Sarahribu

Science Fiction Double Features by a meat powered pun machine var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-21344445-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

[hawk-and-handsaw-blog]

reverse hades/persephone, where the young daughter of summer uses plant magic to ensnare the lord of darkness and keep him prisoner in a beautiful garden above ground. Eventually, enchanted by her cleverness and wild youth he agrees to eat six pomegranate seeds and stay with her for half of every year. 

[sarahribu]

TEDIOUS NOVEL UPDATE

I wrote 3k in 2 hours, which now means I broke 10k today on my novel! Suck it novel!

Also another 2k and it beats the wordcount of my magnum opus, "How did the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis affect multinational companies".

[sarahribu]

Hello campers, I'm doing the goddamn August Camp Nanowrimo. For those playing along at home, yes, I'm also still doing my masters! My dissertation is going fabulously, let me tell you.

This is my profile, and here is the profile/excerpt from my novel, which really needs renaming because 1. The current title is inaccurate since the character its named for is minor at best and 2. It just sounds like I'm ripping off Neil Gaiman. 3. I'm probably ripping off Neil Gaiman a little bit. 4. I'd like it if people wouldn't think this until they've read it and 5. I'm really tired you guys how am I going to write a novel? And then write a dissertation straight after it?

Anyway, start your engines and lets write 50k, eh?

Hana cakara, data sawala, pada jayanya, maga bathanga.

[sarahribu]

This Weather.

The travel agent wore a lot of makeup on camera, probably under the out of date impression that the high definition made you look older and awful without it. Instead she looked like old footage, sparkling and sharp and every chalky grain of silica in her miserable mineral foundation visible on my screen.

I’m looking for a quick week away, I explain. Before she could cut in and bring up the in vision live feed to their Martian Cypriot resort I added “not off world”.

She frowned. “I know it seems counter intuitive but its actually cheaper and easier to travel to the colonies than to stay on Earth”.

“I just want some real weather," I said

She smiled, sadly this time. “Oh honey, you’ll have to go a long way for that.”

I ended up spending a week in England that I booked myself. History tells of the English obsession with The Weather, the capitals pronounced crisp (like autumn) and ominous (like the tutting). History also tells of referenda following the exodus by those left behind, the ‘Jerusalem’ amendments and their fierce white-flavoured patriotism about green and pleasant lands. When terraforming was actually that, transforming terra gnostic into something thought to be lost.

I went in late December, officially the 175th coldest on record, same as the year before. The pretty snowflakes came down on Christmas Eve, right on schedule. The people stayed indoors, curtains closed, safe in the knowledge it would be gone by Boxing Day night.

Part of a 'thing' that's been brewing for years about national identity and the weather and terraforming that is essentially an excuse to write lovingly and mockingly about my country and how we officially call ourselves great whilst congratulating ourselves on being self deprecating. Also cause terraforming is cool. Title is from the Patrick Wolf song.

Also I wrote this in 10 minutes because of how shit my day has been and how writing is something I miss more than anything fuck you masters.)

[sarahribu]

Its shit like this that makes me despair about ever dropping everything and becoming a 'writer'. It'd be fucking suicide.

Thank fuck for economics, let me tell you.

[sarahribu]

The female robot is an extraordinary mimic, and no one suspects that I, the dog in her satchel, am controlling her movements remotely. Men and women alike are always giving the robot their phone numbers, complimenting its haircut, inviting it to tapas. Not only did I program the robot to locomote on stilettos as if they were ice skates, I also designed its fabulous outfit; it sips skinny-chinos with an inhuman grace and never spills a drop on its white jacket. Meanwhile I steer myself through the busy streets in my soft leather berth, acquiring information for my future takeover. “Sooo cuuute!” the passersby squeal, patting my head, smearing their DNA all over me, and I beam their data directly to my home computer. Although it may have been a tactical error to stage the takeover from this particular bag, which is so luxurious that occasionally passersby ignore me completely and choose to pet the Tory Burch instead. Next time, perhaps, a JanSport.

