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(2005) 25 is a collection of twenty-five micro-fictions written for Claire Carré as a present for her thenty-fifth birthday. They were written in the order presented over a twenty-five day period. |
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A Five Shot Film About Death
INT. 16TH CENT. FLEMISH-STYLE HALLWAY NIGHT The sound of dripping water. Moving down a hallway, littered with jugs and buckets catching water dripping from above, towards an open door showing a blank wall lit by flickering candlelight.
INT. 16TH CENT. FLEMISH-STYLE BEDROOM — NIGHT Slightly softer dripping sound. In a bed lies the dead body of René Descartes, shrouded in gauze and surrounded by votives. On the wall above the bed hangs a giant black Christ on a cross, next to which is written, “René Descartes, Philosophe, Mathématicien” in red paint. Dripping sound fades up to the roar of ocean waves.
EXT. STORMY SEA — DUSK Loud, stormy ocean and wind sound. An enormous galleon is chopping through waves at an incredible clip, swaying violently beneath a sky of greenish-brown storm clouds.
EXT. STORMY SEA — DUSK Even louder waves and creaking of wood sound. Close-up of barnacles attached to the hull. One barnacle comes loose in the spray of the waves, dangles by a sinew in the wind, and then flies off. FADE TO BLACK
An Excerpt From a Note Found, Post-confligration
Please dispose of those pages that were left, unprotected, closest to the flames; what ill I’ve imagined they’ve wrought through a confusion of half-consumed words and charcoal transferred to hands and then to other, infinitely more valuable, documents! A regrettable, but acceptable loss; correspondences of a petty nature, better left outside your dear brother’s legacy. Fret neither over those photographs and forget-me-nots strung about in a quasi-religious formation atop the mantle, now reduced to curled bits of char, nigrescent stillbirths of their former weighty sentiment. Dissect them not, but rather bury them with respect to the man who pressed life into them over countless hours of staring and fetishizing caresses. All else, dear sister, in whatever form it has survived, is hereby willed subject to your necromantic effort of reconstruction, which — in your hands — will doubtlessly birth a far more important work of fiction than any of those which line this smoldering tomb.
The Life of a Model Economy
A rapid ticking, almost a buzz, was hidden somewhere in the dark. A thousand shapes slept motionlessly in a hundred rooms, cases and cubbies. Suddenly, somewhere near the heart, the unwinding dial of the timer reached the end of its coil, and a bell chimed. Dozens of lights fluttered on, and a world of dancing forms was illuminated. The spinning doors began to rotate, and a ring of animated overcoats bobbed up and down on wheels set into a looped track leading in and out of the building. Likewise, the arm of a record player set a needle into the well-worn groove, filling the store with a faded waltz. The cash register rung, popped open, and shut on its own, while coat racks hung with uniforms bowed and shuffled about the floor. Overhead, alarm clocks ticked and rung in ornate cages suspended from the molded copper ceilings, and manikins tilted their heads back and pointed. The noise of gears, pulleys and metal sliding on metal grew to a sustained, metronomic scream, lasted until long after the sunlight had been replaced by the humming fluorescence, and was then snuffed out as startlingly as it had begun by the imperceptible shift of a dial.
Two or Three Metaphors
He pulled back his eyelids for you. Looking into those two murky orbs was like looking through a fish tank down a city street at night. You blinked, and his eyes were closed.
