___________
Notes:
1. Made on March 8th, 2021
2. Using the same shadow technology as yet (a sheet of tracing paper and an LED camping torch)
3. This one ended up basically recreating Limbo
4. But as a badly animated gif instead
5. (This live exploration footage is also available on youtube)
We used to play football over the field, me, my brother, and a bunch of other kids from the estate. It was an obsession. It was all we did. None of us were any good, but we never let that put us off.
We never let anything put is off. One time I slid through some unseen dog’s muck, ended up covered in shit from my knees up to my shoulder. I ran home weeping, of course, in disgust and shame and sheer shivering horror, but I still went back the next day. I wanted to go back that day, but I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t let me. I’d already caused her enough work.
Similarly, when I sliced my shin open on some rusty piece of debris, that didn’t put me off. Didn’t put any of us off. That time, if I remember it right, I didn’t even run home, just played on covered in blood, revelling in the gore and the carnage of it all.
Football was like a mania, really, some desperate delirium. Football, football, football. The drumbeat of our lives. I was 10. 11. 12. It went on and on.
It wasn’t even a field we played on. Just some small patch of grass in a piece of dead space between the houses, bounded by garages and back garden fences, forgotten by everyone except us and whoever it was that parked their car at one end, there every day and gone at night, the visible dents in the doors increasing month by month, wayward shot by wayward shot.
I was too young then for music.
***
I was 13 when it happened. I fired in a shot at goal. It the hit the handlebars of whoever’s bike it was that was being used as the right hand goalpost, ricocheted off into the windscreen of the parked car, looped up high over a back garden wall, and disappeared from view. Followed soon by the sounds of shattering glass. Followed soon by everyone running away.
Except for me.
That ball was mine. I couldn’t leave it behind. An official World Cup 90 Adidas Etrusco. It meant everything to me, loomed large in my imagination in a way incomprehensible to me now.
If I was obsessed with football, I was obsessed with all the rest too – boots, balls, kits, stickers, subbuteo, video games, everything. It was a debilitating disease of the mind. It was all I had.
So I looked around, shrugged my shoulders, and climbed over the fence. No one ever saw me again.
***
Don’t worry. They did really.
***
I wasn’t even in there long, to be honest. It just seemed like forever.
The whole place had the stink of abandonment and despair. The garden was overgrown. The rotary washing line was rusted into its hole. A rotten shed. Paint peeling from the window frames. The back door swinging back and forth on its hinges, the glass from the bottom window panel shattered all around.
I stepped forward, stepped inside, big steps across the debris field, small steps as I shuffled as silently as I could across the yellowing lino of the darkened kitchen.
From the shadows, movement. A white orb, floating ominously, the ball as heavenly object, ghostly terror.
The figure holding it smiled out at me over the top. Was it a smile? I couldn’t tell. She had too many teeth, they were too long, too wide, too white. It stopped being a smile and became something else.
The ball rested on her palm, and the fingers were splayed out towards me. Even longer than the teeth were the claws. Even longer than the claws the fingers. Her other arm hung down to her knee. Those claws scraped at the carpet, undulating rhythmically, unable to keep still.
I took the ball silently and turned to leave. I felt those claws on my shoulder, on my legs, running up my inner thigh. Those teeth I felt against my neck. And as they parted, her tongue slathered across my cheek, searching slowly for my mouth. So cold, so wet.
The ball bounced slowly away across the room. Beneath our feet the crunch of broken glass.
I fell into a dream.
***
After that I didn’t really play football much any more.
__________
Notes:
1. Written in December 2020
2. The title is from this
3. All though that version’s slightly different from the one they usually show on the tv.
4. But anyway this story has nothing at all to do with that really I’m afraid.
_________
Notes:
1. Written/made on February 15th, 2021
2. Using a plasticine figure I found in the big box of old plasticine pieces
3. That was hidden away in the shed
4. And had been for two years or more
My father was building things in the garden again. It’d been a while. Once he started he would not stop, no matter what. Not until it was finished. Not until he’d made you look, made you comment, made you evaluate its worth.
Whatever it was. Whatever it turned out to be.
That was the problem, really. You never quite knew what was coming. You never quite knew what you were in for.
Sometimes they were things of quiet beauty, wistful sculptures, delicate carvings, a phrase etched in chalk, as fleeting as thought. Abstract structures as moving as anything Henry Moore ever carved out of dead stone.
Other times they were impracticalities, intrusions, wastes of materials and resources, space, time. Not just his time but ours as well, as we were forced in vain to try and conjure up some validation of his over engineered creations, his cumbersome designs, his broken visions. If you can’t even tell whether it’s a bench or a cage or a new gazebo you’re evaluating, it’s pretty difficult to form an opinion as to his success.
But then there were the nightmares. The horrors only he could conjure. Once he spent six months building a hole. A hole in nothing. Just a hole. Floating there. Inert. Unbounded.
Another time, My mother lost her mind one summer, trying to visualise some casual violation of geometry he’d forced into being. Now she rejects every dimension beyond the three.
And I myself spent six years lost in the fractalising inner spaces of a shed he’d misconceived. Six years! No one even noticed I was gone. I only survived because the roof lekaed incessantly, and the snails proliferated down there in the damp and the mould.
So now I try not to look out of the windows of my room. Try not to listen too closely to the sounds of his tools. Try to escape the looming presence of his coming words.
But this year there’s no escape. There’s nowhere else for me to go. Except to make my way out into the garden, and into his domain. To stand there by his side, and answer that question.
“So, what do you think?”
I can already feel the tears rolling down my cheeks as I try to think of something to say. Already feel that anxiety building in my long since emptied heart as he ushers me through the door, and into his new dream.
__________
Notes:
1. Written in December 2020
__________There was a woman who lived in the woods. She was the greatest witch who had ever lived, with powers and knowledge beyond the comprehension of all but herself. She had lived through the entire history of the universe from birth to death many times, and learned of it something more each time, for it was endlessly changing and vaster than infinity, and as her knowledge of the world increased so did her knowledge of herself.
She had lived recently not just in the woods but as the woods, her consciousness spread through every root and branch and leaf of it, from birth and growth and now its gradual death. To understand the causes of its decline she concentrated an aspect of her mind into the form of a single human, and lived as her and died many times, understanding slightly more of the ways of humans with each new life, and each new death.
Eventually the forest died, and her entire mind came to reside in the latest manifestation of her human form, and she stepped out from the shadow of the final tree and into the town and walked out among its people for the first time.
“Nice tits!” shouted the first of them, but she could not answer, for she did not understand fully the complexities of their language.
“I’ve seen nicer,” said the next one. “She’s not all that.”
“A tit’s a tit,” said a third. “And those are some tits.”
She shifted her consciousness across from her body to touch upon their minds, in the hope of learning from them their language and their ways, and alighted upon the mind of the first. At first she was struck by the vast emptiness of what she found there, an emptiness greater by far than even the final days of the universe, when entropy had fully wrought its way and all lay in silence and stasis and a single thought took longer to form than the lifespans of all that we know and have known and shall ever know. Then, as she tried to leap from the first mind to the second, she discovered that it was not a void but a hole, a great dense immensity of concentrated ignorance that compressed all intellectual thought into a single point and let nothing of worth escape.
All her knowledge and compassion and soul was lost to the universe forever. As her old body fell like a tree to the floor one of the men said, “Hey look she’s a fucking spazz an’ all,” as they filmed her last few autonomic twitches with their phones.
__________
Notes:
1. Written in the summer of 2014
2. And unused till now
3. In lieu of a howling rage of despair
4. That is too inarticulate to bear