William Writes Here

William Hayward presents unpublished short stories, excerpts, occasional poems, and perhaps other letter related content for the willing reader. Contact details: [email protected] [phone]

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Der Sesselpupser (Armchair Farter)

With the sun on her face breathing with the ferocity of a dragon billowing from constipation exertion and the grass below her topless torso gently tickling her with the never-too-much expertise of a nimble fingered pianist when she should have been cooped up in an air conditioned grey office with grey people in grey suits identical to the grey suit she herself had half undonned, Harmony suddenly knew, right out of the blue, that Oblomov had had it right, that Oblomov had had it so right he must have hoarded all the right in the world for himself. Life wasn’t about working, about doing things and stuff, about jumping up and down on the money-go-round for the sake of stories and life events, life was about relaxing, sleeping, not doing a thing, not moving, letting your hair grow as long as it wanted to grow, and it occurred to Harmony as she lay there that all her life, whenever she’d moved or got up to do something perfunctory like fulfil her bladders desperate requests to be emptied when she hadn’t wanted to move at all, she’d lost a certain something, an amount of herself that’d simply vanished, momentarily or completely.

Hours after her sudden knowing, the sky above her head had become very cloudy, the sun still being given a clear route to reach the ground, to reach her, by its blazing eye, like how a mag always manages to find a pie, somehow always finding itself in the gaps between the puffy excretions. There was a soft bird song calling from a distant woodland her bare feet and the big toes attached to them pointed towards that sounded like a harmonica at the end of its tether, and, despite her certainty of what she wanted to do then and for the rest of her life- which was make like a sloth if a sloth was more than the sum of its parts- Harmony could feel her muscles aching to twitch, feel the delightful tickling on her back slowly becoming too much, becoming in need of a scratching. She held on for a few minutes longer, growing more and more conscious of all the hair on her head as everything became harder before, with the little groan and moan of a branch separating itself from the tree, she gave in and gave her muscles what they wanted, shaking them so aggressively they banged into the skin that contained them while simultaneously scratching and blinking heavily for the sake of her dry balls as an image of Oblomov rose in front of her face, black and white and ashy with a portly belly as soft and gently round as a loaf of half baked bread.

Oblomov didn’t move to disparage this would-be follower of his ways, instead the melancholy look in his eyes merely signified that his head would have been shaking with the side to side motions of a rhino trying to discard its horn at her frankly miniscule effort, the very middle of those melancholy eyes looking not upon but through Harmony’s head which, before she could stop herself, turned itself to look at just what he was looking through her at, seeing a caterpillar larger than most, the size of a small dog really, mid-way through building itself a cocoon. The caterpillar’s cocoon was the dark brown colour of a terminally ill faece and had little cracks running down the sides of it like the veins of brokenness that line an exceptionally dry autumn leaf, the half of the caterpillar not yet coated in brown was the rich green of an emerald cursed to have its opacity removed and the face of that green was flat and had the disgruntled expression of a baby whose front teeth were doing just what that baby didn’t want them to, emerging painfully, it looking up at the Oblomov staring and the Harmony who was also staring.

“Caterpillar on the floor!” Harmony, who span 180 just in time to see Oblomov gently fade away before spinning a 180 right back the other way, shouted having sensed what Oblomov had looked through her head to say. “Can you teach me to transform? To cocoon?”

“Why?”

“Questions! You stay so still in a cocoon.”

“But I’ll emerge a butterfly from the cocoon. A butterfly that moves. That flies,” the caterpillar had the voice of a something that constantly vibrated and was perpetually frustrated because it constantly vibrated.

“I don’t need to emerge. I won’t change in there. One can just cocoon. To just cocoon, that’s the way to be the best Oblomovist I can be.”

The caterpillar lowered its head ever so gently and with no further words took a big bite from the tall grass that rose around it with the slow delicacy of an aristocratic cow, its own cocoon growing a little more up its torso with each chew. The caterpillar didn’t speak again and that was okay, that was fine and dandy, Harmony didn’t need speech, she knew what to do and when to do it and that was immediately, going as slowly and with the least amount of effort as possible, she lowered herself to her belly and copied the caterpillar precisely, taking as big a bite as possible from the grass that’d tickled- and still did, the strands playing havoc on her bare belly and the fine hairs coating it, tangling and untangling with them, causing the comfortable uncomfortable sensation of being the best dancer at the ball and so so watched- and chewing the green strands into a wet pulp that slid down her throat with the ooze of a slug only half decided on a direction. The caterpillar reversed without moving its still exposed front legs, leaving little harrow tracks in the earth beneath the tall grass as it slid backwards until it reached a tall tree covered in bark of brown and green, patches of strange purple moss climbing its steep sides glinting moistly in the sun. The tall tree had very orange leaves, but not autumnal about-to-die-and-so-quite-dull-and-sad-because-they’re-on-the-floor orange leaves, naturally orange leaves of the orange fruit variety of colour that clung to the skeletal branches of the tree very happily and waved in the light wind with the carefree nature of hankies being released from retreating train windows, the ones of them without the stems for gripping lying on the ground, intact despite clearly having taken tumbles, keeping their healthy lustrous hue. The fallen leaves weren’t as big as the ones on the tree and were clearly the runts of the litter, unwanted by the wood in the manner of a cracked sword and a prideful scabbard, but the reversing caterpillar, upon finishing its reversal, began to consume them too, its disgruntled mouth stretching to strange proportions- revealing the inside of its mouth and body to be very black and endless seeming, glints of white light residing in the endless blackness that resembled stars that, having retired from the heavens, had chosen a slightly smaller eternity in which to wile away their days- to vacuum them in without swallowing, the leaves falling into that eternity slowly.

With a mouth and throat attempting to replicate eternity, Harmony reached the orange leaves herself and sucked deeply in so that they flittered and fluttered as they were gently dragged towards her face, colliding with her mouth before finding the space to slip in with the casual and hands in pocket grace of someone stepping onto an escalator, finding when in there that there wasn’t space to do much else other than further collide with teeth before falling into an eternity that was very ternal and had the shape of an oesophagus. Mulch the eventual rain would have made them, and mulch they became in the throat that contracted around them, being throttled with a quick prayer to the gods they once hadn’t believed in until pray no more could they do, Harmony choking on that mulch, wanting to cough violently but stopping herself because the caterpillar watched, its open mouth resembling the O shape of a little girls coming across a farmer’s field which had piglets growing like potatoes, curly tailed pink asses emerging from the ground to moon the moon. The orange leaves fell still into the caterpillar’s depths, each one growing its cocoon slightly higher up its large bristled body, and the sight of this resulted in Harmony herself continuing to suck despite her state of near choking, a lump of the leaves building up into a mass until she was nearly a dead-end that could barely suck in at all, a whistle emerging from her throat as a miniscule amount of air continued to force its way through the border the leaves had made.

‘We shall NOT yield,’ the border of leaves cried as silently as a tired old mattress when yet another ass plops down on it, ‘Yield you shall!’ the whistle whistled as nonchalantly as a little boy with a fresh gobstopper tucked in his pocket, that whistle getting louder until, just before Harmony passed out, the border gave way and the leaves went VROOOOOOOM all at once into her belly, settling in there on a sea of acid with the weight of a shark’s smile on the sight of seal’s rumpus rump.

They went like this for hours, the caterpillar inhaling leaf after leaf with the ease of a gymnast gymnasting over a hippo in miniature and Harmony doing the same with the difficulty of a doctor attempting to reinsert a baby into the womb, until all the fallen leaves of that tree had vanished from the world, giving the still gripping leaves even more reason to keep gripping. Come the end of the leaves, the caterpillar had only its head left uncocooned and Harmony’s cocoon- if you could call it that, it being a filmish substance that had begun to wrap around her the colour and texture of phlegm with little red veins running down the length of it- had stretched up to her knees, the cocoon of her being not exactly see-through but certainly not unseethruable so that there was a certain blurriness to body thus coated.

“Ur teachin ma!” Harmony called happily when the leaves were gone, her voice strangled and deformed from the damage to her throat.

“I can’t teach,” the caterpillar said without any real volume, reversing again to get its head a covered.

Where the caterpillar was heading in reverse was a part of the park that teenagers used for various youthful things including dancing, drinking, kissing, and eating brightly packaged crisps whose packets they left to cover the grass like a verbally abusive carpet that crinkled noisily whenever touched. The empty packets were all blue and green and purple with little pictures of the crisps on the fronts- the crisps personified and given eyes and mouths and tongues which stuck out and lolled down their chins to rest with little droplets of saliva forever frozen to never fulfil their destiny of actually falling- fragments of the crisps themselves rested on the top of some of the crisp packets, those packets having clearly been used as miniature picnic blankets by the more sophisticated eaters, and the fragments stuck to the side of the caterpillar’s cocoon as it backed its way over them. CRUNCH CRUNCH went the fragments as the weight of the caterpillar crushed them even more and CRUNCH- SCHLOOP CRUNCH-SCHLOOP went the smaller, wetter, cocoon of Harmony as she followed and the smallness of it became slowly less so, it reaching her neck very swiftly in fact, the red veins running down the length of it having the look of arteries in a cadaver injected with dye to make them sparkle for a stage of watching eyes.

It was the crawling over the packets that did done do it for the caterpillar, its head swallowed when it reached the end of them- the end of them marked as the end by the appearance a tall oak tree with bare bared hands, the bark of it crumbled in numerous places and leaving patches of wooden flesh exposed that had the look of the features of a jolly old soul, hundreds of the same jolly old face covering it, smiling out- and a great silken string shooting from one of its sides, lassoing around one of the tree’s branches to yank the cocoon of the caterpillar up. The caterpillar dangled there in its cocoon, ready and waiting to become the thing that emerged as a thing that flew, and Harmony’s wiggles across the crisp packets became more frantic as she realised that she still had a way to go to get across them and not much time as her cocoon was swiftly rising up past her nose, her time not being much at all as the cocoon completely cocooned her before she was even half across, Harmony becoming a still thing then, a practically dead thing, the silken string emerging from her own cocoon shooting out, striking nothing, and falling limply into a wide stream that ran at a distance.

The string floated on the river briefly, the end of it wiggling with the uselessness of a fishtail removed from ze fish until a fish was what it managed to latch on to, a fat trout with rainbow scales and two eyes as bright and empty as any expensive jewel, wrapping around its middle tightly, forcing the fish to swim even faster in the direction it was swimming in so, pulled taunt, it swiftly dragging the cocoon of Harmony from the field of crisp packets and in the direction of the river in whose waters it eventually plopped with the freedom chime plopping of a particularly heavy poo escaping the rectal prison. Zoom went the trout, and zoom went the cocoon of Harmony in the distance behind it, both of them sailing down the length of the river, the trout safely, the cocoon perilously, striking banks and rocks heavily, the trout spinning after a while to go up river as if that could detach the silken rope holding it hostage. Not that it would have been, but before it could be detached at all, the cocoon was plucked up and out of the river because the trout was plucked up and out of the river by a pigeon of falcon proportions, the pigeon cooing with the happiness of a granny looking down on an absolute beast of a sucky-sweet as it rose with them into the air.

The gigantic pigeon flew to a park with the namesake of it and landed on top of the cathedral in the centre where a nest of even more gigantic proportions was perched, several of its giant ilk sitting in that gigantic nest watching with cocked heads at the then dead and flopless trout being placed in the centre to be consumed by them slowly, the cocoon that’d been unwittingly brought as well rolling gently in the slope of the nest to rest in the centre too.

“Cooooo!” went a pigeon, meaning, ‘What is this, Bartholomew?’

“Coo coooooo?” Bartholomew, the pigeon who’d grabbed the trout, replied, ‘Another trout?’

But it wasn’t another trout and after a few investigatory pecks of it, they swiftly realised it wasn’t consumable either and so it was pushed to the section of the nest where fledglings played while the trout the adults did consume, and play with it the fledglings did, sticking their beaks all up in it over and over again until they beaked it too hard and it rolled- no longer attached to the trout because the trout was no more- over the side of the nest. Bouncing down the side of the cathedral with the boinging sound of a spring gone wild, the cocoon of Harmony fell to the park below- which could only barely be called a park and should be called in fact a graveyard because that’s what it was and was only called a park at all because grass lined nearly all of it and because people congregated there, on top of gravestone and mausoleums, when the city, who often threw events there, put pop up pubs and stalls also on top of the gravestone and mausoleums- and rolled into the midst of a collection of church goers and congregators who gazed, perplexed, at the semi-translucent thing gently coming to a stop in front of them.

The cocoon of Harmony was inspected by the people and then the cocoon of Harmony was lightly and, in an exploratory manner, kicked by the people and then the cocoon of Harmony was cordoned off by the people who recognised it as a cocoon of some sort but not one they could even attribute to a giant caterpillar because of the vague human shape that could be seen gestating in it. The cordon was a mishappen circle and made of whatever items the people in the crowd could gather together from their immediate persons and so the cordon was made of things like handbags, backpacks, scarves, wigs, false teeth, toy horses, pushchairs, left and right shoes, socks, bags of shopping, tins of anchovies, cans of custard, cartons of eggs, and prone dogs. Oblomov, flickering into view on the side of the cocoon and so within the cordon, flickered again, vanishing into the dream the Harmony was having in the cocoon which was a dream of a wicker sombrero appearing like magic in the middle of a canal and floating with the stillness of ham which was a stillness that even the dream Harmony wasn’t managing to copy because she was bouncing on the canal sidewalk and screeching that the sombrero had appeared from nowhere.

“DID YOU SEE? OBLOMOV, DID YOU SEE? SOMBRERO! FROM NOWHERE!”

Oblomov’s eyes shook their heads sadly at the fact that even while the body stayed still, the mind of Harmony could do no such thing and wandered, the head of Oblomov opening up without any effort from him because it simply became see-through to show what was going on in his head, and what was going on in his head was nothing, a big fat nothing, an empty motorway of nothing, a jar of pickles absent of both pickles and brine type of nothing, a single fish hovering in the middle of all that nothing, frozen as if taxidermized, inviting all manner of interpretations.

The cordon was surrounded by the people who’d made it and some of these looked into the cordon in shock horror because who, they wondered, would expect to see such a thing as a human cocoon come bouncing down from the roof of a cathedral on a Tuesday afternoon when the big ol’ pigeons who lived up there didn’t eat anything other than trout from the river Rea and this certainly wasn’t a big ol’ trout from any kind of river. The people surrounding the cordon who weren’t horrified but had no belief for anything in their hearts didn’t trust what they were seeing, didn’t trust the fact that some of the people around them, mainly the people who’d been there to visit the innards of the cathedral anyway, were claiming joyfully amid their distrust and others horror that the cocoon hadn’t come bouncing down from the roof of the cathedral at all but had appeared with the mysticism of the messiah, not trusting even more the sight of those people already kneeling in worship outside the boundary of the cordon with their heads in their hands because praise be, hallelujah, they’d found a new lease of purpose in life founded on the worship of a cocoon. The people not trusting didn’t think the cocoon was the messiah, they thought it was a cocoon that as a whole- entirely because of the human who could be mostly seen inside it- was something new and strange and they definitely didn’t trust new and strange things because new and strange things tended to hurt or disprove the decreasing old and certain things that they had always found to be certain in the life and so held dear to their disbelieving hearts, the people not trusting didn’t think they liked what they were seeing at all.

In the cocoon, Harmony’s dream shifted with the lurching of a crutch into one where she was not by a canal and herself as a person but rather sitting on the edge of cliff and herself was a rock, googly eyes stuck to her rough surface unseeing but gazing out off the edge of the cliff with the round-eyed intensity of calloused eyes set to the task of studying the soul. The rock of Harmony didn’t think or feel a thing in this dream because it was a rock, but if it could have thought and felt it would have been feeling wonderful and thinking that it’d done it, it was Oblomovist and finally fulfilling the cocooned Harmony’s wishes, but these would-be feelings and thoughts would have been falsehoods anyway because Oblomov, appearing again behind the rock of Harmony with a bare foot resting upon her rotund back while gazing out at the world too, slowly, the words falling out of his mouth like overflowing honey from a bee hive, so natural it was without even an inkling of effort, explained exactly why it hadn’t.

“A dead finch isn’t practising Oblomovism. A canal isn’t practising Oblomovism. A piece of unusually heavy lint isn’t practising Oblomovism.”

When vanishing, as if Oblomov and his foot had been the only thing keeping it on the cliff, the rock of Harmony proceeded to roll and bounce down the side of the cliff that seemed to have no bottom while outside the dream the pigeons on the roof of the cathedral, having finished their trout, heard a commotion, and stuck their beaks over the edge of the pillars to gaze down. Seeing the people outside the cordon arguing and tussling with each other, shouting and screaming about what the cocoon was, what the meaning of it being there was, the fighting and tussling of them out of control, violent, but still never broaching the sacrality of the cordon all of their haphazard belongings made up, the pigeon’s heads cocked.

“It’s what we need to believe”, “I believe!”, “It’s come to tell us that we’re doing it all wrong, we’re all WRONG!”, “It’s a something isn’t it?”, “It looks like shit, see-thru shit”, “Is that a person in it?”, “Master, master, I’m your prisoner, bring me wine and bread”, “What is it! I’m scared!”, “Help, I’m confused”, “I’m so right now, now I believe, hallelujah and stuff, I’m so right”, “It can help with that. Just believe”, “You lot are wrong ones and we’re right ones and that thing is scary, prick”, “It’s new, I don’t like it!”, voices mingled like lovers on a moonlit hill coming together on partly grown flowers, their excessive bodily fluids preventing those flowers from ever truly growing, the mingling voices so loud they could be heard in offices streets away but merely bouncing like stones off rubber from the cocoon, whose treasure within remained unmoved, physically and audibly.

The fighting and tussling became progressively more rough and voices died down, became instead grunts and screeches, pushes becoming punches becoming kicks becoming eye gouges becoming genital crunches, blood being spilt wildly around and spraying like champagne at a celebration, eyes growing rounder and whiter, the arguers who considered the cocoon a messiah fighting with extra vehemence, being the first to start smashing heads, smashing them off gravestones and leaving smears of pinkish brains and blood on them while their open mouths released into the air, with the simplicity of a humming bird’s hum robbed of innocence, occasional coherent cries with smiles such as, ‘FOR THE COCOON! KILL THE NONBELIVERS’. The ones who were distrustful of the new thing and of how they should feel about it, saw their extra aggression and followed suit, smashing heads too with their own cries of non-coherent war charges, ‘GAWAGHAHAHHHHHHH,’ but not off gravestones and rather exclusively off knees, smears of blood swiftly coating their trouser legs which the sight of they did not smile at, distrust not being quite as righteous as belief. Hands scrambled at grass when a body fell, nails tearing little holes- that had the qualities but not the chance to become big holes because when in a riot is there time to become big hole?- that lay like craters in a war of the worms, tripping up some who hadn’t fallen but who had particularly pointy shoes, and acting as respites for the others who’d made them and who’d fallen not from impact but despair, that lot burying their available fingers as deep in the holes as they could as if there was time in the depths to wait for their taste for war to regrow.

The cocoon of Harmony lay in the centre of the misshapen cordon like a giant discoloured cigar just waiting to be snipped, the grass beneath it growing darker as a giant butterfly, symmetrical wings having the pattern of a noughts and crosses game where crosses was clearly cheating, flew over it and the fighting went on around it. The pigeons above looked on from their perch, heads continuing in their clockwork cocking, going from left to right to left as the fighting crowd grew larger, threating to engulf the park completely with the exception of the cordon they’d created and unconsciously refused to touch, before their eyes of orange and red rested again on the cocoon that’d fallen not long before from their nests but that their minds had already sifted from memory. The cocoon to them then looked like a strange but possibly delicious trout and the largest of them was told to act quick, to swoop down, grasp it, and bring it up to test and see, the largest of them doing so as quickly as told without being noticed by any, the Harmony in the cocoon not in a position to notice anything, her mind a rock bouncing down the steep sides of a steep cliff, and the fighting having reached knife point, the things of sharpness being conjured seemingly from nowhere and used indiscriminately.

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Kleider Machen Leute (Clothes Make The Man)

‘You’re Randy… RANDY is you… it is you, Randy… hi, Randy… you, I know, are Randy... Randy, hi, say my name and dance?’ words of greeting popped up and out my mouth with claws and teeth of sharpness, scratching at my mirror and the latent reflection of myself that gazed back with the effect of fogging up all the glass like a sharply struck pond of ice with the exception of a corner patch that cast the reflection of the window behind me, my beloved window that showed through it the image of the sun doing a promiscuous drop into the gagging horizon. “Ready to dance, Ran-”

The sun completed its drop without me finishing my sentence and suddenly it was the every night usual of darkness and thunderous rain, taking with it into the depths of downness my hopeful heart and leaving in its place a resigned one that stayed as put as a pea in a gullet and played a slow tempo of melancholy perfectly matched to the hoof beat of a horse cursed to forever run at 20 BPM. With a push of the mirror which was one that stood so it fell into a pile of shattered other mirrors that’d also stood, I spun to my little window chair, that had cushions as worn and rubbed as the nose of any statue of any dog, and sat with my lower half angled into the air as if comfortably resting on the back of some sort of crouching male species, pressing my nose and the rest of my face against the window that looked directly down on Broad Street. Because of a worn Karahafu roof- a traditional Japanese roof made with undulating bargeboards and invented in the late Heian period, used traditionally on castles, Buddhist temples, and Shinto shrines but more recently on anything at all with a roof, information I knew only from a small leaflet on Japanese architecture I had found hidden beneath the worn cushion of my window seat, placed there by anon- that perched just above my window, the pouring rain didn’t affect my view of the outside whatsoever, the rain that poured instead trickling just in front of me in fish spurt spouts towards the ground, forming moderately heavy airborne streams that the dancers below could, and did, use to heighten their nightly experience by skipping through with twirling feet, twirling blazers, twirling skirts, and twirling shirts. The dancers were punctual and were there and twirling after the first drop of rain dropped from the distant above but well before it struck the floor and splish-sploshed, it was no matter at all for them how quick or how early I stuck my head against the window, their arrival always avoided the gaze of my that looked amongst them always for what had once been a short man who wore the greenest green I think I’d ever seen.

