple of days earlier.

But I did run into Him again. I saw him sitting at that same bus stop (had I arrived at the same time as a couple days before?). I didn’t talk to Him. He sat at the bus stop, waiting. I stood and stared at his face, so calm and poised, as if nothing in the world mattered. So simple. How the hell could he be so perfectly indifferent, when my own world was a bubbling pot of turmoil and anguish at the mere thought of Him?

When the bus came, I followed Him on, hiding my face in the hood of my jacket from the other passengers, and especially from Him – from that calm, composed man. The bus took me towards the direction of my apartment, and watched as He got off just a stop before mine. I continued on my way home.

He called and I pretended I was still a virgin, crossing myself, and twisting myself for Him…cigarette smoke curled upwards as I watched the ceiling with dull eyes. The pain was the same. I hurt like before. That afternoon I found Ganzabil half-rotten at the bottom of my entranceway closet. How long had she been there? I spent an hour wrapping her up in newspaper. One for each limb, one for the head, and one piece for the torso. The insidious cockroaches wouldn’t find her that way. Rest, rest.

There was a cockroach swimming in the toilet bowl where I had just thrown up. I flushed the toilet and it disappeared. I shivered and rose from where I kneeled, feeling extremely dizzy. Drip. Drip… something fell onto my hand. I looked up at the ceiling, and discovering nothing, touched my face, and realised that it was wet with tears… tears? Why was I crying? I looked at my groggy-eyed, weepy reflection in the mirror. I thought about going back to sleep, back to the comfort of my dreams, but I had already received a jerking start to the day and resolved to simply get up. I figured fresh air would be good… fresh air in the park – it was springtime, after all.

The day was what would have been a perfect one for so many. Already there were sickeningly sweet couples walking in the park, enjoying the tulips poking timidly from the ground, and it was only eight in the morning. Already the teeth of the sun were sinking into the flesh of the morning. To me, the light glared. To me, the light was just hiding the shameful dreams of the night before. I found myself in tears again and walked a few metres to the nearest available bench. The brightness of the day only served to remind me of the several ways I’d wounded myself the previous few months. It seemed as though there was nothing much to live for anymore, and that the hollows of my life, like that of my cheeks, had been eaten from the inside by ravenous insects. As if to prove my point, a mosquito landed on my arm and began to draw into itself what little I had left of my own life. Strange, that to a person it was nothing – the blood – and to an insect, it was the source that kept it alive. How could I begrudge it of so little? I let it draw what it needed. I let it until it took too long, became irritating, and I crushed it with a sharp slap from my hand.

I was sitting in the very same bench I had discovered Annie on. That fact slipped into my conscience as I looked up to see the same tree I had taken refuge under on that cold winter morning. It spun. It danced, it sang with the song of chirruping cockroaches, treacherously reminiscent of the whine of industrial machinery, yet older, far older than the knowledge even of humans. It fell, under the weight of a million non-weights, and the tree crumbled to the cracked cement of the park ground. There were no people. There were eyes. Eyes that could do nothing but stare. Eyes that would never see again, grey with the light of the morning reflecting off the black pavement. I looked down. There was nothing of my body, and my mouth screamed its cancelled existence with a voice heard by none of the other non-ears, heard by none but my own non-thoughts. And my thoughts cried to see my body devour itself, consume itself into nothing but staring eyes.

Shaking my head free of my daydreams, I wrapped myself in my jacket tightly and ran home, where I could get a few more hours of escape in sleep.

“Hey there… erm… I really hate talking to these answering machines, but…” I reached to disconnect my phone. Silence. I didn’t want to hear. I really didn’t want to hear. At some point I must have given Him my number, although I had no recollection of it. With a sigh, I reconnected the phone. It began ringing again almost instantly. I listened… One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Click.

