Letters From The Dark Side

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Dim sunlight filtered out from the grubby window glass onto the table where she sat, rubbing her forehead against the rough wood and muttering to herself.

'Why, in the name of everything that is merciful, must this be so difficult?!'

She picked up the bit of paper in front of her and crumpled it into a tiny ball. Then she threw it, with as much force as she could manage, at the window. It didn't even make a satisfying thwack.

Pushing back the chair suddenly, she stood up and snatched a large sheet of parchment from the shelf beside the window, and began to write.

A short while later, she put on her cloak and boots, and walked out into the marketplace armed with a hammer and a nail and a rolled up sheet. There she found a suitably centrally located wooden post, and proceeded to do a bit of hammering. She looked at it one last time before nodding in satisfaction and walking away.

Magick Keye Sought, it read in bold letters, below a crude drawing of what was, ostensibly, said magic key.

Keye Lookes Lyke Yon Drawinge. Maye Bee Dangerous. Finder Ys Advised To Bringe Alle Information To The Hutte By The Wooddes.

Greate Reward Guaranteede.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Flux.

There is a restless energy to his constant fidgeting, that you find just watching him for any length of time exhausting. While he is awake, there is almost never a moment he is still: hands, feet, fingers or even eyes, there is always a part of him in flux, like he would redefine perpetual motion to suit his whims. And even when he is asleep, hardly a few minutes pass before he shifts gently, compulsively, and metamorphoses to a new position in time and space and mind.

You watch transfixed, breath held, silent and unmoving enough for two, and you wonder what it would be like to see him still even for a few moments. But you hope you never find out, because you know it would mean something terribly wrong with the world.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Excerpt from the Ravings of a Madman:

"I see now what I did wrong, why it all went to hell. I expected to find my beliefs mirrored in your actions, and resented you when I found them to be otherwise. I believed in my foolishness that your loyalty was worth that much less if you could not understand me. How vain I was to presume that I knew what you were capable of! I have learnt my lesson now, but the cost seems insurmountable. When the world believed me insane, I trusted in you to tell me otherwise. Who do I turn to, if you denounce me now?

No matter. The fate of the world must not be held hostage to one man’s pride. Not even that of my oldest friend. I will, therefore, do as I must. I will become that which I must.”

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Jealous.

If you were to ask him what he liked, he would give you a slightly panicked look, eyes looking anywhere but at you, and perhaps a mumbled reply about not being sure. For every question that demands of him to pick favourites, he shies away like a child from an unpleasant stranger pinching his cheeks. And sometimes, if you push at him hard enough, he is suddenly, viciously angry with you for trying to make him choose. Perhaps because you have broken some fundamental rule of his universe. Or because he dislikes hurting the things he hasn’t picked, because songs and books are alive and capable of feeling in his maze of a mind, and he loves them with a fierce protectiveness. Or maybe because he is one of Schrödinger’s creatures, ceasing to exist the moment his wants are defined.

But if you stay a while, and watch him not too closely, and let him understand that you are not here to steal his secrets, he slowly lowers his guard. Cautiously at first, looking around often toward you to make sure you aren’t spying. (If he does catch you spying, the barricades go up in a flash, and it becomes that much more difficult to get them to drop a second time.)

And when he finally satisfies himself that you are not a threat, he lets you see the things he loves. He doesn’t explain, or point them out to you. But the peace, the contentment in the stance of his body when he is reading or watching or doing something he loves even though you are in his territory, that’s how he lets you know that he trusts you. That is how you are to learn anything of him.

(And someday, perhaps, if you are very very lucky, he will even speak to you of them and come seeking your opinions. But that is a far-away day, and we shall dream of it another time.)

[lettersfromthedarkside]

The Boy Who Was Sunshine.

The ceiling-sky was overcast with the little clouds that each person carried above their heads. They wandered through their lives safe in the knowledge of the unbroken sea of fluffy dull grey that stretched into infinity and hovered a few inches above their heads.

But one day among them walked the boy who brought sunshine with him. Over his head was no cloud, but a bright ray of sunshine fell onto his shoulders from above, illumining his brown hair to a burnished red. The sunbeam cut through the cloud cover where he walked, and sometimes punctured a hole through his neighbours’ clouds as well.

When they saw him, they hesitated at the novelty. But when the rest of them noticed the beam of light, in their fear and hate they ripped him to shreds. He died with a smile on his face as bright as the light had been, before the clouds converged and closed up the break.

P.S. Hm. I doubt I could get more obscure, really.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Alisations Chapter 1 Verse 24

And thus it was the mother spake, “I told you so, you foolish child.” Then there was much weeping, for she was true-spoken And the daughter repented of her sin, and was forgiven in mercy.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Alisations Chapter 1 Verse 23

Spending time in society with humans is as bad an idea as ever. Doing it deliberately even more so. Hm.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Happy.

