Connie Amelia Nicholls

Writer . Aspiring Publisher . Creative Writing Major

[connieamelia]

These Hooded Hordes

                                                              Prologue

In the beginning, everything is blank. Empty. Frighteningly so. There’s nothing, nothing at all and it’s everywhere. What is this not-place? Where did it come from? And what are these things that keep spilling out into it? There it is again! These open, formless…questions? They just won’t stop rolling out. But out of where?

This isn’t right. There must be some sort of something. Clearly something’s alive, living, but in what, from where? Or perhaps, who?

This ‘who’ should be stored inside of something. Something soft, something safe: a brain. Yes! That makes sense. What a good job I’m doing. Oh. OH! I like that- ‘I’! How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

It should have a shell to protect it. Save it from wiggling off and getting damaged in this ever-stretching lack. A head and a body to keep it upright. Not as remarkable as the brain, but it is my first try, and it does the job. Now I need a heart to pump this perplexing life throughout it all. Lips and a voice-box and some ears to hear the curious racket I can make.

But what’s the point in these sounds? What can they do? Maybe, if I string them together, I can give them significance. Let them reverberate from my brain to my mouth into…words. Perfect words like ‘eloquently’ and ‘serendipity’ and ‘cellar door’; tilt the sound and I can sing, ‘doe re me far so la tee doeeeeeeeeeee’, till they catch in my… I need lungs. Lungs to fill up with powerful, passionate, perspicacious words, till I’m spitting out shrillness: ‘putrid fetid diarrhoea shit spatter SLIT CUBICLE QUARKING FETID FLUSH CURDLING CUNT CROTCH’. How easily these things fall from my lips. And I laugh and laugh- let this brand-new feeling quiver all about me: happiness. I’ll make hands and arms, feet and legs; now I can let the pleasure carry me. It spins me about in circles till I’m dizzy and I fall to the… I sit awhile and wait for my heart to run back to me. This must be what it is to be fragile, to be finite. To run out of breath. Looking about, there’s nothing much to do with this new existence of mine. If only I could put these eyes to practice. Try to distinguish outlines of other ‘I’s that might exist too. No luck. This silly darkness must be in the way. Maybe if I prick holes in it; reveal what it’s covering? ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT’, and it starts to seep in. The glow pools around me, leaving shoals of dust in its wake. I flick my fingers through it- try to hold it- but it’s like it’s not there at all. It settles on the tip of my nose, on the hairs on my arms. Till I’m covered in it. In this light and this dust. Yet, I don’t seem any different: I’m still smooth, still squidgy, still just me. It’s not enough. I want to learn what it is to be touched.

A surface starts to stretch out before me, underneath me, on and on and on. I reach down to brush my fingers across its roughness. Stop! Where are you going? All at once, I spring up and try to chase it, desperate to know where it will end. Where it might take me. If I jump from it, where will I fall? I pump my legs as hard as I can, but it’s far too clever, curves in on itself, too quick too fast till it’s right behind me again and to the left and the right. I’m surrounded. ‘You can’t scare me. I made you! And I’ll call you earth, because you’re just an oversized ball of dirt. You can’t do anything to me.’ So, I pounce. I crash down with a shriek. What is that? An unpleasant smear of red has appeared on my now prickly knee and when I prod it, it stings and leaves a nasty-smelling wetness on my finger. Blood. More of this blood trickles down to my toes and I huddle my legs to my chest. This is not what I had in mind. Is everything else so… painful? Maybe if I try again? I’ll do a better job this time. Damn it, I can’t get the hang of this. Nothing is forming quite like I imagine it will. It’s not fair. ‘Go on, admit what you’ve done, you useless mistake. Why did you have to spoil my fun?’ But the earth doesn’t talk back. It’s not like me. I resign myself to stretching out upon it; try to will my bleeding knee to be soft again, but it goes on stinging, regardless. More wet stuff has begun to fall out of my eyes. Ridiculous tears. Not even my body will do as it’s told. As these tears trickle from my face to the ground, soft green stuff sprigs out from it. Grass. ‘An apology? Well, it’s too late now, the damage is done.’ Cautiously, I ruffle my fingers into it; rip at it recklessly when I’m satisfied that it won’t hurt me; let it cradle my shivering body when I’m bored of fighting. The tears have left my eyelids heavy, used up, tired, so I let them rest over my sodden eyes.