“Um… hey again. There seems to be some sort of problem with your phone line or connection or something. I don’t know if you’ll get these messages, but I’d like to meet you somewhere sometime. If you don’t get this… well, then, I guess I’ll just be bumping into you sometime… yeah… Bye!”

Silence makes the corners of reality blur sometimes, so that all is left is a circle. Silence makes you listen, listen hard for reality and what is beyond. Not beyond the realm of morning drowsiness incomprehensibility, but on the other side, beyond the effects of coffee, into acute awareness of reality, is where silence takes you. Silence blurs the straight lines of society, brings them sharply into clarity at the same time, all the while bearing witness to the ends flowing into each other. Through silence there is a point where fuzzy and focused reality swallow each other and it is here that people listen for the first knocks of what in many cases is labelled insanity.

Hush

Things are quiet, they always are. In the midst of a crowd, the whole world turns into a ringing in my ears. In silence, I tiptoe around my house, as if a sudden noise could shatter my delicate state of mind. There are people everywhere, yet there is nobody around me. Not really. Nobody that I would take note of. Only a few ghosts. The all smile at belly and fall through the cracks in the floor.

The crowd on the streets makes me nauseated. There are strangers everywhere, and there is a clutter of sound in my mind that wants to tidy itself up. Drip. Drip. The sound becomes condensed and rolls of my brows in beads of sweat. The anticipation makes me forget that there are problems that need to be dealt with. It’s no use – I shake my head slowly, my thoughts condensing in an unintelligible mass in the centre of my forehead.

There can be no preparation, only action. The enemy is hidden and the fight is unfair, the scenery around revealing nothing but laughing strangers. “What are you laughing at?” – Ganzabil asks me, the words ring through my head, blocking out anything else. She’s a strangely disjointed Cheshire cat, maggots seething under her fur. And I feel like joining in the laughter, but I wouldn’t be laughing out of joy. The only feeling left is self-loathing and helplessness. A last cry for help from the gods I had just a few days ago thanked for being on my side.

I thought perhaps the gods don’t like being thanked. They prefer to remain unacknowledged, as though recognising their deeds belittles the enormity of their feats – feats that no person could grasp even in a moment of self-perceived enlightenment. The gods are on no-one’s side – thanking them offends them, at the very most, if it even touches them in any way. Perhaps the souls that blunder through life with the best of fortune and the least amount of doubts and dreams are incarnates of the gods themselves. They ask no questions because there are no answers, realising in their sagacity that it is not the other way around. Or perhaps they are the most fortunate of people for not meddling in the affairs of the gods. See no evil, hear no evil.

My happiness had balanced itself on a platter balanced on a tip of a needle. Him. There had been plenty of room to dance around, and to be oblivious to the swaying of the dish, attributing the rocking of the base to the giddiness I felt as I exalted in the cool breeze that blew in my hair from where I stood a few days ago. I felt pleased to know that I had come so far. Now those winds of memory mocked me, serving only to remind me of the joy I had only a few moments ago, it seemed, cherished.

I resolved never to pray again. And never to fall in love again. It seemed the safer bet, even if that wager of belief sometimes proved the more logical. Besides, I wasn’t so sure whether I liked the thought of the middleman hearing my wishes. It seemed much too businesslike for my tastes, and I had the sneaking suspicion that I was selling my soul and buying it back at twice the price in holy water. I would stick to pre-meditation – that, at the very least, would offend no gods – and it would not allow anyone but myself to process my own dreams and hopes.

So what went wrong? My world had seemed in perfect equilibrium, yet it must have been empty, for it had now collapsed in on itself, at least as far as I could tell. That’s how it felt to me, but in reality, it was more like I had been a flesh and blood human being, and woken up to discover that in fact, I was merely a balloon, but to say that there was air inside, would have been charitable. So, a vacuum in slow motion. I already knew I was empty inside. How long until everyone else would figure it out?

