short stories

London

I went to London once.

I’d never been before and everyone always used to say to me, “Oh, have you been to London?” and “You should go to London, it’s brilliant,” and “I can’t believe you’ve never been to London.”

“London,” they’d say. “It’s fucking amazing.” And then they’d tell me all the ways it was amazing.

There were a lot of ways it was amazing.

Once I admitted that I’d never even heard of London and they looked at me as if I was mad. “What?! How? That’s impossible!” and “You must at least have seen it on the telly?” and “What about that film that came out last year? You must have seen that!” and I said what film and they said, “That one about London,” and so in the end I said “Oh that one! Of course I’ve seen that!” but of course I hadn’t seen it at all.

So I went to London.

And it really was incredible and I’m glad I went.

They had all these buildings and there were so many of them and so close together and they were huge and weird and all sort of knotted and woven together so you couldn’t see where one finished and the others started and they all glittered like jewels in the sun so the longer you looked at them the longer they stayed with you when you looked away.

And there were hundreds of people everywhere, thousands maybe, all going all over the place like they knew where they were and where they needed to be but they all looked kind of dry somehow, all brittle and faded like old newspapers, and when you spoke to them they’d shift and shimmer and get all scared and fly away into the sky in great directionless flocks.

I bought some food in one of their shops but instead of money they had a system based around physical punishment so after that I didn’t buy anything else although I was too polite to put the sandwich back and too cowardly to show them how cowardly I was and so I stuck out my hand and accepted the sharp cuts across the knuckles that it cost me.

In the evening I found this town square and there was a huge unlit pyre of bodies at the centre and more and more people kept stumbling out of the restaurants and the bars and the theatres all around and collapsing against the mass of it and in this way it grew and grew. I danced beside it for a while with a three-armed girl and we danced and danced and kissed and more and at the end I held out my hand so she could inflict her price but she just laughed and said “It’s not there you pay it’s here” and she tapped me on my belly and cavorted away.

I wondered what she meant at first but then I began to feel queasy and dizzy and unwell and eventually I fell to my knees by the empty horse’s trough at the entranceway to the square and began to vomit up my lunch into it, and then my breakfast and then everything else that came before and after that some blood and then more blood and organs and old tin cans and some pieces of string and misshapen lumps of glass that looked like malformed bones and one that looked somehow like a skull and then a few more drops of blood and then it stopped and I spat and spat out all the saliva I had left into that trough of filth and I wiped the tears away from my eyes and I thought I was going to be okay I thought that wasn’t so bad was it and I looked at the blood in the trough and I thought I saw it ripple and I thought I saw it move and then two hands came out and grabbed me round my neck and pulled me down towards whatever it was they belonged to down towards the blood and into the blood and the rubbish and the half-digested food down and down endlessly into the dark.

I think it was London.

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Notes:

1. Written on March 17th, 2016

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“Why do the dead float?”

The swollen birds heaved themselves from the river and waddled awkwardly across the mud banks. The water they left behind was the same pale orange as the sky, and as silent and still.

“Tell me a story from before I can remember.”
“From before you were born?”
“No. After I was born but before I can remember.”
“Okay. Let me think.”

The sun was almost down. We lit the fire. I stared into it and offered up my nightly prayer.

“I could tell you about the snow.”
“No. I remember that.”
“But you were only one.”
“You’ve told me before. So I can remember that.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I want to hear something new.”
“I could tell you something about before you were born. That’d make it easier.”
“No, I have to be in it. That’s what makes it real.”
“Do you remember the boat?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you about the boat.”

*

This was after mum and dad had gone, ages after it seemed, although it couldn’t really have been long, and it was much closer to them going than it was to where we are now. Time can move at different rates, and those first few months lasted forever. You were about three. It was still summer. I would have been nine.

It wasn’t this river. It was a different river. Wider and longer and somehow calmer, almost like a lake at times. The other bank was a world beyond our reach. We found the boat tethered to a collapsed old tree. Or rather you found the boat and I found you in it, your bare feet stamping up and down in the mucky water that puddled in there at one end, where the boat leaned down the shallow bank towards the water.

It was an old rowing boat, wooden, painted a peeling blue on the outside and white inside, about six feet long. All the paint was peeling off and you could see glimpses of the wood beneath it.