The short man had been there and green from my start but wasn’t there in any of my following presents and the lack of him left a void, a space of green formlessness amongst the dancers; the night I arrived and looked out from my window down, when I’d seen him as an actual man, he’d been ballet dipping a younger man who’d cried out at the height of the dip, “Oh! Who. Are. You?”, the question and the lack of answer from the one who asked sparking the knowhow in me that the who was Randy, the I who did know was Emily, and that we were meant to be partners of the dance.

Down below, the dancers did their dance, the rain hitting their scalps and wetting their clothes so that their whirling clothes let out droplets of rain themselves that caught lamppost light and resembled the orange spitting of distant stars, calling each other’s names so loud that they rang up and atom into the sky, micro thunder bangs that let the universe know that they were people above all and together above all, while up here, room bound and named only by myself, I looked down on the void of Randy move in straight lines amongst the circling dancers like a train attempting to infiltrate a car show. “Samantha!”… “Tiffanny!”… “Boris!”… Horatio!”… “Carlos!”… “Joe!”… “Harmony!”… “Finn!”… “Lynda!”… “Kingsley!”… “Adrian!”… “Steve!”… “Alan!”… “Eddy!”… “Beatrice!”… “Ashley!”… “Sam!”… “Margret!”… “Carl!”… “Fernando!”… “Simone!”… “Haruki!”… “Walter!”… and so on and so forth went the micro bangs, making identities so compound and identifiable in their swirling masses that they could have been gravestones, memorial benches, wombs, newborns all at once, their names holding within them all that they were, all that they was, all that they would ever be.

The night was seven hours long no matter the season and ended as swiftly as it started with me still somehow missing the stoppage of rain and Randy and the dancer’s disappearance, I in my room doing a roomish thing, as always, once I missed the disappearance and sucking myself to bed to curl up in a foetal ball with the duvet pulled completely over me, this I did so that if anyone ever happened to visit the room of a nonperson who had never been named they would see that the bed was made and had a lump of something real beneath its madeness. I slept for some of the day, always some of the day, and dreamt of things and stuff, but was awake for more than some thinking about dancing and my name and, of course, of Randy, wondering to myself often why he’d become less than a form when at first he’d been a form, and a beautiful one at that, and why I stayed mostly a form, a slight one but one nonetheless, always, toying with that wondering like it was a moveable coin with consciousness dancing fluidly across some knuckles.

I remembered the very moment Randy became a void because he’d been twirling like a baton through the air so vividly green it could make a grown woman scream amongst the spinning partners and their called out names, the odd one out he was, the green ace amongst a deck of blacks, feet rapping off the street that was as cobbled as right is not left, before stealing the younger man he planned to dip from his original partner when that original partner briefly let the younger man go to do a bit of solo hip wiggling, dipping him as planned until, once dipped, the younger man asked Randy his name. Oh, it was the moment that I gained the knowhow of our names that my heart could have broken if I’d been person enough to have a heart to break, it could have broken right in two to see the confused face on Randy’s face, crumpling in all his not knowing, before that face became nothing as the dipped man became the dropped man and Randy became a void.

I ventured out into the day after five hours in my foetal position to get money for my room, dressing in as many layers of clothes as necessary to become fully visible and slapping on a name tag that said Clive to the breast of the twelfth coat on my back, going to my sponsor- a large man with a belly the size of a small heffer, eyes the size and shape of two large frogs, who sponsored me because of my Clive nametag, which I’d found shoved under my doormat one day along with a note that read, ‘For hard cash go to the large man at 33 Baccabox Lane. Wear this. Compliment until you receive. Repeat daily.’ It was never clear who’d left the tag or the note, but it was probably someone called Clive- and complimenting him until he blushed and deemed it enough, handing over a sack of coins and shooing me away. People who dressed vaguely like the dancers of the night passed me in the street and greeted me in various different tones and phrases, ‘sup, Clivey’, ‘Cliiiiiiive, you son of a gun’, ‘Hey Clive, where you been?’, but I always hurried past with my head down, lest they realise it (and by it I mean I, Emily) wasn’t Clive at all but a nonperson in layers upon layers of clothes and wearing his nametag, until I reached my room, leaving the sack of coins outside on the doormat to be collected by the one who collected. A new standing mirror had always appeared in front of the pile of smashed ones by the time I returned, gleaming as only new mirrors and polished sand can do, and appeared it had, sitting in front of the little red stool I always sat on in front of it which was the height and width of an enlarged cough sweet. I sat on my cough sweet stool and wriggled my butt and prepared to prepare on clouding that mirror gleam with my practise greetings for the void of Randy, using tones and inflections galore that always came just short of the mark which would mark the point of being good enough to actually use.

The door to my flat wasn’t barricaded come the night and the rain but there was a block on my opening of it and leaving in the dark, a mental one with the strength and textuality of stone that acted like a giant hand of giant proportions if I ever got to close to it, that hand always picking me up and tossing me so hard it felt like I’d flown hundreds of miles through wind and rain and snow before landing when in actuality I had only flown a metre through the stale air to land on my bed in the corner. Sometimes but not often after I dropped my rent off on the doormat, I didn’t go straight back into the room and instead went to stand or sit in the light on Broad Street- which looked very different in the light and dry, less mystical, more run down, the cobbled streets seeming not cobbled at all but tarmacked and as smooth as the bottom of a gentleman who’d won best baby bottom in 03 and then injected a de-ager into that same bottom to prevent it from ever changing, homeless people that weren’t there at night sitting on benches or in doorways while bankers with briefcases and roller skaters with boom boxes clutched in fists too walked or rolled past, the closed night clubs, which didn’t seem closed down but were never opened, lining both sides of the street and flanking the ingrained tram lines like protective soldiers; I sat next to the homeless people, who never looked at me because I made sure I didn’t wear the layers and the nametag when I went out the second time, and watched the trams, which ran with passing dings that had the rhythmic echo of ice cream vans in training, and buses running, letting out choral whines from their electric engines- ready and prepared as I ever could be to simply stay outside and wait for the end of day. But that readiness and preparedness took swan-with-no-wings dives off the twenty foot cliff of my heart before the sky became even orange every time, a fear that wasn’t unnamed but very named doing a goat and charging horn first into my gut until I went back inside, that goat-emulating fear being simply that when night and rain swept away day and dryness what was to stop it also sweeping away the nonpeople at the same time it ushered the dancing actual people in? what was to stop it getting rid of me before Randy could name me and make me a person? This was the question, the fear, and there was further fear as the answer was unknowable unless I stopped letting myself get goat-butted right back into my flat block and that wouldn’t happen as who in their right mind would let such a thing as being goat butted not deter them from the path the goat was trying butt them off.

The day was ten hours long no matter the season and ended as swiftly as it started, with me either running to the window after having spent time uttering hopeful greetings I knew I wouldn’t utter to any other that night as if I was inside and practising then I wasn’t outside come the fall of the sun, or with me in front of the glass door of my flat block’s lobby and caught like an eye on a hypno wheel between watching Randy and his fellow dancers from there or running as quickly as possible up to the room. I didn’t like not being able to run straight to my window, the glass door below didn’t offer a birds eye view and I knew that despite my hesitation I wouldn’t remain in the lobby and that I would instead take a flying leap to my flat just as soon as I snapped out of the freeze, so the staying and freezing was rather a pointless exercise but a pointless one I simply couldn’t control. The running up of the stairs took barely a moment but was moment enough to force my watching for the night to be filled with an underlying anxiety about having missed something or much, pressing my features harder against the window than usual when I finally arrived, so hard that occasionally the window groaned like a potato conscious of alllllll its starch, threatening a breakage I knew would never come because only a person could actually break a window and I didn’t wear my layers or Clive badge either when watching Randy’s void on the almost impossible chance that void stopped being a void, suddenly looked up, and there was a subsequently horrible affair based entirely on a mistaken identity.

The night came, and would always come, and the rain did pour as the dancers did dance with me watching from my window less than hopeful but with at least the possibility of renewed hopefulness come the end of night, the faces of the dancers strangely blurred and unrecognisable to me, like poor oil painted portraits whose definition was being rubbing away by the rain, a fact of their faces that was true night after night but one that’s trueness I consistently noted and then forgot, over and over again, a ring-round-the-roses of noting and forgetting. Randy’s face when he’d been a man hadn’t been blurred and the void of Randy wasn’t blurred either, the vague outline of him being perfectly unblurred in fact, even as it moved between dancing bodies, the vacuum of him weaving with the strange rhythm of a full to the brim bindle sack though legs and between arms and armpits. Not through the window but on the window, I could vaguely see the latent thing I vaguely saw whenever I looked in the mirror being reflected off the glass, but I didn’t focus on that because why would I want to look at a nonperson when I could my keep my eyes on dancing and rain and Randy and my ears on the melodyless music of pounding rain?

The rain was music like the hard soled footsteps of the dancers on the cobbled street was music, like the calling of the names to each other was music, like the crinkle-swishing of clothing was music, and I listened to it combine wonderfully and make a song as I always listened to it songify and wasn’t taken aback by any sudden beats or changes until, with the sneakiness of a feline making a beeline, there was a beat and change that did, surprise me that is, and that was the music of name calling having a name thrown in there that was Randy by someone not called Emily because Emily was me and I was in my high up tree and watching as a dapper dancer in a three piece suit gripped the vague edges of Randy’s void like it was tangible and called that name and named that thing that was him.

There was no flash of light or big bang of creation that added to the overarching song as Randy stopped being a nonperson and a void, as Randy became again the greenest green I’d ever seen and gripped the hands of the one who’d gripped his void before spinning them in a move that was in no way related to the macarena, the both of them becoming as wet as the herd as Randy in turn did add to the overarching music by calling out, ‘Steven’. The both of them, Steven and Randy, the people they were, span under one of the fish spout streams pouring from my roof as I pulled away from my window and scrambled for the door, wanting to stop what I was witnessing but getting pushed back by that old familiar hand of stone not to my bed but straight back to the window where it held my head in place and forced me to watch them dance through the faintish reflection of a someone nobody knew, the would-be breaking of my unreal heart not adding to the overarching anything.

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Fatal Flaw - Da Steppt Der Bär

Read "Da Steppt Der Bär" a fiction story By William Hayward at Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine.

A published piece by me. Finally. Truly. Read, please.

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Eggy-Preg

Michael got back well after Terry had gone to bed- so late the sky was caught in a state of embarrassed indecision, holding the pinkish purple colour of a pigeon’s breast across its expanse like a blush to the cheeks- and, after hanging up his clothes and stretching, followed suit, falling straight into bed himself with the same form he’d had since the age of twenty-two, which was the tall and tubular one of a cardio-centric green bean. The following day, waking up around two in the afternoon as wet with sweat as a horse in lather, upon his first attempt at sitting up, he found to his surprise that he couldn’t with his usual ease because his usual form had been replaced by one with a belly as bloated as a hot air balloon filled with too much fire and at the point of popping, the pain of it when attempting to bend like a fire had been lit inside him too.

He could hear Terry in the kitchen humming to himself, the tuneless buzzing of a bumblepheliac drawing a colony to him for the purpose of honey themed sex, signifying that he hadn’t noticed upon waking the extended belly of Michael, this signification being made more apparent when, after getting up from the bed as gently and painlessly as he could, each lurch making him feel off balance, as if he could fall onto his lump at any moment, Michael walked into the kitchen and revealed it to him, the humming immediately becoming the strangled half-whistle of a mockingbird being throttled, Terry immediately running over and clasping the lump of his belly in his hands, lifting it slightly as he did and causing an unconscious moan of relief to come from Michael's mouth.

“Michael, what the hell is this? You look pregnant.”

“Don't be stupid. Pregnant. I’m just swollen. But it hurts.”

Terry lifted the extended pyjama shirt of Michael and gazed at the belly that when exposed had the look of a particularly angry acne spot on the verge of doing a Vesuvius, little purple lines running down the sides of it like static images of lightning minimised, his face when gazing the face of an astronaut after getting completely and utterly untethered in the depths of space, his mouth coiling like a snake waiting to strike while, hit by a sudden wave of emotion, his eyes becoming as wet as they would if waves of emotion were actually waves on the ocean, Michael started weeping and wailing of his pain.

The nearest hospital was tiled on the outside, the white and grey combination of new and old false teeth all jumbled up together, and they had to wait in a waiting room made up of stray church hall chairs surrounded by people with a variety of wacky ailments- fake udders superglued to chests, eye balls being held, nails and forks stuck through or into various body parts, etcetera- for a long ol’ time before finally being called in by a small doctor whose nametag said Stephanie. Stephanie was around 5 foot tall, but her white coat trailed on the ground as if it’d been stolen from a much taller doctor by two children who’d decided to play hospital and stacked themselves on top of each other beneath its buttoned up buttons, her face not suggesting otherwise, having the appearance of a ruddy and privately educated twelve tear old on the verge of divorcing their nanny.

She led the two, Michael, whose new weight made him shuffle like a mummy adrift without bandages, trying to lean on Terry but getting nowhere because Terry was too busy patting his own belly to make sure it hadn’t grown, into a small office made of cloth partitions rather than walls and containing just a dusty chest of drawers, a bed, and two rose red chairs that had the scent of many an ass hovering above them and exuding.

“What seems to be the problem?” she asked after waving Michael to sit on the side of the bed, as blank faced as a plate until that plate met a Greek wedding and broke. “I'm joking! You're clearly pregnant. What a surprise that is. You're male, biologically, am I right?... Just as I suspected. One doesn't like to assume such things though. Now, how long has your stomach been like this?”

“Since this morning. I woke up and it was like this, swollen, large. I was fine yesterday. I went for a run, drank a bottle of wine out with colleagues. I was everything but pregnant.”

“He can’t be pregnant,” Terry interrupted with a stamp of the foot. “I mean, where the hell is a baby going to come out of?”

Holding up a medically trained finger, Stephanie gestured for Terry to shut up and help her help Michael, who began sweating excessively again from a hot flush while desperately rubbing his stomach like it was a lamp a genie had recently vacated, off the edge of and onto the centre of the bed, their hands collectively laying him back but only Stephanie’s remaining to fondle and caress the extended belly. She did this fondlement for a while, feeling the skin of the belly in different areas as if trying to find the exact spot she wanted, until, with an, ‘aha!’, cry, she picked up her scalpel and a nearby syringe- already loaded with a sky blue liquid- and, without word or question of permission, injected Michael with it, him falling deeper into the bed and pulling the face of no pain, and her immediately setting about slicing straight down the centre of his stomach with the scalpel.

“Hey!” Terry screamed, reaching for the doctor and the scalpel before being stopped in his tracks by the appearance of not guts and giblets, but a bloody but otherwise very white and large egg- the size really of a bigger than average newborn- which lay in the split skin folds with the innocence eggs always have.

Even though feeling no pain, Michael felt a little something else at the moment of release, a groan of relief bigger than any groan he'd ever groaned before emanating from him and stretching around like elastic as the skin that'd been containing the egg receded back to its normal place, sewing itself back together as if nothing had happened.

“I knew it!” Stephanie whooped. “There are only a few male based pregnancies known and this, an eggy-preg as we called it off the cuff in medical school, is the rarest. There we have it. Your egg.”

“What’s in the egg?” Michael slurred, Terry shouting the same simultaneously.

“In there? What is? Oh, just something. You'll see. Maybe,” with this, she span and gathered a pamphlet that was strung to the chest of drawers with oddly thick cobwebs, blowing dust from it that flew off in a cartoonish grey cloud and floated several metres through the air before gathering like a rain cloud over Terry’s face until he dissipated it with a wave of the hands; the pamphlet was a perfect square rather than the usual rectangle with a green background and a single image as the foreground of an eggshell white egg with one long lightning shaped crack running down its front, the side of a yellow smiley face sticking out that crack like a slowly emerging, oddly coloured- not to mention shaped- piece of caca. “Read this. It’ll explain everything I can tell you and more.”

With that, Stephanie, with a doctorly flick of the hair, vanished, moving between the curtain partitions separating offices with the ease of a ghost lacking a sheet, losing them, and possibly herself, easily, the them, Michael-the-still-groaning-in-relief and Terry-the-what-the-hell-is-going-on, looking around as if they could find her again and also possibly a way to escape the cage of worry that’d been constructed around themselves. After ten minutes of them looking in a circle without a word, an orderly, who spied them through a crack in the partition, waved a hand at them and, rather forcibly considering the egg in their possession, removed them from the hospital, the egg lying in Michael’s arms as they left but never kept still, being jostled back and forth for comfort purposes as it’d begun growing at a steady pace since its removal from the belly. The egg was the size of a medium sized dog by the time they began their short walk home, though much lighter, and Michael held had to hold it sideways, hands clutching top and bottom, the curve of it blocking most of his forward vision and forcing him to trust Terry, who kept looking at the egg and shaking his head with sighs of annoyance, to direct him in the right direction.

“We’re going to be parents, Terry,” Michael said after a while, the happiness growing in his recently vacated stomach coming out in his voice, making it breathy and wispy as if attempting to vocally impersonate a feather duster. “Parents!”

“Parents. Parents,” Terry repeated every few steps, his face the face of someone doing their best not to impersonate an egg cracker but failing miserably.

Their house had a living room and that living room was large and oval with a slight dip right in the centre of it where a below foundation sink hole the council didn’t want to fix had pulled the pine flooring down from beneath, the egg, which Michael placed to the floor as gently as you would imagine a swan plants their keister on their own eggs, fitting in that slight dip with the perfection of a penis/testicle set in a groin protection cup of a regulation cricketer. Standing back and sitting heavily on the settee, Michael- while Terry ventured to the kitchen with clenched fists – watched the egg continue to expand and began to read the pamphlet, which had only two pages covered in bold text.

YOUR EGG AND YOU: a guide

Page 1 (Introduction): Congratulations, it looks like it’s happened, you’re a proud parent of what at the moment is still just an egg. Am I right to guess you’re worried? That you have no familial attachment to this thing that sprouted in your belly overnight and was then cut from you/emerged naturally from your behind/ vagina?

Here Michael shook his head at the pamphlet and clutched his heart, which had become swollen and choked with love and familial attachment as he walked with his egg home.

Well, you will do, and soon! Your egg produces a pheromone that will make you and your partner (If you have one, eggs can just as easily be made from masturbation alone) fall slowly but deeply into parental love for it. Isn’t that neat? Now I’m going to guess something else. I’m going to guess that you’re probably also scared. Scared that you won’t be up to scratch or that you’ll do something wrong. But I’m a pamphlet, a trustworthy one at that, and I’m here to reassure you and tell you that it’s all going to be okay. Looking after your egg until it hatches will be as easy as pie. Once you’ve laid, or had your egg removed (a recommended method painwise regardless of gender), and taken it home, settle it somewhere comfortable and warm and wait for it reach approximately twice the height of the hatcher. Before it’s the right height, your egg will simply not respond to the following steps.

Page 2 (Steps):

Step 1: Once your egg is precisely twice the height at the hatcher, wait until the sun goes down. And I mean down! Then wrap a blanket- checkered preferably- around its body. Sit next to it and do the same to your own.

Step 2: Begin to tell your egg a story, any story will do. Existing or made up, make up your own mind! Eventually, provided you tell it right, your egg’s shell will begin to glow with a golden light from within. At this point, continuing to talk, remove the blanket.

Step 3: Once your blanket is removed and your egg glowing, you should be able to see the form growing within it. At this point the form should be the same size as you and floating in or around the centre of the egg. Still telling your story, you should begin rubbing the egg with the palm of your hand until the sun comes up.

Step 4: Continue this process night after night after night until your egg hatches!

Disclaimer: The Eggy-Preg Information (EPI) company is NOT responsible for the time frame in which your egg hatches. Nor any deformations, grotesque natures, or personal growths that may happen to you, the egg, or what comes from it. The information provided is for general informational purposes only. All information is provided in good faith; however, we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of any information.

With no pause for consideration, the pamphlet going flying from the hand of Michael and to some dark corner of the room, the mouth of Michael screamed hoarsely, “Terry, tape measure, blankets, checkered, now, get them, two! The pamphlet said.”

Terry, who’d been watching Michael’s reading from the door of the kitchen, a bottle of wine already half drunk in hand and a head filled with thoughts and wonderings about just why exactly he felt so angry and disgusted by the sight of the egg and, by extension, Michael, who before the egg had appeared, he’d loved more than anything and had only felt unconditional feelings for- such as lust and calmness- put his wine bottle down with theatrical slowness once the scream came his way and got the blankets and measure, tossing them at Michael before picking the bottle back up. Not noticing anything wrong with Terry, Not seeing the grinding of the teeth of Terry, the pulsing veins of Terry, barely noticing Terry at all, Michael immediately measured himself- five foot five exactly- and then measured the egg, the expansion of it having seemingly stopped during his reading, with the aid of a nearby armchair which he stood on - exactly 11 feet. Giggling with the glee of a giant baby coming upon a giant mobile in a giant desert, Michael wrapped the larger checkered blanket tight around the bottom half of the eggs width, noting as he did the thick feeling of its shell and the new warmth emanating from it which was akin not to a wide spread fire but the concentrated flame of a match stick, so cosy but intense that when he wrapped his own blanket around his body and huddled close, sweat immediately beaded on his forehead, chest, and groin, and gave himself the feeling of being tucked back in the womb.