I’d stopped having the nightmares. It should have been a positive factor, but now, more than anything, I knew that it was part of what was making me empty. How could I be a truly living being without fears? Fears are what bring into sharp contrast hope. They approach the soul from two frontiers, but their tug of war is waged on the same rope. It is a rope that begins with despair and ends in delight.

I realised then – my soul was gone. How is it that I was still alive? I’d stopped dreaming for three months now. I would speak to nobody now. I’d been ecstatic for a while, I’d found somebody to love, yet it seemed that I only remembered the happy moments, and had no memories of how it ended. Only that I was once – a matter of a few days ago - happy and complete.

tick tick tick tick

tock.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word…

Hush, hush, hush, when you sleep, don’t dream

Momma’s gonna buy you…

She’s gonna buy you…

Buy you a mockingbird

Words choked with jarring tears

They aren’t real, you aren’t here

If that mocking bird don’t sing

Promises, promises

There was a time when you were going to be here

You didn’t show up on time, or you left too early

Maybe I was late. That was it. One lifetime too late

One song. All lives are songs, poetry and people

People with their notations put into a tune

Momma’s going to buy you a diamond ring…

The blood wasn’t mine.

Unreal, fake, hidden in anonymity, for it wasn’t mine

Not really. Nothing is really mine, after all. It flowed.

If that diamond ring

When things ebb and flow, and thrust, they destroy

Turns brass

They renew, and they nourish

Mockingbirds don’t sing. They cry.

Momma’s gonna buy you a looking glass…

Oh, won’t you join me there, momma?

Please sing me that song again. Please don’t let him come up the stairs again.

There were times when you had to hope for home. There were times when the evils of the world were simply insufficient. Then you just had to hope. Not pray. Prayer has been proven futile. Prayer intimidates the gods, who are not almighty. It intimidates those gods that do not wish to think themselves into existence, and thus prayer is untouched by deity. But hope is different. You can dream for miracles, but you can only hope for reality. Hope is expectation without a yearning.

It was on such a morning that I decided to kill Him. Only on such a morning, when the phone rang and the machine didn’t answer, could I have come to such a conclusion. I could wait. I could wait for two weeks, maybe three, and I would no longer receive calls from Him. But I didn’t want to wait. I loathe the watchful face of the clock and the expectation that waiting procures from the mind. It leads to more thought, and inevitably, more destruction and annihilation of former opinions through insecurity. So. No… I was just going to kill him.

I picked up the phone, watched my fingers dial, and listened to the opaque beeping of the phone. I arranged a date, a dinner and walk in the park. I arranged a long kitchen knife in my purse, too. Then I waited. I waited hour upon hour for what I didn’t only long to claim, but deserved to, as well. He hurt me. They both hurt me.

Before leaving, I watched my reflection in the mirror intently. Perfect lips; perfect eyes, perfect… No makeup of course, none, for what was the point of putting myself out of my own misery by the death of another, if he couldn’t see my face to understand what kind of use he was actually being to me? Blue eyes, black hair, always the odd combination… and pale skin, so, so pale.

The reflection wavered, and I was no longer there. And it was dark, so dark, a disturbing contrast to the brightness around me, emanating from the bright lights overhead. But there was nothingness in the mirror. I saw nothing but the absence of light, which began to see out in excited tendrils. It encased me, as if I were a mummy, long dead and revered in a tomb… and I disappeared, leaving behind the hurt. Mommy was in the distance, so beautiful, the only substance in the vacuum of the mirror. Her long tresses seemed to flow, moving in a life of their own, and her eyes were mysteriously dark. She wore nothing, except for dark beads thrown over her pale white body. I ran, closer, closer, hardly sustaining the effort choking on my own tears as I approached my own medusa. I embraced her, sobbing hard for a minute, then drew back to look at her face. There was nothing there but a skull, cockroaches crawling out from her eye sockets and mouth. Her hair flowed, still, like I had seen earlier, but now resembling mould more than the glittering waves they were a moment ago. Her body – nothing was left but a mire of white maggots crawling in and out, at leisure, of rotting flesh. Mommy pulled out an arm, grinning with yellowed skeletal teeth, breaking it off with such force that the bone that was left was jagged and cruel, and plunged it into her own stomach, out of which crawled a maggot, large in size and a sickly yellow in colour.

