White Roses I: Introductions

Fins arced from a juicy abdomen, curving back against the thing’s body and silhouetted against the sun. Its body was squat and thorny, as if its skin were fanged, and four wings stretched miles across from tip to tip on the massive entity. An elongated neck culminated in a throbbing maw, dripping with suckers with things like eyes within. This thing was poised between the Earth and its star, reaching and gaping towards the lush sustenance that would be provided to it in this corporeal dimension by the incandescent ball. A thing larger than a city, a thing monstrous and terrible, and the brush strokes were violent and haphazard as if the artist were hacking at the canvas in futility.

Cass stepped back from her work, tickling the edge of her chin with her paintbrush as she considered the vision from her sleep now made real as a canvas. Her clothes were stained all over with black, red and yellow paint with a smattering of green and blue and white for the orb that we call home. There had been a time when she would have regarded the things from her dreams as truly terrifying, and even now there were times when she desperately clung onto the waking world but… well, there had been so many. So many horrifying images of darkness and the end of things for, if not all, then a sizeable portion of the humans that think their lives are so important. She had broken before, that was how she was found in the asylum in the first place, but now it was as though she was out the other side. She could just paint the things she saw and not be quite so tormented by them. Thanks to Pip, really. Cass attributed it all to Pip, for Pip was, to most people she met, nothing short of marvellous. So calm, so collected… so put together. Pippa Ridley didn’t live in polite society as the refined classes saw it, but she knew who she was, and that was a quality that was rather attractive for someone looking for a light to steer their ship by. It certainly made all the difference to Cass, who saw it every day since Pip came in with some kind of influence (later established to be truly magical) over the orderlies and nurses and took her away from it all, to her own home, and into a world where the horror was still there and even more present, but where there was at least some kind of understanding of what was actually happening and the delightfully reassuring knowledge that there were people doing something about it. The love Cass held for Pip was so pure and raw to her, though, beyond being a simple rescuer. And while they were together, there was no reason for Cass to be afraid, because they could deal with it together.

And they wouldn’t even be alone, really. There was the rest of the Organisation, of course, people like Gabriel and Clover who had come into and out of their lives relatively quickly but at least Cass knew that they were out there and doing their thing to keep the world safe from darkness. And Nicola, of course. Nicola was a permanent member of the team now, but to Cass she would still be “the new girl” for a little while. It didn’t matter that Nic was older than Cass, or that in the struggle against the extra-dimensional forces threatening this plane of existence she was more obviously capable. What mattered is that Cass had had a good thing with Pip, where they kept their noses clean in the mundane world and conducted research and support for the Organisation, and now this Nicola was assigned to the duo to act as… muscle in this war. That was all she’d be to Cass. She wasn’t there to become emotionally involved in the group, she was there to kill Old Deimons where they were found in the area and defend the witch and the visionary from Gentry attack. Cass did understand this, after the Gentry hit so many cells it made sense to keep the ones that survived well protected, and how better to do this than by assigning a battle-capable bonded Deimon to the cell? But that position did not include emotional involvement. Cass was worried, because Nicola kept wanting to spend more time with Pip. Cassandra was starting to feel sidelined, separated from her lover by the security. It made her want to sleep even less, and this is where it started.

Sorry, Depressed

So I’ve not written anything in a while. I guess it’s time I put finger to keyboard and got something out there, so here goes.

I feel like all the parts of my brain that handle writing have switched off. All the lights and bells and whistles that used to flare and buzz and make me feel well and truly alive have just winked out, and have left me a shell and… wasted. Why is this? What’s changed?

Medication, I think. Maybe.

I once said to my girlfriend that I was surprised to hear she was on anti-depressants because she didn’t seem dead inside. Now I am, and I feel it. I’m considering going off the medication to get the fire back, but I want to be well and not… how I was before I started taking the meds.

But I feel more depressed since I started taking anti-depressants than I have ever felt before. What’s with that? My sister says that it’s probably because the medication hasn’t actually taken effect yet, but it will, and that then I’ll feel better. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to find out. Everything feels so broken and wrong and I feel like a derelict merry-go-round, nobody wants to play here anymore because it’s lost all the music and fun and love and now it just feels kind of oppressive, and ramshackle, and if you tried to play on it it’d probably kill you.

Probably.

I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know that I want to write. I want to go back to when I was churning out stuff every couple of days. But I just don’t feel it. And I hate that. I feel like I’ve been neutralised, and I feel impotent. But I’m writing this right now, so maybe there is hope for me yet. Maybe if I could fire up the drive to start something then the words would flow again. If I can break this dam and gush words out, hundreds of thousands of the bastards, all over the screen in something beautiful that I have made again… maybe I’ll feel like I’ve got my purpose in life back. Maybe by writing this now I’m taking steps to get back to that point.

Maybe.