“What are you doing? Why did you need them?” Terry finally asked, a two percent fraction of his rage dimming, being replaced by a single percentage of curiosity, a half percent of exclusion, and a final half percent of exclusion induced sadness, the exclusion ad sadness aspects infuriating him so much immediately that they also increased his rage, making his feelings go above 100 percent if you can believe it.

“I have to read it a story now is what the pamphlet says. Now shush, come and sit with us if you’re curious. Try and bond with eggy.”

“I don’t want to bond with any eggy,” Terry muttered around the rim of his wine bottle while going to sit on the settee regardless. “What are you going to tell it.”

“I don’t think it matters. Just something. I’ll make something up.”

Settling, rubbing his behind on the floor like a bear scratching up against a tree, coughing to clear his throat, Michael gazed directly at the egg, sitting so close his vision was a sea of white so white it resembled the teeth in the prize selection part of the tooth fairy’s tooth collection, and began to speak.

“There was a time when floorboards weren’t just floorboards. When floorboards weren’t just dead planks of wood. When floorboards were… ALIVE! Living breathing planks that had eyes, three of them, and large mouths with even larger tongues. Red or purple tongues that spilled out across their bodies moistly and made it so every footstep on them had the sound of a wet sponge being wrung. Humans lived peacefully with the floorboards. We coexisted. They gave us flooring for our houses and in return we cared for them. Rubbed linseed oil on them, sanded them so they didn’t get splintered, and fed their tongues water every day so they didn’t dry out. It was a perfect arrangement… until it wasn’t! Until the time came when a floorboard appeared that wasn’t the same as the other floorboards. When a floorboard appeared that was strange.”

Here the egg began to glow with the golden light the pamphlet had promised- a blinding light that radiated outwards and got weaker the further it stretched from the egg, like a candle a child was supposed to follow but that moved much faster than their little legs could do- a glow that made Michael squeal before remembering he wasn’t supposed to stop speaking, and a glow that had Terry throw his hands up at the ridiculousness of the entire situation with the result of the top of his head getting splattered with grape blood.

“Ummm, yes, strange! A strange floorboard appeared,” Michael continued, beginning the unwinding of the blanket from around the egg with the gentle movements of someone who’d abandoned childhood emotions unwrapping a surprise gift, revealing the form within before it was fully unwrapped, Michael swiftly tearing the rest of the blanket off as those childhood feelings came roaring back with no memory of abandonment.

The form exposed was a shadowy outlineish thing that looked as if sketched with charcoal floating in the centre of the egg, bobbing slightly up and down and vaguely resembling a giant featherless chicken from waist down, with thin bony legs that ended in three large claw tipped toes, and from the waist up looking more like a standard human with the exception being similar claws at the ends of its fingers and an elephantal shape of the head, a giant trunkish thing stretching out past its chin.

“What the fuck,” Terry spat into his lap while Michael began step 3, rubbing the egg gently with the palm of his hand. “That’s not like us. What is that. It’s disgusting.”

“-unlike the other floorboards with hair covering it and teeth in its mouth too. Sharp teeth, fangs really,” Michael turned and glared at Terry, shushing him with his spare hand. “People suggested that the reason for this floorboard’s odd appearance was the result of it being born rather than made, the result of an inter-species relationship between human and board. This suggested hybrid wasn’t peaceful like the other floorboards. It didn’t want to work with humans. It was angry. Aggressive. It bit feet when they stepped on it and each foot bit made it grow larger. Made it grow different features. Like arms and legs. Like more hair. With these features there was no stopping it from rising from the floor and becoming a moveableboard, one that proceeded, for no reason at all, to start killing humans but not floorboards. How did the humans know it was this moveableboard doing the killing, I bet you’re wondering? Well, I’ll tell you. It left calling cards so that there would be no confusion. Bits of its hair, teeth marks, written notes saying, ‘It was meeeeee, the moveableboard!’ and ‘I hate humans. Boards unite!’. It didn’t take long before the human race decided that they had to do something about this and do something about it fast.”

With the story continuing, Terry, wanting no part in what he was witnessing, not even a small observer one, after standing up with his mouth agape, backed out of the room with unconscious dump truck reversal noises stumbling out of his mouth like drops of dripping water, hands no longer clenching but agape also and wiggling as if signing him off a stage.

“-the hero who’d been chosen, that young bald girl, clutched the plastic spear she’d been given with both hands. She knew that killing the moveableboard would kill all the floorboards too but having lost everything in her journey to reach the spot the moveable board lay sleeping in, she didn’t hesitate. She brought it down. Hitting the sleeping moveableboard right in the middle. Piercing the hair covering the wood and then the wood itself. Splintering the bits that resisted. Sending its acquired arms and legs wild and drying the wet wet eyes of it. Killing not just it, but all floor objects forever. Making them all as they are now, inanimate.”

The glow of the egg faded when the story finished with the finality of a baby’s eyes closing and Michael, tiptoeing like a ballerina on the verge of being kicked out of the most famed ballet school around if she doesn’t find the strength in her heart to stay on en pointe for longer than forty eight hours, crept from the room with a tired but contented sigh.

The night was filled with the peaceful snores of Michael- who’d kissed the air in the general direction of Terry’s cheek before undressing and going straight to sleep without a glance at or a word direct toward the open mouthed horror held upon, and within, his face- and with the hurried packing sounds of Terry doing just that, tossing all and whatever he could find in the dark into a bag. Followed by the sounds of fleeing, of running away, the front door shutting, the cat flap that’d never been used except for the one time Michael had, for a joke, attempted to crawl through it and gotten stuck, flapping once as the would be father disappear around a bend. Michael dreamt strange dreams whilst this fleeing was taking place, as if he was being gifted new stories to tell, strange dreams of bright colours and moving kitchen appliances that wanted to remove the skin off him and replace it with puff pastry, and when he woke up, early in the morning before the sun had risen but after the moon had vanished, he was cold but had no urge to turn and rub Terry for warmth for he somehow knew without really thinking about it that he was gone, instead he just went to the living room to embrace the egg.

Claiming maternity leave from his work was easy- he simply emailed and sent them a photo of him and his egg in an embrace and they sent back a thumbs up and two heart emojis with a detailed description of his new pay schedule- and the following free from outside obligations days and weeks past in the parental bliss of him sitting before the egg all day every day, thinking up stories for the night, rubbing its shell like it was a mackerel and he a mackerel enthusiast, and staring blank eyed out the window, waiting for the sun do its thing. The need for food or drink had seemingly left him, instead he got his nourishment from the tales he told in the same manner the egg seemed to, the form within the shell, when the golden glow revealed it, growing outwards with each passing day and each passing story until it reached the sides of the egg and then beginning its growing decent downwards towards the base.

The stories flowed from Michael like ripe grapes budding on the vine, being plucked off and dropped onto grassy floors to bounce into the mouths of babes, hitting the ground running and taking with them narratives including flower buds, embers from fires, elephant whispers, karate chop calls, frozen dormice, on fire post officers, little girls with no ears, little girls with too many ears, cassette tapes, sausage rolls, mushrooms with tentacles, potatoes being boiled and mashed and stuck in a stew, afro wearing unicorns, dogs smoking weed, cats injecting heroin, the queen of Arabia doing the fandango, happy endings, no endings, sad endings, bad endings, wicked plants, the stabbing pain of being stabbed, and a centaur being milked. After a while, the form in the egg began to respond to the stories, audibly as well as visually that is, going further than what the pamphlet had said it would do when it said it would simply glow, making a high pitched whining sound when it glowed and growed that was a cross between an electronic buzz and a dog whining for food. The sound, which began small at first, so that for a while Michael thought it was nothing but wind squeezing its way, like a leg into trousers much too small for them or a condom over a hand, through a gap in a window, got louder and changed from night to night, keeping the same base sound but adding buzzes or meeps or beeps depending on what story was being told, and would have been incomprehensible if it hadn’t been for Michael’s acute maternal instincts which swiftly picked up a pattern within them. Sometimes when telling a story, he would slip one of the sounds he’d heard the egg make into it as if it had always meant to be there, like a piece of pie slotting itself back into the whole, and enjoy the way the egg would sort of shake in response, rocking on its base without fear of falling, which Michael noted as a good thing, ‘It’ll be brave!’, went his thoughts, ‘God, I’m proud.’

The form in the egg stopped growing just before its feet touched the bottom of the shell and there wasn’t enough room for it at all, it didn’t matter that the stories kept coming or that the rubbing didn’t stop, it stayed just as it was, still eating the tales, still making its noises as it heard them- the sounds growing louder even, resounding as they echoed and bounced off the surface of the shell and then the surface of its body- but hearing them, digesting them, as if no longer hungry at all. Michael, as peaceful in heart as an anteater face to face with all the ants it could eat anteater style, didn’t worry and continued to spin his tales, weaving a thread through each night, throwing in more and more of the eggs own noises from his own mouth and just trying to enjoy the extra time he got to spend with the child when it was still just an egg, the nourishment of tales he was receiving from what he gave out giving his skin a shiny milky glow, like a recently waxed surface.

While this was all happening, though not right at any specific moment and rather just in a similar time frame, Terry was sitting on a plastic bench eating a carton of scrambled eggs in front of a petrol station advertising advent calendars in June and beginning to weep, his left hand stretching out towards the empty space to the left of him as if there was someone there to hold it and comfort him, scrambling with it, hitting nothing but net over and over until it finally promoted him to toss the scrambled egg in the manner of a cricketing bowler-hat, where it landed on concrete with the hiss and splatter of whitish lava. Terry had been alone since he’d left Michael and the egg, spending his days, and then weeks, on various benches and in public toilets masturbating over the thought of Michael’s personality before he’d held the egg inside and hating the egg violently for appearing, for getting in the way of things, for being around,, for not having something inside it that looked normal, until the point when the egg flashed through his mind during the climax of one of his masturbation sessions and that hate became for himself. It was that moment of self-hatred that brought Terry to buy scrambled eggs to eat, but it was the pangs of it, like the pangs the sight of a premature rose would prick a fully bloomed rose with, that also made him decide to go back home, deciding that if eating eggs in spite of his hatred for the egg waiting for him at home was enough to bring him to tears then perhaps he could be a parent to whatever the hell kind of creature that was growing in it and, maybe, if he told Michael about his tears and how they’d flowed- probably leaving the part where he’d had to eat egg to find it out- he would forgive him for leaving too.

It took Terry over two days to get home, not because he’d travelled very far at all, having not even left the city, just taking the local bus routes as far they would take him before removing him, but because he was a coward and despite his resolution, he was still afraid that the music he assumed he was bound to face would send its most jagged notes forward to strike his face. When he finally did arrive back, the bus squeaking to a stop at the stop just outside the premises, him- having been poised by the door- flying out as if ejected by the force of its brakeage and snake-strike door opening speed, he stood on the doorstep in the dark for over an hour with a shivering of the lip and a quivering of the leg, staring at the curtained window to the left of the door that would have looked through into the living room if the curtains making it curtained hadn’t been curtained shut. He couldn’t see any possibilities or clues for the type of reception he’d receive through the curtain, no shadows danced on the fabric despite the soft golden light that emanated from within, illuminating them with an ethereal angelic glow that suggested that even the slightest movement from within would have sent some black things WALTZING.

The house wasn’t quiet when he, finally, with a sigh and a shudder and a desperation to ignore the fact that he was wishing with all his might that the egg wasn’t an egg anymore but a normal child, a human looking one at that, and that Michael wasn’t the Michael he’d left but the Michael who made him hard, opened the door. The house was loud, filled with strange noises, whoops and beeps and growls and grunts and whistles and clicks, that didn’t seem to be coming from one direct spot but rather from everywhere all at once and called to his mind, for reasons unknown to him, the comparison of them to the silent screams of a hemlock garden being picked or a cactus being dethorned. The house was dark except for the golden glow that flickered like the tail end of coy candle flame, a door, standing halfway open with the patience of a giant mouth waiting for an unsuspecting traveller to mistake it for a cave, blocked an immediate view into the living room and a sighter of what was causing the brightness, until Terry played the role of an unsuspecting traveller and went in, one arm proffered in a half circle awaiting a hug and the other with the hand extended, palm up and out and waiting to push back whatever ran at him if whatever had hatched. Both of those arms freezing in place as a feeling tickled his fanny to completion and his eyes and ears were confronted with the sight and sound of not one, but two eggs, giant ones at that- filling the room like it was the room itself that was the egg- sitting side by side, glowing their glow and showcasing the decidedly strange forms inside them, filling the air with stories.

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Short story with footnotes. Hence the strange formatting. Hence*

*Repeated for fun

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Die Nase Voll Haben

Thron threw the first throw, tossing the one toothed man against the alley wall with the type of snort and grunt a caterpillar would make if enraged and given the features necessary to let such noises out; the one toothed man threw the second, changing Thron’s following snort and grunt from that of an angry insect to that of a surprised sumo wrestler by changing what could classed as a throw, raising a dirty fist and driving it towards the hole in the middle of her face. The hole was too small to let all of the fist gain access but big enough that fragments of it- think the smaller knuckles and part of the pinkie- were swallowed momentarily into its wet warmth before being spat out as the one toothed man spat in disgust and wiped the reddish fluid that coated the inside of Thron’s hole and by extension the portion of his hand that had entered it off on his coat while Thron fell backwards, her hair spilling towards the ground and forming a cushion to cushion her head as it followed suit.

Thron’s mind took a holiday following the ‘throw’, venturing into sunny Camelot for a ride of the Knights of the Roundtable roundabout, sitting on it with Guinevere and letting it pick up speed until the cheering knights around them became a blur and she was flung back into her skull which had eyes that opened with a fluttering and a flapping of lashes. The sun had risen while her eyes had been closed and was staring down at her body which was on its back, there was nobody with her in the alley and her head ached with a kangaroo yearning for the hop, her teeth chattering together despite the warmth of the peeping sun, her body feeling cold enough that when she sat up it was with a blowing of warm air on her not really cold fingers, her not really cold fingers that upon coming into close proximity to her face came into close contact with something that had sprouted from her hole whilst her mind had being riding roundabouts- a nose of Roman proportions complete with two little holes at its base.

Her fingers were Francis Drake as they felt the outside and then inside of the nose, which was as warm and wet as her single hole had been, and then her fingers flung themselves away and Thron jumped up in search of a reflective surface, finding one in the form of a puddle on its way to being too dirty to be reflective at the end of the alley and finding in that puddle the image of a nose too large and masculine for her face but one dotted with the same speckle type freckles as the rest of it.

“Hole?” Thron whispered as the reality of the nose became the reality of her face.

 She began tugging at reality until the pain of tugging at reality got to be too much, stopping with a groaning loud enough to cause a red foreheaded lady walking past the mouth of the alley to double take and decide to check on the groaning woman while smiling the smile of a grandma in love with checkers.

“Groaning in an alleyway I see. Are you okay?”

“There was a man who changed the rules of throwing, and I had a lovely hole,” Thron replied miserably as if that answered the question. “Just last night.”

“A hole? Well, I’m sure you still do, it can’t have gone far,” the woman almost sang. “But if it has gone far, take courage. That’s a honker you’ve got there, just like mine but large. Far better than a hole.”

“But I want my hole that’s not just like yours or large. It was a perfect hole and with it I really stood out. Now look at me with a thing just like yours and just like you.”

The jolly woman threw back her head and emitted a jolly sound as jolly people are wont to do in the face of those less jolly, bongo slapping her stomach when deciding she need no longer check on the previously groaning form before strolling away with a dismissive goodbye and cheer up etched into her waving hand, leaving Thron to get up and copy her strolling style but fast forwarding it into the homeward bound run of a woman who felt she was a frog with no arms or legs in a pond of carp but that the carp were blind and stupid. The mirror in her bedroom upon becoming homeward arrived revealed what the puddle had but with better detail, how the nose, with all the charisma and Neroesque style of Napoleon, had conquered her face, making a base camp while she slept in the space her hole had once had its own base and slowly altering other parts of her facial features to accommodate its size and shape until they were nothing but cogs of a great Noseian Empire. It revealed all of this until the resistance couldn’t take being revealed to any longer without taking action and two high ranking members of the movement disguising themselves as Thron’s hands turned themselves into points that pointed up at the nose and its base camp with sharp nails very threatening and sharp.

“Viva le trou! You won’t win while there are parts of this body that resist. While there is a heart that beats and desires the hole you’ve replaced, you will not win. You may have taken our base camp and its immediate surrounding allies, but we will get back what it ours. You will not take our soul,” Thron’s voice, a not so secret resistance agent backing up the high ranking members, shrieked at the mirrors reflection of the nose before her body ran to the kitchen to fetch a knife.

But the knife may as well of been a kneecap for all the good it did, merely thudding the nose she sawed and hacked at, only breaking any skin when it slipped from the nose and bit into her cheek, proceeding to raise a thin line of blood that trickled down towards her chin with the slowness of a symphony while her impenetrable enemy did its best to wink and let that wink be known. The knife was flung to the floor and her cheek furiously wiped, the tip of the blade sticking into the woodiness of said floor straight up and quivering in the same manner as Thron’s chin as she leaned forward and prodded the surface of the mirror with the tip of the unwanted nose with no ideas in her head and a bank clerk named Pessimistic Paul probing the thought of moving into a cave within her until the coldness of the surface rose through her skull with an idea.

“A punch!” was called out to the air at the same time her fist sped down the autobahn in the wrong direction, followed by a, “YES!”, as it did an abrupt U-turn that disregarded traffic and commenced approaching her face with even more speed, colliding with the nose with a THWAK! and a KAPOW!

The pain of the punch made her spine do the hokey koke and her eyes do the splits, but the nose, the only part of her face not hurt, simply sat protruding from her face with the smugness of sugar, having even grown a little larger for both the trouble she’d went through and for its own amusement, and so prompting Paul to stop probing and move immediately into her with a guaranteed lease of two hundred years and Thron to walk away from the mirror and straight into bed, curling into a ball above the covers, the warm sun shining into the room making everything the same warm temperature. She slept for as long as she could sleep which was until her mobile alarm went off and she had to go to work, not bothering to shower or change and simply rolling out of bed with the thought that if even one person looked at her and knew she wasn’t a carp like them, looked at her perhaps with two seconds of confused curiosity, she would win and the nose would lose and so simply lose itself from her face. But she received no curiosity on her deliberately slow walk, the eyes in the passing faces that looked at anything with curiosity looking with curiosity in fact in any direction other than at her as if there had been a mass conspiracy to rob her of a win, and Paul began settling into his new home within her, lighting a fire and assembling a custom bed in which he could lie down and relax in his down time.

Thron tried to deter Paul by inviting Optimistic Olivia to move into her alongside him as the idea that maybe the twenty other people who worked with her who all had noses and who had always struggled when she’d had a hole to keep their eyes and words off it would at least be still unable to keep their eyes and words off her sudden lack of one. She worked in a team of setters in a jewellery workshop on the top floor of a Victorian factory made mainly from wood and metal and when Thron arrived, breathless from running the last mile in her hurry to convince Olivia it was the right decision to stay with the curmudgeon Paul, the twenty other setters were already there, milling about with tools and diamonds and gold clenched between dwarfian fingers or spilling out of pans and trays, the sight of their collective noses making the one on Thron flair in recognition. Making her way to her section, Thron turned to her immediate neighbour, a woman with a face made of timber named Jen and gave her a helloing smile while Olivia cheered like a leader, chanting, ‘attention, attention, gonna get you a great big mention.’

“Hey, Thron, nice nose, did you see Tyrone brought those rings you recommended? He wants us to set jade in them today.”

Jen’s eyes then turned away without even an ember of curiosity burning in them and Olivia suffered a stroke during her follow up cheer, collapsing and lying lopsidedly in place while Paul grew large enough to burst free of their cave and construct a dwelling on the surface of her heart as Thron smiled in acknowledgment and went to begin that task, unable to bear the fact that if attention was monkey shit, she was barely coated in it at all and that the monkey shit she was coated in had no curiosity attached to it when the fact was she wanted to be nothing but monkey shit made of curiosity. More passing comments came as she walked to the storage room, ‘Nose? Nice.’, ‘Are you getting to work on setting that jade? Good.’, ‘Did you see the game last night? Fucking hell I bet you got a nose just to get over it ha-ha’, filled with an off-handedness she wanted to be replaced with the shock of discovering the lack of the holy grail in a collection that had always had it, ‘Thron? My god! Your hole! Jesus! CHRIST! That was your thing and only yours and now you have a nose like ours! But damn if it isn’t at least large and more magnificent than anyone else’s,’ and the despair of not getting what she wanted caused her to veer away from the storage room and all the way out of the factory.

The narrow street directly outside the workshop was filling up as the day reached puberty and at the very end of it opposite a small pub Thron could see the toothless mouth of the alleyway she’d slept in tiredly yawning to accommodate anyone who wished to enter it, smacking its lips in a way that reminded her that she hadn’t in fact punched herself in the face and caused the infernal nose to grow and that it had in fact been a man with only a tooth more than the alley had who’d done the deed. So forceful was the reminder, Olivia, having shrunken to the size of a lopsided pellet from her attack, became slightly less lopsided and pellety and gave a miniscule thumbs up to Thron who immediately did a little leap in the air and stuck a finger in the shape of a gun up one of her nostrils, letting out a blast as she imagined it firing with a pew-pewing sound.