Things are easier in the dark. When I wake, I don’t recognise anything. In my mind, I can view it all at once. Did I cry all this out? Rivers. Lakes. Seas. And more things like the grass have grown. Brilliant flecks of colour with tilting faces: flowers. Fiercer things reach their twisting limbs towards the sky: saplings. I can feel their life spread out all around me; hear their whisperings as they sway about in the breeze, yet I can’t understand what they’re saying. ‘Hello? Are you ‘I’s too?’ They carry on as if I didn’t say anything. Can they even hear me? ‘Please, I don’t know what I’m doing! There’s only one of me and so many of you. This isn’t fun anymore.’ Maybe if I will there to be more ‘I’s- like I willed myself- they’ll pop up somewhere. I get up. Clench my eyes tightly shut. Give it a go with all my might and think about another brain and shell and voice, like my own.

Hold on. What if- like the earth- the other ‘I’ tries to hurt me? Or what if they think I’m stupid, or don’t like their body and think I’m rubbish at this creating thing? At least I won’t be by myself. Will they be able to create with their thoughts, like I can? Will they even have thoughts? At least I won’t be by myself. I scrunch up my nose and- one eye at a time- peak to see if the willing has worked. Nothing. Maybe they’re somewhere else? I listen out for any sign of life, but I’m alone. ‘HELLO?’ What if they’re smaller than me? I turn over every rock I can find, till my palms are tender and rough. Always holding the idea of this other ‘I’ in the front of my thoughts. What kind of body will they have? I picture them. Will them into being. Nothing. I close my eyes: I’ll try again tomorrow. ‘IS ANYONE THERE?’ I hunt through every woodland, plain, jungle, tundra. Willing always as I go. Till my legs are scratched and aching, and I can comb every trail in my sleep. Still alone. I’ll try again tomorrow. ‘CAN YOU HEAR ME?’ I hold my breath and dive under still waters. Crashing waves. Till my lungs are filled with salt and brine. Willing, willing, willing. Nothing. I’ll try again tomorrow. ‘WHY WON’T ANYTHING ANSWER ME? IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE?’ I will as I run and as I search and as I sleep, and I try again tomorrow. I will as I search and I run and search and tomorrow. And I’m alone and tomorrow. And I will and search run alone run run search alone run WILL run alone search run alone alone tomorrow. ‘HELLOOOOOOO?’ I use up the last rip of my breath. Time has formed a mountain beneath me. A look-out point to an empty world. As if my mind, my existence isn’t enough of a reminder. I almost didn’t notice it. Are you real? Am I dreaming? It’s perched on a rock nearby and watching. Cautious. It’s silent but it’s certainly m o v i n g! Tilting its head from side                      to                    side and fluffing the strange flaps where its arms should be. Is it imitating me? Is it as fascinated as I am? THIS IS IT IT’S FINALLY HAPPENING It hops on its little, pink claws, edging closer to me. Not like me, but potentially friendly. Definitely alive! Dove. 

‘Hello.’ Only manage a whisper.

How long have you been searching, little one? Were you looking for me? And for a second, it opens its beak and I think it might speak back to me, but instead it whistles a funny tune and takes off into the sky.

I’m not disappointed. This is proof. Proof that I am not the only ‘I’. Proof that there is the potential for more. That this is only the beginning.

