Prisonic Fairytale
The stones were scarred here, masses of concrete in the distance built up into grey, oppressing Ts. Dry, delicate branches that were once tipped with succulent fruit turned to rot, and the berries became fibrous husks. Here, the faces of deer were human, vicious smooth and red. And here, Eleanor fed me the machine, pushed pins between my lips and never once broke the skin. We lay side by side on our rock. Nightly, the frost pulled our skins tight to our bones as Eleanor taught me the cruelty of the stars.
Tonight I hardly hear, the ropes at my ankles have cut deep into my flesh. The deer have started to lap at the wound, their cold noses buried into my skin as the nip and lick. Eleanor can see this, her dark lips curl back like smouldering petals and I glimpse a blaze of smiling teeth.
“She is a whore” murmurs a voice in the hollow of my ear. It is Aylogue the scarlet mantis, it is Aylogue my oldest friend.
“A hoar, a hoar, an old hare hoar.” He scuttles across my cheek and rests upon my nose, pink, perfect round eyes so close to mine, “Our little sister won’t put herself away. Too stubborn to close her brain or cover her breast – her wits are outlandish.” The sky has become lighter and mottled, it looks dirty. Aylogue rolls his bulbous eyes to the clouds solemnly, “You never write me letters anymore.”
My hands are bound, old friend. It is all I can do to lie here, and sometimes think.
Most often, I think about the Autobahn. I remember the path it cut against the tedious green, the smell of concrete grazed with rapid panic. Some walked upon it unawares and turned to nothing. Not dust, nor a smear or a cracked man’s shell; they disappeared completely.
“The Autobahn is gone, my sorry one, the lesser machines along with it. With so many hundreds turned to vapour, the earth shattered it with shoots and roots, all forest and thicket again. It happens in circles, while you lay on your back and viddy times past. When we peel back the angel, out crawls the limbed beast.”
You are not a prophet, Aylogue. You are a scarlet mantis, and I want to leave this rock. The deer smile so sadly here and I do not like their look. Old friend, your talk of beasts frightens me. Our letters were so kind, once.
“And I remember when you were more than a sorry sack of straw. Then, your life was more than another lonely affair between a woman and her marionette.” He climbs upon my brow and stoops down to meet first one eye, then the other. His antenna brush against my eyelashes. “I see. Eleanor as fed you the machine. You soft flesh and blood can endure such strange tortures, provided that you are promised a little comfort. It is your gilded future that cushions this terrible grind.”
A clamour of rooks are cawing in the dawn madness. Wood pigeons, sparrows and finches, I remember a chorus of sweeter voices. Only rooks and ravens are left to tear savagely what little meat they can from these tangles of dry grass. Horned shrews, worms, dark, scuttling lizards; all things bony and dry. Frenzied in the light of the red rising sun, they are found in clamours and murders pecking dying trees to pieces. At night they roost upon the Ts to admire this moor, their battered nest. It is so beautiful, it is devastating. I remember Lylando, Ayolgue’s magpie friend. If beady Lylando could only quench his appetite for mantis, the two may be have become closer than brothers.
Your voice is clicks and murmurs, little more. Over this crazy dawn I can barely hear a word, climb back into my ear and whisper again.
Behold! Eleanor dances. The latent tar of the autobahn that rises with Eleanor’s seasons, so rises my poor lungs as if I spit colour into the air- And I wish that she had never put me here, or fed me that damnable machine! Today it strikes me as wiser to live far from her kindness.
Yesterday she took a fawn with the face of a beautiful woman and held it close to mine. It sat wide-eyed in the crook of her elbow and trembled, its dark lips parted in terror and confusion. I had never heard a deer cry before; I could never have imagined such an ugly sound. The tears when they came were like its face, a bright crimson. Supporting the fawn against her breast with one forearm, she took my jaw in the other hand and squeezed gently. If I did not comply I feared she would slip her hand to my throat; I swallowed. The tears tasted like the juice of rotting berries. I remember, juice from autumns ago, a staggering fawn (it’s shining eyes, wide lips, early pubescent horns) under old fruit it would wilt, legs wilt, stumble, crack.
The meadow, the dark eyes of a randy hare, the moon is useless, the earth is dull a resilient, our mother is gone. Gone and we are grown, tried and pining, we (Eleanor) shape the mud between our fingers, roads grow pure out of the meadows. Meadows of shit. Help, we are living in the bowels of a dying man! He doesn’t know us, he cannot feel us, our earth is humid. The shell of the machine, I think I am the shell, am the shell, am the shell, am the shell of each machine we have ever known.
