Late! Again. Monday Project: Treasure

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She has been trapped in this room for a month, watching. One morning the television screens were just there when she woke up. A whole wall of them, flickering at her, humming quietly.

That morning she couldn’t find the door to her bedroom; the screens had been erected in front of it. There was no escape. At first she had yelled, screamed, cried, but no one had come and there had been no change in the television screens.

Then she would not watch them. She closed her eyes, blocked her ears and hid under her blankets. For a while it was blissful. But her imagination eventually got the better of her. ‘What if no one comes for me?’ she thought. ‘There must be a way out.’

And so she spent the first day inspecting the space around the screens, trying the window. But there was no way out. Here she was stuck, at least for now.

Each of the screens showed a different image. Some screens were clear and distinct, on others the image was intermittent and sometimes blurry. On that first day she became transfixed on a screen that flickered between a hazy yellow light, as if the camera taking the footage was pointed directly at the sun , and images of a little girl building a sand castle with her pregnant mother. The little girl was chattering incessantly and the mother replying occasionally, but their voices could not be heard.

Sally looked for a volume knob and turned it as far to the right as she possibly could. But only the hum of the television screen got louder, the voices still only heard as if from a distance.

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This is my (late again) submission for this month’s Monday Project. Come and play along!

This clearly isn’t finished, but I thought it was better to submit something unfinished than to submit nothing at all. I’m not entirely sure where this is going, so any suggestions or impressions would be welcome!

The Monday Project: Missing You

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She looked at the pile of boxes in the room. They reached higher than her head. The heavy step ladder helped her reach the top box, which she brought out of the room with her.

New memories were in her head now, they filled up nearly every corner of her brain, trickled down her spine and flowed into other parts of body. They dictated how she moved through the world, what she saw, what she smelled, whether she danced or frowned. But one little part of her refused to forget, refused to live in the present. It lived in this box, in the memories.

She did not open the box for a long time, just sat on the end of the bed with the box on her knees. When her legs started to fall asleep she moved the box to the floor at her feet and continued to watch it, to feel its heaviness with her eyes. She was frightened of this box and its contents, even as she simultaneously loved it.

Packing it had been difficult. It had taken her days, even months, in her head, but the physical packing was over in mere minutes. Years of her life, years she needed to forget, had been thrown carelessly into this box. She had thought that packing her memories away would help her move on. If she couldn’t remember she wouldn’t mourn what she was leaving behind. But she had missed the memories, missed who she was with them in her head, and this had kept her off-centre. Now, more than a year later, here she was. Box at her feet, about to dive back in.

“Wish me luck,” she whispered to someone unseen, and cut open the tape on the top of the box.

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This is my submission to the Monday Project this month (the project theme is Missing You). It’s a little late — sorry!

The Monday Project: Storybook

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The book sat open on the floor between their beds. Liam didn’t know how to read yet, but he could look at the pictures. Adam had been able to read some of the words.

Earlier in the evening, Liam had taken the book out to his mother.

“Mummy?” he offered her the book.

She had looked at him, eyes wide and glistening. She walked away from him.

“Mummy?” he had called after her, his arm still holding the book out to her.

“Liam, leave her alone,” his father said from behind his newspaper. “No book tonight. Bed time.” Something about the way his father’s voice struggled to leave his lips had made Liam run.

He opened the book and sat on the floor of the bedroom. The story he knew – it was their favourite book – but he didn’t know the exact words, and it wasn’t the same if it wasn’t in their mother’s voice The booked stayed on the floor when Ben crawled into bed and pulled the covers up under his chin.

“No book tonight, Adam.” The empty bed didn’t reply.

Liam lay on his back, looking at the light bulb, letting it burn a white spot on his eyeballs, one that he could see when he closed his eyes. He liked to do this so that when their mother turned out the light he still had a little bit of it to help him go to sleep.

This night, however, no one came to turn out the light. Liam eventually fell asleep, their mother crying in the next room, and their father’s tense voice droaning behind it. He dreamed of reading the book down at the dam at night, with only the light behind his eyelids to see the pages.

—

This is a submission to a monthly creative project for The Monday Project (this month’s project is Storybook); this is a site I run with my friend Kate. Come and have a look!

Television screens

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Without her fully realising it, her life had become a strange dream-land where things didn’t really happen. Or at least they didn’t really happen to her. She often felt like she was standing outside the window of an electronic goods store, watching the many televisions displayed there. Even her thoughts and memories were on show. She wondered if anyone could come up and watch her life like she was now. The thought terrified her: her life was like melodramatic day-time television.

She wondered if maybe the out-of-body problem she was having might be depression. She worried that because she couldn’t work out how to climb back into the television set – or even which set to try first – she was missing out on some rather nice things. Each day she would wake up and watch herself stumble to the bathroom in the dark; use the toilet; have a shower; poke contact lenses in her tired eyes; catch the bus and walk to work; stare mindlessly at a computer screen for nine hours; take a similar route back home again; pull together some ingredients for dinner; stare mindlessly at a different screen for an hour or so; and then crawl into a borrowed bed.

