FICTION: Bodies

Another naked man bounced off the bonnet, and the sickening way the car jumped made it clear he had fallen beneath the wheels.  A glance in the rear-view mirror confirmed it: a bloody mess of crumpled muscle and bad angles.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” Melitha swore through gritted teeth.  Ahead, naked bodies lay in various stages of decomposition, rudely shoved to the sides of the road by earlier collisions.  The smell here, like the smell everywhere, was insane.

Melitha floored it.  

“Melitha,” said Thophie, trying to keep it together as the car sped along a road slick with blood, “where are we going?”

“Away from the hadron collider,” Melitha said, narrowly missing a stiff and flyblown woman on the road. “Just away.”

Thophie was certain none of this was anything to do with the hadron collider – how could it be? – but she refused to get into that argument again.  And in the end, it really didn’t matter what the cause was.  What was happening was happening.

A fly buzzing on the dashboard caught Thophie’s attention.  It was on its back, spinning, wings a blur of sporadic panic.  It seemed so normal, she almost sighed.

Another naked human – maybe once a rabbit, maybe once a fox – leapt out in front of the speeding SUV.  Melitha swerved but hit, and the naked woman spun in a grisly pirouette and fell. 

She would probably live.

(Was that a good thing?)

Thophie checked her phone again, praying that she could just google some kind of answer to all this – but the phone was still blank and lifeless.  Whatever was turning the animals into humans had also fucked with the satellites.  “What if it’s like this everywhere?”

Melitha laughed, a noise that was nothing to do with joy.

“It’s not.  It can’t be.”

A thump on the roof as someone who had, moments ago, been some kind of bird plummeted onto the SUV from above.  

“Fuck!” Melitha instinctively ducked her head, but the roof was strong.  Thophie turned and watched the naked body bouncing and rolling on the road behind them, getting bloodier and bloodier, before coming to rest on the sticky wet bitumen.  

It had started with the mammals.  But now it was happening to birds too.  Bodies fell from the clouds, heavy, flapping, scared.

(Melitha said she’d seen it happening to fish too – apparently the bay was now filled with men, women, children, all drowning.  That had been Melitha’s last straw.)

Suddenly the dashboard was filled with naked flesh.  A full-grown man, thrashing and wild-eyed, was where the fly had been.  Melitha slammed on the brakes.

“Oh, now the insects? Great, just great.”

As they dragged the man out of the car and threw him weakly onto the road, a horrifying thought occurred to Thophie.

More than 90% of the cells in the human body are parasites.

“If it’s spreading,” she said, feeling instantly uncomfortable in her own skin, “how long until…”

“Come on,” said Melitha gruffly, “let’s get the fuck out of here.”

FAQ: The Glass Is Empty, But You Can Reach The Tap

These questions are about the short story “The Glass Is Empty, But You Can Reach The Tap”, and definitely contains spoilers which, once seen, cannot be unseen.  For the actual short story itself, please go here.

*CONTAINS SPOILERS!*

 

I believe this was another of the ten stories you wrote in ten days for the Swinburne Microfiction Challenge in 2017, is that right?

Yep.

And you didn’t win this one either?

No.

It’s another one of your teenaged emo musings on suicide and meaninglessness, right?

Yeah, I guess so.  I do tend to orbit this kind of stuff, because of my own struggles with meaninglessness and nihilism, I suppose, as well as my own intermittent battles with depression.  I don’t get overwhelmingly depressed very often, but when I do, it does feel, well, overwhelming.

What was the prompt word this time?

The word was “point”.  So of course my mind went directly to “what’s the point?”, as it tends to do.  Everything that the caller in the story says to the Lifeline lady is shit that I wholeheartedly believe. There is no meaning to existence, and it is all incredibly temporary, and none of it means jack diddly foobah squat.   But everything that the Lifeline lady says in response I also wholeheartedly believe, which is that because it’s all intrinsically meaningless and temporary, and it’s just complete blind stupid luck that we exist at all, it’s our struggle for meaning that in the end gives our lives the meaning we’re struggling for.  So the whole story is like this conversation I have in my mind regularly, and each party is me, and it turns out my nihilism is actually narcissism and my teenaged emo musings are just my inner child reaching out to my inner adult for an inner hug and maybe a biscuit.