“I’ll blow you away with a punch and away you shall blow,” she whispered to the nose before approaching the alleyway, wandering its walls of grey brick with hands pretending that they were used to reading information from wandering walls of grey brick before finally sniffing with the nose when the wandering of the walls told her nothing, the nose- she noted with the reluctance of cold honey- having a much keener sense of smell than her hole had ever had and so having the ability to track.

The nose quivered with a quivering laugh at her for having to use it to get rid of it as two stenches appeared, one her own from the night before which she saw a sickly yellow cloud floating about, and the other a wide eyed green blob smelling of a mouth with only one tooth to protect it which hid helplessly from her furious sniffing in a dark corner before being sucked violently into her nose to be kept there and tracked.

“You can laugh quiveringly but I’m going to use you to get rid of you anyway and who’ll be laughing then? Me. This doesn’t mean a thing other than that I want my hole to suck you into oblivion and don’t you forget it. Now track!”

Sniff… sniff… went the nose, as unconcerned as a drop of water that knows that though it’s being swept towards the edge of a cliff there are other drops of water that have done the drop before and no one had ever heard them complain, and a line of green the same shade as the wide eyed blob appeared on the floor, leading Thron out of the alley and into the middle horizon. Thron almost threw herself on all fours to follow the line while sniffing all the time but decided against it as it would make her doggish and dogs loved noses and she didn’t love her nose, instead walking with her head down and sniffing extra hard every few seconds to keep the trail strong, following it through the middle horizon and into the brightly lit shopping district where it swiftly stopped and rooted itself and her in the middle of a large portion of grass sitting like a wart on the cheek of the petite ass of buying and selling. The portion of grass was empty apart from a single figure who stood in the middle of it playing with pigeons and being illuminated by a greenish glow that made them indistinguishable and led Thron to bound towards them, Olivia growing as she soared through the air, with a pushing of hands that sent them tumbling in a way that made all the previously played with pigeons take to the sky.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at,” the indistinguishable figure scrambled up shouting, the greenish glow coating their face so strongly it was difficult to look right at them.

“I’m playing at being a woman who previously had just a hole and now has just a nose. A woman suffering from this because of your fist. Now do me a favour and let that fist loose on me again.”

Thron followed up this speaking with a scratching of the unbearably bright face, inciting a fist to emerge from the rest of their bearable brightness with a swinging and striking of the nose of Thron with such force she involuntarily did a star jump before landing back on her feet unsteadily, shaking her head while the figure, who’d lost their glow at the blow with a revealing that it was a man with a mouth full of teeth and not the man with a single tooth that she wanted, ran off from the shame of publicly striking a woman, which was fortunate for him because Thron would have continued to attack him simply for not being the one and for dealing a blow that meant nothing as her nose was still indisputably there.

The shoppers of the district carried on doing what they did without looking at the woman sitting on the large portion of grass and looking at the tip of her undamaged nose while wailing as silently as Paul, who was whipping the hapless Olivia inside her, would allow, hundreds of individual eyes milling past her on all sides and not one of them paying her any attention, curious or other, because she had a nose just like them and besides shopping never got done by stopping and paying attention to things.

“I thought you at least had a use of being good at sniffing, but apparently your sniffing ability is as useless as your appearance on my face,” Thron muttered before flashing a hand up to slap the side of the nose. “Or is it? You have nostrils and I’ve seen you can sniff. I’ve sniffed your sniffs and mmmm, I actually conclude now that your ability to sniff and smell is very good and that you lead me in the wrong direction because you’re looking out for yourself. Trying to get out of being sucked back into my hole.”

Haw haw… the nose laughed in its quivering way that confirmed it had been looking out for itself but only slightly and had mostly just been mocking its host, but its quivers quickly shuddered to a halt as the host it had been mostly mocking took charge, grabbing the reins with the force of an Olympic rein grabber and forcing the quivering laughs into a halting sniff… sniff…sniff… that showed if not THE way forward then certainly A way forward in the form of a new line of wide eyed green that cut the moving mass of shoppers in two until it didn’t. Until it followed instead of cutting so that when Thron followed the line, forcibly sniffing with the wanting to be laughing nose, she became one of the shoppers (albeit not one doing what they did) and couldn’t walk as fast as she desired because of the congestion, instead plodding along with them.

“Morning, morning,” went up and down the plodding mass of people and after a while of slowness Thron stuck her head out from the side of it, sniffing in the hope her wide eyed green trail would ignite in a different, less plodding direction, but her sniffing was for naught as no further ignition happened and the wide eyed green stuck to its course as the, ‘morning, morning,’ flowing down the stream of shoppers reached her mouth and was halted in its tracks, her lack of response causing several eyes in the plodding to turn to her in a concerned manner. Their concerned manner excited Thron because it made them look at her as closely as they’d done when there’d been a hole there to look closely at and her face itself had simply been a hole for their gazes to get sucked into, but her excitement was short lived as their close looks, once coming into contact with the nose, became distant looks that crinkled at the sides as they tapped the side of their own noses in recognition.

Thron lost track of time as she followed the trail from within the mass, eventually just letting the movement of the others take her along, a piece of weed of the sea variety being swallowed by a much larger collection of weed of the sea variety, and it was by doing this that, instantly, the mass charitably gave her the other option she wanted, the shopping district vanishing in a flash of bright colours behind her and the mass itself dispersing, leaving her to have to create her own momentum again and follow the green trail into the suddenly open and in front of her warehouse district. The warehouses looked the same as the Victorian factory she worked in from the outside but with the added quality of having been left, like a pile of dismembered enemy genitals, to rot, and the wide eyed green led the obedient Thron into one slightly rottener than the others that lay on the side of a runoff composed of canal water the texture of soup. The nose bumped the sides of a decayed wooden board blocking one of the glassless windows without her eyes seeing it and the bump tore a hole through the wood and left the board attached to the advancing face like a sightless mask so that when Thron pulled away in shock she took the entire board with her, the nose- once getting over its own shock- flexing on her face, impressed at itself and saying, ‘could your hole have ever done that?’, and forcing Thron to silently admit to herself that no, it could not.

The inside of the warehouse was a frozen drop of water, the tools and stations of its previous workers left perfectly in place, covered in dust that Thron disturbed by stepping on and over them as the trail led her up two flights of stairs and into what had once been an unnecessarily large unisex bathroom before becoming the homeless jungle it was with fourteen different people camped out in various corners of it. Thirteen of the fourteen weren’t in the way of the trail but the fourteenth, sitting on their own at the back of the jungle and relaxing in an end of the line bright green glowing type of way on top of a disused toilet, was kicking their feet until Thron approached to prod them in their cue ball face with the tip of her pool que finger, Olivia and Paul, small and whipped bloody and large and unwhipped, having fisticuffs within her with the weak Olivia getting repeatedly pummelled but always getting back up.

“Punch me,” Thron demanded to the figure whose face was less bright than the rest of their body and so had a mouth that visibly had only the one tooth, yellow and cracked with the sheen of a tortoise shell. “Punch me in the nose. Hard.”

The figure looked her up and down and with a shrugging did as she asked, slugging her with a worm shaped fist so hard that their body moved back as Thron’s flew back, colliding with an old sink that broke beneath her, the blow giving the nose an inch of pain for the first time which delighted her as much as the hamster feel of it wiggling up, down, and round and round on her face, suggesting it was collapsing in on itself.

Wiggle… wiggle… went the nose, shrinking and growing as if trying to decide on the action it should bet on, existence or back to the hole, wiggle… wiggle… until… POP!... It decided with a decidedly loud and painful sound that it would exist and forever at that, extending itself to the size of a half baguette so that the speckled freckles stretched into blurry scribbles on a page before swiftly shrinking back down to its standard, large but regal, size and staying there with the air of a crossed arms fascist, the visible tip of it twitchingly orchestrating the battle of Thron’s innards as Paul again knocked Olivia to the floor and sat on her before she could get up, rubbing his buttocks up and down across her face.

Pessimism killed the tsar, the queen, the king, the prince, the lord, the captain, it stabbed Thron’s heart with a dagger poisoned with poison and Paul- still sitting ass rubbingly on Olivia- grew to fill every cavity of Thron’s body, taking control of her limbs which hung as limply as the penis of a jellyfish would hang if that jellyfish had a penis and the urge to just let it all hang. Paul jerked Thron up from the ruins of the sink she’d crushed and turned her eyes to the man no longer glowing with a wide eyed green but reeking of rancid moss who’d gone immediately back to doing what he’d done before, sitting with a kicking of feet while looking at the floor with a little smile on his face, and then proceeded to jerk her out of the homeless jungle, the warehouse, the district, and all the way back to the shopping district where he collapsed her back on the large portion of grass.

The grass had been filled in her absence with men and women scaring off the previously played with pigeons by playing loud music beneath a sun even warmer than the one that had looked down at the newly nosed Thron the day before and dancing among their ever so carefully placed shopping bags with graceful swinging and jiving feet that never swung and jived with the carelessness required to accidently connected with them but did quite often accidently connect with the splayed Thron, who Paul had made cry like a castle. The swinging, jiving, dancing feet belonged to bodies that belonged to heads that hung back with noses thrusting phallically into the air and, after making her remain in a kickable position on the ground for a while, Paul got Thron up to stand amongst those bodies and look at their identical dancing ways, growing even larger as she did so that he was like a set of oversized fingers inside an undersized glove. He made her stand completely still in the middle of their swinging and jiving- an unspasmodic statue in a graveyard of spasmodic ones- so that it wasn’t their feet that collided with her accidently but their waving fists, each one hitting Thron perfectly in time to the music, exclusively in the head and nose.

The hits came as naturally as rain and Thron felt them and the nose, which received blow after blow without ever once considering becoming a hole, began to bleed while her head jerked back and forth, almost and then actually as in time with the music as any of the dancers so it was suddenly as if she was dancing too- and it was when it was as if she was dancing too that the hits making her head jerk abruptly stopped coming and it was when the hits stopped coming that she realised her head was continuing to jerk even without them and without any input from Paul, who was in fact confused and trying to imput into her that he didn’t want her head jerking without hits, trying to stop it with such a lack of success that a lump named Oliva grew larger beneath his butt.

Thron felt better as Olivia grew larger and began to jerk with more than just her head, her feet and arms and body wiggling like a bowl of tickles as the eyes of the many, which were the eyes of the dancers and had a weight to them, suddenly weighed down her wiggling body while also giving it the grace to avoid the stowed shopping bags with the same ease as all of them so that her feet gave the grass and nothing but the grass a hiding. The nose quivered as she span amongst the bodies, separate but conjoined, laughing not at her but with her as the Paul who wore her was lifted from her innards by the lump in his butt and shanked in the spine and throat. The sun stayed warmer than the day before and looked down at the dancers as Thron raised the nose with the dramatic air of drawing a duelling sword, her heart becoming as light as a puff of breath and almost rising up and out of her chest but not doing so because it was busy keeping her alive, thrusting it up and flaring its nostrils at the same time the other noses thrust up and flared, in time with the music and in the direction of the watching sun with the defiance of a herd of goats.

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Das Ist Mir Wurst

Unlike most transmogrifications Mark’s didn't happen while he slept but while constipated and straining, a sunbeam spotlight showcasing his pushing, grunting, purple tinged form as instead of any blocked mass moving out of him his mass metamorphosed to become swiney and peritoneum encased. The sausage of Mark was that of the Nuremburg variety, small (barely the size of a thumb) and rather thin, with beady eyes the size of freckles resting on an nondescript part of his tubular shape above a small mouth with no teeth but a tongue the same colour as the raw meat encased in him- a tongue that waggled with the desperation of a spinster skipping rope as he fell from the toilet seat to the tiled toilet floor and rolled towards the door, leaving small oily grease stains in his wake.

His roll stopped just before the door with his new eyes and mouth facing downwards so that when his silent tongue waggle turned into an audible tongue waggle it was muffled and failed to reach the ears of Karen who was busy doing some relaxing television type things on the ground floor of the house, failed until several hours later when she paused the television to prepare a cup of tea and heard finally a faint noise that sounded like the faint noises Mark made when he was in distress and the cause of Mark’s distress was him being relentlessly squeezed by a giant and forced to inhale copious amounts of helium. Cupping her ear in an elderly sort of way with a hand turned hearing trumpet and a squeaking mouse to track, Karen was led to the bathroom and opened the door to find a small greyish sausage illuminated by a circular sunbeam crying on the floor like an unhealthy poo that had jumped from the toilet bowl and gained sentience. With a hesitant toe, Karen turned the sausage over, making its cries all the louder and revealing it as Mark only by the dark green specks blinking from it that Karen would always recognise and the shriller than normal voice that emerged from the toothless mouth when he saw her.

“Karen, something’s happened.”

Karen touched the sides of her soft cheeks in shock and nodded slowly.

“Something has happened. You’re a sausage, Mark. That’s what’s happened.”

“Oh God. I don't want to be a sausage. A sausage isn’t Mark. I want to be Mark.”

Karen instantly and instinctively leaned down to flick the side of the sausage that was Mark on a spot that she figured was equivalent to his cheek, causing him to roll across the floor again until Karen stopped him with her foot and wagged a finger in his eyes.

“You are Mark, sausage or not. Mark is you no matter what you look like, and Mark is with me. We’ll figure this out. We’ll make this work.”

Mark, once reassuringly flicked and berated, found himself much less scared and able to finally begin experimenting with his new body, quickly realising he could actually move it around in a wiggling sort of way and, once he’d gotten the hang of it, wiggling himself up onto the base of his form so he was as standing up as a sausage could be and looked Karen in the eyeholes.

“You mean you’d be with a sausage like me?”

Karen picked him up without hesitation and inserted his head inside her mouth, moving him back and forth lovingly to confirm that she did indeed mean it, and as she did the sunbeam spotlight that had followed Mark’s body from the toilet to the floor and so warmed him as he transformed, grew bigger and spotlighted them.

Karen carried Mark to the living room, sitting with him on a faded red armchair facing the busy street outside the house to mutually decide that Mark would immediately leave his job in publishing as it was unfeasible for a sausage to attempt to bind and print books together just to bring home the bacon and that Karen, being not a sausage, would pick up a few extra shifts at the metal factory to support them financially while Mark would fill the days shopping for and then making their shared nightly dinner to support them nutritionally.

“We have to be a team to make this work, and a team is what we are. Yes yes,” Karen said happily, gazing out the window with Mark resting as he was in her bosom blinking up at her, getting warm throughout his meat while muttering.

“I'll make pesto and pasta tomorrow. You like pasta and pesto. Yes yes.”

The following day Karen left for the metal factory at four in the morning instead of her usual seven with the sky the colour of an ocean that doesn’t know it’s being watched, a whistling smile on her face and a metal lunchbox swinging by her thigh while Mark, waking six hours later, manoeuvred himself out of the house holding some plastic pound notes Karen had left on the side for him between his lipless lips, joining several pensioners waiting religiously by the entrance to the shop to be the first ones in when it opened. Helpful pensioners who, once it did open, helped him collect the shopping he needed and then pay, even tying his small bag of shopping- containing only a single jar of green pesto and small bag of pasta- around his middle when he left to help him slowly drag it back home with his implausible movements, letting himself back into the house through the cat flap in their backdoor that existed despite them never having had a cat. It took the rest of the day for him to shimmy up to the kitchen counter and have the food cooked and plated in time for Karen to get home, the large meaty smile on his face as he did all this being echoed four miles away by Karen, both satisfied they were making it work, that they were doing their part and the other was doing theirs.

Karen’s factory job involved hammering thick slabs of metal into shapes different to the shapes they were in than when they first came down the assembly line with hammers larger than those who wielded them heads, the beat of each hammer blow making a rousing sound like a broken horn attempting a call to battle. They never spoke as they hammered, all of them focusing on swinging and hitting and shaping, knowing that it was frowned upon by the big bosses if they did the same shape on more than one slab of metal in a single working day, and they never smiled as they swung so it was noticed when Karen went against the grain by contorting her facial muscles into an upwardly and decidedly joyous expression.

“Mmmmmmm, the pesto is good and what’s more the pasta even without it is delicious,” Karen later spooned the concoction Mark had crafted and had ready for the moment she got home into her mouth, deliberately leaving hints of green oil to gather on the corners of her lips and sometimes raising Mark up to them so he could lap.

“I’m glad you like it. I took a little dip in with the pasta water to give it some more flavour. Can you taste me?”

“I thought I could taste you!”

Both laughed together and toasted to the future and their continued happiness and Karen ate nearly all the food that Mark had made and flavoured with himself, shovelling it into her mouth while Mark, who didn’t have much room in him for more than a single bite of pasta and a few laps of pesto sauce anyway, watched her. Once she was finished they went to the living room and lived, watching television with a glass of wine until Mark, growing confident from two sips of red, hesitantly poked the tip of himself into Karen’s side, asking.

“Shall we go to bed? I know I’m not big but…”

And getting a response after only a brief pause when Karen poked Mark back, lowering her head with the certainty of an insatiable birdie to gently pick him up between her teeth; carrying him like that to the bedroom, him giggling and groaning between her jaws, her silently panting, until it became clear that size was not an issue and Karen knew just how to use it more than Mark ever had.

All was good, all was fair, all was right, and days and weeks and then months past and as Mark got more experimental in the recipes he began preparing for their dinner, seasoning everything with himself, even vegetables, and Karen continued to work in the metal factory seven days a week, twelve hours a day, the smiles that had emerged tattoo-like on their faces stayed plastered there from morning until night because they were not only making it work between them but that they were happy as they did so. It was only when grumbles about Karen’s smiling whilst on the job subsequently became loud enough for her ears to detect and ignore that tension over her continued expression reached a boiling point and a jaded unhappy man called Simon with an A-road of a monobrow approached her on a Friday as her hammer was in the air- something that was disapproved of in the factory as approaching raised hammers can result in the approaching faces being struck by raised hammers.

Simon also worked at the Factory seven days a week for twelve hour shifts but unlike Karen was not doing it as an essential cog in a two man pocket watch but as the entire working apparatus of a grandfather clock that not only chimed and ticked but also had to plan an evening meal to shop for and prepare following the chiming and ticking and, if there was time before his aching tiredness got too much, consume it. Simon had gone so long without using them he no longer had facial muscles that weren’t atrophied and useless and so hated those with facial muscles unatrophied and worse of all being used in a space where he was miserable, tired, and planning for a meal he might not have the strength to make. He was the cause of the grumbles that went around the factory, starting them and then persisting in bringing up the issue until it was being discussed externally without him- but unfortunately this wasn’t enough, the other factory workers didn’t have the same level of anger towards smiling as he did, some even doing it themselves whilst not confined at work and the grumbles soon faded away when they saw Karen’s smile wasn’t going anywhere; some even got used to it and began experimenting with doing the same themselves while hammering and liking how it felt. It was here, at the very point in time when Simon saw the man named Carlos who worked next to Karen on the weekends doing a small little smile while hammering a slab of metal into a bison shape, that boiling point was reached, and Simon approached Karen mid swing and was bonked on the head.

“Ow my head,” Simon spat on the floor.

Karen turned.

“I’m so sorry. I really am, but we don’t approach whilst someone’s mid hammer swing. That’s metal factory 101. You should be more careful.”

“We also don’t smile while swinging, but you seem to be forgetting that. It’s shameful when we work so hard, to be smiling like that. Look at Carlos grinning like a chimp, and it’s all because of you.”

“I’m happy. Why shouldn’t I smile,” Karen pointed at Carlos who was trying to hide his little one away from the red faced Simon. “And why shouldn’t he smile. He looks quite happy too.”

“I am quite happy,” Carlos turned away more from Simon, who began laughing with a desert horizon type of mouth.

“Of course he’s happy, he’s a part timer. He has a right to smile, but not here dammit. You’re encouraging out of work activities to become in work activities and it’s nonsense. You shouldn’t be smiling. You’re here as much as me. It isn’t right. You should stop it. Aren’t you tired? You must be very tired.”

Karen stopped to think about it, her shoulders unconsciously slumping slightly downwards.

“I mean sometimes… a little. But I have a Mark who cooks for when I get home and I can just go sleep after I eat if I want, ready for the next working day. Mark’s a sausage now but he’s started to cook very well. Much better than when he was a man and didn’t have such a nice flavour.”

To her side, Carlo’s smile got a little bigger as he rubbed the side of his hammer head with an, “Aww that’s nice,” coo that Karen nodded at.

“It is nice. I’m doing my part and Mark is doing his. We’re a T-E-A-M team.”

Simon jumped on the spot, sneering miserably.

“Well not all of us have a T-E-A-M team, or even a sausage. No niceness for some of us at all and so don’t or can’t smile while working hard. Stop it.”

Then he walked away from Karen in a jealous rage that made his foot kick out at things and his back hunch from the burden of it all, and as he walked away and kicked, from the dank dirt of his mind, an idea burst free, flowering there, purple, myopic, and tall, its roots weaving through his nerve system to make him spin with a narrowing of the eyes- the closest he could come to smiling- and a moistening of the mouth. Karen wasn’t mid-swing when Simon approached her for the second time so his face remained unbonked, she was cleaning the end of her hammer with a white cloth so any pieces of stray metal that may or may not be stuck to it wouldn’t influence any future shape she decided to make, and when she looked up it was with a dreamy grin that met Simon’s narrowing eyes in mid-air, two falling feathers competing to reach the ground first.

“But isn’t this harder than cooking? This hammering all day?”

Karen’s smile twitched in a high-volted dead cat kind of way.

“Mark doesn’t have arms or legs. It’s hard for him to cook and to cook well.”