By Karen Russell, From Vogue Street Style Shorts

(If you haven't read any Karen Russell, you should. St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves is my favourite short story collection of the last few years, her prose is beautiful and stories imaginative without falling into tropes. She also adapted one of the stories into a full length novel that is winning all the accolades. In short, she rocks.)

(I also cannot wait to finish this masters so I can start writing again :( )

[sarahribu]

If you read anything today, read this. Its rare a story makes me cry twice but this definitely is pitch-perfect.

Everything coming out of America these days fucking terrifies me. 

[previouslygalfridian-deactivate]

Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

The Boy Who Lived Forever | Time Magazine (via galfridian)

[hammerheadroberts-blog]

[sarahribu]

The world began to sparkle at the edges, like when you stare at a bright blue sky and see the white blood cells in your eyes. They stretched out against all points of the universe, a spinal cord in a galaxy of nerves.

They weren’t dead.

But on the downside, they weren’t on Earth anymore.

[sarahribu]

Absolutely Cuckoo

“Ugh, work is so irritating this morning. Not only has everything been running slow but there’s this beeping at in the office that is infuriating! Its driving me insane! It has an edge that must have been specially programmed to be on the same wavelength as screaming babies in tight spaces. I’m pretty sure its coming from the server room though, but when I ring IT they say that nothing’s showing up, but that a guy from the IT department will come and deal with it.” It’s the bad syncopation of it that I couldn’t stand. I sent that email to my sister and she emailed back something funny and cute, with a cat attached. There’s a cough from my boss when she sees it flash up and obviously not work related. She goes to lunch early and so the office is empty now, the wind blowing through my hair from the open window. Its silent, apart from the beeping.

At lunchtime I like to go into the field behind our office. The good thing about working in a industrial estate in the middle of nowhere is the proximity to nature. On days I remember to bring a lunch, I break through the fence and sit on my coat. There’s a field mouse nearby. It’s snuffling, happy in the dull English sunshine. My sandwich is the only thing ruining my commune with nature; it’s so cold from the enthusiastic fridge my teeth end up hurting.  I go back to my desk and stare out of the window all afternoon. There are flowers on my desk when I get back, the date I had on Tuesday. They’re blue roses, coloured by romance. They stand for unobtainable, impossible desires. 

I can’t get my head out of the office when I get home, and can’t stop thinking about the field when I’m at the office. My dreams are half mad. The mouse under my fingers snuffles when I stroke the scroll-wheel in its back, reassuringly ridged with tiny vertebrae that takes me down the page with a tiny click. The chirping of the birds sounds suspiciously like the failing server’s beeping. The flowers on my desk, wilting in grey blue water, their stems floppy and colours muted. My desk kicks me in the knees with strong hooves when my attention drifts from the document. The rolling hills shine in mid morning sunshine, too bright to be real.

[sarahribu]

Its the pits

The man who would become my Father was a hunter, generally well ranked and fairly successful. He had a string of trophies for rare game, a job as a village hunter in quiet months and a reputation to uphold.

On the day he fell for my Mother, he was sitting in a bar, keeping on eye on his new knife, thin and flat like the palette knife, but with a blade of a homicidal, vengeful artist and a virgin blade. He’d paid extra to have it cleansed by a priest to make it as holy and pure as possible. It glinted in places where the black paint had been washed off a little with the combination of holy water and godly hammer-strike against the blessed anvil. Each dull thud and droning syllable had cost money he didn’t have; he’d only managed to afford it by borrowing handsomely against the payoff with charm and a coal-smudge of blackmail. He took out a tiny brush from his pack and dabbed more blackout paint on the cracks, before leaving the knife in the sun to dry.

My father checked the hunt board for the third time in the hour, marking the location of his mark on a faded map with a stub of a pencil. I learned to read off the big, worn strokes of his round a’s and sharp crescents of his hunter’s shorthand on that piece of paper. Scales strong, need to get between them; weakness=holy fire; beware of pits.