I’d seen a lot of boats before, when I was younger. I haven’t seen any since. There were two benches, one at the back and one across the middle, and a single oar tucked under them. A dead frog lay bloated and white in the puddle by your feet. I scooped it out with oar rather than touch it with my hands.

It didn’t take much for me to push the boat into the river. I clambered in and used the oar to push us out, away from the shallows and into the river proper, and we floated away.

What I remember most about the water were the jellyfish. Some just hung there, completely still, suspended motionless in it as if the water was a slab of glass. Others gently pushed their way onwards to wherever it was they were going. The perpetual rippling of their bodies – from the outside edge all the way in towards the centre – was hypnotic and serene. That movement is the way I’ve always dreamed our hearts beat inside us, if only we could ever see them. If somehow we could turn our skin to glass and look down into the dark depths of that sea of blood that fills us up and keeps us alive in some way.

The sun shone that day and there was hardly even a breeze. We left the hum of insects and the cries of birds behind us on the shoreline and drifted out into silence. I let my hand fall into the river and watched the water bubble up and break around it, felt the steady constant push of the current against my palm. You pointed at everything – at the boat, the water, the oar, at the sky and the clouds and at the jellyfish and at me.

The boat crashed heavily and we both fell off our seats. You looked at me for a moment and then burst into tears. I picked you up and held you and comforted you while trying to turn and see what it was that we had hit. It was huge, dead, floating there in the middle of the river. I pushed at it with the oar. It didn’t move, and instead we did, driven slightly back from it for a second, before the current pulled us back toward its mass. I pushed again with the oar and slowly manoeuvred us around it, and once we were past we floated off away and left it behind.

*

“And then what happened?”
“I don’t know. Nothing much.”
“How did we get back?”
“Get back where?”
“Where we started.”
“We didn’t.”
“But what about our things.”
“We had them with us.”
“In the boat?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t say that.”
“I forgot to. It wasn’t important.”
“What else did you forget to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Where did we end up? Did we float out into the sea?”
“We got out further up the river. On the other side.”
“What was there?”
“Nothing much. It was like the other bank. It was like this one. Like all of them. Like everywhere.”
“Did we see any people?”
“Not that day.”
“Why do the dead float?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the living sink?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Do you remember mum and dad?”
“A bit. Less and less.”
“I do.”
“You can’t. You were tiny then.”
“I do. Although sometimes I think I made them up. Or you made them up.”
“Maybe we both did.”
“What do you think that thing was in the water?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think you made that up?”
“I don’t know. How would I know? How could I tell?”

The fire crackled as it burned. Smoke drifted up towards the stars. The thin sliver of the moon fell down below the horizon and the last of the light left the night sky.

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Notes:

1. Written in June and July, 2012

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Crack

There were a load of cracks all over the field behind our house. They weren’t there yesterday. They were only there today.

The biggest one of them was so deep you could put your arm down it and never reach the end. This worked whether you had a short arm, like me, or a long arm, like my dad, or a leg, like my mum, who refused to lie down, like we were doing, and just sat on the side and dangled a leg down there instead.

“What are they, though?” I said.

“Mouths,” said my dad.

“Mouths?” I said, uncertainly.

“Yep, mouths,” said my dad. I could see my mother shaking her head and putting a finger to her lips but he carried on regardless. “It’s been so dry all summer that the ground needs to get water from somewhere. So it’s opened up some of its mouths in the hope of gulping down a child or two.”

“A child?” I whimpered.

“Children are full of water,” my dad said, and laughed and made to push me down the hole but he didn’t push me down the hole.

I jumped to my feet and thought of mouths and began to cry and my mother said, “Christ!” but not at me at my dad. My dad just shrugged his shoulders somehow even though he was lying on the floor and then rolled over onto his back and looked up at the sky.

“He needs to grow up,” he said, bitterly.

“You need to grow up,” said my mum to my dad, while hugging me and assuring me everything was okay, everything was all right, they weren’t really mouths, they weren’t going to eat me at all. And she made it all better and I stopped crying and I really love my mum I do.

A little while later we went off to the shop to get some ice creams, and when we got back my dad was asleep on the blanket. My mum smiled at me and put a finger to her lips and then exaggeratedly sneaked over to my dad and rolled him up in the blanket and pushed him down into the crack.