Mommy opened her mouth and screamed, a piercing, shrill scream, not protested by the ears, but by what soul I had left. I ripped off her head; I ripped off her head, still screaming in the silent void, and with it, I stamped out the life of the maggot, the disgusting worm that had crawled out of her and killed her. Her skull smashed into fragments, so brittle had it become, and the screaming continued, louder and louder, until the piercing sound grew so loud in my mind that I reached a hand to my own neck, nails desperately groping, and punctured a hole in my own throat. I couldn’t help but watch, fascinated, as blood poured down my front, soaking the maggot infested body before me, still standing, with the blood spurting from my veins. I opened my eyes wide, looking up at the ceiling lamp, somehow still there, but no longer possessing of a warm glow, but a distant cold one, much like the moon, and laughed. I laughed, laughed, and laughed, until I realised the sound was not in truth coming from me, for I had no throat any longer, but it filled the air. An amazingly blue eye stared at me from the corner. It was mine.

A gentle pat on my forehead brought my attention to the paw of Ganzabil, moving tentatively about my face, exploring, seeing if I was still conscious. I was sprawled out on the ground, a pool of crimson blood matting my hair. An attempted move from myself, and Ganzabil’s claws were no longer retracted, digging deep into my skull. Where that should have caused pain, I felt none. I attempted moving my legs, but glanced down to notice Him sprawled across my feet. Ganzabil mewed plainly, and was gone. Annie was in the distance, where I could barely see her face, but beyond the stains of blood on her features, I saw her beaming at me, benevolently, and her lips seemed to mouth “pretend, pretend, pretend” over and over again. I turned and was laughing. But laughing brought pain, and the laughing sounded like gasps. I looked down to where my stomach had been gouged out, and where my hand held a knife… like some failed suicide attempt. I hadn’t meant to hurt myself. Ha… haha... Dreams do come true, I thought, and I watched as a timid cockroach climbed onto my shuddering entrails, and in the space of a few seconds, was joined by another. There they stayed, one on top of the other, natures oldest creatures, and didn’t leave, ever.

By Fon Krairiksh

Ghandi and Yudhistira

2004-10-26T06:22:00.000+10:00

In the forties, Gandhi liberated India, and arguably saved and reformed the Hindu tradition. He has been compared to Yudhishtira, his sense of Dharma and faith to that of the great king of Indraprashtha, setting him as a modern day example of a Dharma-raja . The sense of imminent doom in the final scenes of the Mahabharata resonate today with both Indian and Western readers or audiences, as the threats of nuclear war threaten to destroy the world, as when Arjuna and Ashvatthama invoke ‘astras’ to fight each other, placing the three worlds – heaven, earth, and hell - in peril. Controversially, one could also seek to justify the actions of George Bush in the context of Dharma, by saying that, like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, is following the Dharma. Indeed, the largest part of the Mahabharata, taking up twelve to thirteen of the eighteen parvas (chapters), all deal with the great battle and imminent destruction of the worlds and the spiritual departure of the main characters from their worldly roles. The last two parvas of the Mahabharata, the Mahaprasthanik parva, and the Swargarohan parva, deal with the aftermath of the Great War, and the work that the Pandavas must do to restore peace to the world before they finally make their journey to paradise . Finally, even in Paradise, Yudhishtira encounters layers of deception to test him, as Gandhi encountered the split of his motherland into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India .

To the character Yudhishtira, Dharma is of great importance, and this central goal of knowing the true path can be applied to Gandhi:

“He described himself as a sanatani Hindu, one who follows the sanatana dharma, the eternal law once embodied in the dharma-raja, Yudhishtira. And Gandhi's dilemma was the same as Yudhishtira's: what and where was the sanatana dharma he claimed to follow? Was it in his heart or was it in what the Brahmans proclaimed?”