He usually hunted with something larger that could double up as defence (and in one memorable case, shelter) but this was no ordinary mark. It was a wyrm, and one so old not to have been renamed dragon when they switched from the archaic names to the newer tongue, and therefore it demanded a more subtle touch. It would be worth the expense and the potential sucking wound for the bounty, a smouldering goddess worth a lifetime of coin, bread and beer that he yearned for more than any glory or experience. After all, their patina would erode, deflate and dwindle in a less enjoyable way than the gold ever would.

The caves were nearby, and setting out at sunset with a few beers and a final teleport token tucked into his belly and belt, my Father set out for his future.

---

My Father loved to say ‘I never expected to fall for your Mother’ when he was upset. My Mother would get angry, and insist that they fell for each other, that it was mutual and inevitable. He was right in the poetic way - he wasn’t usually looking for women like her, strong and powerful with magic and knowledge and well schooled. He was right because he never expected to fall at all. She was right, because some things always happen, no matter how you prepare against them. Sometimes you do the right thing, something chivalrous and charitable that you have to live with for the rest of your life.

---

The wyrm was huge. Not just that, it was deranged and desperate in the way ancient beings that secretly doubt their eternity are. My Father set about knocking as many scales away as he could, avoiding the huge disembowelling claws that cast about wildly in order to expose the underbelly that was supposed to be its weakness.

The wyrm had killed bigger and more famous men than my father, and so it was inevitable that it did eventually catch him off guard, taking his breath and most of his insides outside his body with one deft, dangerous claw. He fell to his knees, trying to whisper a healing incantation with lungs empty and vision blackening, eyes rolling away from the coils of intestine winding their way into the dust when he was knocked sideways again, this time by magic, strong and warm and so tight it hurt but put him together. He looked, and there was a woman, tall and centred and wielding her stave like an extra limb.

He caught her eye and nodded once, intending it to be ‘I’ll give you 30% of the bounty and no more’. She nodded back, meaning ‘Get out of my fucking way, I have an infernal wyrm to kill.’

(They never told each other this, but whispered it to me in their own retellings of the story, secrets endowed in my mind, the only safe place they knew.)

They fought the wyrm, my Father’s crafty slices countering my Mother’s beautiful arcing streams of holy fire punctuated with the dull thud of her roundhouse kicks to the monster’s head and slowly the Wyrm’s resistance crept down a little faster than theirs did, until the great beast roared its final, ineffectual attack and slumped just as my parents were about to ascend themselves. Exhausted, they watched its great tail, studded with razor barbs and the statistical potentiality of poison charms, arc towards my Mother, and my Father grabbed her firmly around the knees to save her, throwing them both off balance – falling, feeling sickening dread along with the seductive pull of gravity.

They braced for what felt like hours, for the eventual dull crush that would signify the end of their lives. It didn’t come, despite what they hoped. It’s why ‘beware of pits’ was underlined.

The practicalities of falling forever are rarely discussed. The general advice (as taught by General Tautology) is ‘don’t fall down a bottomless pit. If you do fall down a bottomless pit, don’t fall down a bottomless pit.’ It’s not on the syllabus at any school of monster hunting, if there was such a school (there are a few training camps in the mountains for city folk, but they rarely offer anything but the basics, for people who can barely pack a box or skin a grass eater) my parents weren’t the kind who would have taken ‘practical workshop in near death experiences’ or ‘survival in highly unlikely circumstances – seminar’ had they been offered. They were skilled warriors, so they never starved, Mother was adept at summoning magic, even at distance and velocity. Every morning (or the parody of morning they fell into) she would try the teleport spell, and Father would hold his final token like the get out of jail free card it wasn’t.

There’s not much of a life falling as fast as you can to nowhere, down a charmed column of blackness made of infinite numbers and the sadistic imaginations of wizards. Not much at all, which is why I was born months later, my first wails stolen by the rushing wind as I was caught in my father’s steady hands.