You’d never believe how much water there is inside a person, how thick and dark and endless it all is.

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Notes:

1. Written on August 3rd, 2018

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Support An Accumulation Of Things

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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.

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this is as small as i can write

When we were little, my mother invented a game for us to play. She’d write a sentence at the top of a piece of paper and say “This is as small as I can write” and then the next player would write a sentence in slightly smaller handwriting and say “This is as small as I can write” and you’d pass the page to the next player and if they couldn’t read your writing you’d be out. And you’d continue round and round the table until either everyone was out or you reached the bottom of the page and it was so filled up with tiny writing there was no where else for your writing to go.

None of my brothers or sisters remember this game at all when I mention it. And none of them ever really liked it back then anyway. But I always loved it and I never stopped playing, even if for most of my life the only person I’ve been competing against is myself.

I bought magnifying glasses and microscopes and ultrahard ultrasharp pencils and even thinner pens, and etching equipment and even a cutting laser at one point, always trying to better my last sentence, to beat my last score.

Now I’m down to atoms there’s nowhere else to go.

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Notes:

1. Written on September 23rd, 2016

__________

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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!

Our recent excavations

Our recent excavations underneath this site unearthed a sealed and untouched incontamination chamber, dating from sometime before the Shift.

The following documents are transcriptions of the text contained on the printed matter found within. Visual matter beyond the scope of words is currently being checked against the corpus for possible rights issues, and will hopefully be cleared for inclusion presently. Descriptions of any relevant visual material needed to contextualise the written contents are presented for illumination purposes only, and pre-suppose no claim to their ownership.

The physical artefacts from the chamber, including food receptacles, mechanical and electrical devices, clothing, waste products, are currently being scanned for reproduction and facsimiliation, and an exhibition of these items is currently planned for the endmonths of this year.

The desiccated corpse of the inhabitant of the chamber is currently under investigation by the genetics department and will be released only when the consent of itself or any cloned derivatives are able to be obtained. As forced maturation techniques are uncertain to work on pre-shift brain matter, if undesiccation of the body is not successful the obtainment of consent will be unable to be legally accepted for at least a further 19.54 years.

Item 001: The Racist Cop in The Zoo Of The Future (#8 in a series of 183)

Printed card measuring approximately 13.4yn by 8.93333333333333333yn. Full colour printed picture on upside, text on obside. Found on floor, although analysis suggests it was likely to have been affixed to the wall (picture side visible) near desk by an adhesive of some kind.

The picture on the card depicts a clothed humanoid individual hollering aggressively directly at the [holder of the] camera.

Racist Cop

Timespan: 19th – 21st Century
Area: Prevalent everywhere except Antarctica
Diet: Meat, Fish, Bread
Characteristics: Racist Cops were a common subspecies of the parasitic Cop organisms of the early industrial/commercial periods of human history, characterised predominantly by severe and extreme violent tendencies, allied with a strong herd instinct and a subservience to a rigid social hierarchy within their own populations.

Shorn of their uniforms and weaponry, and separated from their protective power structures, however, Racist Cops are revealed to be incredibly timid and cowardly creatures, although still obnoxious, as can be seen with our specimen here in The Zoo Of The Future.

Although likely to withdraw from the view of passing crowds, if the Racist Cop sees its chance it will leap from hiding and attempt to attack or abuse any isolated figure it deems weaker than itself. For your own safety, please do not linger by the enclosure unaccompanied.

There is some scientific disagreement as to whether the Racist Cop and the Sexist Cop (#9) were distinct subspecies or just slightly different variations of the same.

The Racist Cop in The Zoo Of The Future is card #8 in a series of 183.

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Item 002: The Forever Parade

Encyclopaedia article printed on a single sheet of yellowed paper (32.1yn by 21.4yn approximately), text on one side only. At the bottom of the page, text indicates that this was page 1 of 3, but the other two pages were not contained within the chamber. Found on desk.

The Forever Parade

The Forever Parade is a conceptual public gathering, consisting of a continuous, oblivious, and ever-changing grouping of pedestrians that, when followed through time on mapping sites, surveillance channels and other publicly available data, constitute the titular Forever Parade. The length of existence and the minimum sizing of the group for such a grouping to be considered a Forever Parade have long been under debate, but, at a minimum, a constant presence of at least two members must always be maintained.