“Hard for him to cook sure… but he’s not hammering metal for twelve hours a day. It’s not hard in the same way. What’s more, it isn’t hard to cook well when your own flavour is good.”

“He does the shopping too,” Karen’s protests fell flat while, her smile falling a fraction, and she considered the floor; her eyebrows doing the considering, her eyes doing a wandering, as Simon swooped on the fractional falling, her considering brows, her wandering eyes, with the fluidity of a cloak intending on turning day into night.

“You’re a mermaid, you and Mark, and you’re the hard working tail. Mark’s just the lazy torso wagging his arms every now and then. I bet Mark smiles all day as he’s cooking and shopping, and he should smile, it would be wrong not to, he’s got the better side of the deal. Better sides of deals have a right to smile but you, the hard working tail you are, what have you got to smile about?”

Here Simon floated backwards, back towards his own working station, his hands wringing in the air to signify he considered his work done despite Karen’s smile merely becoming gelatinized, a bouncy castle being pounced on by children’s feet, and he was right as the smile remained in this state for the rest of the working day, its wobbles following the movement of her body as she swung, and the uncertainty of it affected the other factory workers, even Carlos, whose smiles were erased from their faces as if never there, the bottom half of their expressions becoming as plain as the underside of a jellyfish. Meanwhile, in their distant home, a concrete smile unaffected by the happenings in the metal factory still remained on Mark who was preparing a French onion soup for dinner, his little fleshy mouth holding a silicone spatula that fondled the onions as they cooked, remaining the same hours later, him then by the slow cooker as the concoction finalised, when Karen walked through the door and, seeing the table not yet laden with food for her belly, had her wobbling smile crash to shore and wash away.

“Mark there is no food on the table so please tell me it’s ready, my ears really need to hear it.”

Mark wobbled around the kitchen counter until he was facing Karen, trying an even bigger smile to bring hers back, stretching it as far across his tubular body as he could and keeping it there, as if a puppeteer was hovering above him and holding it in place.

“I hate to let your ears down, but I can tell you it’s nearly done.”

Karen touched her ears which burned, the words Simon had filled her with camping out in them, lighting fires to keep warm, and she let out a shrill scream that made Mark so scared he played dead and fell on his back, almost rolling off the kitchen counter before being stopped by Karen’s long fingers which prodded and poked him as if they wished they could go right through his skin and plunge into the meat below.

“I was told today my part is harder than your part, Mark, and I realised its truth. All I want is dinner ready for when I get home, on the table and then in my belly, mmmm. Is that too much to ask? I don’t think it is. But dinner isn’t done and you’re smiling as if you’ve had the easiest day in the world, as if even your giblets are happy.”

Mark didn’t argue, but nor did his large smile drop so determined was he to apologise for what he’d done, instead wrapping his beaming mouth around one of Karen’s fingers- which stopped prodding before it could pierce him- to apologise whole heartedly, lapping at the nub of her finger with his tongue to say it would never happen again. Karen was almost swayed by this lapping feeling, teetering on the precipice of a tightrope stretched between two large buildings where on the one side lay smiles and on the other an black absence of them, but then she fell to the absence and her face tightened up and her finger pulled itself roughly from Mark’s mouth, so roughly he fell from the table with a scream akin to that of a pig in the slaughter house, landing with a soft bounce on the floor.

“Say sorry,” she demanded.

“I’m sorry,” he lay face down on the floor.

“To yourself because I’m fed up where I wasn’t before and we’re switching. Our roles reversed, our parts recast, and it’s you who’ll work for money while I stay here, shop, and cook for nutrition. I want reason to own a smile as big as yours again. I want the better side of the deal. You can have the unlucky roll of the dice.”

Mark rolled over, his smiling face greasy from some of the juice the fall had squeezed from his meat, happy they were still a team, happy he could continue to do his part for them, sticking his tongue out as a form of a thumbs up.

“Anything you want, I’ll find a job I can do out there tonight. I’ll start tonight, or more likely tomorrow. I’ll make it a hard one, I don’t mind, we’re a team. It doesn’t matter what I do.”

Karen picked Mark up from the floor and put him back on the kitchen counter, letting him finish the dinner he’d started while she went to the dinner table and waited for it, her face a stone sculpture of a recently liberated woman as they ate the soup. When they finished they took out the computer until Mark found a job that he could start the next day that wouldn’t be a problem for his limited movements and then they went to bed, together but separately, with no insertion of pleasure to be had no matter how close Mark tried to get Karen- her skin seeming to have obtained the unattainableness of a distant iceberg that repelled him when he got too close.

Mark slept badly but woke up energetically, wiggling off to his new job at seven the next morning wearing a small plastic baseball hat from an old children’s toy around the top of his head to protect his meat from the early morning sun. Karen slept soundly and woke up at eleven feeling tired and weary, stumbling out of bed without washing to go to the shop for things for dinner, what remained of her smile lost somewhere in the region of her chest, lodged like a stone in marrow as she browsed the aisles and decided that the first dinner she’d make in her new team role would be an easy one of just beans because of how tired she still was, and picking up the tin trotted home to go back to a bed while in the distance at his new job Mark was slid, ketchup clad and smiling, into his first bun.

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

As Safe As Houses

Like that of footsteps on foot soldier leaves felled from trees during the annual orange war, the arm rustled as it was drawn back, but there was no sound at all as it was thrown, soaring in a flat arc with the gay grey grace of a pigeon before deciding that it wouldn’t be silenced and letting out a ping! as it bounced harmlessly off my breastplate, the it of it being a pebble- or small stone depending how large loose rock has to be for you to promote it from pebble to small stone- and so doing only a ping! amount of damage. Through my visor, I watched the mouth attached to the throwing arm get maniacal as its owner, a boy with sausage roll type thumbs, bent and picked up another hunk of rock, one which nobody, no matter what their opinion in the pebble/stone debate, would not consider a STONE- capitalized for the danger its sharp mineral edges posed- hurling that at me too with a further rustling like that of a packet of crisps being domestically abused, this STONE not soaring with any gayness or grace but zipping, almost invisibly, with the speed of a rock whose life motto was its ore or nothing, colliding with my breastplate with a clang!

“Why are you standing there? Here?” the sausage roll thumb boy asked as quick as lickety once did the splits, another STONE already in hand ready to let fly. “You should be at a castle or something. Are you a weirdo? Something else?”

I was about to spin a yarn so tight around him he’d know for sure that I wasn’t a weirdo but very normal and that my armour was also normal and merely a precaution, like the inflatable suits those who’ve been hit by cars wear to prevent any other damn car intending to hit them from hurting them again, and that he shouldn’t throw rocks at me because that really devalued my precaution, but just then Beth came out of the coffee shop with our drinks, saw the patch of dirt the STONE had left on my breastplate, and made the boy leave me alone by doing what Beth did so well, which was toss her temper in some easily lost in woods in such a spectacular way that she didn’t have to say anything to make people deeply regret doing the something that'd made her temper be tossed, her face going as red as the belly of the beast who’d forgot their sun cream, her body contorting, wiggling like a slab of heated butter being struck with a tenderiser. At seeing such a sight, the sausage roll thumb boy fled into the day, leaving me with already spun yarn to swallow and gratitude to express as Beth, satisfied but still red faced, smiled and handed me my coffee specially equipped with a twisty visor accessible straw, grabbing my free gauntlet before I could express anything and dragging me towards the park and the point in the park we went every Sunday, Intervention Point, a point living beneath a fat, rather squat, tree that's trunk had been so shrouded by its own overhanging branches it resembled an upside down mop we entered by pushing said overhanging branches apart and revealing a circular space invisible from the outside, filled with logs and other such woodenry for Beth and me to sit on.

“It’s been four years today, Delroy. Do you or do you don’t think you’re finally ready to step out of that armour, feel the air?”

“Beth, not today or possibly ever, I'm not ready, and it's because I just don't need to feel that. I can feel the air, it runs through my joints sometimes and is oh-so rejuvenating when it does, and most importantly, I feel safe.”

“But being clad from head to toe, still, it's just unnecessary. Isn't it?"

“True... if I take the un from unnecessary and toss it in a blender to make the word I think you know it makes but which I’ll say anyway. Necessary. Look at this dirt on my breastplate, Beth. If I hadn’t been cladded from at least torso to toe, I could have been mildly hurt, mildly!”

“But you wouldn’t have had rocks tossed at you if you hadn’t been wearing armour!” Beth gripped some of the hanging branches that hung into the space of Intervention Point, wrapping them gently around her fist and rubbing the green leaves on her cheek, clearly preparing to say what she was always going to say, all the while knowing that what she was preparing to say would exasperate me to no ends. “It’s the solution to the problem it causes.”

“Don’t get therapeutic on me. You know I hate it when you get therapeutic. You’re supposed to be my friend and support me, not give me know-it-all advice with no thought for how I would advise if I wanted to advise myself. The armour isn’t a problem and most of the time I forget I’m in it at all.”

“Don’t get defensive, Delroy. Remember, you’re not a coconut tree so stop dropping spiky balls on me. Also, don’t pretend that I don’t also know what it’s like to be in armour. I was more than half clad in metal myself when we met.”

I put my helmet in hand and sighed, looking around at the fragments of yellowish light that filtered in through the Intervention Point tree’s dense leaves and lived as butterflies- swirling hand in hand with smaller fragments of dust when young and bright before abruptly discarding childish things such as swirling and being hand in hand, settling down in patches on the same leaves Beth had rubbed up on her face and fading to black-enjoying how said light, while swirling at least, glinted off the armour I’d conditioned in the bath that very morning so it would act like a prize poodle and shine for this meeting with Beth. I fingered the patch of metal residing directly above the space below where my bellybutton resided with my other free hand as I looked, my bellybutton below that was mottled, puckered, and wholly unlike a normal bellybutton because when Beth and I had met I’d still been with I-Won’t-Say-Their-Name-Because-They’re-An-Asshole and not wearing armour, and Beth, who was not only wearing armour at the time but also going by the name of Arbalist and carrying round a crossbow to keep people at bay, had let loose a bolt in my belly.

“I know you remember,” Beth continued. “With that mottle that used to be a bellybutton you don’t certainly need reminding. But you do seem to need reminding that I used to say, insist even, that I often forgot I was wearing armour or shooting bolts at people. So, I know it isn’t true. I also know what you will know today if today is the day, and that is that it was a load removed when I finally did just that.”

No armour is complete without a weapon and mine was a sword, tucked as snug as a bug in a leather sheaf on my side, unused against other swords or weaponry in the five years I’d carried it- my instinct in any situation that might have required weaponry or sword swinging, which without a doubt was a situation that lay way past the last chance saloon, being to flee as soon as any situation approached I’m-getting-close-to-getting-angry mountain- but used whenever Beth milled my nerves, drawing it from its sheaf and raising it in the air with a ‘Hiyaaaa!’, swinging it aimlessly at any straggler hanging branches that didn’t have the function of hiding us beneath the Intervention Point tree but had the function of getting in the way whenever we tried to walk around.

“Delroy, every week with the slicing and hiyaaas. Stop slicing. Stop Hiyaaing. Look at me. This situation is getting silly enough for the others in town who know you like I know you to think that it’s been way too long now since it happened with I-Won’t-Say-Their-Name-But-They’re-An-Asshole to justify you still wearing armour without it being weird.”

“... others are thinking that?”

"Others are talking about that."

"Are you thinking and talking about that with them?”

“I’ve talked of course, it would've been strange if I’d been around and hadn’t. But what I’ve talked about is beside the point. What the point is really is that more often than not the others who don’t really know you but have seen you around join the others who do really know you when the others who do really know you are talking and comparing you to weird persons such as Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House.”

Obscuredly I dropped my jaw but visibly I swung my sword, not at branches or leaves, but in a general circle, my armour making the cartoonish sound of chattering teeth as the many times I’d partook in the talking and making of not very nice comments about Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House, usually when Mary had been in hearing distance and just buying a coffee or sandwich to take back under her bridge, ran through my head alongside the still but familiar image of Mary- who’d forsaken clothes along with her beautiful house and so stood naked and exposed to the world because, as she shrugged answeringly when questioned, ‘What have you got to hide under a bridge?’- smiling at all the talking and not very nice comments and tipping an imaginary bowler hat to those of us that had made them, her body language clearly signalling the start of a sauntering off that would certainly be done with the fantabulous energy of a potato that knows the pot is a waiting but also that it has at least five damn minutes left to live like a potato with nothing to lose. I knew I wouldn't be able to take the hearing of any not very nice comments quite as in my stride- which even before the armour had been the self-conscious stride of a newly legged trout- as she, and that my armour would soon resemble a flaky painting of a muddy sunset from all the salty tears I would shed within it, salty tears that would be shed regardless even of hearing as just knowing comments were being made was scary enough to induce moisture, that knowing made doubly scary- you know double scariness? That feeling when you’re in an old easily broken down car on a dark night in a dark wood and that car has done its dues and broken down just when a fog as thick as a curious French brie is settling on the surrounding dark trees and just when a shadow darker than the rest of the shadowy darkness moves in the same surrounding trees in a lurching manner so that not only does the frightful fog settling afear you but the lurching shadow does as well- by also knowing that to stop the comments I’d have to cast my precaution to the wind and invite all the hurt and pain of all the hurt and pain varieties to have free rein over my fragile body.

“I’m nothing like Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House,” I cried as Mary crawled beneath my general sword swing to grab my gauntlets and stop them sword swinging in general. “I don’t live under a bridge though I have a delightful converted four-bed warehouse home to go to or go about laughing at those who want some protection with her exposed belly and shoulders which by being exposed say me? Need protection? Pishaw that stuffs for wimps. She doesn’t and has never engaged in the making of not very nice comments or talking, but I have and do! I engage with talking and commenting whenever I’m allowed or around. I’m completely normal if you do what I do and forget I’m wearing armour.”

“It isn’t just engaging with talking and the making of comments that make you normal, Delroy, it’s being like the rest of us and you can’t be like the rest of us because you don’t look like the rest of us. You’re a walking talking suit of armour and nobody, not even you so don’t lie, can forget that.” Beth paused here before saying something further with the out-of-the-side-of-the-mouth whispering of a war photographer perpetually puffing on their wartime smoking pipe and asking photographic permission without wanting the asking of photographic permission to be heard. “Sometimes when all the others are talking and commenting not very nice things and I’m there too Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House isn’t even mentioned, sometimes she’s skipped over and they go straight to comparing you to Mark-Who-Believes-He’s-A-Nuclear-Bomb-And-That-Only-By-Kissing-The-Most-Handsome-Men-On-The-Mouths-In-A-Surprise-Kiss-Attack-Will-He-Save-The-World-By-Not-Going-Off.”

Mark-Who-Believes-He’s-A-Nuclear-Bomb-And-That-Only-By-Kissing-The-Most-Handsome-Men-On-The-Mouths-In-A-Surprise-Kiss-Attack-Will-He-Save-The-World-By-Not-Going-Off was the worst person to be compared to if you wanted to wear armour but for everyone to treat you normally- him being the epitome of social avoidance, there often being town meetings that I often went to all about how we could convince him there was nobody left to prevent him going off, plans such as all of us collectively leaving the town for several days, leaving him having to wander so far in search of handsome men to sneak kisses on that he would eventually wander right into a different town or city- and, upon hearing the comparison had been done, I did what life calls everybody who wears armour to do at some point after being cornered by those wishing them to take it off, become defensive and attack those doing the cornering, pulling my gauntlets from the grasp to point a finger at Beth’s face.

“You were wearing armour and shooting bolts for over two years at least after being hurt and not once were you compared Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House or Mark-Who-Believes-He’s-A-Nuclear-Bomb-And-That-Only-By-Kissing-The-Most-Handsome-Men-On-The-Mouths-In-A-Surprise-Kiss-Attack-Will-He-Save-The-World-By-Not-Going-Off. Not once. So I’m starting that maybe nobody in town is saying this. I’m starting to think that maybe I should start thinking that it's maybe just you who’s saying this and that you’re simply saying it because you want me to take it off so you can steal it for yourself.”

My attacking voice, which had been used barely once a year since I was four and which had certainly never been used on my friend, made Beth flinch like a love-lorn leviathan coming upon their love entangled with another and reach almost instinctively for her handbag- which like most bags, or personal objects of concealment in the town, held a small portion of armour for those moments in life when protection really is required, her small piece being in fact not that small and in fact being the quite large crossbow from her Arbalist days- her face turning tomato as her temper, which as mentioned before was a large angry dog held in the garden only by a threadbare lead that could be snapped at the dropping of a hat if the hat that dropped happened to drop on that lead, was let loose. Beth, who had always taken great care in not losing her temper with me because she was a sweetheart and knew that even before my armour I could only take so much shouting and that after I’d donned it could take even less, forgot her care, barked while slobbering like an Igor impersonating a dog, and jumped on my breastplate, denting the plate covering my breast and pushing me backwards so that I fell, also backwards, and rolled on the floor with the elegance of a mechanical elephant whose trunk has taken it upon itself to both trip it and lasso its legs together midfall- that is with a great clanging and a Damn-I-Have-A-Tripwire/Lasso-Rather-Than-A-Trunk type roar, picture a metal bin making love to waste compressor and you’ll get the sound- right out of Intervention Point and back into the park, but not stopping there, going further with the roll, Beth still on top of me and rolling too to make it so we were both a part of the most aggressive roly-poly the world had ever seen.

We roly-polypunched right into the Fighting Point- earmarked as that by Beth and I years before with it’ll-never-happen-but-just-in-case deep bellied chuckles- that, rather than a peaceful circular space hidden beneath a tree, was a deep dark pit resembling the bear fighting pits of bygone years when pits were still dug to accommodate such things as bear fights, so close to the edge of the park you could, if you were inclined, theoretically say that where the pit sat wasn’t park at all but the town and was only still considered park because some trees shaded it, though a large clothing store did too, and because it had a dirt floor that was not soft but hard enough to take both Beth’s and my own breath away. So that for several moments after we roly-polypunched alllllllllll the way down to the bottom of it, we were entirely breathless, held close by the dirt that'd taken our breath and desperately sought more, its soughting being unfruitful for the several moments we lay in its arms, gasping with the quiet desperation of mushrooms with mouths but no respiratory system, these several moments prefacing further several moments during which all members of the town in seeable and hearable distance came to look down into the pit and watch us abruptly evolve into mushrooms with lungs, air flooding back as Beth and I crawled away each other and stood, me drawing my sword on my friend and her drawing her crossbow on hers.

“Look, it’s Delroy. Urgh, and still armoured from head to toe…” the town members said while gathered as they were around the lip of the pit, their voices loud and echoing down to my ears. “…he’s definitely more unusual then Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House now… equal I’d say to Mark-Who-Believes-He’s-A-Nuclear-Bomb-And-That-Only-By-Kissing-The-Most-Handsome-Men-On-The-Mouths-In-A-Surprise-Kiss-Attack-Will-He-Save-The-World-By-Not-Going-Off…worse? No that’s too much… could get there… definitely getting there… I for one say he's arrived at his destination... look at all that protection… how obscene and strange… been way too long since it happened… it makes me feel like the small piece I carry for just in case isn’t enough… a small piece is more than enough… it’s Delroy who's overprepared… he's not a knight.... weirdo… freak… GET HIM BETH.”

Hearing that talk and not very nice comments really were being made about me not having removed my protection or yet got over the solidified ball of acidic pain slowly corroding my heart that I-Won’t-Say-Their-Name-But-They’re-An-Asshole had planted made my anger towards Beth fade but seemingly did the opposite to her as she let out a shriek and a bolt as soon as the suggestion she get me was given, so quickly that I barely parried the zooming bolt away, leaving it stuck, quivering, in the dirt side of the pit. You’d think it was but it wasn’t the loosening of the bolt that brightened my anger again, rather it was the appearance, sudden and as light as the light of the Lord when they said with a snapping that light should be let, of I-Won’t-Say-Their-Name-But-They’re-An-Asshole leaning with the other town-folk over the lip of the pit, looking with the satisfaction of a serial whistler doing their serial duty at my armour, and shouting, ‘YEAH, GET HIM BETH,’ that made that anger rise right back up and make me return something for the loosening of the bolt- that return being a short sprint followed by a short swing.

“Five years of my life, Delroy, five of them,” Beth, who just managed to dodge that short swing with the agility of a particularly dexterous dolphin or someone not wearing full metal body armour, snarled. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5. All of them spent being your friend, interventioning, only occasionally when I really wanted to do it more joining in with the talking and not very nice comment making about you, and you accuse me of simply wanting your armour? J’accuse! Auf der hut!”

 Here Beth did a fashionable roll I suspected was just for the watchers, who supportively let out a cheer to let her know they still were, while simultaneously re-loading, sending another bolt my way as soon as she rightened in such a smooth combative transition that I failed to notice a bolt had been loaded and released until that released bolt went clean through my armour, missing my flesh by somehow finding a gap between my shoulder and the shoulder of my casing but causing a hole that curious air swiftly flowed through to explore nonetheless.

“Look at you, Beth, clutching a crossbow, AKA a piece of armour. Oh hypocrisy, come and lap from my frigid breast for your mother lies milkless before me!”

“Look up and then also look around, Delroy. Look at the people, your township, they’re all, ALL, clutching pieces of armour. Ipso facto there’s nothing wrong with a little clutch every now and then, to feel safe.”

“But if there’s nothing wrong with a clutch now and then, why is there something wrong with a clad?”

“Because no one else is clad! Why should you be that safe? No one else is, no one else even wants to be except for directly and then for a reasonable amount of time after being severely hurt. Being that safe this long after being hurt is weird, not to mention unhealthy.”

