Stories
LAUNDROMAT
Final Draft
Laundromat
Round and round, and round the other way.
“They don’t make em like they used to, the machines, they make em so they break, so ya have to buy more.”
Heather smiled and nodded at the old man. He was always there, every Friday night, every laundry night, talking.
“It’s the way it is now, all about money, making a profit for the shareholders.”
‘Shareholders’
The word squeezed out through his ruined teeth.
“And I fought in Vietnam for that.”
He reached into his tote bag. Out came the brandy.
“Don’t mind, do you love?” he asked. “Want some?”
She smiled and nodded. He swigged and swallowed.
“Ahhhhh, that’s better… Now like I was saying, if I had my time again there would be no…”
Round and round, and round again. Every Friday night. She liked him, and sometimes his stories rang true, but tonight the talk was grating at her bones, and he stank, really stank, sweet liquor and sweat.
She needed a bigger flat. One with a washer and dryer.
“Yep, they’ll take what ya got then take the rest, suck you dry, chuck you in a ditch.”
He swigged again offering it to her. She nodded. He talked.
“Used to be different, you helped each other, but these days…”
A pokey woman in a pale purple tracksuit shot in from the street, opened two dryers, pulled the warm clothes onto a long white table, lit a cigarette, and started folding at breakneck speed, smoke in her mouth, mumbling.
That was the last straw. The heat, the noise, the sweat, the raving, and now the smoke. Heather grabbed her handbag but – Beeeeep – the washing. She rolled the damp clothes out in front of an empty dryer, pulled her phone, swiped, started the cycle, and headed to the door.
“You off love?” He shook his head. “I’ve had enough to, but I got nowhere to go, and the machines hum, they sing to me…” His face went flat.
“My mum used to sing to me.”
She stopped at the door and looked at him. They looked at each other. A pillar of wind from the street outside eddied the smoke between them, dancing in the spaces between the machines. She smiled.
Then from outside a sinewy man strode in and pushed Heather hard against the table, jittering with a drugged intensity, fuming out through distorted eyes.
“Give me money maggot, where’s the money!” He wrenched her bag, but she held it tight.
“Bitch I’ll do you!” He stepped back, flicking a blade, elbow bent to thrust… but the blade went nowhere. An arm crushed his neck from behind, pulling his hand back, jolting the knife to the floor, and the old man nailed that asshole to the tiles.
“You alright love?”
She nodded, shaking like a scared bird. He went on.
“Like I was saying, they don’t make em like they used to, the machines.”
URN
Final Draft
Urn
“I remember this place. It’s changed a lot.”
“Me too, and there’s parts I’d rather forget, or rather, I remember parts I thought I’d forgotten.”
“What are you making?
“Oh, I’m not sure yet, something for the kids.”
Her hands cupped the clay, squeezing as it spun, thumbs pushing down in the centre, opening it up.
“How do you do that, make something from nothing?”
“It’s not from nothing, it’s from everything. I throw the memories at the wheel and make a shape as it spins. It’s already there. It’s there before I start. The wheel and I just help it come into this world. The big things help the small things along.”
He left her, went to the window, and looked through the panes. Outside, autumn put sunset in the leaves and pulled them to the earth. A fresh wind came in where the window wouldn’t close, and the wheel quickened with the smell of clay.
Every empty moment in the whole square room was filled. The bees floating over clover flowers underneath the clothesline, grandma hanging washing with funny looking pegs. Water planes landing on the lake over smooth rocks under cold water. A lot had changed. He turned back.
“How’s it coming along?” The wheel slowed.
“Almost done.”
She drew a string under the clay releasing it from the wheel. “I’ll have to go soon.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back out there.”
“Can I come?”
“Later.”
He knelt at her side. “Oh that is beautiful, what is it?
It’s an urn.
“Is that for the kids? What will you put in there?”
The wind rattled the old glass in the window.
“Ashes.”
CHAMBER
Final Draft
Chamber
Our obsession had become a religion of craving that gambled my sanity to the brink. It had stretched our friendship over the racks of time and brought us at last to this tomb deep in the earth, under a thousand years of dust.
“Heeeave-Heeeave-Push!” The captain spat his orders in the dead air. Our sweat wet dirt in the chambers meek light, eyes bulging, giving all we had to that huge slab of stone.
“Grayson, light another torch. You men, push with me now.”
“Hhheeeeeeeeeaa-vvvhh!” Sinews rubbed across my bones through mad muscle under my skin, chaining the desires of my mind to the blood of my body.
The stone nudged, scraped, just a finger.
“Hurry, get a wedge in there!”
“It’s coming! It moved! Kandinsky, hammer that wedge…”
Kandinsky drove the hammer hard and we levered, surging with unnatural force, till in one blaring moment it split a crack open into the dark. We sprang back from the stone, stark figures in the flicker-light.
From beneath our feet came the snapping sound of ice in steamy water, then the airy whistle of breathing over pipes. Hesitation rippled through us, but the captain reared up and bellowed again.
“Now men now, this is it, give it all you have!”
The hammer swung with echoless smacks, pounding at the wedge.
Crack…Crack…Crack…
Something moved in the earth, dislodged below, and the captains beard, singed with ginger, jolted in the rapid sucking of air from around us.
“Give it one more, one more!” he howled.
The whistling rose and we pushed. Kandinsky swung again but missed and struck the slab. The stone gave way, breaking over the wedge, caving into the hole. A lewd cobalt blue beamed from the opening, and quiet came upon us.
We stood immersed in the emanation, entranced by what I knew could not be true, yet lay there in unbelievable brilliance.