I hope so, anyway. Because I don’t want to be a shell. I don’t want to be wasted. I know that I do still have the power to write stuff that people will want to read, but it’s hidden away underneath a woolly cover of drugs and depression. There has to be some way to let it all out again.

Thanks for reading.

Kedge

Every Door, Shut

It’s like I can’t see. So much has happened and yet not really much has happened, but my life is changed and I’m not sure where I’m going anymore. Every door has closed and I can’t see out and my course is all blurry and I don’t even know if my ship is still moving in the fog or if it’s just floundering, uncertain.

There was so much I wanted to write but I can barely bring myself to.

But I know I have to. Because if I don’t, who will? I know no one else can write my words for me. That’s why they’re my words. And there is power in me  yet I know it. It’s just uncontrolled at the moment and that scares me, it doesn’t have a focus or direction or intent and I’m afraid if I don’t get to work on it soon it may all fizzle out and I’ll just be a shell rather than just feeling like one.

I’ve got to write. I’ve got to stop procrastinating. I’ve got to do it. But I can’t do it now. I just can’t do it now. I can’t see through these shut doors and I can’t just create words on the other side.

Or can I? Maybe I can. Maybe we’ll see.

Something that bothers me. A bit.

I’ve got quite a lot of views now.

Pushing 3,000, in fact.

But I’m not happy about that.

Why am I not happy about that? You’d think that I’d love to have my work getting seen like that, that’s the point of the blog, isn’t it?

Well, you see, WordPress is a very clever site. It tells me not just how many views I’ve got, but on which posts those views are coming from. And a simply colossal amount of views are coming from that one random post I did about jellyfish tattoos.

In case you didn’t know, I had had a few people finding my site via searching for jellyfish tattoos and I’d never actually mentioned the two together, so feeling helpful I made a post with lots of images of jellyfish tattoos and just jellyfish so the people finding my site that way would have something to look at.

I am sure somewhere in the region of 1,500 (at least) of those views are just on that post and its images.

That’s not what I really wanted to be seen, you know? I write all this stuff and sure maybe you think some of it’s bollocks but the point is that I put it here because I want people to see it. And now my way of gauging how many folks are seeing it is completely skewed because of people who just want to see some jellyfish tattoos. Which is all well and good I guess but I feel like my purpose is being sapped.

I’m not going to stop, though. I’ll keep doing what I wanted to do and maybe someone who finds this and is reading about tattoos will think “Oh, I can read some dark shit too” and read some of the rest of my blog. Just maybe.

Anyway, if you’ve read this post, odds are you’ve read some of the rest anyway, so thank you.

Kedge

She’s Not Home Right Now

Have you ever wondered where she goes

When she’s not with you?

When her eyes glaze over and everything you say means nothing?

When it’s like she’s listening to music in her head

Is this a time that you dread?

Thing is, friend, it’s not like there’s anything you could have done.

It’s not you, it’s her.

It’s always been her.

She’s the one with the problem.

That’s what you’ll tell people anyway and you might be right or you might be wrong but does it really matter, the point is she’s not actually there to begin with.

She’s taking a trip to a tea party

She’s lost with the falling stars

And she’s gone somewhere you can’t follow.

Don’t feel bad about it.

It’s not like you want to.

It’s not like you ever wanted to.

She’s not one of you, she’s one of us.

“Broken.”

“Fucked up.”

“Being treated.”

She’s not home right now.

She’s Elsewhere.

Risen [Just In Case]

Raise your head

Open your eyes.

Blink, maybe.

Rub.

Blink again.

What do you see?

Morning’s just a word.

Sometimes it’s always dusk,

Time is relative.

Is anyone coming for you,

Or are you alone here?

Abandoned?

I’ll be looking.

Just in case.

Just in case.

Rabbit Hole

Sometimes you just fall in. You weren’t looking or being in any way curious or inquisitive, but you just fall in and when you come out the other side you are not in Kansas anymore.

The hole just opens up in your path, perhaps. Or did someone put it there? Certainty of uncertainty is still certainty, but does it matter?

So you blink a bit and see the galaxies colliding above you as the moon leers down at you because you’re all alone and you roll a cigarette and spark up. The smoke hangs in the air and the celestial violence makes it purple and red.

There are no people in the streets. They all left town a while ago, didn’t you hear? They were scared. They couldn’t face up to their reality, but can you face up to yours?

Can you fly?

Meat Factory

You can smell it. That’s the worst thing. Worse than the sights of stretched, cured skin or of bodies being fed into the grinder. Worse than the sound of bone snapping and crunching or of children and men sobbing in the pens. It’s the smell that really gets to you in this place, not of rotting flesh but of fresh, treated and lovely for the consumer.