She wondered if maybe her real life was happening while she was asleep. As a child she had often worried that, if one’s dreams and real life got mixed up, one might never know. And how could she know what kind of person she was in her real life if she forgot it like a dream the instant she woke up? Her childhood concern had a little more weight now.

The thing that had broken her all those months ago had done a very good job: she wasn’t sure if she would ever heal.

On being alone.

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What leaves me more bereft than anything else is the feeling that there are stitches loose in all my joints; that I’m wobbly when I try to do things on my own, because any one of the stitches could break at any moment and I would lose a limb. I have not aged: I have been pushed back in years to a time when the unknown in the world was terrifyingly weighty.

It is heavy as it presses in around my body, like I am deep underwater and fighting to keep the barrier of my skin intact. And in that dark world of water I am alone. But, even as I wonder how much air I have left in my lungs, I am learning to sew.

The Laughing Clown (a work in progress)

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It had all started with that cloud of pink fairy floss. The little girl was wearing red denim overalls with the hint of a grass stain on each knee. She had a blue and white striped t-shirt on underneath. The day was too hot for long overalls so her cheeks were rosier than sheer excitement could make them.

She was a very ordinary looking child, but it was her fairy floss he was interested in so she could’ve been anyone. His obsession with food began as soon as he saw delighted look on her face as she pulled the wispy pink cloud away from her face. Some of it had made it into her mouth but most of it had stuck to those overly-rosy cheeks. She used her stubby little fingers to peel the floss from around her mouth and push it into the black hole between her lips. Not once did she take her eyes off the rest of the pink haze she had left on the end of the stick in her hand. As far as she was concerned, nought but she and the fairy floss existed. He was fascinated.

He had never tasted fairy floss. He was a Laughing Clown, employed by the theme park as extra security. All he had ever eaten were those white balls people put in his mouth to win prizes; a guise designed to hide the immense security presence in the park. While the balls provided him, and the other Laughing Clowns, with all their nutritional requirements, they didn’t taste like anything at all. They were, after all, reusable, so any taste they might have had once had faded a long time ago. He had never experience the sensation of taste before.

The girl with the red overalls was the first of many humans he noticed who seemed to forget about the world around them while they ate. The food they ate was nearly as varied as their age, colour, gender or social class. There were a disproportionate number of children-fairy-floss combinations. He also noticed a similar pattern with children and ice cream; women and chocolate.

After hours he began to compile a list. One small sheet of paper turned into several larger pieces, and then into a fat, well-thumbed notebook. Each night, after the lights went down in the park, he would extract himself from the games stall along with the other Laughing Clowns. He would write up his daily report on the potential security risks he had noticed while scanning the park that day. He would chat politely with the others, usually about something work-related. Walking back to his small room in the dorm under the rollercoaster he would try to avoid running into any of the other park employees, particularly the Mummies from the ghost house: they weren’t allowed to speak intelligibly all day so they would talk your ear off if you gave them a chance.

When he managed to get back to his room he would pull a small wooden box out from under his bed, unlock it quietly and calmly open the tattered notebook to the next blank page. This page, and usually two or three after, he would fill with detailed reports of that day’s food. His handwriting was neat and simple. There was no fancy prose involved. Just the kind of detail a highly-trained security employee was expected to notice.

The Doll

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She is just a little bit broken, the forgotten doll on the shelf whose arm is starting to tear off at the seam. Just a few stitches have broken now but, with time, it could easily be the whole arm. She still smiles, mostly blankly, but underneath all the intricate face paint she is terrified of losing her limb. After all, she thinks, it always starts with the arm, and who knows which body part might come next?

Things started to go awry the day she was put on the shelf and left behind. The day was otherwise just like any other; the sun rose, the birds cheeped, some clouds passed over, games were played, imaginary tea was drunk from tiny plastic teacups, dinner was eaten, baths were had, bedtime stories were told. But instead of her usual place on the pillow, the doll was placed carefully on the shelf high above the floor.

That first night she hardly slept at all. She missed the child’s warm breath brushing lightly across the top of her wooden cheek. She could hear the breathing in the dark but it was so faint. For the first time, a tear came to her wooden eye.

For years she sat on the shelf, made stationary and silent by the fear of losing her limbs. After many years no more of the stitches have broken but the doll’s surroundings have changed and her wooden face has aged.

No longer does she sit, lump in her throat, in a child’s bright bedroom. Instead of colourful posters on the walls there is dull mould and damp rot. The floorboards have mostly disappeared to reveal a dark pond of uncertain space. No longer does a door hang in the frame. Curtains still hang about the large windows but they are littered with holes from visits by moths; the light that comes through is mottled and gives the room the appearance of a shadowy underwater cavern. Through the cavern, like the rise and fall of the ocean, echoes the faint memory of the child’s sleeping breath.