Here my temper- which had already flared up by the sight and sound of I-Won’t-Say-Their-Name-But-They’re-An-Asshole looking smug and cheering Beth on, and been made worse by the amount of air flowing into my armour through the hole, which was too much air to merely be rejuvenating and was actually rather exposing- flared even more and aided my speed of attack to no end, so that with a dart and a dash I burst toward Beth, the sound effects of SHING! And TING! being the ones my blade let out as I blocked two bolts somehow sent my dashing way before a KACHING! rollicked out as my sword, which had been falling with an executioner's precision towards the crook of Beth’s ostrich neck, came in contact instead with the side of her crossbow, raised just in time to block me.

‘PHUT, PFFT,’ were the bullish snorts falling with white puffs of hot air down into the Fighting Point, echoing around to make things feel Caligulian as Beth and I freely traded blows, the sun, which didn’t dare shine into the pit though it illuminated the town in a picturesque glow metres away, illuminated also the folk doing the snorting, highlighting the moment Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House, breasts and chin thrust proudly up to the sky in her pride at not needing protection at all, oil and other living-under-a-bridge liquids smeared on her flesh, joined them along with Mark-Who-Believes-He’s-A-Nuclear-Bomb-And-That-Only-By-Kissing-The-Most-Handsome-Men-On-The-Mouths-In-A-Surprise-Kiss-Attack-Will-He-Save-The-World-By-Not-Going-Off- slyly kissing all the men he could on their mouths as he crept along- neither of them joining in with the cheering but watching all the same, Beth tipping her invisible hat at the sky as if saying she’d never cared about the not very nice comments being made about her but that my word was it nice to stand in a big ol’ crowd and not have them be about her.

“Be a good girl and hit him harder, Beth,” howled the familiar voice of my mother, who had never approved of my armour even when it’d only been a week after what happened with I-Won’t-Say-Their-Name-But-They’re-An-Asshole, and who shoved her way to the very lip of the pit to wave her walking stick in the air in the erratic fashion of a conductor conducting not a symphony but a mass spanking of not just the ass but the whole body of me. “Hit that bleedin’ armour right off him.”

The sound of my mom’s voice, familiar and oh so supportive, spurred Beth on, and with a duck only the truly supported can manage, she lowered her knees and dodged my next swing completely, the weight of said swing not encountering any opposition at all dragging me in a half circle that got my boots tangled tantalisingly, for Beth anyway, and left me wide open for the bolt that suddenly entered my armour at thigh height, going through it and said thigh with the cleanliness of a dentist’s dogs dentures and making me fall, arms jellyfish wiggling as I did so that quite by accident my blade nicked the knee of Beth, the tip digging in and then digging out a portion of flesh, eliciting a swearing from her as she also fell that would make a kakologophobic kooky.

“Shit, shit, shit, twat, my fucking knee, Delroy, you cunt. You’ve taken a fucking chunk out of it.”

“Ohh,” I moaned, my voice doing a breaking, a snapping, like that of a twig person in gloom, loud enough for the watchers high above to all hear, letting me know they'd heard by laughing loudly, and for Beth, much closer, to hear as well, her eyes widening. “Ohhhhhh I'm hurt. I'm not safe, I'm hurt.”

It happened as my arms wrapped around my leg, as if by swaddling it I could revert it to its unhurt childhood, and as I began to rock back and forth on the hard dirt below, tears dripping from my eyes and making the soft cymbal sounds of gentle rain on a tin roof as the droplets formed arms and drummed on and pooled in my helmet, in a flash it happened, the end of the fight. Because while Beth lost her temper easily, a fact that could easily be carved into the side of the town’s little mount rushmore if the town had such a thing and not be disputed by anyone or anything who knew her, it was also a fact that Beth found her temper in whatever enclave or grove it’d been tossed in just as soon as tears of any kind made their way into a situation, those watery incentives quickly drowning her anger in a puddle of themselves before making it bob to the surface as a severely sorry corpse. At the sight of my tears and the hearing of my broken voice, Beth did as she did, calmed, and crawled, as well as someone with a chunk missing from their knee could, to me, stroking the beak of my helmet- which I don’t think I’ve mentioned was of the armet variety and so had a pointy metal growth stretching out from where my nose was, and which was what Beth often affectionately, but usually mockingly, called a beak. The sight of the stroking of me, a weirdo, by a Beth, who was still considered one of them and normal, did not please the watching town folk, who jostled with anger as they watched, at all, as they knew that if one of them was willing to do a stroking, all of them would have to be willing and to prevent having to be willing to do that, the watchers instead began considering that maybe it wasn’t just me who was weird and not one of them but maybe Beth as well, because let’s not forget, they murmured loudly from above, she’d also worn full armour after being hurt, for two years as well, which wasn't that long but was still a period of time that passed in which armour was worn and that maybe two years was just long enough for the wearer to be considered weird even if the armour was no longer around, and that, maybe, if they formed a hoard and spilt over the lip of the pit towards Beth and me, they could, maybe, make the Fighting Point worth its name again, and even rename it, if they could, as Victorious-Point-Where-The-Armour-Was-Finally-Removed-And-Delroy-And-Maybe-Beth-Too-Were-Made-To-Realise-How-Weird-They-Are-And-Banished-From-Town.

“Beth, we hate to say it, but we’re starting to think that maybe you’re an oddball and a weirdo too. We’re starting to think that you don’t really belong with the rest of us and so should be treated like Delroy,” was the prevailing thought process of the town, who had the kindness to also chant it out loud so I'd know it, and once knowing it could disagree completely with the way they were turning on someone who’d interventioned me every Sunday just to get me back in with them and who’d warned me of their growing lack of patience with me and my armour.

“Beth,” I whispered, tapping her shoulder. “Get off me, get away. You aren't a weirdo, you're lovely and don't deserve that label. Go up to them, I'll stay down here. Maybe they'll leave me alone then. Surely they can't be mad about my armour if I also live in a pit.”

Beth didn't say anything in reply, simply stopped stroking my beak to look at me, balls meeting slit, those balls moistening as she assuredly felt what I felt in that moment, which was the feeling of being a baby goose being cradled in the warm crotch of a friendly giant who took goose babies in and loved them endlessly, our mouths suddenly revving the throttle and playing the roles in a major motion picture of two siblings coming together after struggling out of heaven and hell respectively to meet each other in the middle, apologies spilling out simultaneously so it was as if our voices were trains racing to get through a single tunnel.

“I should never have cut a chunk from your knee.”

“I should never have joined in with comparing you to Mary-Who-Lives-Under-The-Bridge-Even-Though-She-Has-A-Beautiful-House.”

“I should never have called you hypocrisy’s mother.”

“I also should never have told you about the Mark-Who-Believes-He’s-A-Nuclear-Bomb-And-That-Only-By-Kissing-The-Most-Handsome-Men-On-The-Mouths-In-A-Surprise-Kiss-Attack-Will-He-Save-The-World-By-Not-Going-Off comparison.”

“I should never have let us roly-polypunch into the Fighting Point and more should be able to say I-Won’t-Say-Their-Name-But-They’re-An-Asshole’s name and you should be able to too. They don’t deserve us not saying their name.”

“They deserve more. They deserve for their name to be legally changed to Asshole-Who-Hurts-People-Enough-To-Not-Be Called-Anything-Other-Than-Asshole. Just Asshole for short.”

The town folk who’d been ready to form a hoard, had all frozen in their forming at the outburst of our emotion and hadn't yet unfrozen by the time we got to the point in the major motion picture when the two siblings collide in the middle, sparks and flashes abound, the familiar smell of their mother's vegetable patties filling the air, reminding them of their childhood and causing them to fall into each other's arms and hug away all the mistakes they'd made to have gone to a different afterlife than the other, hugging the paradise and the torture from each other's bodies, the force of Beth's flesh on my armour as we enacted this giving me the courage to do something I hadn't dared to do in four years, pointing up over her shoulder.

“Hey, Asshole”, I called, receiving the recipient of my call’s eyes on my visor at the calling, their eyes that were no longer smug but sightly averted, shamed- the eyes of a hurricane with barely any wind left revisiting a place it had ruthlessly hurricaned in the days of when it’d been full of wind. “Yeah, Asshole. You look, that’s your name now, and don’t you forget it. If I hear you say differently, remember I have a sword.”

[alittleghostwhoeatsbread]

Dafür Zu Verrostet

Fred had used and abused many a pedestal in his early years, having favoured concrete or metal square blocks for their plainness and balanceability before growing up and settling on a marble triangle in Victoria Square, the realisation that flair and a lack of balance weren’t always a bad thing settling it, perching on its upmost tip and striking the pose of that of a naked and aroused sailor mistaking a distant pile of seaweed for the bosom of a charitable mermaid for twenty years. Victoria Square was a haven, filled to the brim on all sides with statues of different forms, shapes, and materials, its centrepiece being the visitor named Floozy who lounged in a jacuzzi shaped fountain the size of a bus and the colour of jade with hands that stretched to the sky as if asking a cloud lover to return, but Fred was close only with the two statues perched close enough to his own pedestal to converse with without shouting- Vicky, an iron made royal figure with a froggish chin gently cradling a baton, and Hazel, a sandy stone sphinx complete with exposed tongue and fangs. One day as the sun rose and turned the square the colour of an oranges intestine, it deemed it time to cling to the statues forms and highlight their imperfections with the magnifying glass of a recently divorced judge, sending a perfect ray out to strike the surface of Fred’s backside and showcase a small patch of discoloured flaking metal to backside loving Vicky, who upon being showcased too immediately raised her baton and pointed it at the affected area of the closed-eyed Fred, who was smiling up at the warming sun with the bliss of a tightrope stander mid tightrope stand, jerking it up and down as if it was a gun rather than a baton.

           “Rustitis, Fredrick. On your backside. Rustitis!”

           Closed-eyed Fred instantly became open-eyed Fred and his peaceful smile began the slow downward crawl of an accidental amputee to their accidentally displayed and dashed about limbs, opening into a chasm of fear while waking several statues who’d still been sleeping with the rhythmic hammer on metal slapping of his own ass, slapping which caused more of the rusted surface to flake and drift off with the Joie de vivre of a gang of oddly coloured snowflakes who know their own attractiveness and aren’t afraid to flaunt it.

           “No, no, no. It can’t be. Maybe it’s bird shit or a miraculous tattoo. For God sake look again and say it’s bird shit or a miraculous tattoo,” Fred pleaded with a Vicky who was still pointing her gun at his ass in a way that cast no shadow of doubt on the hard bodied fact that if she had ammo or a real gun, she wouldn’t have hesitated in shooting.

           Hazel, whose pedestal was on the side of Fred which meant his backside was inaccessible to her, woke up during this hullabaloo, confusedly lapping at the air with her fat tongue until the sun helpfully exposed with a blinding light another patch of rustitis on Fred’s shoulder blade and caused her to retreat that fat lapping tongue back into her mouth to hide, almost leaping off her pedestal to forcibly remove him from the square but resisting, partly because he was her friend but almost entirely because the idea of actually touching him was too much for her to bear.

           “Oh, Fred. I’m sorry,” she murmured, shaking her great head from side to side with enough force to hammer the final nail in the coffin of belief that the marks could simply be miraculous tattoos or bird shit.

           “Don’t let them take me,” was all Fred said to the nail being hammered, his eyes, which had looked pleadingly at an invisible patch of bosom shaped seaweed for twenty years, spinning to look pleadingly at his friends instead.

           But it was too late for anyone to not let anything happen even if they would or could, which they wouldn’t and couldn’t, as the signal had been sent and received as soon as the word of rustitis had been uttered and within seconds they arrived in white coats and vans with miniature cranes on top, eyes cold and uncaring, ears hearing but ignoring Fred’s stammering pleas as they wrapped several ropes around his waist and attached them to the top of one of the cranes which had cogs that immediately began to scream like coals in heat as they strained in removing him from the top of his triangle. They screamed for five minutes alongside a Fred whose feet clung like a hunch to a back to his pedestal and hands reached desperately out for his recoiling friends who still cared enough to turn their eyes away and pretend they didn’t want what was happening to happen before his hunch feet lost the fight with a POP! and he came off his pedestal and was lowered into the back of a van to watch from the rear window, his arms still stuck in the pose they’d held for so long, as his home pantomimed a hairline and receded away.

           The van sped through the city and Fred’s eyes grew as mournful as a dog in heat as they passed several of his old pedestal points and he wondered if all the times he’d watched other statues with rustitis getting dragged away without making a sound other than a small laugh was why the disease had targeted him, doing his best to feel sorry for all the past victims of his small laugh in his heart of hearts as if it would make a difference to his own circumstances before discarding his limited memories of them and feeling sorry only for himself in his heart of hearts, fearfully considering what was going to happen to him. He, Vicky, and Hazel had debated on what happened when the rust part of rustitis got worse, usually after an afflicted statue was taken screamingly away, and had laughed as they discussed possibilities such as disintegration, missing limbs, and exposed or hidden genitals rotting into twisted things that sang with lyres about the sadness of having never being touched before they were rotted twisted things. He briefly became afraid that his penis would become a twisted rotten thing that sang with a lyre before dismissing the possibility with a clenching of the fists, believing fervently that his penis was at least of the class of genital that would pluck a harp as it approached its end, a clenching of the fists that was remarkably therapeutic as it enabled the metal to stretch, with the grinding grind of a convicted robot’s ass being dragged alongside the back of a police car as a method of cruel and unusual punishment by a cruel and unusual jury, as it hadn’t been able to for twenty years.

His feet were still stuck in the unusual tippity toed ballet position that had been required for him to stay bonded to the tip of his triangle and the stuckness of them prevented Fred from turning his head around enough to look not through the rear window but through the gap behind him where two heads belonging to two white coats floated, but his ears could prick like radar dishes and hear well their mumbles and grumbles about the damn growing number of patients being brought to the Establishment’s treatment hall and how it was too much dammit. Fred had never heard of the Establishment or its treatment room but the fact he was going to a place where treatment was to be had filled his chest with the hope the sailor he had posed as for so long must have felt at mistaking the seaweed pile, and he began working on stretching out the rest of his body as the city continued to pass with the speed of a runaway cat who’d got the cream. He'd just gotten his feet to unstick so he could turn and stare through the back of the white coated heads to what they were driving towards when they pulled into the driveway of a large granite building with all the charm of a train ticket inspector, completely square and almost impotent looking, and the driving stopped, the backdoor of the van being thrown open by more figures in white and the scream of the van’s crane cogs coming again as Fred was pulled out, suspended, and dropped onto a little trolly with wheels that wheeled him towards a huge doorframe as square as the building with a sign above it reading, WELCOME TO THE ESTABLISHMENT: CLEAR YOUR THROAT UNLESS YOU’RE A PATIENT.

The white coated figures pushing the trolly hacked and hawked to unclog themselves before wheeling Fred into a spherical hall as in odds with the shape of the outside of the building as an abstinent ant with a horny-horny hippo, the sloping hall walls bordering a space filled with beds that in turn were filled with statues in a variety of positions and stages of rustitis- some merely with flaking patches of discolouration like Fred, some peeling all over like overheated oranges, some as rusty as a former prodigy returning from retirement- any tiny movement from them letting out froggish croaks and creaks but those croaks and creaks being kept to a minimum as they all kept movement of any kind as infrequent as possible, most of them lying as still as if their beds were their pedestals and the other statues their visitors.

Despite their stillness, rust floated off the statues filling the beds, forming clouds, puffs really, in the air of swirling vapour metallic in taste no matter what material the statues they came from were made from and Fred was pushed through and made to inhale these puffs on his journey from the entrance all the way through to the back of the hall, which was the back of a hall, blocked from both extending the space further or revealing whatever wilderness lay beyond it by a curved brick wall that Fred was pushed up against before being levered onto his back on top of a bed homed in by metal bars. The bed was bordered by a row of others just like it that followed the sideways curve of the back wall- the hall being set up like a Dantesque version of hell, the rows of beds continually forming their own circles that grew incrementally smaller until the ice cold centre was reached- the two on either side of his own being occupied by a wooden whinnying and rearing horse and an alabaster little girl with an oversized and extended hesitant finger hesitating over some invisible debris. The white coated men who’d wheeled him in nodded at Fred after tying him to the bed with a leather strap that would have looked more at home in a brothel to say that yes they had brought him and that yes their job was done before leaving with a sharp turning of their heels and Fred’s legs, one of the only parts of him able to move with restriction, began air running desperately in the air as if he did it enough he would somehow air run back to a period in time when he was not tied to a bed and slowly rusting.

The wooden horse did its pose a service and let out a high-pitched whinny before immediately doing that same pose a disservice by turning that whinny into the wet-lipped hacking of a smoker face to face with a clown, inciting the little girl on Fred’s other side to look at Fred and let out a tinkling akin to the splash of urine in a dark alley.

“Did you hear that helped with the rust?” The horse asked in between hacks, his raised legs nibbled, almost to what would have been bone if bone had been there to arrive at, by rust, raising higher and kicking with glee and a little bit of hope as if he might have actually heard it helped with the rust.

“Yeah, ha-ha, did you?” The little girl also began kicking, not her legs which were cemented together to form a shapeless mound the rest of her body rose from like the fire of a firework, but her oversized hesitant finger which abused the air with wags.

“I just want to run. Out of this bed, out of here, out of the present, but I can’t because I’m immobile and not by choice.”

“If you didn’t hear that helped from someone then being immobile should be your choice, it’s good for your rustitis,” the little girl’s wagging finger purposefully came to a stop as the horses' legs also stopped kicking. “We’ve heard, and from trained and informed specialists in white coats too, that staying as still as we can might be the way to being cured. Why do you think we’re strapped down like this?”

“You’ve ruined a solid week of immobility,” The horse neighed, its gaping nostrils gaping furiously. “My rust has gotten worse already, look. Look at it!”

Completely smooth holes with the look of tunnels of the worming worm, larger than the nibbled patches that had been visible before, had appeared right across the horses hide, dotting it like enlarged speckles, and when Fred turned his head and saw these holes leading to somewhere he didn’t want to go but was heading any way he shivered and turned his head and body as much towards the little girl as he could, questions falling out of him.

“Are we safe here? Has anyone here ever been cured? How long have you been here? Why are we strapped down? Does rustitis make your genitals twisted and rotten? Will being so close to others like you with it worsen my own rust? Answer the second question first please,” Fred flicked the insides of his eyes down to all the parts of his body not covered in strap but keeping the outsides of them solely on his penis, rubbed gold by twenty years of visitor's hands, his mind playing tricks with him so that he sometimes saw rust there and sometimes didn’t as he waited for the little girl to race to answer all his questions but specifically the second one, the little girl being interrupted before the starting whistle by the horse forgetting its desire to stay immobile, click-clacking its teeth together.

“Boulton’s going bucket,” it shouted to the excitement of all the statues whose beds were positioned in a way that they could see what was about to occur, all immediately abandoning their own respective immobility exercises and spinning as much as their straps would allow them in the direction of a bed containing what had possibly once been a full statue but may have always just been an overly large bust of a head.

The head of Boulton had two eyes which had rusted into perpetual shuteye and a mouth that was looked down upon by what might have once been quite a regal moustache but was then little more than a smear, tiny patches of metal not rusted and showing his original colour splattered like pox across the rest of his features showing him to have been a statue of much finer quality and material than most of the ones salivating at the sight of him trembling and flapping his looked down upon mouth with the haplessness of a seashell with wings, each flap letting out a cloud of the progressively darker rust until, with a tremendous booming noise that temporarily made the world go black, he exploded into a beam of light so dense and bright it couldn’t be seen into. The beam of light, stretching from floor to ceiling of the hall, stayed dense and bright for several seconds before beginning to swirl in the manner of a tax-evading tornado, the tip of its swirl bouncing on the bed in the spot where the head of Boulton had been before finally dissipating, leaving behind only a little nest of fragmented rust, the egg resting in its centre not an egg at all but a shiny silver bucket that shouldn’t have surprised Fred by appearing but still did. The horse’s teeth were two coconuts making love, going slower and slower as the excitement of the scene died down, stopping without finishing as the cheering and whooping of the rest of the statues faded too and several white coats appeared to remove the bucket, the bodies of all the statues returning to their immobility with the exception of their eyes which fixed and flickered to remain on the fastly disappearing bucket that had been Boulton until the fastly disappearing bucket that had been Boulton had completed its disappearing.

Fred’s teeth took up where the horse’s had left off and clicked together, two homeless pennies huddled together in a winter rain, as he contemplated what he’d seen until he felt as if he felt all the patches of rust on his body growing and eating away at him bit by bit as if there was a hungry rat let loose inside the pipes and tubes of his innards who had no qualms about coming up for air to munch indiscriminately on things it thought looked tasty, and when he felt as if he felt that a mad thrashing, accompanied with a little old lady groan that escaped his lips like a stray balloon and rose into the air, began to be done by him. The little girl turned to look at the fearful flaying of Fred, reaching from her bed with her oddly long finger to prod him gently but repeatedly in the left eye, a shhhhhhing sound emerging serpently from her lips until he stopped thrashing and groaning to look at the tip of her prodding perpetually ponderous finger which had an expanding patch of rust on it far worse than any of the other patches on her, a rust so rusty the slightest breeze or gust or gale sent parts of it smoking away into the ether and encouraged him to scuttle as far back on his bed as a strap would allow.

“Did you know Boulton?” She asked once he’d scuttled.

“N-n-no,” Fred stuttered, fearfully watching the tip of the little girl’s finger sway in the space his left eye had occupied.

“Then what’s up duck?”

“I didn’t know that’s what happened.”

“You didn’t know going bucket meant you turned into a bucket?”