I’m not saying this to anyone in particular. I don’t think anyone can hear me, but my parents deserve a decent send-off, this eulogy of sorts. Falling into their eternal grave. They did their best with me, but they were lousy teachers, and their death signals my own eventual one, as I didn’t inherit my Mother’s magic, only my father’s cunning, a useless weapon against this prison I grew up in.

Of course, I can’t seem to overtake them, even when dead. Terminal velocity, its the pits.

The world that the characters live fell to their ironic death in is of course, 33% Monster Hunter, 33% Final Fantasy 12 and 33% every other monster hunting/class based JRPG I've ever played. I really love JRPGs, what can I say.

[thiszineisaspaceship-blog]

[sarahribu]

thiszineisaspaceship:

It’s giveaway time!

Simply reblog this flier (this post only) and help us spread the word about the zine and you will be entered in a drawing to win a fabulous prize package including but not limited to a special edition print copy of the first issue, a print by Anna and perhaps a drunkdrawing by her and/or her cohorts, in addition to anything else she finds lying around and can fit in an envelope.

You have until Sunday at noon to do this, then a random winner will be selected and contacted Sunday afternoon.

[sarahribu]

Armadillo

"Mother, I have something to tell you."

I can't reply to her. She knows this.

"I'm converting. Work's sponsoring us all to do it. Look, its just common sense really. If you do it without sponsorship it costs a fortune, and its ended up being a really good deal, there's no contract to sign or obligation to stay there once its done. Katie's work asked for ten years service for the price of the conversion, AND her conversion is branded, so good luck with that one. I told her she was stupid, but she did it anyway. She's got that baby coming, she said she's going to want to have a job to cover it. Did I tell you she got pregnant? That idiot knocked her up then fucked off, like we all thought he would."

She's babbling, but my head, oh, my heart. Even if neither are there for me anymore, I still feel the deep, powerful ache within because what she is doing is so unbelievably stupid I want to kick her.

"I know you can hear me, the admin said so. But look, once I convert, we can talk again. I've made sure we're compatible, so I'll be able to hear your voice, even if its not your voice, but how you remember your voice, with the skull echo and everything. Mother, Ibu - cintamu. I miss you. They even said it wouldn't hurt. I'd still feel the same afterwards, still me. They keep a backup even once everything's been incinerated, so if it goes wrong they can try again. The failure rate's really low these days."

She sits. She's obviously here to convince herself. I want to tell her that they lie, it does hurt, even if you by all reason shouldn't have the ability to feel pain by that point.

"There's all kind of stuff involved, but work said its a cost saving drive, to get their staff to convert. Saves money on training in the long run because its just bzzt! They can just zap all the knowledge through the server and into our heads. Do you know that the software package it comes bundled with is kung fu? Like, the demo? I thought you'd appreciate that, you always loved The Matrix. Also, I paid the extra so they do the daily backups, so that when I die, I can be added to the bank, and we can always be together."

She's quiet for a long moment, consumed with her grief and I seethe within my programming, silent and fuming in my subroutines and so full of love and hate that it kills me again, corrupts me like the cancer tried, before they backed me up and let my body die.

"So, yeah, I'm becoming a cyborg. Getting the positronic brain. Trading in my soft centre for a hard one. Becoming the opposite of an armadillo."

She shudders, properly and involuntary. Will the fake brain be able to replicate that? Will it keep her weird twitching, or smooth her out?

"I love you. I'll speak to you soon. Bye."

She trails her fingers over my touch screen as she leaves. It doesn't feel like a kiss.

[jamiedrew-deactivated20121129]

[sarahribu]

My excellent writer-friend, actual-friend and person-I-owe-drinks-to Jamie Drew has released an ebook. Angelic choruses from the heavens! He is an astoundingly good writer and genuinely good chap who deserves to be able to eat whenever he goddamn pleases something other than back-of-the-cupboard chow. The man's a vegetarian already. Its just cruel.

He's doing this whole thing in a rural-honesty-box style for payment, so what you think it is worth. I think its worth a few pints. Perhaps even London-price pints. Yeah, I said it.