Kandinsky murmured a prayer and moved for the tunnel but tripped in his haste, dropping the hammer into the open crypt.
It is true, what they had written, in all those books, over all those years.
The hammer fell, spinning down, smaller into the deep blue, its handle whirling round its head like the hand of a crazy clock, and we watched, ghosts in our own flesh, as it fell into a wide, open, starry sky.
Two Clowns
Final Draft
Two Clowns
It seems a pinprick of light in a clouded sky at night, now I’m outside the life still there. I can only connect the memories in beaded sequence, flapping like sodden flags on the plastic bones of this carnival tent.
The melting smells of last nights’ horse-shit and little rivers of rain coming in under the sides, the air not cold, but thick in the thin light of the dusk outside.
I found a high place of damp straw near the edge of the ring and went to sleep.
I suppose it was sleep. A space or a break or a loss of control, for some time, away from familiar things, until the back and forth of smudged voices lifted my lids to two figures on the far side, moving just enough to see. Heavy rain trampolined on the coated canvas above.
I stretched my arm through the matted hay to prop up and hear, and to level the scene. I made out two figures, a clown and a nun, talking and moving about. The one with the funny boots pointed his gloved finger straight up to the bulging roof.
“We’re trapped in here, in the story, and it’s absolutely pissing down, and It’s getting worse.”
The nun rolled her eyes. “Yes, I am well aware of that, but we… we can’t dismantle it in this weather; you know that.”
They back and forthed, arguing, pumping their elbows and leaning in at each other, while up above the rumble got so loud I couldn’t hear, and the top started sagging like a balloon toward the ground. Then in one long moment the roof bell bottomed, sucking the walls up and spitting them through its tearing teeth. The whole thing bleared translucent, and my breath replaced with empty space, till the sun of a clear morning washed in past the twitching curtains of my caravan window.
So, like I said, it’s easier to see now I’m gone and the pain is someone else’s. No need to ponder, no vessel to steer, no need for distress, released in oblivion, adjacent only in these words.
And apart from love, in its way, this is all that’s left.
Twisted Towers (Yellow Bell)
Final Draft
Twisted Towers
Every few days we need more, so we call, and we wait for them to deliver our magic tragedy.
The waiting is the hardest, in the same amber alcove, down the same broken alley, in the backward street of the Twisted City.
We need it, to turn again alive inside, to reunite with the trodden promise. We call to stop the veins knotting in legs that tighten with every empty second.
Outside my hole the fat drips of rain too heavy to stay, roll down to clouds in the concrete below.
Two people come pressing through the damp grey, half hidden under the yellow bell of a wet umbrella, passing by sellers in the alley, separate from the system that drives us to this.
The orange of old televisions and the pink noise of people, swish with the traffic in the hothouse outskirts of the disappearing day.
It could have been different, if we’d been shown, but blind direction taught us to burn time in a wasted vacuum.
Soon enough they’ll come, just wait, till the bough breaks and the feeling falls, and we’re standing in an open field outside the city, children again in the warm morning rain.
Moshab and Layne
Episode 1 – Black Wasp
Final Draft
Moshab and Layne – Ep1
“It’s about collecting opportunities”. said Moshab, “that’s the secret.”
Layne sniggered and shook his head.
“By collecting you mean stealing, and by opportunities you mean money right”, he scoffed”.
Moshab blicked his fingers across the spaceships’ control panel, pretending to check things over.
“Depends how you look at it my good man”, he said. “The universe provides ample vantage from which to view – why not choose a perspective that suits your purpose?”
“Makes you rich you mean”, said Layne.
“Money is just a concept Layne, a means to an end”.
“Ha yeah, a means to our end.”
Moshab brushed this off with more dotting at the controls.
“It’s a fundamental law of existence Layne. Life is a gamble worth taking, and anything worth taking is worth gambling – It is what it is, it aint what it aint, the perfect cycle of self-perpetuation”.
“Wow dude, you’ve plunged new depths of diarrhetic verbiage with that one”.
He’d heard it all before, the linguistic concoctions, the distorted reasoning, the contrived explanations designed to justify a need, but this time it was different – they were coming after them, every conceivable specimen of being, from all over the Milky Way, chasing their money, looking for their ‘Pound of Flesh’.
Moshab turned the ship toward a time-puddle and leaned back. “Never mind good fellow, in about 30 seconds no-one and no-thing will know where we are. Another beautiful beginning in another part of this beautiful…”
The controls lit up, and a massive wave of deceleration pulled a gravity wrap over the ship. Layne swivelled on his chair and heaved the contents of his stomach onto the controls.
“Oh god… somethings… I feel… oh god”, he spluttered.
He pushed back against the chair, wracked by hot convulsions.
“Layne!” Moshab froze in confusion as his friend split like a waterlogged melon, flesh peeling back. A slender, smooth, black-bodied wasp-being with faceted eyes forced its way from the flaps of Laynes outer coil, tossed the skin aside, and perched thereb staring.
“Where’s my money Mosssshhhhaaabbb?”
“Oh shit Shylock, you’ve dismantled Layne, please, wait, we were just going to get your money.”
Shylock snarled a long slow smile, then spoke like a spikey gangster through the mandibles of his insect face.
“That which you go to get should already be got, my dear Moshab, and I’m here to get whatever you got instead.”
And with that he leapt onto Moshabs’ chest, forced his mouth open with two, sharp, shiny legs, sucked up his tongue, and bit it off at the base.
The creature spat the sluggy meat in the pile of Layne and spoke above the gurgles and shrieks.
“Do not screw with the black-wasp brood, cos our moneys’ as holy as blood,
For if you refuse, the debt you elude, will be paid with the weight of your tongue.”