I actually thought that the biscuit-eating Lifeline lady was going to talk about how shit don’t mean shit, and he might as well kill himself, and I thought that he’d actually kill himself on the phone, and then she’d realise in shock and horror that saying “go kill yourself then” is a whole different kettle of fucking fish to hearing someone actually kill himself in real-time over the phone, and the shock would kinda smash her flippancy and casual ease and make her realise that life and death are actually mega-serious topics, and that her flippancy and casual ease were just masks, protecting her from the gaping void that is the ineffable truth of oblivion.

Interesting that you say that, that was very close to the original idea I had for the story.

Woah, really?  Maybe we have some psychic connection!

Maybe!

So what stopped you writing that dark and horrible original version, and made you turn it into the hope-filled light-hearted G-rated life-affirming glib motivational poster version that it turned into?

Well, I feared that by writing a man killing himself over the phone, I was actually turning tragedy into entertainment, almost in exactly the way you describe, taking these heavy nihilistic horrors and turning them into a 500 word competitive short story (which, win or lose, was still being entered into a competition).  Sex and death are the easiest and in a way most flippant topics to write, they are automatically lowest common denominator stuff, because we’re all interested in them.  So, as I was writing it, it felt like maybe having the Lifeline lady be all biscuit-eating and flippant and having that lead to the man’s actual death and having that shock the Lifeline lady into some kind of nihilistic terror, maybe that was just not very nice and too easy and maybe irresponsible and exactly the kind of flippant biscuit-eating attitude that I was trying to critique in the story.  It became this circular vortex of vortexual disappointment for me.

And so everyone lived, and ate Butternut Snaps?

Exactly.  Because, for me, whenever I’m in the life-cancelling self-obliterating nihilistic eye of the storm that is Depression, the only thing that helps me is knowing that life is temporary and meaningless.   I’m sure I’ve said this before, but knowing that everything is temporary and meaningless – including this desperately anti-happy black veil of existential despair – knowing that everything is temporary and meaningless actually brings me hope.  Because my internal tragedy actually just doesn’t matter, to the universe.  My heavy emotional weights don’t mean anything, in the bigger picture.  I could exist, or not exist, and the net difference to the universe is so minimal as to hardly even happen at all.  It doesn’t matter if I live or die, so I might as well live.

You don’t think that maybe the fact that you implied that depression can be cured by eating biscuits could be seen as maybe a little flippant itself?

Yes.  I do think that.  In fact, I’m constantly gripped by the fear that everything I’ve ever written can be interpreted in some terrible way that I never intended, and that I’ll be socially-pilloried for some unintended consequence of something I’ve inadvertently said in my writings.  The constant paranoia of being a straight white male writer in the current aeon is real.

See, that last line is the bit that will get you socially-pilloried, dude.

Ah shit.

One more thing: the title?

I tried out a bunch of stuff before I settled on that one.  In the end, I thought of that thing of “an optimist says the glass is half full, a pessimist says the glass is half empty”, and I thought that, when you’re horribly crushed by the feelvoid of brutal depression, it’s like the glass is completely empty.   But then I thought, well, that’s not a problem if you can reach the tap and fill it up again.  So I thought of it like that: life is the glass, and inevitably it ends up empty, but if we can find some way to generate meaning, we can temporarily fill it up again.  It’s a struggle sometimes, but one I heartily recommend.  Not that I have anything against suicide, of course-

Let’s just end it there.  Thanks!

FAQ: Blood

These questions are about the short story “Blood”, and definitely contains spoilers which, once seen, cannot be unseen.  For the actual short story itself, please go here.

*CONTAINS SPOILERS!*

 

So this was another of the ten stories you wrote in ten days for the Swinburne Microfiction Challenge in 2017, wasn’t it?