Not everyone lays bound to have their heart rubbed raw by the rough sunlight. She is such a different creature to my own sorry wreck of skin, my bloated gut heavy with metal machine, my withered limbs spread idle and compass like.
“Oh, poor martyr. Oh, blessed spread-eagled star. My pity and admiration, truly.”
That poor patience of yours. It wears so thin, it scrapes against this weary ear. And yet so like a brother you are, I let you make a bed of it!
My live is riveted with compassion. Aylogue makes a home of my body and Eleanor dotes upon me tirelessly. She smiles prettily as she mops my midday brow, listening intently to my every groan. She brings me what shrivelled fruit she can, the more I starve the more she picks, and lays it beside me with such tenderness. As I strain against these bonds to pluck the up most berry, she strokes my hair soothingly and whispers encouragement, tongue darting softly against my ear.
Aylogue, did you hear that scrape? Things clatter a clutter in the nearby forest.
Someone has put the metal birds back. Wire contraptions, simplistic and delicate, resembling birds only in that they appear to nest in trees. They are, on the whole, spherical devices made with curved and jagged pieces of scrap metal held into their roosts by heavy chains that allow them to bounce and spin amongst the branches. These mechanical animals remain in their trees until rust causes them to either crumble or seize. Eventually, they will fall from their mother-chains and become forgotten, metal carcasses on the forest floor. But whoever used to put these contraptions in their lofty chain nests I never knew. They stopped replacing their fallen birds years ago, yet this morning I was met with their metallic melodies and scraping chirps. The wildlife of this wasteland is returning, slowly.
“Never. This forest had nothing before she, before the rocks. Quiet, muddied. The deer were dumb and expressionless once, the birds were fragile. Look at the glint in Eleanor’s whisky eyes.”
Whisky? Whisky sounds beautiful.
“A heady drink of fermented and fortified hops. Causes dryness, disillusion and sickness.”
It sounds vile. “It is vile, it is the purest of man’s merriment, drunk beyond those Ts.”
How fine it must be for these men who live beyond the stones to have both delight and sorrow in a single glass.
I know that one day Lylando will pull my last true friend out of my ear, leave my head still and silent. I shall become more picture than man without your clicking whispers. Aylogue, are you safe? Speak, I can hardly hear you breathe. If I did not fear missing you, I could rejoice in the negative space between clouds and eternal stars tonight.
I remember something, friend. Dots and lines and some instrument to make noises. Was this paper, Aylogue? Did I ever know paper? I have heard of it, I want to use it, is it a container? Could you keep whisky in paper?
Lines appear in my thoughts.
Perhaps the machine Eleanor has fed me is a metal bird? I could not stand that, those slight wires, thin steel of something that may as well have been alive, more alive than I ever was upon this rock.
Aylogue, brother, even the stones are scarred here, what chance do I have?
“None. It will not grow back, the machine is in your belly, stewing like a medicine, and Eleanor is smiling.”
Let the Caged Bird Sing
And he says something like, “Don’t touch me, we shouldn’t be two people.” leaving me to this back broked soggy mess of flesh that is what I am now. I think body is here, I think butterfly and flying fish are dead in this air because you spoke, and made my body
Then scoop up the wormy innards from my lap and put them back, because I don’t really want to be anything at all, you know? Every titchy pinchy action and slip of my fingers makes me flinch and clinch, cause I think these stupid coils will feel pain and that’s stupid because they go beneath the nerves
and I hate those fucking nerves. There is sometimes this whole halo of bit that is just air really, or maybe real thin. Skinny nought. Then there is a wall or a spoon or a woman and they break it and it’s, Eurgh, opaque.
So then he mutters a thing to me, and it doesn’t seem like a word or anything at all, just all grunty hurt beast noise, like boar.
Remember we rode boar backs in the forest and we were two people then cause all the hooves and thumping on the shitstink ground were from these two different piggies and all their horns and biting happened in different places to eachother, and the creatures they ate went only to their own bellies.
Don’t want to live here anymore, it is scum. It is skin and scum and nooks in the wall, you hate it too.
My eyes are numb, no feeling to where they look now, just lots of different seeings of the room. It is the innards, they full. The shock of them against the nerves has hurt my head and it will pass.
Why is he looking at the vermin in the corner? Not even an insect, no wiggly, stalky bits. All gross fur. Now I do not want to go back because his eyes are feeling all the lice and grease, his eyes are licking lice and grease, might make us ill.
Put it in a draw, put it in a desk draw, old bamboo heavy draw where it won’t ever be out of chinese darkwood dark. And I would not have done it if I had been in air, so!
