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: How Long Are You Supposed To Wait?

These questions are about the short story “How Long Are You Supposed To Wait?”, and definitely contains spoilers which, once seen, cannot be unseen.  For the actual short story itself, please go here.

*CONTAINS SPOILERS!*

 

This one was another one of those ten stories you wrote in ten days for the Swinburne Microfiction Challenge in 2017, right?

Yeah.  Although if I’m perfectly honest, I already had the idea for this story before I ever entered the challenge.  I make notes on my phone whenever I have an idea for a story, and this one said something like “person trapped under boulder, has to saw off own leg with pocket-knife to escape, moments before person gets rescued by large group of fit and friendly backpackers who could easily have just moved the boulder”.  It was just a twist on that “person has to saw off limb to escape” trope, something that I thought was simultaneously hilarious and brutally horrible.

What was the prompt-word?

“Lost”.  It reminded me of that idea, and so I went for it.

So what’s the appeal of making someone do something horrible for, in hindsight, no good reason?

I think it’s rooted in my own inability to ever make a proper decision.  I think, if I was in that situation, I’d always be thinking “hang on, don’t be too hasty, there might be another way out of this”, and then just end up dying of hunger and thirst or whatever.  I don’t think I’d ever be certain enough that sawing off my own leg with a pocket knife would be the right course of action.  I find it hard enough to choose something off a dinner menu.

Is this symptomatic of a bigger issue, Mr Blackwell?

I really don’t know.  It might be.  I mean, when my delightful life-partner asks me something like “would you like a cup of tea” out of the blue, I’m thrown into paroxysms of indecision.  I’m like, do I want a cup of tea?  How much desire is want?  I was fine without tea moments before, so clearly I didn’t want a cup of tea seconds ago, did things really change so drastically in the last few seconds that now I do?  I mean, a cup of tea might be nice, but do I want one?  How do I tell?  Is it based on thirst levels, or pure flavour, or just the warmth of the cup in my hands?  If she hadn’t’ve asked, I wouldn’t’ve got up and made one myself just then, so does that mean I don’t actually want a cup of tea?  Or that I do want one now?  How did things change so fast from not wanting to wanting, just based entirely on someone else making a cup of tea for themselves?  Am I really that much of a herd animal that I need to have whatever someone else is drinking?  Is that a healthy way to be?  What if she’d asked me if I want a cup of something else?  Do I really crave beverages at all, or am I just craving inclusion in a social act?  Is it about the tea, or the experience of sharing an activity?  Would any activity do?  And how much-

Does she ask you very often?

No, not any more.

I’m not surprised.

Sometimes when she asks now I just pick a random answer. “Yes, absolutely”, I’ll say, without even considering whether I actually do or don’t, avoiding the traumatic whirlpool of decision altogether.  Because, in the end, it’s just a cup of tea.  It’s not really worth all that stress of actual desire-interrogation and multi-level cravings-analysis.  The decision-making maelstrom is so much more bewildering and takes so much more energy than it does to just say a quick yes or no, and then deal with the consequences.  So I tend to do that nowadays.  Um.

So -

“Black with one sugar thanks.”  See, easy, done.  Boom!

So, the title of the story, “How Long Are You Supposed To Wait”, is really just you asking this question of yourself, isn’t it.

Yes.  Trying to get some handle on exactly what an appropriate time is.  Because if the character had just waited a few more minutes, she’d be out and safe and with the perfect quota of legs.   When are we being hasty?  When is it time to panic?  How do you panic properly?  I’ve never quite been able to get my head around this stuff.

I’m guessing you enjoyed the ending of that Steven King movie, ‘The Mist’?

Fucking best ending ever.

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!