One of Peter Brook's influences in his theatrical work is George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1877–1949) and his tri-cerebral structure of the person. Gurdjieff describes the person as a triangle possessing of three sides: The base as the emotional centre, or “locus of reconciliation”; one side as the intellectual centre, or “locus of affirmation”; and the other side as the instinctive motor centre, or the “locus of negation”. A state of harmony results when there is a balance between these three centres. Peter Brooks applies the same ternary structure to theatre: using for the base the audience’s consciousness; for the two sides the inner life of the actors, and the actor’s relations with their partners.

Given this balanced view of theatre, Brook’s approach was not to engage the actors in his production of the Mahabharata in extensive readings on Hinduism, as this would be an unbalanced focus on the “locus of affirmation” or intellectual centre. Peter Brook chose instead to immerse his caste in the Hindu culture, allowing them to develop relations relevant to the Mahabharata with their acting partners, incorporate elements of ‘Indianness’ to their inner life, and thereby be able to more completely influence the audience’s consciousness.

Brook’s work with Carriere was an attempt at bringing the stories of India to a western audience , in such a manner that modern theatregoers could assimilate the ideas and stories into their own lives, without losing the central lessons in the original text. However, it seems natural that as the text passes from one culture to another, the story is moulded to fit the culture of the recipients. The tradition of sacred texts the world over has been an oral one, deeply linked to an evolutionary process. This evolutionary process ensures the survival of culture, for in the transient nature of the world, what is stagnant will ultimately die. Even though tradition has it that the Mahabharata was originally a vision that came to the sage Vyasa, with Ganesha as the scribe , the story has always been an integrative staged experience, or an oral one, the majority never having read the text. As these words of wisdom pass from one generation to the next they are interpreted and assimilated, retaining the main ideas and characters, but shedding from them antiquities that would alienate the audience from the texts. The threads of Dharma and global destruction running through the original, which are core concepts of the Mahabharata, retain their strength.

Peter Brooks has been criticized in his adaptation of the Mahabharata of falsely portraying Indian culture, and of taking an imperialist view of India, and leaving the Bhagavad-Gita, the core of the teaching of Dharma, as nothing more than a whispered exchange.

My goal in staging the final scene of the Mahabharata is not one that is designed to introduce the concepts of the Mahabharata and Hinduism to the audience. I assume an audience that is already familiar with the concept of Dharma and somewhat familiar with the story of the Mahabharata. The idea is to draw direct correlations between events of the world following world war two until the present day and present them as questions of Dharma and global destruction. It is to homage the resounding chords of truth that were struck by the sage Vyasa over two thousand years ago, which resonate accurately with the political strings of the world today.

This performance of the Mahabharata is to be an indoor one, with a stage empty except for a white curtain spanning the entire length at the back of the stage, from whence the characters of the play will emerge and introduce themselves, and with a dim oil lamp in the centre, as in the traditional Indian style. Also in the traditional Indian style, a man on either side will hold up the sheet. The men should be dressed as modern day military men standing tall and still. The sheet will serve a double role, also functioning as a screen where a political scene comparable to the interactions in the play will be projected.

The actors of the play, in contrast to the minimalist and modern setting of the stage, should be garbed in traditional Indian style. This is to highlight the message of this production: that the state of the world is not divorceable from the history and folklore of mankind. Since the focus in the final scene of the Mahabharata is on Yudhishtira, the idea is to compare him and his actions to relevant and universally known political figures and actions. These may include figures such as Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and more controversially, George Bush and Osama Bin Laden. What all these men have in common is that they all claim to follow their duties (Dharma) as leaders fighting for what they view to be the right thing to do.