So I win. Fishies and butterflies are deadened at your knees, and I have a vermin in a draw in a desk in a room full of walls and skin. So this is the place I made where I go back, back, back, back, back.
Bye bye, him. Bye, you. You will be all floaty skinny soon. It was disgusting that we met at all really, but I resent nothing. It was natural that there was a whole bough of it all, and it was only normal for it to be in the different bits that made it a thing at all. Bye bye.
Threads
Pick a name out of the hat. The battered bowler that belonged to his grandfather or the tiny grey veiled hat she pins into her ringlets. The names are the same, old friends, forgotten visions, mannerisms. Nice, cut and dry alter egos, each a part of another, sliced up neatly into the little letters of a single name. Pick a name.
Tonight is White Rook and Chequered Herald. Last night we had Fuchsia and Clock Tower. Perhaps tomorrow shall be Wake, Glass Girl, Little Frank, or Mister Tricky.
Now that he is Herald, the boy removes his signature crimson lipstick, the girl her glasses. They step onto the mattress. The room is low, the floor around about 7ft square. Aside from the shelves of books, electric-wired devices, typewriters and clocks, the floor is taken up entirely by a thin double mattress. Above the mess of blankets, pillows and velvet there is thrown a rough, wicker-like rug of a bright weave, hardy enough to support soft soled shoes. The mirror standing slouched in the corner between the wall and the bookcase is worshipped.
White Rook plasters her face first with paint, then anthrax white powder, becoming first pale, then ghost, then blank paper. The lips, brows and lids are also painted, stopping sharply at the neck and ears. Her curls too are sprayed and clotted a chalky white. A translucent petticoat covers her pale body, light lace stockings her legs. Her feet nest laced in supple cream shoes, ready to sprint, climb, fly up walls.
Splayed upon the mattress she waits, turning and stretching at leisure, watching Chequered Herald eye his reflection intensely. Indigo paint streaked across his eyes becomes a mask, cheque blazer and red shirt open to display bruised torso, stained inky blue, feet bare. He puts a pewter ring around each finger and draws a square upon the back of his left hand. Rook rolls onto her back, pulling on a pair of white kid gloves, frayed and stained beige with age. An elderly pair of ladies gloves that have grabbed, pulled and shaken, never patiently grasping another hand, never gentle.
If character is built through repetition, then perhaps every break from a pattern is birth. A blackened tongue becomes a new woman. Herald places three dice in his breast pocket, the larger two white, the smaller blue. Every time he rolls the dice the flesh below his shirt clings firmer to the squares of his blazer and painted face than to his bones. He grips the bowler between his thumb and forefinger with a fever. He is not dust yet, not yet, not. Tonight must move, like every night, with a manner of a finale. (He presses it onto his skull like a lid)
He peers out of the single small square window, a shadow of a man’s face in a square of light. Those people who once had his body well up inside it. He remember funny things, like the blackened face behind the wall, or a cold metal chain around the waist on a winter British beach. Just bones and clothes above the chilled water. Rook has already flown from the door which swings behind her, he follows. The engine of this city is ripping through its own concrete to form a river and White Rook can smell it. She paces the streets and alleys in a frenzy, senses a warmth from sandstone walls and runs alongside them, her fingertips wearing raw against their grit as she feels for the stone’s pulse. Sometimes the heat will fade, or die suddenly. Rook will jolt backwards and expel a primeval shout, grunt, caw. Chequered Herald whispers,
“Fictions should never be butchered, executed, condemned to a stagnate iron lung.” gasping for breath between his words, Rook laughs. Perhaps their blood is becoming thin as they grimace, the laugh that suffocates and strangles, blood light and waterlike. The moon is thick behind the clouds, diseased. It shines a dappled pox onto their painted faces. The lunar joy has made them ill.
At last, White Rook collapses upon the flaking tar of a fractured underpass. The walls and ceiling are drawn upon, not with the curiosity and naivety of a cave painting, or with the passion of artists, but with the violent territorial signature of a lion’s piss. Each name stands bolder, fatter, brighter than the one beneath or beside it. Each voice shouts louder and louder into the empty ears of Chequered Herald. He takes a marker from his pocket and marks a square over the bickering names. No victims, only pity. Some are sliced at the lines, others float helplessly within the square like dead fish. These words belong to Herald now.