Although the concept of a Forever Parade was first outlined (but not named) by the Descriptionist Ichid Naer in her book “The Poetics of NoSpace” (published in 2021), it wasn’t until the introduction of live image data to Apple Street in 2029 that a real world example could be shown and followed.  

As of today, the longest currently running Forever Parade is London Forever III, which has been existence for over 17 years. However, there is some discussion over the legitimacy of this, due to the tendency for it to be artificially maintained by tourists, sponsors, and other organised groups (see Controversies).

1. Conceptual Framing and Mathematical Underpinning
2. Real World Discovery And Naming
3. Records
4. Controversies
5. A list of current Forever Parades

1. Conceptual Framing and Mathematical Underpinning

In an aside in The Poetics Of NoSpace, Ichid Naer outlined a scenario thusly: “Given this density of humanity, there is, if we could only trace them, certain to be flocks of people that, viewed as a mass rather than as individuals, have been perambulating across the city together for some time now and will continue on for some time yet. It would be interesting to see whether there is any pattern to their routes, to find out whether these unknown, unaware, herds, constantly shedding and gaining new members as they roll onwards, loop back and forth between two points like the seasonal migrations of birds, or if they snake erratically through the streets at random in the fashion of a photon trying, futilely, to escape the heart of the sun.”

After much online interest and discussion of this passage, she, along with the mathematician Ogawa Naoko, attempted to set out the statistical like-

[article ends]

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Item 003: untitled poem

Handwritten poem, red ink on green paper (6.1yn by 6.12yn). Found screwed up on desktop.

Fractured heart
beneath shattered ribs
Crooked hands
around my throat
Is this enough
if its all there is

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Item 004: The Metamorphoses

Encyclopaedia article printed on sheets of yellowed paper (32.1 yn by 21.4 yn approximately), text on one side only. The article consisted of 4 sheets of paper, held together by a coiled loop of stiffened metal. Probable fifth page of article missing. Found on floor by extraction tube.

The Metamorphoses

This article is about the television show. For the viral infection, please see The_Metamorphoses(Virus) or The_Metamorphoses(2049_Outbreak). For the work by Ovid, please see Metamorphoses. For the work by Jean Michel Jarre, please see Métamorphoses.

1. Overview
2. List of Episodes
3. Controversy
4. Legacy

1. Overview

The Metamorphoses was a short-lived lifestyle and makeover television programme, created and produced by the BBC and broadcast on six consecutive Saturday nights between October and November 2037. The premise of the show was based around the contemporary fashion for transformational surgery. The programme’s unique selling point was the use of metamorphical designs created by some of the foremost visual artists of the day, as well as the lavish cost and large-scale scope of some of the resulting human-sculptures. Contestants/subjects were chosen by the producers, except in the case of Helen Shapiro, who was chosen at (longtime fan) Damien Hirst’s request.

On a per-episode basis it was one of the most expensive television shows ever produced. Due to the cost and its low viewing figures, it became a symbol of the decline of the BBC, and was specifically cited in the Jackson Report as evidence of the public service failures of the then tax-supported media network, and of the shortcomings of the public service broadcasting paradigm as a whole. For a more detailed look at the Jackson Report and its outcomes, please see Jackson_Report(BBC).

2. List of Episodes

Episode 1 – The Angel Of Hull
Broadcast Date – Saturday, October 10, 2037
Artist – Brian Froud
Subject – Fran Masereel

Fran Masereel, a primary school teacher from Hull, was given fully functioning fairy wings, granting her limited powers of “flight”.

Episode 2 – Aural Sensations
Broadcast Date – Saturday, October 17, 2037
Artist – Toby Vok
Subject – Toby Vok

The musician and artist Toby Vok finally transformed himself into his long-proposed “All Body Theremin”.

Episode 3 – For The Love Of God Again
Broadcast Date – Saturday, October 24, 2037
Artist – Damien Hirst
Subject – Helen Shapiro

In this episode Damien Hirst recreated his famous sculpture For The Love Of God by embedding over £200 million worth of diamonds into 90 year-old Helen Shapiro’s face.

