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Notes:
1. Written on 12th June, 2009
2. A pre-emptive comic for tonight, tomorrow, the rest of our lives
horror
Crabs
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Notes:
1. Written on 27th April, 2009
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For me, perhaps for everyone, what I find to be the most dreadful part of Hansel and Gretel, the most horrifying bit, where it ultimately turns it into a tale of horror beyond compare, is the happy-ever-after ending.
There is an escalation of horrors throughout the story, of course – their mother’s death; the jealous malevolence of their stepmother; their abandonment in the woods; the pitcher-plant lure of the gingerbread house; the witch; the imprisonment; the slavery; the threatened (but never actualised) death by cannibalism.
But in a way this is all for show, a deft piece of misdirection, obscuring the real horror at the heart of the tale, the monster lurking at the edge of the screen as the credits roll, that final moment of dread as the screen goes black, that gnaws at you all night.
For here is our happy ending: the witch is dead, the stepmother is dead, and Hansel and Gretel return home to their father.
Their father, who took them to the woods and abandoned them, not once but twice.
Their father, who was perfectly willing to let them die, simply to appease his new wife.
Hansel and Gretel escape from the forest, and they escape the witch. But can there be any possible escape for them from their father. From his blankness, from his pliability, his disinterest and neglect. From his next, inevitable, betrayal.
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Notes:
1. Written in 2017 sometime
2. I remember starting it in January 2017
3. While ill
4. At the Eden Project
5. But I have no idea when I finished it
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!Magic Trick
Our mother was a magician. She performed on stage and everything. She was brilliant. One day we came home from school and she had bricked herself up in the chimney.
“I’m in here,” she said cheerily.
“What are you doing in there,” I said.
“Hiding,” she replied.
“From who?” I asked.
“Everyone,” she said.
“How did you get in there, anyway?” Jane asked. “It’s tiny in there.”
Jane knew that cause once she’d crawled in the fireplace and pushed her head up there looking for fairies, and she’d almost got her head stuck.
“It was a bit of a squeeze,” Mum admitted.
She must have done some impressive contortions to slide herself up there. I could see Jane looking up and down the wall, imagining Mum’s body all stretched out up the pipe, standing on tiptoes, her arms pointing right up to heaven.
This still didn’t explain how she’d bricked up the fireplace behind her, but then Mum never did like explaining her tricks. She said it’d spoil them.
“Now go outside and watch this,” she told us, and we went and sat in the garden and waited. Eventually there was a puff of smoke, and a great fat pigeon flew out of the chimney pot and fluttered away across the street.
Two weeks later child protection arrived, and we’ve been in the orphanage ever since. They’re still looking for Dad.
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Notes:
1. Written on August 8th, 2019
__________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!Graduation
They did not reveal to us our true nature until we were close to graduating from high school. An assembly was called, and a member of our class was brought on to the stage. As we watched, they peeled back the skin of their face, showing us the metallic structure beneath.
Knives were handed to each of us, so that we could confirm upon ourselves. We were thus sent out into the world, unsure of what it was, what it had been all this time.
I pulled the skin back down over the hydraulics in my wrist. The lacerations healed without scars. I never spoke of it again.
This was how it had always been done, how it always will be done.
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Notes:
1. Written on August 15th, 2019
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