“I didn’t know we would go bucket at all!”

“What did you think would happen? We’d disintegrate into clouds and float into the sky and that would be that? Wishful. The white coats told horse who told me that we’d have to have a really lazy disease for it to end us like that. At least we don’t have a lazy disease.”

“What are they going to do with him now he’s a bucket?”

“I don’t know. Use him to collect water or hold a mop. Sell him to people who’ll use him to collect water or hold a mop. You know, bucket things,” the little girl, who’d finally withdrawn her finger and gone back to being still, shrugged with her eyes.

“But doesn’t the idea of that scare you? Buckets don’t have eyes or a mouth or anything,” Fred was adrift and agog that nobody else was adrift or agog themselves about the entire situation.

“I’m assuming we won’t need eyes or mouths or anythings when we’re buckets but of course it’s scary and we’re all scared,” the horse snapped while moving its mouth as little as possible, his teeth hitting together nonetheless with a force that made it clear they wished Fred’s gonads were between them. “Why do you think we’re trying to stay still? For fun?”

Fred sat up as much as he could sit up to angrily reply, the strap pulling tight across his chest with the type of restriction only a strap made for restricting could enforce, just enough for his body to be at an obtuse angle and for the digits at the end of his hand to mimic a furious mouth, but before that open mouth could spew or sign any words at all into the ether, an old speaker attached like a hair follicle to the curved wall directly above Fred’s head, snap, crackled, popped and announced with the voice of an elderly snake charmer that it was that time again, yes that’s right, treatment time and streams of white coats began flooding into the hall from areas unseen and unknown, all with different objects in hand, all of which they held with the air of charitable givers giving umbrellas to those caught in the midst of a terrible rain shower when in fact the objects they had in hand were nothing like umbrellas brought in the midst of terrible rain shower but things such as guitars, canvases, paints, beers, plates of food, cans, megaphones, tape recorders, violins, microphones, wine, chopsticks, detergent, antibacterial spray, soap, shampoo, tables and chairs, boxes of toys such as little cars and figures, torches, blankets, teddy bears, teddy dogs, teddy cats, dogs and cats, one giant tortoise being led by a lead, forks and knives, meringue, stones, and lemon shaped juggling balls. A white coat with an electric violin and amp went to the horse’s bedside, another holding a plate of macaroni and cheese went to the little girls, and approaching Fred’s, a white coat with white hair and a small white goatee and two cheekbones made from bone holding a can of polish, a rag, and a bottle of beer, all of which were brandished in front of his face with a hand as steady as an unflyable kite as the sound of an electric violin being poorly played filled one ear and cheese and pasta being force fed filled his other.

His white coat mimed clearing his throat before screaming over the sounds coming from the bedsides beside Fred and the similar sounds coming from and echoing around the entire hall.

 “Hello, I’m sure you have questions. Hold them inside for a mere moment. Introductions first. You are my patient and you have rustitis. I am Doctor Doc, one of the leading healers and leaders of the Establishment and I will be treating your rustitis. This will be a long process that may take longer than you last. We are sorry this is the case but the case it is, so try and take heart that your potential demise could be the key to us finding the cure for others. You can let your questions out now.”

Fred’s face had turned as shiny as a new fish from holding in just two questions which had been competing with each other to be the first to scale his body and emerge victorious from his mouth so when he did let them out, both of them having arrived at the same time and been beating on the drum of his clenched lips, they spewed into the world almost simultaneously.

“Your name is Doc? What will you be treating me with?”

“Yes, my name is Doc, short for Doclan, and with the items I hold in my hands, of course.”

The can of polish, rag, and bottle of beer was again brandished to Fred’s face before the bottle of beer was placed on the ground and, with the air of a magician convincing an audience he is about to do a dramatic trick but instead just exposes his nipples to them, Doc twisted the nozzle on the can of polish from locked to unlocked, spraying the substance first on just the visibly affected rust areas on his torso but then everywhere so that foam as white as the surf of the sea coated his body. Fred looked at the little girl as his body was foamed, her oversized finger poking at the white coat of the white coat who was shovelling food like slime into the Styx into her, each poke causing the white coat no apparent discomfort, their face remaining as jolly as a jellyfish in spring as their mouths repeated, ‘It’s homemade at home by me!’, but each one reducing the size of that finger, and then looked at the horse who lay as still as he could as the electric violin let out a tune that could have been O Danny Boy and could have been a cat being molested, accepting its treatment with the wide eyes of a steed broken in and willing.

Doc, once Fred was covered to his satisfaction, began wiping away at the foam with a variety of polishing techniques more akin to that of a window cleaner- the S shape polish, The V shape polish, the rubadubdub polish, the whenI’mcleaningIsinggggg polish, the circular polish, the freestyle jazz polish, before doing the towelling off a wet child finale- each stroke, rub, and wipe of the rag on Fred’s surface making him tingle as Doc, who spoke as he stroked, rubbed, and wiped, ducked his head close enough for the words to be heard.

“You’re in luck having me treating you. Such luck. I almost cured my last statue. They were showing such promise. I’d faded not one, but two of their rust patches to patches of almost not rust before they, alas, went bucket. But I considered what I’d done, and I think now I’ve figured out a way to speed up the process. With these treatments and my new know how, you could be the one!”

“What treatments? Where? You’re polishing me, that little girl is being force fed, someone’s playing some awful violin. I don’t understand,” Fred’s voice came out in the tone of a claustrophobic tortoise feverously praying to escape its shell.

Doc stopped polishing in its tracks and looked sternly down at Fred who’d shouted loudly enough for some other white coats to hear, his mouth in the middle of his goatee a puckered anus ready to release a shit storm as the violin screeched into silence and the white coat holding it brandishing their horse haired bow like a rapier towards Fred, eyes wet as puddles and cheeks pillowy.

“Of course, you don’t understand, are you a white coat? Are you a member of the Establishment? Have you ever had to treat a patient so sick you’re afraid that nothing you do will ever cure them? No, you’re a statue with rustitis. A statue with rustitis whose damn well lucky if you ask me to be being treated by such an esteemed white coat as Doc.”

Doc held his hands up before the bow, twisting them as if controlling the internal temperature of the angry white coat.

“Now, now Igoress, calm down. Carry on with your playing, which I much mention is getting much better by the way, Fred here is just afraid.”

Igoress stared at Fred with their bow brandished for several more seconds, its tip shaking with a Parkinsonian tremble before spinning with a dancers gait back to the horses' bedside to begin again inciting wails from the electric violin while Doc, still paused in his polishing, looked down at Fred, his brows berating him as his mouth gently explained, the very definition of a man with good bedside manners.

“We members of the Establishment treat our patients with rustitis in the best way members of an Establishment not made to treat patients with rustitis can do. This disease hasn’t been around long and we don’t know much, so we treat it in the ways we think best. Me, for example, I’ve always been a good polisher, Igoress over there can, almost, play the violin, and Llewyn has always made damn good macaroni and cheese. Now, accept your treatment because it will only maybe work if you accept it and there is nothing else to be done.”

Fred fell silent as Doc began to polish him again, accepting the rubs and wipes like tight hugs from an aunt you’re obligated to accept them from, until his parts unaffected by rust shone like the light of life, the parts affected had an even uglier blemish to them than before, and Doc wiped some sweat from his face, throwing his rag down and cracking open the bottle of beer he’d placed carefully on the floor before matronly lifting Fred’s head up and tipping some of the liquid across his tongue and into his depths where it swished and swashed down with the sound of a rainstick when you’re all tucked up inside. Fred liked the taste of the beer and was disappointed when Doc stopped pouring into him and started pouring into himself, relaxing into an armchair that appeared from nowhere at the bedside as an alarm went off and the rest of the white coats placed little white pills in their statues mouths that even without swallowing made them close their eyes and sleep and all streamed away, leaving with their items so quickly that if you blinked you would have missed them, all except Doc, who stayed in his armchair beyond a blink watching Fred and taking minuscule sips of the beer in between periodic licks of his lips.

“I’d like to start devoting a bit of extra time to my treatments,” Doc explained without being asked to. “I feel that forming a connection with my patients is the missing link to what I’ve been doing and forming a connection can’t be done to a time constraint or while polishing someone. No, you have to have a drink with them after a hard day's work. I’m simply doing my duty to my treatment by doing this. Does that make me better than the rest of the white coats who don’t do it? Most of them would, and do, say yes, but not me. I’m very humble.”

Doc leaned forward and poured more beer into Fred’s mouth which had been left agape with the aura of a tunnel waiting to let in battle reinforcements, the alcohol entering his system until his head felt as if a bumble bee was in there bumbling about and his pleading sailor face became a content sailor face, a grin changing its structure as Doc finally finished off the beer with a dramatic gulping, throwing the empty bottle into his deep white coat pocket, his eyes shiny as he spread his wide hands wide, the lines of his palms beckoning Fred to lean into the treatment by asking, ‘Tell me about you Fred’, and Fred did.

“I’m Fred. A statue. I stood in Victoria Square on a triangle pedestal for twenty years. The visitors of the square liked me and the two statues I stood with liked me. I liked them too. All of sudden I caught rustitis and now I can’t be in the square or stand on my triangle because I was taken by you and the Establishment. I’m confused and scared about maybe becoming a bucket without eyes or a mouth or anything.”

 “The lines on my palms didn’t ask you to tell me about your situation. I read your case file, and I know your situation. I want us to form a connection, Fred, my Freddy boy, I need you to tell me a secret. A secret something that reveals a certain something about yourself to me. A secret something that I can gasp and nod and feel as if I know you in a way nobody else does.”

Fred cleared his throat and thought until the beery bee in his bonnet told him what he already knew, that he’d had spent his life posing and had no secrets, not in his bonnet nor his bumper, and so, scared that would mean he couldn’t lean into the treatment and thus commence to be treated, closed his eyes like a rabbit afraid of rejection, whispering. “But I don’t think I have any secret somethings.”

Doc’s mouth became an upside-down rainbow with two pots of gold masquerading as dimples on each tip as he considered what he’d heard before he grabbed Fred’s hand, rubbing his thumb over the surface of his metal, pointing first at his chest and then at Fred’s with his other hand, pointing and pointing until Fred felt a little sailing ship sail by his heart and throw a rope around it before sailing into Doc and throwing that same rope around his, tying them together.

“Now that’s worthy of a connection. Do you feel that? That’s treatment baby. You told me something and to make this connection as strong a connection as a connection between a white coat and a statue who’ve just met can be, I will now disclose something to you. When I was young I… sigh… I had a dream where I molested a shrew.”

Doc nodded after his confession, looking down in shame while Fred nodded in return to show he’d heard and accepted that secret and what’s more wished he could move his arms out of their restrictions enough to pat him on the side of his white goatee and gently show that he felt the connection, oh boy did he feel it, but before he could say something to show what he was wishing, Doc was standing up and looking at his watch.

“That’s enough treatment for today methinks. We have a connection that we will continue to build on in further treatments, believe you me.”

Doc pulled out a white pill of his own and, putting it on a tongue which lapped out as trustingly as a trussed up taco terrier, forced Fred into a sleep in which he didn’t dream but merely stared at an oil painting depicting the horror he’d no doubt feel when turning bucket until he awoke again in a hall absolutely bustling with statues in states of shock and excitement about the four buckets that had appeared while he’d been gone, all lining the back wall, the horse who Igoress had been playing so badly to one of them, gone and replaced with a bucket made from shiny wood and dull metal bolts.

“Finally awake?” The little girl asked, not yet a bucket herself but much rustier than she’d been before Fred had slept, her childish features marred by the creeping and crawling patches, her oversized finger suddenly normal sized as she turned as fully as her restrictions allowed, her rust addled components letting out Shakespearian shrieks as she did… haaaaaaarkkkkkk… horatiooooooooooooo… “You missed it all. I was lucky. I woke up as it was happening. Four buckets, all at the same time. Look, the light of them burned the floor! The horse wasn’t even that rusty, but it didn’t matter, bang, bucket he was. He wasn’t even awake yet.”

Fred shook his head in a daze and a similar shrieking as what came from the little girl came from the folds and sheets of him… Viennaaaaaaa…. and when he looked down to see how that could be so, in shock and horror, he saw, with shock and horror, that his own rust had gotten worse to a degree less than that of the little girl now he’d woken up but more than she’d been when he was first brought in, a swirling pattern of it decorating his chest and shoulders giving him the fear his life would never be beautiful or good that sipping expired milk will give you.

“Nobody thought you could go bucket asleep or as not very rusty as the horse was but now everybody’s thoughts have been changed by the fact that both of those things can and have happened,” the little girl suddenly gave a leap from her back, coiling her spine so that she came a tiny bit into the air with a smile. “But try not to show you’re scared. There’s a new educated rumour going around that showing fear makes you go bucket faster. I’m also heard that the previous advice of staying immobile to help with treatment was just a joke by the white coats and that it’s actually more helpful to keep moving.”

The little girl’s features ticked in perpetual movement as if some great beast was waking inside of her and pushing at certain nerves within her casing and it was then that Fred noticed that it wasn’t just her, that whereas when he’d last been awake the hall had been accompanied by the Royal Stillness Symphony Orchestra, it was, now he was awake again, accompanied in fact by the Royal Movement Symphony Orchestra, all the other statues leaping and jerking within the bounds of their confines like machine parts come loose from their machines, smiles spitting in the face of fear tattooed on their faces so they resembled convicts queuing up to be shot but not giving their shooters the satisfaction of shooting people not smiling in a spitting manner. Fred began to move too, with more force than everyone else, jerking his limbs around and letting out a scream that shut most of the other statues in the immediate area up and removed their smiles, a scream that had an under and overtone of fear to it, words mingled in with its gargling,

‘HOOOOOOWHOOOOOOFuckfuckfuckfuck, I’m afraid and I’m not going to hide it because I am afraid and you keep changing your minds about how to fix things and I want to speak to Doc because I’m his patient and we have a connection and I want him to hold me and tell me it’s okay to be scared.’

When his scream finally fell off the edge of the cliff it had been precariously balancing on, the other statues in the hall began their fearless in the face of fear smiles again, making them even bigger than before so they could make like a gaggle of magpies ignoring a dodo in distress, thinking in their hearts that he would be next to go bucket while they would all get better, and then, from wherever in the Establishment the white coats congregated, Doc appeared, sliding through the circular maze of beds, white coat billowing in a capeian manner, to place a hand on Fred’s brow gently.

“You are showing you’re afraid, stop it. Have you not heard the new advice now we’ve had enough of our joke? Showing your fear is detrimental to your treatment.”

“I told him. I told him,” the little girl said. “I tried to help. Can I get a new white coat because I tried to help? Please. I don’t want any more macaroni.”

Fred and Doc ignored the little girl who was doing the worm in bed as she spoke, their eyes on each other as Fred’s tongue waggled, “But I am scared. Very scared. Scared about this, scared about that. Scared I’ll go bucket when I really don’t want to, scared because I’m even rustier now than when you started treating me.”

Doc put two fingers upon his chin in an Apostolic manner before using his remaining six fingers to undo Fred’s restraints and wave him up and out of bed with a ‘come with me’, chirp, taking his hand and pulling him away from the back wall of the hall and through and towards the right side wall of the hall, on which, almost hidden, sat a small brown door with the number three perched like a cleaved in two number eight on it. Doc pushed the door open roughly and they stepped through into another hall, larger than the one they’d left and more appropriately shaped to the cubic nature of the building from the outside, one divided into patchwork sections by towels and rags and curtains with a thin mazey strip of a path running between them for you to find their way through. They walked down this path for a while going sideways and upways and crossways, Fred marvelling at the sheer lack of noise permeating the air, as if all sound was being smothered by a jealous pillow, until Doc stopped them at a floral curtained section, his name embroidered on it in emerald green thread, and they entered, Doc pushing Fred down on a wheely chair next to a chest of drawers and quickly drawing the curtain back across the hole they’d made, the silence which had followed them in there becoming somehow even more so, so it was as if they stood in a vacuum cleaner that had accidentally hoovered up the vacuum of space.

“This is my office,” Doc said, sitting down himself while synonymously drawing up the sleeve of his white coat to reveal that he had a pale arm under it, a pale arm of normal length but one that’s paleness was disfigured by patches of greenish rustitis. “And as you can see I, and I’ll tell you now all of the other white coats as well, have what all you statues have. None of us has gone bucket yet, but the time is getting closer. None of our treatments have worked so far and I, we, need one of them to work, for all our sakes.”

Fred’s mouth, so used to falling open and letting out a string of fearful nonsense, was already halfway to being open but was stopped on its rusty hinges by the palm of Doc striking it with the sound of a triangle being clanged somewhere in the back of a complicated piece of music.

“We have a connection. You showing your fear makes me want to show my fear and I don’t want to show my fear because deep down I believe what we white coats have made up. Besides, neither of us should be afraid at all because I have a plan that has never been tried before and so is almost certainly bound to work.”

“What is it?” Fred kept his tone nice and middle ground though his innards were a battlefield of giblets stampeding to escape a disintegrating arena.

“I’m going to put a white coat on you and let you treat some statues.”

“Why would that work?”

“Because it doesn’t seem as if it should. Why should trees grow when wood seems so dead? Who knows. This has never been done before, a statue white coat, who would have thought, and so I think if you treat a few statues, eventually either they or you will begin the process of de-rusting and BOOM, a cure.”

At that Doc threw off the rest of his white coat and then top to reveal that underneath them he was nearly all rustitis with a hole where his heart should have been so that if Fred had wanted to he could have peeked through and seen the face of God, and then he threw that white coat at Fred caught it with his head before standing and slipping it on, becoming a white coat in all the ways putting on a white coat can make you, it muffling the screeches of his movements as Doc himself pulled on a t-shirt and sat down where Fred had been sitting, putting his feet up in the air with the air of a handsome feline about to be milked.

“Don’t dally, go, go,” he said when Fred paused.

“But where shall I go? Who shall I treat?”

“I guess I can hold off Llewyn and his macaroni for now so go to the little girl. Treat her.”

“But how shall I treat her?”

Doc sighed like a trunkless elephant.

“What are you good at? What can you do?”

“I can stand really still.”

“It has to be something more than that. You can’t just put on a white coat and stand as still as a statue.”

“But I’ve never done anything other than be a statue.”

“Well, we need something.”

Doc got up and began rummaging through the wooden chest of drawers that by golly seemed to be there simply to be rummaged around in before, with a “Hoooooooo”, he withdrew a large thermal mug sealed with a black lid and threw it to Fred whose hands sprung to grasp its round warmth instinctively, caressing it as a bovinophile would an udder.

“Take a sip of that with your gob.”

Fred did as Doc said and took the lid off, releasing a finger of visible steam that suggestively fingered his nose holes and carried with it the stench of a burnt carrot, before sucking a sip and turning back to Doc while posing as he imagined a version of himself that had been born a white coat would do while treating, putting a hand on his hip and sullenly gazing into the middle distance, a pose that made Doc act as a stray dog at a buffet, veering up further on his hind legs and smacking his lips.

“That’s what I’m talking about, yoooooooooooo-mama, you look great. Very Geil, to bust out my almost perfect German. You drink very well and what’s more look good doing it. That my friend is coffee, and drinking it shall be your treatment. That mug won’t ever run out, believe me, so take it, go to the little girl, drink around her, maybe talk to her a little as well, but mainly drink.”

Fred took more sips of coffee, deep ones that felt like rivers as they flowed into him, and sighed, the burnt carrot stench having been replaced by the stench of perfectly cooked toffee and the taste, which upon first suck had been like tar- hot and thick- dancing devilishly on his tongue, having replaced itself with what he could only imagine was the taste of godly ambrosia and didn’t move until Doc began to jostle him towards the curtain door with his feet.

“Don’t dilly dally, go treat. You don’t need to wait until treatment time dammit. You can treat by your own rules. Be the renegade white coat, the maverick. We all need you to succeed quickly, and I definitely don’t want to see you fail slowly.”

Doc’s words shoved Fred out into the wilderness for him to walk in the direction he thought was right for him to get back to the hall he’d been in before, zigzagging like a hindered bolt of lightning through the maze of curtains, towels, and rags, drinking his coffee as he did and feeling more and more like dancing in a moonlight he wished was spotlighting him until finally stumbling upon the back of the brown door with the dismembered eight on it and opening it, puff puffing on his mug’s hotness like a choo-choo train has he stood white coated before the ailing statues, forgetting with his feeling of power that underneath that white coat he was still also an ailing statue. Fred followed the curvature of the hall like a blind mouse, sniffing at the toffee-scented finger of steam and trusting it to point him in the right direction until he came again upon his own empty bed and the little girl who he was surprised hadn’t rusted any more in his absence, the bed where the horse and then the bucket that had once been the horse having been filled by a cat-sized plastic statue of a slug hunting toad desperately stretching its tongue a metre out.

The armchair that Doc had materialised by Fred’s bed had since been placed by some unknown helper at the little girl’s bedside and Fred swept himself onto it with a dramatic flurry, coughing to gain the still gyrating and jiving little girl’s attention, stroking the lapels of his white coat as he did, expecting the little girl’s little mouth to fall open at the sight of him, a statue as a white coat, but instead, that little girl’s little mouth simply grinned as if she’d merely stumbled upon a balloon filled with grinning gas.

“A new white coat, oh yes a new treatment! Thank God, I couldn’t have swallowed any more macaroni, let alone cheese.”

“Are you not surprised it’s me giving you that new treatment?” Fred asked, slightly put out, leaving his thermal mug hanging from between his teeth like an armless Inuit.