The concrete is rough and mean against Rook’s thin petticoat. She slumps against the wall of the underpass, her pale eyes fixed upon the square prison. (Gloria was a dog, Rook remembers. Her heart flutters violet)
Herald banishes the branch of oak he adopted as a baton; it is smashed against the surviving names in turn, killing each with a blunt blow to the capital. A single name is held hostage: Long Jon. The man behind Heralds eyes already has a gait for him, a colour, perhaps, for the shoes or lips.
(Akira, a fallen name, in his dying moments shudders with a flash of visual intensity: Severed hands, clean and bloodless, flocks of them, hovering over the paddy fields in late spring, green wetlands, low hands, he cannot bring himself to move his own arms, the hands are flat, their fingers pressed together lightly, straightened palm, drift slowly with the wind barely two feet above the tips of the rice, Akira knows that the hands may one day crush his crops)
Crumpled, Rook straightens herself. She struggles against her own thin ankles as she leaves the concrete cave. The city streams sound sharp in her nostrils again. Delirium is not an escape, it is stripped vision. If it were a lie, how could White Rook fly flawlessly through the city by night? Arms spread like wings, she flies into the dark rocks once more, her fingertips bare, the craving of her tongue enough to navigate the river.
(The man behind his eyes wonders briefly what he would do without the girl beneath Rook.)
Anyone found on the narrow roads of the city at this time of night will have much the same mind as you. Women cry into the shoulders of strangers, men take glasses from deep suede pockets and share wine with people they have never seen before
Rook and Chequered Herald pass unquestioned, though not unnoticed. The streets seem thin, their travellers bleak and miserable, or manically unreal. A scream of a cockerel erupts from heralds lips whenever any night soul has the misfortune to pass him, the girl grabs at their faces and groans softly, her thumbs pressed gently to their eyelids. Occasionally some struggle and bruise, others fall limply into her arms and shudder at Heralds dawn cry. The first suggestions of sunlight strain the horizon, barely lit clouds tarnish a bronzing sky.
They skip across the zebra crossing, Rook tiptoeing upon the white lines, Herald the black. He gasps as he leaps from each tarmac stepping stone, his lungs raw and throat sore from fierce bird-cries. As White Rook pirouettes onto the kerb, footsteps sound sharp and urgent from a muddy alleyway. Rook stands frozen, transfixed. A woman bathed in the dirty amber light of the dim alley is emerging, the muted heels of her little boots clicking softly against the stone-grime. Silently, Herald steps behind Rook and places a cool hand upon her waist, his square shoulders raised in aggression in the manner of an ape, blocking the wide road behind him. The woman opens her pale mouth in horror. A sour tongue between the dry lips of a night-walker. Skin turns to an ash in the cold light of the grey street; the tongue is loose in its box and may fall into her lap if she dares gasp. Beneath the hideous sky her pink-pearl eyes shine against albino skin and colourless hair.
Still tighter, Herald grips her waist. The Rook is shaking now, trembling and muttering, swaying under Herald’s firm clutch. Hands buried in her platinum hair, the woman steps back from the pair, their gaudy painted faces snarling, leering like angry Loa gods. With a guttural shout, White Rook shakes herself from the Herald’s geometric arm. Cawing and jabbering she climbs up the near flat stone wall of the alley with bestial speed and precision. Before the woman can gasp (and let her dry tongue fall softly to the ground), Rook jumps upon her, clawing desperately at the imposter-woman’s supple flesh in a hunger for bones.
Herald screams shrilly with the crescendo of the dawn chorus, his bare feet gripping the stone with a fever of anticipated exhilaration. Each hair bristles as he darts towards the pale stranger, teeth bared. He brings the oak club down upon the woman’s frail crown, knocking her to the ground. Each strike of solid wood moulds her skull to the right-angle of wall and stone floor, Rook caws with glee at each wet thud. Within a minute there is little left, save for a beige suede trench coat and wet, unrecognisable sinew.
The boy and girl stand back, side by side, red fingertips touching. With the haze of violence thinning, they realise that neither of them knew her name. Rook kneels at the woman’s side and dips a gloved hand into the crimson well of her head. She glazes her lips, cheeks and the tip of her nose with the red stain. From the side of the crushed body, Silly Jane rises, grinning. She prods Heralds nose and giggles, wiggling her spread fingers in their now red gloves. He smiles shyly at Silly Jane. They link arms and walk into the pink dawn of the open, Chequered Herald breathing heavily, bare blue-inked chest heaving. Cackling, Silly Jane leads the way, never once looking back at White Rook, crumpled and useless in the shade of the alley. The boy and girl stagger upon their weary legs, eager for rest. Eager to awaken at the first dulling of dusk to pick a name. To pick a name out of the hat.
The Electric Angels 