As a further testimonial to its greatness, this pimp shop entry has an astounding TWELVE hyphens, you gotta know its worth it. I don't break out the grammar for just anyone.

Get at it, tumblrati.

[sarahribu]

Strangers quiet in the street

Milo had bought his holiday by sacrificing £50 of his pay a month to add the extra three days to his time off, which turned out to be just enough to get the cheap flights. An ex girlfriend had told him that it is liberating to go somewhere, anywhere, just go to the airport and buy a ticket to the place on the departure board you've never heard of and just deal with it. Which is how he ended up in Rabat.

  Rabat isn't as touristy as Marrakech, it lacks the big central souk and a fair bit of the history and instead is a modern city by the sea, the desert a distant influence. Milo lands at 4PM and is in the city by 6, sweltering by the harbour, pockets full of dirham and a small bag with notebooks, leaky pens and half chewed mints piling messily against a change of clothes. He sits on the edge of the harbour, his feet dangling above the water and breathes deep the salty Atlantic air until his lungs are full to bursting and he is dizzy from over oxygenation. 

  He sleeps in the first place by the harbour that takes his credit card. It is hot, the fan stirs through the heat rather than disippating it and the bed is inexplicitly full of sand despite the distance to the Sahara. It is uncomfortable, but he is too excited to get much sleep in any case. He watches the sun rise from the roof garden; he squints and imagines he can see Spain, the tourist he could have been had he not been taking a risk, quaffing pints and shagging birds from Essex he could have shagged backed home. The waiter brings him tiny thimble sized mugs of the tea they jokingly call bourbon and smiles at him, long eyelashes over sleepy eyes.

  Milo spends the morning in a cafe, drinking more bourbon and eating a mediocre cous cous salad thing and spreads out the pamphlets lifted from the rack in reception, the glossy professional ones mixing with the cheap desktop inks, staining his skin black and red. A cursory look barely differentiates them, all written in that Papyrus font and boasting a Unique Moroccan Experience. There’s a wealth of choice; camel or riviera? Bedoiun or yacht? It’s a stupid question really. He grabs his bag, drops some coins, and heads off in search of the desert. 

  A bus takes him deep into the Sahara. He'd bought 2 meters of bleached cotton from a smiling woman in a market for a ridiculous amount which he had fashioned into a kind of sun-shade headgear which he thinks makes him look like he just got out of the bath, but he is cool at least. His sunglasses were cheap and tint the world red so it looks like he has ended up on a foreign planet rather than continent. The Sahara is rocky, rockier than you would expect for miles and miles before finally breaking into the frozen typhoon of dunes. The bus plays a disaster movie dubbed into French with Arabic subtitles but Milo took German and so he barely notices, thrumming with the excitement of it all. The bus is full of teenage backpackers, lonely planet guides well thumbed and sandals encrusted with the world. They chatter in charming American accents and offer him their bottle of water. He gulps greedily and swears to get out at the next stop.

  It is 1:24 in the middle of the Sahara and there’s a wave of panic as he speaks neither of the languages and looks like a bandaged sausage. He hurries as if on fire out of the sun into a cafe, painted so white the sun turns it into a searing beacon. There's a bar but only a mouldering bottle of Jack Daniels shows evidence of what he needs, and the body language of the bartender gives off a clear signal of NOT FOR SALE; he instead gets a cool, sweating bottle of coke handed to him without a word and decides to weather the heat. The man sits bored, elbows together on the bar, facing him but staring 2 feet above him at a blurry, static filled football game.

  Milo bought just one book with him, some historical biography he was intending to save it for the plane. He's never been much of a reader at all, and finds it even harder with the sweat pooling between his shoulder blades, tickling as it trickles down his back. He squirms, rubs, curses. The green-eyed man giggles. They meet each other's eyes and the green eyed man smiles and nods at the telelvision. 'Manchester United?' 'Er, no' says Milo. 'Chelsea'.

'Ah, Abramovich, sonofabitch?' said the green eyed man. Milo stares with narrowed eyes for a moment before changing the subject.