This sort of staging, comparing Yudhishtira to relevant political figures, raises the question of the search for truth, also a resounding theme within the Mahabharata. Not only is it necessary to follow the path of Dharma, but to also to discover it. How is it possible to know what the true Dharma is, especially in a modern day setting where there are so many conflicting views on what is right? Who is following the path of Dharma? Is anyone? By showing images of these political leaders, I am inviting the audience to ask these important questions, asked equally by Yudhishtira as by Gandhi.

As Yudhishtira, who in his life patiently suffered humiliation and exile, ascends to heaven, his brothers Bhima and Arjuna, their wife Draupadi, and his cousins Nakula and Sahadeva, as well as a dog follow him. The mountain Himvana (in the Himalayas) claims the bodies of all but Yudhishtira, who has the privilege of entering heaven in his bodily form. This is easily compared with the struggles of Gandhi in his fight to liberate India, with Nelson Mandela’s struggles to fight apartheid and Martin Luther King Jr.’s freedom marches. Where Yudhishtira will not falter from his path of Dharma, and will not abandon those who love and support him, neither will Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King Jr. Finally, Yudhishtira is liberated from the deception which is put to him as his final trial, and is allowed to rest eternally in heaven, as Gandhi, the modern day Yudhishtira, liberates India, Nelson Mandela leads his country in an apartheid-free age, and Martin Luther King Jr. peacefully ends racial segregation in the U.S.A.

To introduce thought and controversy, modern political scenes of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the twin towers should be juxtaposed with those of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr., making the audience question whether to accept that these are men who are following their Dharma, or whether it is possible to know, in the midst of action, what the true path is.

Gandhi said “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.” Yudhishtira, who consistently advises his brothers against war, wanting instead to resolve issues between the Pandavas and Kauravas in peace, also preached this message of non-violence. Gandhi’s quote would make for a thought-invoking finale to the play. After Yudhishtira has passed through a contrived hell to retrieve his brothers, cousins and wife, and the Pandavas are finally admitted to heaven, everything should fade to black, leaving only the projection of Gandhi’s quote on the white sheet.

“Most of what is called theatre anywhere in the world is a travesty of a word once full of sense. War or peace, the colossal bandwagon of culture trundles on, carrying each artist’s traces to the ever-mounting garbage heap… We are too busy to ask the only vital question which measures the whole structure: why theatre at all? What for? Has stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve?”

These words of Peter Brook are especially relevant in my modern-day staging of the Mahabharata. For the sacred concepts to survive into the world today, they need to be contextualised, and the audience must, by the familiarity of the cast with politics and their relations with each other on the stage, be influenced to think of these important questions.

Events Occurring In The Realm Of The Heavens Prior To The Prologue Of The Main Text Of The Good Person of Setzuan

2004-05-26T06:14:00.002+10:00

In the palace of the Three Gods.

[Three Gods sit about in apparent luxury. One idly spins a globe as another crumples up pieces of paper and throws them over his shoulder. The third god spoons caviar from a huge glass jar. Wong watches the Gods with mild interest]

Wong: [To audience] There is a dream I saw.

Second God: [Sighs loudly] Another letter of complaint!
First God: [Stopping the spinning of the globe] What is there we can do?
Third God: [With his mouth full] Yes, if they simply followed our meticulous moral codes, there would be no such problems!
Second God: [Scanning and crumpling another letter] They never shall learn.

[The three Gods haughtily shake their heads, as Wong dons a messenger’s cloak and hat, and appears before the Gods]

Wong: A message from the Supreme Council of the Gods!