[connieamelia]

The Ersatz Boy

Jeremy Copper stared into his lunch box. His ham sandwich- due to lack of cling film- had welded itself to the side of the plastic container, in a not-quite spherical mush. He had asked his mother seventeen times to use cling film when making his lunch. “Please use cling film, Mom” he’d said, and she would always nod and stare out the window and say “sorry Jeremy”, but he knew she’d forget again.

Jeremy did not want to touch the thing that had once been his ham sandwich. He carefully recovered a spoon from the schmutz, scraped off a few moist crumbs, and removed the lid from a dishevelled apricot yoghurt, which had somehow avoided the worst of the carnage. Midway through the yoghurt, he noticed a soggy note stuck to the bottom of the box. He glanced over the familiar, neatly-formed words:

“My special boy, I love you so much.”

After school, Jeremy sat alone in the library. He fingered the pages of his favourite book- ‘Beetles: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred of Nature’s Gems’- but struggled to concentrate on the words thanks to two giggling girls outside the window. They were nearly middle school age, and possessed a plumpness that could no longer be passed off as puppy fat. When they saw him staring, they stopped their snickering and hurried on their way. Jeremy pushed his thick rims up the bridge of his nose. They weren’t prescription glasses, but his mother made him wear them to protect his eyes from bacteria in the air. She was late. Again. This happened about once every week.

The next day was a Friday, and on Fridays Jeremy did not go to school. His mother said it was more important for the two of them to spend quality time together, and so they went to the park and he’d listened to the coos of faraway pigeons. Sometimes- when he was particularly good- she’d let him fly the special red kite. The string got tangled round his scarves and when he asked if he could take one off, she’d put her hands on his shoulders and ask him if he wanted to get hypothermia. Jeremy didn’t know exactly what this word meant; just that hypothermia was surely something he did not want to get. He found three beetles after their picnic and kept them all in a bucket, to take home. A man walking his dog told him that the beetles would fight if he kept them all together, but Jeremy told him he wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers and ran back to his mother, hugging the container close to him so no one could take it away.

His mother quizzed him on his times tables on the walk home. Jeremy was the best in his class at multiplication and- even though he’d only just turned seven- he already knew his nine times table. When she told him he was her special boy, he tried to hug her, but she put her hands over her mouth and he could feel how tense her fragile body became. She never held his hand, but she wanted him to stay close. At home, she made him practise locking and unlocking the door eight times, and then they watched Jeopardy! on the TV.

Jeremy secretly practised his reading alone at night. His mother didn’t believe in putting children to bed. When it turned 7.15pm, he would check in the cupboard for monsters, tuck himself into his duvet, and try to memorise his mother’s favourite fairy tale story book. She’d read it to him once on one of her ‘sunny days’ but, halfway through Rumpelstiltskin, she started to cry and she cried for a very long time. She didn’t finish the story and she never read him the book again. He never quite understood why a funny little man with a funny little name would make his mother so sad. He just knew that he hated this Rumpelstiltskin, and refused to say his name out loud ever, even though he assured his second-grade teacher that he definitely could pronounce it.

At 8.00pm, Jeremy would kiss all his teddies goodnight and turn off the lamp by his bed. It never took him very long to fall asleep, but tonight it took exactly forty-six minutes of listening to his own breathing before he tiptoed downstairs and waited by the front room door. He saw his mother on the couch with her photo albums, but she wasn’t looking at them. She was staring at the small rectangle of darker paint on the wall. It had once been covered by a photo of her with a small, frail boy that looked very much like Jeremy, but different somehow. He noticed- even from his hidden vantage point, behind the door- how she sucked at the inside of her cheek.