Silence
Even if prison made me a man, my release instantly made me a child. Deprived of the romantic scene we’ve all seen in movies — the one where the guard hands me my belongings, slams the cold, iron gate behind me, and then I look out over the desolate stretch of highway that symbolizes my future — I was merely escorted to the bus station and given a one-way ticket. What I’d hoped for so long would be a chance to redefine myself was instead a tortuous charade, as I waited in the empty station in the clothes I’d worn as a teenager, under the hostile stares of the ticket sellers. When the bus arrived, flashing C H I C A G O in green lights above its windshield, everyone on the bus quickly placed their bags next to them to avoid having to sit next to me. The passengers on the bus were visibly uncomfortable stopping here: not one moved to make use of the only public restroom facilities and vending machines they’d seen in hours. My nervousness only increased theirs. I walked straight to the back and tried to disappear. Looking out the window, I became absorbed in a stream of unfamiliar landscapes: urban sprawl, mini-malls, townhouses, outlet stores. After two hours, this sensation quickly changed as we entered the part of town in which I was raised. My heart began to break as I saw men who could have been my classmates and friends huddled in doorways, sleeping on sidewalks and clutching bottles in paper bags in the heat of the midday. On the verge of tears, I turned away and met the eyes of a young woman sitting across from me, who was listening to her headphones and staring at me. I smiled a desperate smile, feeling in that moment the full weight of an unforgiving childhood and a decade of isolation. The young woman, the first living person to witness an ounce of my insides in my entire adult life, picked up her backpack and walked to a seat three rows ahead. I still cannot fully explain what happened next, I only remember feeling as though that woman’s reaction was a sign that I had reached the end of the silence that I had endured for as long as I possibly could.
The Encounter on the Veranda
Henrietta possessed all the charms of a woman twice her age and, fittingly, her hair had gone completely silver by her sixteenth birthday. Now, in her twenty-fifth year, she was having her weekly meal on the veranda of the Hotel du Loup Blanc, during which she enjoyed reading the latest best-seller and crushing ice with her teeth. Just after her salad on this overcast afternoon, she felt the back of her neck heating up with a stranger’s gaze. Taking sidelong glances from beneath her black sun hat, she could make out the outline of a large, stout figure wearing a dark suit two tables behind her. Despite Henrietta’s fervent desire for privacy, the stare of the unknown man only grew in intensity, forcing beads of sweat from her skin. Unable to concentrate any longer on the almost-true adventures of a Victorian madam, and not being the type to passively accept such a brazen display of intrusive behavior, she turned to meet the stranger’s eyes head on. Instead, she found herself looking into the dead eyes of an oversized, stuffed canvas doll, each embroidered with St. Mark’s cross. Alarmed and fearing herself to be the victim of some bizarre and certainly humorless practical joke, she stood and marched resolutely towards the doll’s table, but was instantly enervated by the sight of a half-eaten sandwich, a burning cigarette in an ashtray, and a notebook spread open on the table in front of the obscenely grinning doll. “This really is too much,” she thought with a haughty chuckle, and picked up the notebook. In a strained cursive that looked like the work of a deranged child, the following words marked the first page of an otherwise empty volume:
[Please, dear reader: be so kind as to quickly write Mlle. Henrietta a short note of whatever style, intent, and design you wish. She is waiting.]
Communications Hardware
Imagine the television satellite, coasting through telemetries of incoming and outgoing signals, brainless in void. Pure junk, pure matter — lacking even the conditional identity of the mirror-when-not-looked-at-as-a-mirror, the mirror-when-looked-at-from behind — with only one intangible function: a channeler, a medium of electrons. It is like a miniature Apollo, pushed and pulled by radio waves as if by solar mandate, the manifest beacon of the unbridled intellect. Throwing spears of sitcoms and tsunami footage, it exists without any knowledge of the body, the earth, or of dreams — which can only impede, and never enter into the system. When the signal breaks, the system hemorrhages static, noise — the purest sensual evidence of the hollow heart of consciousness, the process of thought severed from life, drifting. The most that can be made of this curious object by living, human beings is summed up in the moment when, leaning back or heads, we mistake it for a meteorite.
Breaking Sound
Whenever a window breaks, I am never there to see it. I only hear it, and am usually started. The same goes for car accidents. I cringe at the squeal of breaks, hoping to not hear the distinctive sound of metal crunching into metal that sometimes follows. And one time, when I was young, I watched my friend break his finger when catching a ball I threw to him. We both heard the muffled snap of his bone, but naturally we could not observe it, hidden by skin and muscle. Considering the odds of having an unobscured view of an accident at the precise moment it occurs, I must admit that nature, while cruel at heart, is at least thoughtful enough to give each object a breaking sound, so as to alert us to our duties as custodians of the entropic world.
