How I am going to explain how this feels to people? I am no longer feeling this. It’s not that I’m not here, because I am, because this body is here, and I’m not having a fucking out of body experience; I’m not sitting in the backseat or in the driver’s seat, that’s for sure. I’m not at home. I am in the boot of my own car, covered in my own piss and shit.
Christmas day.
I wonder how other people will see this. I’ve pressed the red record button in my head. I am directing this.
Alannah thought about her dad, revisiting the horror of visiting him in hospital. Six months of almost daily visits, the guilt and the relief when she didn’t go. And then the memory of her grandfather, his cancer, kissing him, how she would wipe her lips or cheek after she left the ward, to rub away his disease, so she wouldn’t catch it. She remembered the letter she wrote years ago and found when her grandmother had died with:
xX x to pop x X X X X
x X x x X x
on the front of the letter, and:
to pop x x
x
xxx
On the back. Then:
get wel son.
On the pages inside:
l love yoo pop
l love yoo
l love yoo ples
get hom
love from A
l love you only
It was a Valentine card, a love letter, a get well soon card, a desperate attempt to wish someone health in coloured pencil and paper; a talisman, useless to a dying man who couldn’t even open his eyes to see it, who didn’t have the strength to move a hand to touch it.
Alannah had read that you can sew talismans into the clothes of the dying, magical words into the hems of their trousers and skirts, and the person would live for another year. A whole year. Would that be a lesson to the person who made it, to have this zombie walking about behind you with bits of paper rustling in their clothing? A plague bell. Words badly stitched where the cloth touches their undead skin. Following you for a year. A golem. Magic only works when you realise you don’t want it or need to do it work.
If magic were just a magic trick I’d get out of here, like a bunny from a hat. They take bunnies out hats; they put lions in cages.
She was a lioness in the trunk of a Fiesta.
How did you get here?
She made imaginary liberators ask her.
Miro bundled me in.
Why?
Why? Why! Because… because… I don’t fucking know why!
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Isn't something which is based on magic a con because you can invent the rules as well as the situation and the characters to suit yourself. There are fewer rules. Neither relationships nor events are governed by precedent or framework.
ReplyDeletethanks for your comment, micky. and yes, i agree. the character is a little bit confused and distressed after being locked in the trunk of a car for a day (!). she's just flicking through some random thoughts. she's a friend of the main charcater 'miro', who has locked her in there. this little sketch is just one of the many short scipts that i'm using to 'create a file' on miro. he is going to be the some of these events, an apparantly substantial thing that appears after many such stories (with him as the central figure or sometimes a bit-player) are repeated. some of the stories about him are only a few lines long, a bad poem written by him, others are 10,000 or 20,000 words long. i'll be puting up another one of these tall tales in a bit.
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