Jeremy knew that sometimes his mother would go out at night. He never knew where she went, but he thought it was odd because it was far too cold to go out after nine. He didn’t mind it when she went out, though. It was quite exciting for him to be in the house all alone. He liked the quiet. He liked to imagine that the quieter the house became, the louder his thoughts could be. When his mother was home, he made sure his thoughts were very quiet, in case she could hear them and they interrupted hers. He didn’t want to do that, because his mother always looked like she was thinking about lots of important things all at once, and he didn’t want to disturb them, in case it made her upset. As Jeremy watched his mother, he made his thoughts as quiet as he possibly could. He thought about how strange it was to watch people when they simply don’t know people are watching them. He thought about how people act differently when they think they are on their own, and why this should be. And then he accidentally had a very loud thought, because he saw that it was already nine o’clock.

Fearing that his mother would see he was out of bed, Jeremy tiptoed back up the stairs and into his room. He lay very, very still on top of the covers, and concentrated on the sprinkling of glow-in- the-dark stars on the ceiling. He listened for the open and close of the front door. Through his window, he could see his mother close the garden gate behind her. He’d never spied on his mother before tonight, and suddenly a heavy feeling flooded through him: a feeling that his mother had once called ‘guilt’. Nevertheless, he watched as she walked across the road (checking both ways for oncoming traffic first, of course) and down the strange hill, opposite their house. Before he had time to think about what he was doing, Jeremy ran back downstairs. In the front room, his mother’s photo album lay open on the floor. He glanced at the picture of the not-quite-Jeremy lying in his hospital bed, and felt a pang of envy at how his mother had her arm around his frail shoulder. He looked a bit older than Jeremy here, and Jeremy wondered what could have made him so unwell.

He knew that he had to follow her. He didn’t quite understand why. He put on his heavy duffle coat (so that he wouldn’t blow away in the wind) and, with tentative footsteps, he hurried after his mother. Half way down the hill, Jeremy began to regret his decision. It was cold; it was dark; it was also a little bit scary. His mother was nowhere in sight and, to make matters worse, his slippers were getting soggy. The path led him to a gate, and the gate opened into a type of field that Jeremy had never seen in real life. He’d read about them in one of his Goosebumps books, but he had hoped he would never actually have to enter one. A cemetery.

As he walked past the serried ranks of headstones, he wondered whether he should turn around and go back home. The air smelt of sadness.

“Jeremy?”

His mother was crying. It wasn’t like the daytime crying he knew, where her face would crumple and her body would shake. No. This crying was different. It was light, and somehow filled with relief.

“Jeremy! Is it you?”

At first, he thought she would surely be very cross. But before he could tell her how sorry he was, her arms were all around him. She bent down to his height and kissed his forehead tenderly.

“Please don’t cry, Mommy.”

“Oh, my special boy, how can I be sad when you have come back to me?”

Jeremy did not know what she meant. He stood very still, for fear that if he startled her, his mother and the graveyard would slip away from him. Another dream: him fumbling desperately at the wisps of unconscious embraces; waking up alone and shivering, underneath the constellation of his bedroom ceiling. But this was real. And she was so close to him. The tense, fragile creature that had raised him was suddenly a blossoming, beautiful bud. As she held him in her arms, he peered into the darkness and read the words on the headstone that his mother had been tending:

Jeremy Copper

Died age 7

‘My special boy, I love you so much.’

[connieamelia]

Cell

Sometimes all it takes is a certain smell

An acquainted softness to the wisps of the sky

But other days, it’s harder to grasp

And you can go over and over the list of names in your head

Stare for hours at posters that hung once on your walls

Tacked up comfortingly

Shielding your view of the shriekings of night

But these aren’t your bedroom walls

 Sometimes it’s only a sound

A faucet running somewhere above you

Signs of life in the creaks and coughs of the floor

And you close your eyes to it

Submerge yourself in the familiarity

But these waters are shark infested

Their clambering: too urgent to be kind

You cannot rely on the numbing cream of your imagination

The ache still remains in your bones

 So you try to snuff out your consciousness

Beg your dreams to carry you to that analeptic place

Lie in the sweat of your own internal grappling.

For your veins aren’t a map leading home anymore

You are covered in calloused skin

Even your body is a constant reminder of it:

You’re alone.