"You should be with someone who makes you happy," she told him one day.

"You make me happy," he shot back immediately.

She spared him a pitying look before explaining, “No, I don’t. I am convenient, and comfortable, but I don’t make you happy. You’ll know when you meet someone who does.”

P.S. Aaand that’s it. I couldn’t think of any way to end this funnily or wittily or sarcastically or unexpectedly. No, I have no idea.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Fairth.

She hurried on her way, already a few minutes late, but stopped when she spied him seated against a tree up ahead. He hadn’t noticed her approach, so she edged forward cautiously, all the while berating herself for acting a fool. A part of her mind noted the details of his posture: the sleeves casually folded up to his well-shaped forearms, the bent knee with an arm resting on it, the other leg stretched comfortably out in front. The gentle orange of the sky nicely outlined his rather sharp nose, but the sun still held enough light to throw the rest of his face into sharp relief. Head flung back, half-closed eyes, day-old stubble. She remembered being confused when someone once told her that beards were attractive, but now she had to admit she saw the point. His unruly hair was just long enough for her mind to imagine what it would feel like to run her fingers through it, grip it tightly and… she flushed and forced herself to move faster, heart beating just that much more insistently.

He raised a hand to acknowledge her as she passed, and she nodded curtly in return, before hurrying on.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

The (Un)worth of kindness.

"Y’know, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, I’d implicitly trust you with my life," he declared out of the blue one day.

Your life, yes, but not your mind, supplied a voice in her head helpfully. She tamped it down and wondered what answer he expected of her.

When they first met, she professed to hate him, like she usually did to anyone she thought was better than her. But over time a sort of bond grew between them, a bond that she could not put a name to, for it was both more and less than friendship. They shared banter and riddles and randomness, and sometimes even secrets. It was the easy companionship of two people who were content to remain strangers. And when he went away, he promised to remember her.

But she noticed gradually that while she was increasingly honest with him, he remained as opaque and unreadable as ever. She came to the conclusion that what she had taken to be his regard had merely been his kindness, the kindness that he distributed freely among all and sundry in that genial grandfatherly way of his. She could not pretend to be shocked at this realisation, nor even particularly upset, but she had believed rather stubbornly that it had been more than just that. She had never thought that kindness could be worth so little.

So when he told her that he trusted her with his life, she replied in the only way she knew: she took his words, twisted them with her trademark bitterness and threw them back at him as though they were her own.

"Me too. I wouldn’t trust my mind to you, but my life? Oh yes."

P.S. I’m not mad at you, strangely. I wish things had been otherwise, but I understand. And as always, this is an exaggeration. You have not treated me so badly, nor have I felt it so keenly, as I have put across here.

P.P.S. In the words of Gaiman: “We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together.”

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Silence. Click. The fan starts creaking in a dry monotone. There are no clocks in my room, I hate their relentless tick-tick-tick-tick. But the fan creaks as if to make up for their absence, and somehow, it is comforting. My arms ache from lying propped up on my elbows, but I don’t notice it except as a vague discomfort, dismissed as unimportant. The only light is from the screen of my laptop, my dearest possession, my companion in solitude, my bed warmer on cold nights. Its beautiful light-up keyboard glows a gentle bluish-white as my fingers fly across the keys in sudden fits of inspiration. My eyes itch a little, my arms ache a little more, but I feel strangely peaceful. The night, at least, is mine.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Chronicles of a particularly jobless day at work.

1. It bothers you that your cappuccino foam isn’t exactly up to the brim, so you blow air into it with a straw after every sip. You feel unreasonably happy when it does come up precisely to the brim.

2. Counter-intuitively, not talking to anyone for the entire day tends to make your mouth feel like it’s been stuffed with dry straw.

3. Anyone older than you is uncool, and anyone younger than you is uppity. Only the ones exactly as old as you are worth your time. You know all of the above to be explicitly untrue.

4. If your head HR has an insect tattooed on her neck (or even if she doesn’t), it’s just good principle to not provoke her in any manner. There is a reason why she is working that job, and it likely doesn’t involve her demure and soft-spoken nature.

5. That cute guy who helped you out extensively when you first joined about a year ago invariably flirts with the pretty young intern that joined a month ago. You feel slightly offended, vastly amused and oddly sympathetic. You remember that you are getting older.

6. If you want to read something inappropriate during work, make sure the screen is as zoomed out as possible. Small print is usually enough to deter most casual peekers.

7. At least once a day, the friends you (grudgingly) made talk about leaving. To study something else, to get a better paying job, to get married. Some days one of them goes through with it, and that sense of being left behind comes back stronger than ever.

8. Free soft drinks get old really quickly. Especially after you have to go pee ten times a day. All the air conditioning isn’t doing your bladder any favours either. You wish you could eat a sandwich instead.