"Do you, by any chance, have a camel?' he says, hope shining in his voice.

'No', said the green-eyed man, vowels long and languid. 'I do have a land rover?'

'Close enough', Milo feels himself smirk.

  The Green Eyed man is named Murat, after the Turkish king. He studied in Manchester for 2 years before coming home to get married. His wife works in Rabat 3 days out of 5, she is a lawyer and much smarter than him, in his own words. He likes the easy life, and Milo is the first person he's sold a coke too in a few days. Together they wrestle the canvas roof on the landrover and pile in with bottles of water, some bottles of coke and the dusty bottle of Jack. Murat drives like a posessed man, the radio is missing, and Milo is grinning beneath his ridiculous head gear and cheap sunglasses. Murat is singing loudly, stripped to the waist and won't say where they're going, despite the dunes stretching desolately around them. They drive until the sun gets dimmer and Milo feels his hair dry crunchy from the salt in his sweat, causing it to stand almost straight on end. Murat calls him Bart Simpson and Milo nudges him with his foot. It’s a bizarre afternoon but familiar, a bit like when you turn up at junior school and immediately make a friend.

  Its almost night when Murat points out some tents on the horizon. 'Bedouin' he grunts, and floors it without changing gear. The engine makes horrendous noises and Milo laughs, aghast. When he finally changes up and the din quiets, Milo asks politely 'Your people?'

Murat laughs a deep, throaty laugh 'Oh no, I'm from Casablanca. But you know, even Bedouin need coke and lawyers sometimes. Friends of the family'.

Its true, when he arrives Murat is welcomed like a friend, not in a cliche way, but as if someone has dropped round for tea. He barely introduces Milo, from what Milo can tell anyway from the fast paced Arabic. They get some bread from the sand-fire and dig some lamb out of the tagine and retreat to a dune with clay plates and watch the sunset, and then sit silently, swigging on the bottle of Jack between them as the stars come out to play.

  If you haven't seen the stars rise over a desert you can't understand what its like, just how pure and clear, how you can see the galaxy as clear as you can see your hand, the colours of the stardust and the swirling, beautiful pinpricks of light, blinking in and out of existance. It is beautiful, and Milo cannot believe this is the same sky, the same day as his morning in Rabat with the dismal breakfast and cheap leaflets on a Formica table. 

  Of course its a cliche, but this is Milo's story, and maybe in another universe they'd have met at uni and things would have been different, but Milo went to Leeds and dates girls, but this man he's barely said a significant word to, who is covered in sand and so, so drunk, just doesnt even have to turn before they're kissing and have hands in rough denim, everything rough to touch with sand filled hands, terrible and abrasive and so, so intoxicating. Milo licks the taste of the cheap alcohol from Murat's mouth and bites at his stubble and goes down, down, down, with the universe swirling above him.

Of course its awkward, and sticky, and they didn't bring blankets and can't go and wake the Bedouin smelling of sex and with come streaking his cheek and hair, Milo has to lie back and think of where he is compared to where he was a few days ago. He closes his eyes, feels Murat boneless and snoring the rasp of the sated and intoxicated, and wriggles, and feels himself sink slightly into the grasp of the dune. And when the sun rises, Murat smirks and touches him and its fine, its really fine, this isn't the world at all, Murat can go back to his wife and Milo can go back to his lightbox and no one would believe him if he said that he got laid under the universe by a man with green eyes who laughs when he comes.

  They do drive back and part company by the bus station with only a wave and a slip of paper with an email address that Milo loses when he washes his trousers back in his flat. The stars above London are never bright, but sometimes he feels the ever-present graininess in his travel bag when stuck in Travelodges and smiles, where no one can see him, at the secret history in those grains of sand.

Wrote this years ago when I was yearning to go back to Morocco on holiday. Milo and Murat are two names that I keep in the bank, and pop up everywhere. So, so self indulgent, forgive me.

Also this isn't science fiction. Just imagine there's been an apocalypse or something whilst they're canoodling in the dunes.