The paint on her face is faded and patchy, her hair has mostly rotted away, and what is left is covered in a crown of furry mould. She is the only toy in the cavern and she still sits high above the floor; the sad, reluctant queen of the forgotten room.

Nevermind

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‘Nevermind,’ she said quietly to herself as her suede shoes were rapidly ruined by the rain. At least they had character now.

She stood under her broken umbrella on the unfamiliar street corner and marvelled at the genius of the contraption she held above her head.

Somehow the rain never made her sad anymore. It reminded her of a place she missed dearly but was also glad to be away from. It reminded her of him, of that street, of that house and of the wet-cold winters. And it always brought a smile to her face, even if her shoes had become its victim.

The Train

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The steam train spelled out a name that wasn’t his. Each of the little wooden carriages was a letter with a different grain and colour; all with knots, but none of them the same size or shape.

This was his favourite toy and he had cried when his mother tried to get rid of it. He was embarrassed that he had cried, but it had worked.

Before he played with the train he liked to sit and look at it. He would separate the carriages from each other and from the engine and sit them a small distance apart. He liked the way the timber in each piece of the train was like water, swirling and flowing in a different way to every other wooden stream.

The timber smelled like the small forest that sat behind his grandparents’ house. The back right wheel of the engine had a small squeak, like a baby mouse, he thought.

He sat with crossed legs and watched the stationery, separated little train, inspecting it for new scratches at the same time as imagining the boy whose name it spelt sitting on the floor and pushing it around. In his mind, the engine’s wheel squeaked like a chorus of mice; the train wheeled around corners, capsized, and was miraculously restored to the haphazard tracks it travelled. The boy whose name it spelt made all the appropriate noises with great gusto and no shame: he was lost in the world of the train.

The train would speed through the afternoon and the two little boys – the one whose name the train didn’t spell and the one whose name it did – would sit in the driver’s compartment together. Their hair would be full of knots and their faces covered in soot and grime. They would shriek in unison as they approached a very tight corner at a dangerous speed, and sigh with relief when the train finally pulled into the last station of the evening.

In the room where the boy whose name the train didn’t spell sat, the train’s engine and all its carriages were still separate. He now moved to join them all and slowly pushed the train back into its box.

Carefully he closed the box and put it back on the shelf in his cupboard where he kept his favourite stones. In the cupboard in his mother’s room was a similar wooden train that did spell out his name, but he had never played with it, despite much encouragement to do so. Only with his brother’s train could he imagine they were playing together.

How to Use Your Stovetop: A Manual

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Ron cannot remember how to use his stove. He is standing in the kitchen, barefoot and wearing a dressing gown, with a frying pan in his hand. The instruction manual, ‘How To Use Your Stovetop’, has vanished completely from the archive room in his head.

He peers at the slate of cool, grey metal shining at him from underneath its protective bars. He has always thought the cage was to help the stovetop user, but now he feels vaguely betrayed; the cage has switched sides without warning.

Ron does not want to call his son again, so he will have toast.

The toast cooks and Ron is careful not to watch it: life experience has taught him that, like a kettle, the watched toaster never pops. Instead he watches a small bird flitting around outside. After a little while he wonders if this bird might have the same memory lapses as he does, because it keeps returning to the same spot on the same tree without any apparent knowledge it has been there before.

The popping toast frightens him. Its mechanical noise is very loud in such a quiet house. It reminds him of the stovetop and how cold his bare toes are. Sighing, he thinks of all he needs to do today. On his desk there are three thick books to read and a box full of photographs to sort through.

As he butters his toast, the sound tearing through the otherwise quiet room, he is struck by the irony of it all. That he, the ultimate obsessive photographer always on the lookout for a moment to capture and remember, should be losing his memories.

Sometimes he wakes violently in the middle of the night with the distinct feeling that someone has had something small and cold in his ear or up his nose. Something very much like a hook. Every time he sneezes he thinks it is a memory, not his soul, that escapes. When no one else is around he will say ‘Bless You’ to himself; he has never before been superstitious but he is getting desperate and will do anything he can think of to keep the archive intact.

So this is why he must work so hard each day. He has re-read all the books in his numerous bookshelves once already since the diagnosis; he goes through photo albums every day, writing down people’s names, birthdays, favourite colours, their relationship to him; he writes letters to his wife, who will never read them in her grave, recounting in as much detail as possible the story of their long lives together; he listens to music every day, trying to name all of the composers’ other works; he walks slowly through his garden, naming all the plants.

He does all this so the next time his granddaughter asks, “Da, what’s the best day in your life so far?” he can answer with genuine certainty. And so he might remember how to work his bloody stove.