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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
horror
Building
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.
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Notes:
1. Written in December 2020
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If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!Tale #149: The Woman Who Lived In The Woods
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
Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!A Horror Story For Halloween
they made me watch question time
on a loop
forever
and every time i screamed
they added another episode
on another screen
until i faced a wall of it
wider than the horizon
brighter than any sky
any sun
any laser fired directly through the eye
and into the brain
and every time i wept
they turned the sound up
and up
and up
until the entire world throbbed
with ignorance
and hate
from which i could not escape
___________
Notes:
1. Written on October 29th, 2020
__________Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!Tale #133: The Three Sons
A lord had three sons. One day, when they were fully grown, he took them to the top of the tallest tower of the castle and made them fire an arrow over the parapet and into the town. And wheresoever the arrow fell, there his son would find his wife.
The first son, the lord’s favourite, and upon whom the lord had lavished his entire life’s fortune and love, fired his arrow and his strength was such that the arrow flew out beyond the town to the castle of the neighbouring kingdom. It flew through the window and struck the headboard of the bed where the king’s fairest daughter was sleeping. And so the lordling and the princess were married that very afternoon.
The next day, the second son, about whom the lord was largely indifferent, fired his arrow, and his strength, though not as great as his elder brother’s, was still such that the arrow flew out over the town towards the church, where it struck the gate of the vicarage. The bishop’s only daughter was cleaning in the yard, and so the second son and the bishop’s daughter were married that very afternoon.
On the third day, the youngest son, who the king despised, fired his arrow. After years of abuse and neglect, the young man was so weak and useless that the arrow tumbled straight down into the market place below, where it struck a travelling merchant in the throat and killed her instantly. And so the third son and the corpse were married that very afternoon.
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Notes:
1. Written on the 18th May, 2016
2. So I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to include it here.
3. Perhaps cause it was a bit too bleak and cynical
4. Even for me.
5. (And the same applies for next week’s one, too)