Oh and the title is from Hawksley Workman's Anger as Beauty.

[sarahribu]

This is not a drill

I emerged from my hiding place when the blackness of night and the terror within the walls broke through into uncanny silence and watery sunrise. The office was empty, if you ignored the corpses of my colleagues, which I was trying very hard to whilst I assessed the situation. The key was in the lock and the shutters were down; they’d managed to make themselves a secure place to bleed to death at any rate. Moira’s throat was nearly completely gone, and Jack was curled at her feet in a mockery of their entire relationship, his head bowed to hide his ruined face.

The fact I can remember that kind of detail means I didn’t do as good a job as ignoring them as I thought.

The hospital was full of pools of blood. Even the most avant-garde films don’t show this much, even in the really bad type of over the top Kung Fu movies where people slice each other in half with swords the blood never gathers enough to make stagnant pools of coagulating abomination on the linoleum. They also don’t tell you about the smell. Day old blood has a smell that bypasses your nose and goes straight into your brain and haunts worse than a ghost, lurking between every smell to come and get you.

At this point in the game or the movie I would get the gun, or the sword, or even the cricket bat, and begin my rampage of revenge and destruction. It’s amazing how many of those things you don’t find in real life. Even if I had had a gun what use would I be? I’m a bookish girl from a crumbling Somerset seaside resort. I’ve never fired an air rifle. I’m pathetic at sports. I spent my university years campaigning against wars and getting into wholesome activist trouble. I’d likely end up shooting everything but my target, should I find an unlikely cache.

My housemate though, kept a crowbar by the door literally for this precise situation, as is trendy for boys of his ilk. It was a proper crowbar too, heavy unmoveable iron that he kept just inside his bedroom door and I figured I could probably wield that, if it came down to it. I could do it for as long as the lactic acid would let me, at least.

I walked out the front doors into a silent world. It was exactly like 28 Days Later but instead of sweeping vistas of national landmarks there was just the horrible eyesore hospital and its unremarkable suburbs. The trees rustled in the breeze louder than I had ever heard them. It was haunting how loud the city was without the hum of traffic and the shuffle of footsteps. In the car park there was more blood and more gnawed carcasses of things now only identifiable as men and women by a process of elimination. The things that had done this were nowhere to be seen, if they could be seen at all, and I took that as an indication that I needed to move quickly in order to sneak home with my life intact.

As I set off down the long, straight road home the fight or flight urge was giving me adrenaline as pocket money and I quickly turned my brisk pace into proper full out sprinting, relieved that I had chosen the sensible work shoes and not the heels. I rounded down the last leg, the Groves still blissfully silent, I noticed something that made me come to an abrupt halt.

My front door was ajar. More than that, there was a slumped man outside it. And he was moving, slowly.

My eyesight wasn’t what it used to be so I edged closer, hands gripping my skirt for something to hold on to. As I got closer I realised three things as my eyes came into focus: that the corpse was my housemate, and he was holding the crowbar, and most importantly, he wasn’t a corpse, he was alive. I crept hurriedly forward.

“Oh god what happened?! What are they?! Where does it hurt?!” The manic interrobangs in that statement came as thick as my fear. I was standing as near to him as I dared in case he turned out to be a creature lying in wait for me. I may not be a blonde virgin but I know that as the girl I’m destined to die early on in the zombie movie. I was not going to take any chances.

There was silence at first, as he appeared to struggle for breath. “Bears” he said, finally, the word oozing out like a sigh. I rushed forward. It’s his answer to any inane question, and so unless the creatures could replicate irritating boy-mannerisms I was sure this was he and not some zombie-vampire facsimile.

I felt along his left side for any sign of injury, and then tenderly checked his abdomen before going down the right side. It was on the right leg I felt blood, a lot of blood. Hysterically, it felt like more blood that anyone had any right to lose. It was dark red though, not the bright red I feared, and gushed out relatively evenly rather than in the unsteady pulse of his heart.