9. You don’t really need more money, you could live comfortably on what they’re paying you, but you still complain about the abysmal bonus you received, or the ludicrous hike you didn’t get because it’s bad form to say you are satisfied. And also because they’ll promptly force you to treat them to lunch else wise.

10. Corporate office washrooms are fun places to hang out. Mainly because they are warm, unlike the rest of the freezing building. And also because they are about the only places in the entire complex where you have a reasonable chance of speaking on the phone uninterrupted and un-eavesdropped on.

11. Having the right soundtrack on while working is extremely underrated. Sure, you’ll stop working from time to time to sing your favourite lines, and sometimes attract concerned stares because you forgot to keep your voice down. But at least it’ll be, well, fun.

12. You realise you are now well-practiced at making the laughing sound, without actually laughing. You reserve that sound for those times when your senior comes along and makes a joke.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Long after you are gone, I still keep stumbling, in the most unexpected of places, upon the answers to all your little puzzles, testing and teasing and twisting into dream stories. I curse you for being such as you are, I curse your fickleness, you trickster, you Dragon (and shine!)

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Whatever.

May arrived, bringing with it a feeling that she was forgetting something vitally important. A date, somebody’s birthday or anniversary, but something more ominous, a deadline of something, she knew not what. Or perhaps a person, she knew not whom, but ‘twas someone she ought not forget, and each day she quietly dreaded that someone would call her out on it, but the days stumbled past, as they had in April, as they had in February, and nothing happened.

She counted on her fingers all the people she knew, and mentally revised that birthdays came in Feb and October and December, and some in April, and there was one in May, but it wasn’t the 25th yet, and it wasn’t that. It was the fourth or the fifth, or perhaps the sixth, and when sixth went by too, and she couldn’t remember what it was that she was supposed to remember. Nothing, she told herself, there was nothing remarkable about May, but the dread would not shake itself off. P.S. Gueste Poste by Miss Mathur, cuz she’s contrary like that.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Recipe for whirled peas.

So I was thinking about the state of the world, etc., and I’ve decided that one set of laws cannot make everyone happy. (A few centuries too late, Sherlock.)

Anyhow, it’s time we did a great big Reorganization of the Nations in the Known World. We should totally have countries based on people’s personalities. So you see, all the atheists can have a country to themselves, and the monotheists, and the pantheists, and so on. All artistic types and such like should be thrown in one country, where they can offend each other in peace with all their creative license taking. Supporters of open source/copyleft and those of stringent copyright laws can live on either side of said artistic country, and lure them to their own lands accordingly. Folks with a penchant for violence can all live in peace (or war) within their own borders, not offending the sensibilities of delicate minded folks. Rabid fans of Twilight can have their own country too (especially because that would mean Team Edward and Team Jacob would annihilate each other and provide the rest of the world with perpetual energy). You could even have separate countries for people who want a male-only/female-only society (and place them next to each other, just for fun). Folks who believe in free love, folks who believe in paranoia. Folks who love chaos, and folks who hate folks. Everyone has a place in the world, and everyone is included. The only important thing is that people are allowed to travel freely between nations, so it accommodates all their thoughts. P.S. This bit of nonsense brought to you by: gods who are repressing my freedom of speech. How’s that, you ask? Well, I’d been trying to write about how gods are mostly assholes, but they wouldn’t let me. Soon, gods. Soon. Meanwhile, all this.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Creator and Destroyer.

With infinite patience she wove each strand of the fabric that would eventually make up the new world, the utterly absorbed look on her face making evident how much of herself she poured into its creation. Figment by tiny figment of imagination she gave it life, and she wrote the laws of this world into the stories that would later inhabit it. And when the creation was complete, she vouchsafed to it a fragment of her soul, to sustain it and keep it whole. In time she grew bored of it, and the world she had painstakingly created was stuffed unceremoniously into the dark place where thousands of previously abandoned worlds languished.

P.S. It would have made more sense if it had started thus: The little girl was bored. She needed a world that worked according to the rules she thought were fair (or simply fun), and had reached the conclusion that all she had had to do was build a new one in her head.

My guess is that she grew up to be a storyteller. Or a goddess. P.P.S. God, that is perhaps the clumsiest piece I have ever written.

[lettersfromthedarkside]

Excerpt from the Ravings of a Madman:

"Midas was a lucky bastard. No, the Golden Touch was never a real threat (especially because they had magic to clean up after it). The ashen touch, that’s the danger you have to watch out for. It’s a syndrome where everything you touch turns to ashes and dust. And the trouble with it is not so much that it’s powerful, irrevocable or just plain depressing. Lots of things boast all those descriptions without being unduly worrisome (mainly by dint of being nonexistent). No, the trouble with the ashen touch is that it occurs so unbelievably frequently among the general populace that it would flummox even the most jaded cynic. Too many people have this power, and too few know about it. Compounded by the fact that the ones who are aware of its existence in their fingertips (or in their very breath) are usually stark raving mad."