No matter how hard you look, it doesn’t actually seem there’s a door to this place. There must be some sort of way in because you weren’t always here but, perhaps more distressingly, there doesn’t seem to be a way out. And every step you take from where you started takes you past further horrors. A pile of bodies waiting to be tossed into the hungry grinder. Men and women chained like cattle in a line to have their throats slit. Some weep, some scream but others are ghostly silent as the grave, dead already.

There’s another smell in this place, just as strong as the flesh. Saltwater.

Tears.

One Long Night: Part Four: Sand

It was Diego, the dark man, the secretary and me who woke up in the wreckage of our ship on the outskirts of a town surrounded by sand. The girl from Abuse had found us, my love, and was giving us water. She did not react to Diego, he had been completely forgotten. We were apparently on the other side of the world. That made sense. What did we have to do? We had to get home.

She said she would show us the way.

We had two bicycles, presumably in case of crash landing, but there were now four of us, and when the girl went to arrange better transport we were captured by men, and buried to our waists in the sand, and then we had clods of the sand and snow thrown at us in a hot and cold torment.

I don’t know how long it lasted.

She found us again, with a younger girl – or was it a boy (Diego thought it was a boy, I thought it was a girl) – and they freed us. We escaped. I had sand in my hair.

We stole a car. It was the girl from Abuse’s idea. It had seven seats. Two in the front, three in the middle, two in the back. The secretary and the dark man sat in the front, the dark man was driving, and Diego and I were in the middle, and the girl from Abuse and the younger girl sat in the back.

We drove for hours. Through deserted barren roads and through town centres, through riots and explosions. I asked the girl from Abuse if this was normal but we couldn’t easily talk. She just rolled her eyes at me.

We stopped for water and discussed changing the seating. I only talked with Diego, I was too nervous to talk to the girl from Abuse properly. Diego said that the others had considered moving around the seating too. He suggested I sit with the girl from Abuse, and I wanted to but I was scared. It was at this stop that Diego and I had the discussion about what gender the younger girl – or boy – was. I stated that she had hands far more girlish than Diego’s or mine, but Diego remained convinced it was a boy. I think I will never know for sure.

It turned out that where we had stopped was where we needed to be, though. I cursed this hot place, and didn’t know why. There was a sinkhole in the ground, and monkeys were jumping through it. If we followed the monkeys, more easily if we held their feet, we would get where we needed to go, so said the girl from Abuse. Nobody wanted to go first. I decided I would go first. I would find out later if I was followed.

I held the nearest monkey’s ankles, and he jumped down the sinkhole.

And now I’m here, back in the real world. Trying to make sense of what happened. As often happens after I’ve been Elsewhere.

One Long Night: Part Three: The Meaning of Life

I woke up and I was still in the mud, but now it was dark and the father was nowhere to be seen. My face seemed okay. I struggled to my feet and wondered where to go. The stars were coming out, and I felt very ignorant. As a result of all that had happened, I felt I needed to know more.

So I went back to school. My old school. But it wasn’t a school anymore, it was a research facility.

Some archaeologist had discovered a cube in Egypt with equations on the side. It seemed to be about faster travel through space, about how the universe is put together. It seemed like a less complex version of a cube they found on the moon, but the US government kept hushed up. Together they pointed to Jupiter, and a third cube, more complex (but still understandable) yet, had been found on that massive planet.

I don’t know how they got there and retrieved it, but they had.

The cubes pointed to a cataclysm. Something bad would happen on Earth soon.

The school/facility wanted to do an expedition, work out how the formulae on the cubes worked and monitor space around the planet. When I told my family, it was my mother who suggested that perhaps there was a further cube, beyond Jupiter. Neptune, perhaps. Or even the next star. This seemed important so I ran desperately back to the school/facility to tell them, but it was not in a happy state. Sparks were flying from every surface. Everything seemed broken or as if it had never worked in the first place. Nobody would listen to me, either. The doctors and scientists were all so clever that no idea I may have to impart could be important, they had bigger concerns.

Maybe they were right, but they wouldn’t tell me what their concerns were.

They told me to speak to the secretary, but when I found her, she was a wreck. Her husband had just died, or was about to, it wasn’t clear. I couldn’t tell her important news, I had to comfort her somehow. She was just crying so loudly and nothing I could say would stop it.

Then a dark man arrived. I don’t know who he was, but he and the secretary seemed to know each other. Perhaps he was her son? She looked very old. Following that, Diego the boy who had been a cat found us. I don’t know what he had been doing in the time between, he did not say and I did not ask, but the secretary seemed to appreciate his hugs.

Time was running out, though. The expedition needed to leave soon, with its falling-apart technologies, and I demanded to be on it, as perhaps then I would be able to tell someone the idea. Diego, the dark man and the secretary came too.

It was disastrous. The ship went up, made a slight orbit of the Earth, but something was wrong. We came crashing down again. I think I must have lost consciousness on impact.