He wasn’t speaking anymore. I bent close and could feel his breath soft on my cheek and his breathing raised my hand where it pressed against his ribs, even if it was a bit irregular, so I pulled one leg up and tucked one arm under his head, then rolled him over on to one side. I could see the wound more clearly at this angle, and as it was clear of debris I stripped off my cardigan and wrapped it tightly round the wound in order to staunch the flow of the sticky venous blood. It was one of those trendy waterfall ones with the long points, and they make great impromptu major external bleed bandages. The fashion magazines that proclaimed them to be indispensible for all fashion emergencies; they had no idea.

I kept coming back every few seconds from applying pressure to the wound to place a hand on his chest and so I felt the moment that he stopped breathing. I rolled him onto his back as carefully as possible whilst my hands fumbled for the bunch of keys in my pocket and with trembling fingers I tore open the facemask I kept on my keychain. I placed my hands in the middle of his chest, on the slight dip between the ribs, with interlocking fingers. Beneath them he felt so fragile, and it felt counterintuitive to push, but push I did. There was no crack to begin with, and I couldn’t remember if that meant I was pushing hard enough, my mind instinctively counting its way up to thirty. In my training I had chosen the disco classic ‘Staying Alive’ as my rhythm song because I liked the dark humour in using it, and so my head was full of warbling falsetto and the count battling each other for supremacy until…28, 29, 30. I stopped. I scooted round to his head and laid the flimsy plastic mask I had always secretly wished to have an occasion to use (but never, really, god, I would give anything to not be doing this) over his face, tipping his head back, pulling the jaw down and pinching his nose as I breathed, long and slow and watched his chest rise with my breath.

I gave my second breath remembering the little Resus machine they trained us with at compulsory training, the lovely man in the machine with his perfect RP accent going ‘and Breaaaaaaathe’, holding the vowels to emphasise the long breath. Thirty compressions go on forever when there is someone’s life underneath you but then the two breaths seem nowhere near enough to keep a fully-grown man alive. I wanted to breathe into him for far longer, give him my lungs, and do anything I could think of to give him life. It was a lot each time to go back to compressions and even more to keep the momentum up as the adrenaline burned its way out of my arms and the lactic acid crept in.

The book states that you have to keep going until the emergency services arrive, someone else takes over or you are physically exhausted. The book also states that basic CPR is only to preserve life, that without defibrillation it’s unlikely that the subject will revive and without post-resuscitation care it would be a poor quality of life. I had seen the empty ambulance bays and the nightmare scene at the hospital and could feel the oppressive silence whispering the fact that if anything came, it would likely not be a someone anymore.

My arms buckled. I had guilty thoughts running full tilt through my head, chasing the Gibb brothers out with their whispers of ‘you should have grabbed the defib machine. It was there in the next office. You should have taken up running. He will die because you preferred to sit on tumblr, twitter and facebook than go for a run or pump weights at the gym. He is already dead. You’re just beating up a corpse’.

I was sobbing when I stopped. The blood from the leg wound had saturated through my cardigan and was running down the slope of the pavement towards the river so even if I got him back the blood pressure would be too low to stop him crashing again. There was no signal on my mobile and no one to come.

I took the crowbar from his tight grip and closed his eyes, like they do on the movies and stepped over him into the house.

I've been really annoyed recently at how inaccurate CPR is in all the genre things I've been watching. Therefore as I hadn't done any revision on my first aid since I qualified in August I thought I'd dig out the book and remedy it by doing an accurate version, but include zombies because zombies are always welcome, right?

Obviously, CPR isn't accurate in these things because by the time the heart and breathing have stopped you've got the actual contributing factor that's killed your red shirt/main character/love interest. Therefore CPR is all about preserving life long enough for proper medical wizards to bring them back, if possible. 

Anyway, thanks for reading what's essentially my homework.

Oh yeah, and the image has nothing to do with it but it made me giggle.

[sarahribu]

This is utterly lovely, and haunting, and not cheesy at all, despite the tag on the original. My favourite of Jamie's pieces (so far, anyway).