Notes: During filming, Damien Hirst fell off his skateboard and broke his leg, hip and elbow.

Episode 4 – It’s What Inside That Counts
Broadcast Date – Saturday, October 31, 2037
Artist – Olajire Ojo
Subject – “Barry”

This week’s subject, appearing anonymously and pseudonymously, was a sufferer of extreme body dysmorphic disorder who had been seeking psychiatric help for his condition. In a collaboration with both his doctor and the artist, it was decided that his flesh and bone structure be removed and his internal organs placed in a series of crystal cubes connected by a complex series of osmotic membranes. The various organ cubes could be stacked in any order.

Note: This was the only episode where the basic human form was completely discarded during the metamorphosis.

Episode 5 – You Will Never See My Perfection No Matter How Long You Stare
Broadcast Date – Saturday, November 7, 2037
Artist – CHU
Subject – Desmond Tenpence

In a direct response to the previous week’s work, the renowned conceptual artist CHU took Desmond Riley, an extreme narcissist, and made him perfectly transparent by means of a cloaking device fashioned from an internal woven mesh of carbon nanotubes.

Episode 6 – The Averaged (Wo)man
Broadcast Date – Saturday, November 14, 2037
Artist – Armelle Bourgoin
Subject – Mary Rose Hannigan

Supermodel Mary Rose Hannigan, long-feted as the most beautiful woman in the world, wished to retire and live a normal life. To this end, the French artist Armelle Bourgoin gave her the “average” British face, which ended up being almost perfectly featureless.

3. Controversy

Along with public, political and press unease over the cost and quality of the programme, there was also a specific controversy concerning the use of private customer data in the sixth episode’s metamorphosis. Although it was later claimed by the artist that he had not actually accessed the licence fee payer’s database to create the “averaged face”, instead having used a simple photo-manipulation smear effect in a freely available software package, it did not prevent the corporation being levied with a record fine for data insecurity.

4. Legacy

A persistent urban legend has arisen concerning a supposed seventh episode (or possibly an alternate regular episode) in which a child’s hands were replaced by crab’s claws (some variants of the tale have them as lobster claws). However, no firm evidence of the creation of this episode or of its broadcast has ever been discovered.

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Item 005: Notes on reading dates, times and orders of magnitude in historical documents.

Large book. Dimensions approximately 33.3yn by 18.43yn. Cover only, all internal pages ripped out. Analysis suggests cover made of (unidentified) animal matter. Found in desk drawer.

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Item 006: Untitled placard

Mounted and framed placard, placed on the wall above desk. Dimensions: 35.99yn by 25.34125yn. The glass in the frame had been cracked (although not shattered), seemingly by a single blow.

For many years I walked across the earth, so as to encounter new things and thus gain an increased knowledge of the world. But eventually I came to the belief that constant novelty hindered the pursuit of wisdom, for it allowed no room for the contemplation of events, nor of meaning.

So I returned to my home and sat down in my room, and vowed to remain there until I truly understood the few meagre things contained within – the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the bed, and myself.

After many years of solitude, the only epiphany I experienced was that, when I walked the earth, I walked because I enjoyed it. And when it was solitude that I craved, I sat here. The reasons I constructed around these decisions were delusions constructed to create a mythology of purpose around my actions that they themselves did not warrant nor deserve.

Yet there was no importance in anything I had ever done, no purpose, and there never was in anything. And in understanding this I could live and die freely, however I pleased.

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Item 007:

Text, scratched onto the wall near bed.

Nostalgia eases the present by erasing the past

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Item 008:

Text, scratched onto the wall near extraction tube.

I remember so much and so little at the same time

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Item 009: fragment

Scrap of paper ripped from a larger sheet, found in corpses trouser pocket. Roughly triangular in shape, 8yn in length along longest edge. Text printed on both sides.

Side 1

is, Geo
y friends li
ereas your penis
ing disgusts them, you kno

Side 2

e monstr
nd said, “Lo
f it. It’ll never fit
she nodded and said, “That’
my problem, is it. It’s your anu

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Notes:

1. Written in January and February 2016
2. Although I think bits of it came from the year before

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Support An Accumulation Of Things

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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!