[The three Gods turn their attention to him rapidly, alarmed]

Wong: [Reading from a long scroll] The Supreme Council of the Gods has been considering the case of the cities of Shun, Kwan, and Setzuan with regard to their governing body of deities. The treasury of the council has found of late, that in these three cities, there has been no productivity in the area of good people and actions. We hereby render First God, Second God, and Third God of Shun, Kwan and Setzuan obsolete and incapable of motivating any single member of the public to act in the morally correct fashion expected of them.
First God: [Standing up and knocking over the globe] I protest!
Second God: [Hastily moving papers out of sight] It is not us that can not manage!
Third God: It is the morally abject people of these cities.
Wong: You accept no responsibility in this?
Second God: Oh, no, of course not.
First God: Yes, we were most meticulous in the writing of our laws. Only the most irrational and impious of the people could choose to disobey us.
Wong: So how is it that all the people of these three cities are so impious and irrational?
Third God: [Guiltily removing caviar from view] It is a lack of funding! The people are morally depraved and deprived.
Wong: And whose task is it to ensure that they are well provided for?
Second God: Surely, it can not be our task to knock from door to door, demanding the goodness of the people.
First God: Yes, like tax collectors!
Wong: Well, if you put it that way…
First God: Oh, surely, you can not blame us for the immorality of the people.
Wong: [Regaining composition] That is precisely your position, as the officers of the Supreme Council of the Gods
Third God: [Whispering to First God] Should have stopped talking sooner…
Second God: [To Wong] Might we have a moment to convene, o messenger of the Supreme Council of the Gods?

[Wong nods. Gods huddle near the front of the stage, whispering torwards the audience]

First God: What can we do?
Third God: Surely, there must be some way of retaining our posts?
First God: I feel that we are trapped.
Third God: But we’ve hardly done anything wrong.
Second God: It appears to the council that we have not done our job, as they have not been able to enrich themselves with morality.
Third God: But we’ve only just have enough ‘good’ to survive – how is it that we are able to pay our dues to the Supreme Council?
First God: Yes, but it is expected of us. We must produce enough morality to support ourselves and to contribute to the larger authorities. They’ve got us cornered.
Second God: We must find them a good person, so that they will not relieve us of our positions.
First God: Oh yes… I don’t think that I could handle another Godly coup.
Third God: Yes, one in an eternity is quite enough, especially since it was so beneficial to us [chuckles for a moment].
Second God: It will, however, require much self-sacrifice from us.
Third God: Oh! What shall we have to suffer?
Second God: Well, we shall have to travel among the … people.
First God: Yes, I suppose we must, if we are to find our good person.
Wong: [Stepping forward] Are you finished?
First God: We are ready, o messenger of the council.
Wong: The three of you stand discharged from your positions as the official deities for the cities of Shun, Kwan, and Setzuan [He hands them a scroll].

[First God unwinds that scroll and the three Gods look on it together, worried looks on their faces]

Wong: You shall have two weeks to pack up your belongings and leave your posts.
Second God: Wait! We would like to make a wager.
First God: Yes, a wager.
Third God: Ah! A most noble idea.
Second God: You have given us two weeks to leave from this place. We shall do so with no conflicts, if you allow us to be banished into our provinces.
Wong: [Scribbling on paper, looking perplexed] Is that to be your message?
Second God: There is more! Should we manage to locate for the council some good people, then we shall be allowed back into our office.
Third God: With increased income, naturally.
First God: Yes, as compensation for the humiliation we’ve had to face because of the doubt of the Supreme Council of the Gods.
Wong: And if you should fail to find a good person?

[Gods sing]

Chorus of the Three Gods, Humbled by Authority

Now the time has come for us
To show you what is right
Please pause for a moment and
Reconsider our plight
We humbly agree
A good person to name
And should we be right
We’ll have no more shame
For then shall we rise again
To our heavenly posts
Tor then shall we rise again
To our heavenly posts

However if we should be wrong
And great be human crime
If a year should prove to be
Insufficient time
Humbly shall we
Bow down to our fate
Realizing our good
Intentions were late
We shall ourselves take on the task of
Banishing our laws
We shall ourselves take on the task of
Banishing our laws

Wong: I shall deliver your message and challenge to the council.

[The Gods smile and bow, backing offstage in unison]