Sacred Irony
The choirmaster had finally succeeded in culling from his students the stamina and power necessary for The Messiah — no insignificant accomplishment when dealing with teenagers, innately apathetic and vain as they are — and the great hall pulsed with the ecstatic music. So loud were the voices, so enraptured the participants, that the fire alarm went unnoticed — long enough for the two-hundred year old rafters to succumb to the flames.
Girl
Luis flipped the tape, took a quick pull of his cigarette, crushed the ember in a bottle cap, and pressed play. The moth battling the desk lamp was undeterred by the distorted fuzz and screaming that filled the room. Julia smiled at Luis to convey her approval of his musical selection. She sat up and, groping the floor around the bed for her shirt, asked Luis for a glass of water. He cracked the door and peered into the hallway cautiously. Julia thought he looked funny in his underwear and socks while she fastened her necklace. Luis darted towards the kitchen and Julia suddenly leapt from the mattress to the desk, taking this opportunity to inspect Luis’s personal things. A small, tattered notebook with the word, “GIRL” carved into it instantly caught her eye, and she noiselessly slid it from beneath a stack of skateboarding magazines. She listened briefly to make sure Luis was still far away, and then opened the book. On every one of the one-hundred and twenty or so pages of the notebook, Luis had pasted dozens of pictures of babies cut from magazines.
Gestation
Between cotton bolts and ivory threads a watershelf bears the weight of weathers. Bubbles stick in bracelets to the gelatinous arms of nascent torsos crackling with pink electricity pulsing from the cloudheart. A cellulose web softly unfolds into the black beads that form eyes and genitals, while the coiling veins churn a bloody waltz. Come spring, the bellies burst and wings distend from the silver pupa long into the green blackness.
Historians
The wolves ran in circles around the fires striking their terrible chord. The militia disbands with fear that distracts their bullets. From a limestone ridge we watch the flashes of fangs and bayonettes. We can see the distorted forms of cloth, fur and flesh illuminated by the sporadic gunfire. Before long, the screams fade into whimpers and distant shouts. We climb down and begin to sort the bodies, burying man and beast side by side.
Techniques
With practice, you can modify even the smallest decisions. You can fill the tightest space with the stuff, once it is hot enough. The trick is in knowing the signs of when the wax is ready, flowing: smell, color, shine, and vibration. If you master these, your pieces are sure to come out looking great, and sure to catch the customer’s eye. Last week alone I sold twelve butterflies, six beetles, and at least two dozen owl-horses. With hard work and time, you can do the same (or better!).
Cellar
Mother made a pancake, covered in syrup and butter. Father always liked the pancake, and we ate it over and over. Mother, and me too, we had a dog. Dog liked pancake. And running around crazy all the time, I remember. Ha! His face! “Oh, where’s my pancake?” Locked in the cellar I bet! I didn’t get it then. Now I do, and mother got it. I mean, always. “Look in the cellar!” “I need the dog!” “In the cellar.” Oh and I’d go, look, then—LOCK! Forget the toast and jam today. No school on those days. “Stop running around so crazy!” I said. We’re going to be in here a long time. “You’ll get tired.”
Bedroom Scene
From the second floor, a western window allows entrance to the branches that press themselves to the wall of my house with the full intent of communion. One day — this one — I let them in and find in their company a weathered cartilage handle, which seems to have sprouted and aged a hundred years overnight. Through the green latticework of the valley, deep inside the horizon, I can see the shimmering mechanics compelling my involvement in this sudden interface. My flesh creeps toward this generator, and now my wish to wake you twists my pupils to your spool of shadow — you, dreambound and sticky, purifying the air. As if enough of my weight could stick to the flicker white paint in apparition coils for you to rest unfazed by my absolution, your violet eyes flashing on/off through the cataract of night…
Outline for a Study on the Futility of Standard Investment ProtocolI. Corpse-smell A. Demonic influence B. Stain removal 1. Unforeseeable fluctuations in Climate Dependant Markets (CDMs) C. Physical contact 2. Love
The Conversationalists
The conversationalists met at their usual spot, settling into their chairs and setting their notes out carefully before them. The winner of a brief game of chance sits back and listens attentively to the loser’s opening remarks, which include a slightly amusing ice-breaker about the current political climate. When the initiator reaches the end of his exquisitely constructed and reasoned argument, the listener quickly bullet-points his relevant notes and then delivers his rebuttal, which has the flavor of high rhetoric but something less of the coherency displayed by his opponent. Once finished, both parties rise, gather their materials, shake hands, and walk away.