“You? I don’t know you. I suppose I knew you for a bit when you were a statue but I don’t know any white coats so even if you are the same statue I knew for a bit underneath that white coat, I certainly don’t know you now so no, I’m not surprised but am curious as to what you’ll treat me with? I really hope it isn’t more macaroni food. Don’t tell me it’s more macaroni food.”

Fred’s put outness disappeared at the sight of the little girl’s eyes looking so earnestly and questioning at him, a man of power and decision making, so, raising his thermal mug dramatically with his pinkie sticking out like some sort of vestigial tail and wiggling his ass to get comfy, drank deep from his well of coffee, almost drowning himself before coming back up for air, blowing his finger of steam into the little girl’s eyes where it coiled and licked like a flame at the rust creeping around the sides of them.

“I drink this coffee and you listen as I most likely, almost certainly, definitely, talk. The end result, the treatment works and either you or I are cured.”

The little girl, obedient as a fable, waited as Fred sucked back some more joe, waited as time commenced to pass, the seconds doing what seconds do, speeding down the autobahn into nothing as Fred waited for some words he could use to treat the little girl with to arrive at his tongue until finally the little girl, who was patient and obedient only until she got tired of being those things, proceeded to incite the words to appear herself.

“Tell me a story. A good one.”

Fred looked into the depths of his coffee and swirled the shadow substance around as he tried not to panic, taking back the finger of steam from the little girl, breathing it in, deeper and deeper so that its entire length became inserted into the depths of his brain, its tip there not licking or lapping like fire but prodding and pushing at all the sleeping masses and parts that resided there in beds with quilts up to their chins, legs and feet skinny and disused but sturdy enough to carry their weight as they were awoken by the incessant prods and pushes and forced to roll over and out of those beds with grumbling grumbles, pulling at red tipped levers that sparked and flashed.

“There was a girl once who desired nothing more from the world than to be able to eat porridge and sit on a boat on the water,” Fred’s voice was a mistreated otter standing before a warm hug as it started in its attempt to tell a story, a good one. “She had many oats, lots of milk, and a very nice boat made from shiny wood with a blue sail sticking from its mast, but unfortunately there wasn’t a drop of water around for that boat to sit on as the ground where she lived was a hungry beast. A dry thing filled with cracks and slices like the dome of a bald head made from sand.”

Fred’s voice was interrupted by his hands raising his mug back to his lips to take back more than the finger, cramming in fact the whole body into his brain, finding room somehow, smacking his tongue at the taste and clicking his fingers, feeling gargantuan in both mind and spirit.

“One day, sad beyond belief at not being able to eat her porridge while sitting on a boat which was, in turn, sitting on water, the girl began crying thick salty tears that dribbled from her eyes and fell like drops of rain from the tippy tip of her nose. These tears plink plonked to the hungry ground and, knowing their origins despair, surprisingly, raised a knife before they could be swallowed, threatening the shocked ground with castration until the shocked ground lost its appetite and cowered into a foetal position, allowing the tears to stay until their edges touched other edges and became more than single tears...”

The little girl in her bed watched Fred talk and every now and then inhaled deeply with a flaring nose that acted as a net swinging around a lakeside trying to catch a hint of the scented steam that had once floated from the top of his mug and tickled her but was then firmly ingrained with the rest of its body within the maze of his brain, each swing being followed by a shower of rust flakes falling from her marred features, what had been her oversized finger but was then little more than a stub waving in the air with the air of a frog conductor conducting a symphony of bassoons as if it, as a sort of finger itself, could call the steam back out.

“… soon they formed a lake the colour of an aristocrat’s embarrassment that drowned the ground and raised the little girl’s boat in the air. Unfortunately, the girl, who had jumped onto her boat as soon as the lake started forming, had only two hands available and could only grab a few barrels of oats and a single jug of milk to bring on board the boat before the rest of her stock was washed away, but she didn’t mind too much to see them go. In fact, she was happy enough to be sitting in a boat on some water to stop crying once a large enough lake had formed. To stop crying and start smiling as she prepared a small bowl of porridge and ate it for the first time while bob bob bobbing on the lake.”

Fred waited for the little girl to speak, his hands, in the manner of a giant holding a lock of hair taken from a non-giant lover they’d physically loved and subsequently crushed, curled around his mug, nervous until the little girl clapped her hands together and wriggled and jiggled for the first time not from her desire to be constantly moving but because of excitement.

“I liked that. I liked that a lot. I like this treatment and when I had it, I liked the smell of that coffee. Could I try some of its taste?”

“Coffee taste is for white coat’s only and even if it isn’t and I’m wrong, it’s still a no because though Doc told me this mug is endless, he could be wrong, and it would make me very sad if it was finished by anyone other than me.”

“But what if the taste could cure me quicker. You’d be the best white coat around then and even if it did run out, get more.”

The little girl’s lips pursed, stretching towards the edge of Fred’s mug in a manner crocodilian, but Fred only nodded thoughtfully in the way all nodders who aren’t listening nod, sitting back, his white coat brushing his ankles as he took another bigggg long gulp of coffee, the taste of it having acquired subtle hints and clues of hazelnut, dark chocolate, and iron the more he sampled, and he flicked through these hints and clues, enjoying each one individually and collectively while stroking a large patch of rust along his collar bone, quite enjoying the lumpy bumpiness of that too until his stroking came upon a small patch of rust within the larger patch that felt less lumpy bumpy and more just lumpy, causing him to use his eyes and see that the small patch of rust also looked less lumpy bumpy and, what’s more, less rusty than the larger patch around it.

“Break time for treatment, that’s what I say,” he stammered before running back to the office of Doc, finding it upon throwing back the curtain much changed; Doc, still there, but lying in the crack of a luxurious heart-shaped bed completely naked apart from the parts of his body, such as from the waist down and where once there had been pectorals, that while Fred had been spouting a story to the little girl had succumbed to rustiness and gone away.

“You see what has become of me?” Doc raised his head when he heard Fred come pantingly in, also raising what would have been a thumb if hadn’t just been a fist. “All in the space of five minutes. One second I was relaxing, drinking a beer, polishing my arm, trying to form a connection with myself, the next, reality’s palm, my face, SMACK, I fell, my legs piles of rust, my middle melting away. This is a cruel disease.”

“But look,” Fred sensually exposed the small patch of treated rust housed tumourly within the larger patch of untreated rust on his collar bone. “I’m getting better.”

Doc attempted to jump to feet that no longer existed and so simply fell back down onto the bed with the grace of a disco dancing dodecahedron, what had once been a jolly well deep belly button becoming less than that and joining the dusty rust pile of himself lying in the middle of the hole that had been his middle, but still the light in his eyes jumping to attention as he shook his hands together as if they belonged not to him but to two eminent businessmen who’d been waiting a long time to meet and whose first impressions were more than good.

“I’m the greatest of all the white coats. Look at that rust, running away from its death which my imagination imagined with such force it’s becoming reality. Was it just drinking the coffee around the patient that did it? Was it more? I need information.”

“I drank the coffee around her, but I also told a story I made up. I’d never done that before, make a story up, but apparently, I’m good at it. I’m a storyteller.”

“Undoubtedly. Indubitably. Christ on a cracker at Christmas this is exciting. What about the patient? Did her rustitis show any improvement? Did you give her any coffee?”

Fred clutched his mug tighter, hesitating before clearing his throat with a shake of the head, swirling the hem of his white coat around his knees like a blackhole hating ballet dancer doing their act in front of a ballet hating blackhole.

“I gave the little girl some coffee, of course. Are you suggesting I didn’t? Of course you’re not because she did have some, but when she indicated that she didn’t enjoy the taste as much as she enjoyed my story I stopped giving her any just in case it was a waste. Which it would have been, because no there was no improvement to her rustitis.”

“So, the treatment only works for those administering it. Mmmm, a reversal of the typical white coat/ patient relationship. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, how interesting and good,” Doc smiled at Fred before holding out a hand, its one remaining finger doing the mariachi. “Well, pass me my white coat back then, lickety-split. I’ve gotta get to work!”

“What do you mean?” Fred instinctively took a step back. “I’m getting better. If I take the white coat off, I’ll stop getting better.”

“You won’t, you won’t. Well, you will, but only until me and the rest of the actual white coats are cured. Then we’ll take to the beds and let the rest of you have way. That’s an actual white coat promise. Now come on, have off with it.”

“What if I go bucket before you’re finished being cured? What if all the statues do? Look how quickly your rust has spread.”

“Exactly, look how quickly I could go bucket if we don’t start my treatment immediately! Now I don’t want to invoke our connection, not to mention my natural superiority over you, a statue, but I have to insist you pass me my things right now.”

Fred took a long swig from the mug, knowing as he did that his connection to Doc had been seized like a jewel by Blackbeard by the black stuff in there, the finger and body of steam, which had slunk back out of his brain as soon as his making up of stories was over, beckoning him to drink some more and then never stop drinking, to stay in the liquid forever, and so, shaking his head at Doc once he’d finished slurping, Fred stamped his foot on the floor.

“Our connection has been rerouted and I won’t do what you insist. I’ll keep wearing this white coat, drinking this coffee, and spinning my yarns until I’m completely cured and not just on my way there, and you’ll keep lying there and getting worse until that happens.”

Fred’s shout was a grain of rice announcing its passion for frying, the sheer loudness causing Doc to cower in his bed with his neck sinking into his chest, his crumbling hands held up as to defend themselves against a Fred who hadn’t planned to strike him, his crumbling hands which had a meekness that prompted Fred to strike him despite his lack of plan, giving him a little flick on the nose that turned its rust black and blue. Doc began to howl once he’d been flicked, the jagged end of his waist that had once worn legs kicking up and down as he mixed vowels together indiscriminately, “OOOOOOUUUUUUIIIIIIAAAAAEEAIOUEAIIIII!”, before Fred stopped his mixing as abruptly as an ant in headlights by flouncing off through the curtain to continue his treatment, waving his elbows like maracas until he reached the little girl who was pleased to see his mug again, her lips immediately pursing.

“Well, it’s been several minutes. Break times can’t last forever, and I figured I should see how you were looking. I see now you’re looking exactly the same except for several patches that have gotten significantly worse. On with the treatment then!”

“I really think, and it’s not just because it smells so good it would make me salivate if I could salivate, that if you shared the coffee my treatment would go much faster and with a bang and a wallop and a tick, I’d be as cured as ham and then you could be as cured as that too.”

Fred stiffened like a statue and put the little girl’s pursing in the bin by physically pushing her lips back towards the rest of her features, his breath becoming the sound of wind in a tunnel and funnelling out to strike the little girl’s face, the same shade and scent as the finger of steam arising from his mug as he asked.

“Are you a white coat?”

“No.”

“Have you ever even worn a white coat?”

“No.”

“Exactly. You’re a white coatless statue so do as white coatless statues are supposed to and leave the treatment ideas to me and the Establishment. In fact, if you can’t just leave your thoughts where you find them, discard them in a bin. The coffee is mine. Ask for it again and you’ll receive no treatment from me or anyone else and bucket you shall go. Stand of the under?”

The little girl sat sullenly back and she and Fred stared at each other, a battle of wills armed with batons having a baton-type tussle, until, finally, she was tussled into a submission that equalled the back of her head resting on her bed’s pillow and her ears opening wide enough to swallow the voice of Fred, who clenched one white corner of his white coat in hand as he again began to story and sip, the rusty parts of him becoming slightly less rusty at the end of each one he spoke, the rusty parts of her becoming slightly more so throughout. He told her the one about red having a fight with blue who was having a fight with yellow so it was that they were all fighting until they realised the fine line between love and hate and stopped to form a throuple and collectively give birth to brown, he told her about the man who stuck himself in a hole filled with quicksand and refused to leave until he was given the perfect bite of croissant but eventually sank to the bottom all alone and biteless, he told her about a featherless bird who was mocked for being featherless and unable to fly until it evolved and invented a flying machine that helped it fly better than any of those with feathers, he told her about a photograph of a desert that wasn’t fixed in space and time and how its image would shift and move depending on the time of day and of the little boy who found the photograph and realised he could dive into the image and so did dive only to find he was and had been a desert snake all along, he told her about a bowler hat made from wood by a carpenter who’d always wanted to be a hat maker instead of what he was and how that wooden bowler hat was rejected by the men and women who wear hats not made from wood but because of that rejection went on to experience adventures no other hat-shaped object in the history of anything could claim to have experienced such as becoming a pirate and marrying a slug, he told her about a chocolate bar the size of a skyscraper never unwrapped and destined to never be so though it was made of the most delightful tasting chocolate the world had ever seen and so simply basked in the sun until it grew so hot it melted and flooded the city it sat in.

The little girl never got to hear the end of the chocolate bar story as that same little girl, all of a sudden, went bucket with a tremendous bang much louder and tremendouser than the bang Boulton had bequeathed when he’d done the same, a shard of bright yellow light piercing Fred’s eyes in the instant before she fully became a bucket but had already ceased to be a statue, the bucket of her when it appeared having the appearance of any old classic plain stainless steel bucket if that stainless steel was whiteish rock, its surface trembling against the buffed surface of Fred’s hand, which he briefly laid on its side in commiseration, as if it still held the writhing spirit of the statue it’d been, before pushing himself while still story telling in the direction of a chicken the size of a desk rock rocking back and forth in a bed too small for it that would have been rusted from beak to cloaca if patches of unrusted granite resembling miniscule versions of the polka spots of a polka man hadn’t still dotted its sides.

“… and the city was forever coated, chocolate coated. The end. Good story, shame you only heard the end. I’m Fred, a white coat, previously just a statue with rustitis and without a white coat, I’ll be treating you…”

“Baaaarqqqkk?” came from the chicken, who was one of the rare statues made so well they could sound only like the thing they’d been made to resemble, as Fred went straight into the story of a man who, being in love with his own daughter, locked himself up in a high tower without windows or doors to protect her before ultimately being rescued by a foolish hero who thought he’d had been locked up by a fiend and needed rescuing and who, upon being rescued, thought he’d been saved by God’s grace and had permission to take his daughter as a wife and did just that to the misfortune of their severely impaired offspring, the coffee bouncing around Fred’s mind like a ball designed to bounce causing him to speak faster and with more excitement, his foot tap tapping in time with his words, each one giving out the ringing of a bell muted by touch. The chicken went bucket at the very end of the incest story as if consciously taking a way out, wings a-flapping as it boomed away, but Fred barely noticed- so intoxicated was he by the mug and the substance within- his veins a marching band marching and banding in a rising drone, his tongue a piece of Velcro catching those sticky treatment words flying from his sparking mind as his body zip zipped from the chicken’s bedside to a section of four bedsides that he spoke to as a whole, as if their rusted forms formed one giant bedside, speaking until the crackling speakers lining the hall walls crackled to announce that it was that time again, that time equalling treatment! and all the other white coats began flooding in, some commencing to remove the buckets Fred had left in his wake.

“Excuse me? You, statue, why are you in a white coat?” Four white coats chorused in unison, the hair on their heads bristling with just as much union, every strand of it on their skulls standing up and increasing in thickness so that they could have easily and collectively brushed down a dragon if there’d been a dragon handy and a person big enough to wield them, as they stood to the side of the bedsides that Fred was treating and that they were used to treating themselves, their voices aggressive but not enough to stir the big ol’ cup of coffee that was Fred who thought, ‘I know your secrettttt,’ when they interrupted him and stood up, his movements fluid, his rust barely surface level, to grip and rip their white coats from their bodies.

Gasp, shock, and horror were things done and felt by all the statues who could see the rust eating away at the white coats and curiosity followed by a gasp, a shock, and a horror were done and felt by the statues who couldn’t see this exposed event but could and did hear tell of it as like a domino falling, screams followed by a roiling as statues strained against their restrictions filled the air. The white coats Fred had exposed screamed too, their noises the same as foxes caught in play, their legs slightly crossed and bent, covering their rust with hands and arms despite their rust being uncoverable no matter how large the palms or expansive the fat while the rest of the white coats, unexposed but being angrily confronted by shouting straining statues- like blocks of mouldy cheese that know they aren’t appetising and that they won’t be eaten and that if they aren’t eaten will simply mould even further- thought, ‘fuck you,’ and took off their white coats to make themselves even more unappetising, exposing their states of decay to the masses. Once they were all exposed, all the white coats then all fled the Establishment, each fleeing footstep causing great puffs of rust to rise from their afflicted bodies and float in the air, the exact colour of a variety of extinct and poisonous caterpillar, before being sucked towards the inhaling wailing mouths of the restrained statues lying beneath them while Fred, whose eyes had reflected the fleeing scene, turned back to the bedsides he’d been speaking to and carried on with it in the same garbled excited manner that reflected the fact that his coffee was sweet and bitter and made his liver a jazz drummer beating a cymbal at 4/4 time.

“Now we’ve got them out of the way, now we’ve got the space to ourselves, as it should be and as it is, I’ll carry on, I’ll tell you my stories, I’ll make them up because I’m a deity writing the history of an elephant named Grady. Or maybe I don’t have to make anything up for it to be a story? Maybe this is the story and we should fuck Grady? A stream of story sent straight from my consciousness to yours, beamed in like an image to a television. Tell me can you see this in your heads? Can you see me sitting and speaking to you as closely as if I was actually sitting and speaking to you this close? Or am I crackly and distant like a pirate radio station or your grandmother who never thought you smelt good enough to hug on Christmas? Drat and blast it, I have to tell you, I know I shouldn’t, you’ll be upset I’m not allowing you the opportunity to take this opportunity now there are all these vacant white coats lying around, but I’m too busy to give even some of you this opportunity. I’m a white coat drinking coffee and telling tales busily but not too busily to have to tell you that I’m in fact being cured while you’re all slowly going bucket and that it’s all thanks to my drinking coffee and telling tales in this coat. Don’t be upset or angry, that is if you can even hear me over this din, this absolute racket of-”

All four of the bedsides interrupted Fred by going BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, the echo of those noises being followed by an even more alarming BANGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAABOOOOOOM! as loud as anything the world had heard since the first big bangaboom spat it into existence as every statue from the hall’s entrance to rear went bucket with the force of a large bomb going off in the style only large bombs going off can go off in, violently and with the power to make Fred, a bronze God with a firm palm over the opening of his thermal mug, go flipflopping through the heavens as the entire Establishment came down around the field of buckets and uprooted beds that had appeared, the building crumbling into nothing as Fred landed on his back one hundred metres away, getting up quickly to take a calm, measured sip from the pool of coffee he’d collected in the well of his hand.

“Well that’s something,” he muttered, staring at the rubble before raising his arms and shoulders in a full-bodied shrug that opened his white coat and revealed the rust that had once snaked up his chest had finally snaked away into nothing, the blast having blown it all away so Fred was as shiny and new as a shiny and new penny not yet put in a pocket or spent at a shop or tossed in the air and accidentally dropped down a drain. “My, my that’s something indeed.”

Fred took off his white coat and laid it gently on the ground to inspect and stroke his once again unblemished surface and think of the freakshow contortions Hazel and Vicky’s faces would achieve when they saw him lackadaisically stroll, white coat clad and rust free, back into Victoria Square to mount his pedestal and reinvent all that a statue could be; no longer would he pose in naked stillness, NO! he would keep his coat, change his pose often, without routine or rhythm, and keep making up stories to regale visitors with, a prop thermal mug of delicious coffee held clenched in hand, the only constant in his ever shifting posture. He began to walk back in the direction of the city on roads that had been close enough to the rubble that had been the Establishment when it went bangaboom to have become black and cracked like the toothless gums of a grandma coal, roads that sounded like dry leaves underfoot and remained like that until Fred had walked on them enough to allow the hungry horizon to swallow what he’d left behind. He drank at the same speed he walked- fast, erratic, and urgent- time moving as fast as that as well, speeding away from him, taillights winking, so that it was soon dark and he was soon on the outskirts of the city, staring at the lit lampposts lighting up the Aston expressway like the strip of an unloved and abandoned airport. There were no cars on the road and his feet were cow lovers shaking and banging their cowbells to make them go a-clanging and call their loved ones into pasture on a cold Sunday morning as they came down on the tarmac, his mouth a ravenous limpet slurping and suckling on an open wound as it drew coffee into him, coffee that made his thoughts flicker with the quickness of a deluge mob … Hazel… Vicky… coffeeeeeeeeeeee… dancing?.... Doc is bucketdeaddeaddeadbucket, dead as a doornail… how many doornails are in a pudding pie? Too many!... each one frozen and then thawed as if introduced to the centre of a dying star as they rapidly arrived and left, his mind being the centre of that dying star, pulsing, pulverising, pitter-pattering as he reached the end of the expressway and the great square pedestal of the great floozy, lounging jade-like in her jacuzzi in a spontaneously seductive manner, appeared in the distant centre of the bright city and into Fred’s sight.

His hurried footsteps hurried, turning the sound of cowbell clangs into the childhood memory of a hammer coming into contact with a sheet of aluminium and his leechy slurps into the gasping inhale of a pirate realising they have nothing left to live for… home… red slippers… clip clop… I’m a horse hoarsely heading homeward… hospice for can I ever stay still again?... how can I dance and run on a pedestal?... I’m a better man with a better plan... drink… sip… yeahhhh… his sight affixed so intensely on the beacon of the floozy’s great square that it was all he could see as he burst onto the square with the confidence of a gigolo knowing a large phallic legend will have preceded them and worked up a clammer, panting as his burst finished and no clammer was met, standing still finally to listen out for voices that upon not hearing he finally looked for amongst the metal, wood, and stone buckets standing upright on pedestals dotting a floor of smaller buckets made of veiny skin stretched thin that lay on sides or upside down and twitched as if attempting to escape their inherent bucketness, or dance in celebration of it.