Yep.  The prompt word for this one was “Blood”, and I thought an interesting approach to it might be the idea of “blood” being a word for familial bonds, rather than a flowing substance rich in haemoglobin.

Did you win this one?

You seem very interested in the competitive aspects of the challenge, rather than the artistic ones.

Sounds like a ‘no’ to me.

Fine, no, I didn’t win.  But I still think it’s a pretty nice little story.

So this one looks like it interrogates notions of the importance of “blood” in familial relations, right?  In that Cass has found out she’s adopted – “not blood” – to someone she had always identified as not only a close family but in fact her twin, a familial relationship normally seen as perhaps the very closest familial relationship possible.  So in this way, the story interrogates concepts of family and blood, and, Baz, in tearing up the proof of their non-blood relationship, and in his simple response – “Nah” – denies the facts of blood, instead favouring the less-physical-but-still-undeniable facts of their shared childhood, shared experiences, emotional closeness, and their respective positions in their respective lives.  To Baz, the blood actually doesn’t matter, despite having spent the first three quarters of the story insisting that it does. 

Um, right, yes, that’s what this story is about.  Couldn’t’ve said it better myself.

So, what I want to know is – do you have a problem with adopted people searching for their biological parents?

What?

Do you have a problem with adopted people searching for their biological parents.  Because many adopted people feel a real need to discover who their biological parents were, and I wonder if you’re sitting there in your comfy writer’s chair telling them not to worry about it, because “real family is who you grow up with” or some such easy schmaltz.  It could be interpreted that you’re saying “biology is inherently unimportant”, thereby marginalising and erasing and kinda making fun of people for whom biology is deeply important.  You’re basically saying “the Stolen Generations was totally okay”.

Wow, um, I really don’t think I said that.  It wasn’t meant to be a slur against people who want to discover their biological links. Definitely wasn’t attempting to make any kind of comment on the Stolen Generations.  Wow.  And my chair isn’t any kind of special “writer’s chair”, whatever that might be, nor is it particularly comfy.  In fact I’m pretty sure we found it on the side of the road as hard rubbish-

Enough trying to change to topic – what’s your stance on adoption?

I don’t have one!  It’s fine!  It’s good to adopt people.  And it’s fine if you want to find out your biological ancestors too.  It’s all fine.  I have no official stance.  And, for the record, I think taking peoples’ children from them in some kind of genocidal kidnapping, whether good-intentioned or not, is generally pretty despicable.  I’m honestly surprised you think I’m being controversial here-

What about lesbians?

Sorry?

Your character Baz said something about “not minding if she was a lesbian”.  What do you have against lesbians?

Nothing!  Some of my closest family are lesbians! And the character said he didn’t mind if she was lesbian, was the point-

But why would he mind in the first place?

He wouldn’t!  He didn’t!  And even if he did – which he didn’t – this is a character in a story, not an essay about “what Mat Blackwell actually thinks about adoption and/or lesbianism”-

“Death of the Author”, bro.  “Intentional fallacy”.   What you think your story is about can’t be divorced from what belief systems went into creating the story.  What you actually write is interpreted and deconstructed and parsed by the reader, and that interpretation is just as valid as any desperate excuses you make to weasel out of your offensive viewpoints.

I’d love to get into a discussion about this stuff, really I would, but I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me.  I wasn’t saying anything negative about adoption, and I wasn’t saying anything negative about lesbianism, and I never said anything about my hard-rubbish chair.  I was just trying to write a short piece about “blood” and how family might mean more than blood and how one person reacts when one other person suggests that she’s not actually “blood” after all, and how the person silently renegs on his position that blood is really important, and embraces her as his “real sister” even when presented with biological evidence to the contrary.  I can see now how maybe that idea, that “blood doesn’t mean anything after all”, might impact on people searching for their own biological parents, yes, and I can see that I was maybe insensitive in that area, but, honestly, I wasn’t trying to be comprehensive or all-encompassing or whatever, I was just trying to write a short story in 24 hours and I’m sorry to everyone I might have offended.

…Thank you.  It’s not enough, but it’s a good start.