She
Early that morning, after setting out the fruit and grains she had prepared the previous night, she brought two large buckets of water from the river (a full half mile away), for bathing. The men woke, ate, and headed out. After that she removed the furniture from the porch, washed the dirt and footprints off the cement, and then replace the furniture. Only then did she unwrap the leftover cakes from yesterday’s breakfast for her daylight meal. By the time the men, drunk with work, clamored onto the porch, shedding their heavy boots, she had laid out fresh bread and sliced meats for their luncheon. In the interval between their lunch and their return in the late evening, she prepared a simple yet flavorful broth, marinated the rest of the meat, and put the vegetables in the afternoon sun to cook. When the men returned, they ate supper, after which she took their soiled clothes in several loads to and from the river. During this time the men bathed and smoked. They fell into their beds while she prepared their breakfast. And then she sat down, taking up her needle and thread, staring long and hard into the fire.
A Capsule at the Bottom of the Sea
65 cm long, with a diameter of 22.5 cm. Light grey, with normal oxidation patterning. Approximately 78 kg. Stenciled, in an “official” type on either side: IN MEMORIAM
Accident
A trace of windy, summer glare, your eyes unraveling in your hair, an emerald brocade. The song, Le songe, A lovebird in pearly twigs moves about your shoulder fading to white at the watermark. In a prismatic fever, only a thin fissure of blood descends from your ear to disturb the perfect heat of the asphalt.
Fortune
I should have a much greater fortune. My fortune, while fastened tightly to my attractive alligator belt in an ivory inlaid tortoiseshell heirloom clasp, does exert a considerable gravity on my person. But it is still too exposed, by its relative lack, to the covetousness of the weightless. Were my fortune greater it could be eternally defended by an innate implacability. Then, and only then, could my head rest easily upon my whalebone collar.
Avatar
Arms rippling with opaque fire, the Avatar is easily distinguishable from all other semiphenomenal beings. However, one must never make the (often fatal) mistake of confusing this distinguishability with a specificity of any kind—lest your phenomenal body become unhinged by the Avatar’s spatial inconsideration.
Meanwhile, on the Planet of Unchecked Industry
The tiny, quadrilateral tiles, placed long ago in spectrum of crimson and turquoise, lead in acute angles to a short, grated sewer conjoining decrepit steel walls. The passengers scrape uneasily into each other in a stilted pace, chafing flakes of resinous char from their protective suits. A harsh, metallic rumbling couples with the hum of generators embedded in the walls, loosening the rigid patterns of the crown into a fluid mass pouring to the edge of the platform. The pitch-black orifice of the tunnel suddenly emits a terrible cloud of coal-smoke, the thickness of which is soon illuminated by the headlight of the engine pulling into the station. What happens next is difficult to see, as the black forms of passengers board and exit the cars amidst the miasma that now, muddy and sticky, fills the entire station, sticking to the thin, plastic visors that must be constantly brushed clean in order to successfully navigate the endless city.
1/0
Just as the light could not be said to exist exclusively in waves or particles, falling yellow on her sweaty nape, neither was her throbbing pain located exclusively in the purple hemorrhage on her leg or in the feverishly expanding capacity of her encephalon.
A Disproportionate Algorithm
Underneath, Ayurveda wrestled with a dictionary. Arms strained massive folds of gold-lined reams. Her defeat appeared inevitable after she took a well-timed blow from actuate-adamantine, but her victory became clear as she pinned her blunt shoulder squarely upon cataract. A dark, quick heave of dust sprang from the tattered spine as she pressed the book onto a razor-like appendage of granite. Elsewhere, in the interplay of evergreen and amber pine needles, an arachnid observed her dancing through the polyopticon.
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