Tagged: story

…a king of infinite space…

I am certainly no king this morning as I had a very disturbing dream last night. I dreamt that I was visiting a family, I think they were friends, and their mother warned me that one of their children was special (indicating some disability) but also evil.

For context I didn’t recognise the friend, or their family, and I think I was much younger. Though I seemed to be my height.

The ‘special’ child in question was a girl, maybe eleven to thirteen, who had short dark brown hair and incredibly large round, brown, eyes. (There are likely overtones of watching Wednesday here.) She had a frown on her face and just looked unhappy. She spoke fine and we all talked about school and lessons, the only unusual thing about the girl was that her answers to questions were often abstract and she laughed at the wrong points. This didn’t seem evil, just slightly neurodivergent.

Scene change, hate it when dreams do that. Now I am in the kitchen talking to the friend and his parents. We hear screaming. At this point I discover that the friend is from a large family as there are about ten other siblings in the room we run into. The girl is there. She is wearing jeans and a lime green top and there is a spreading pool of blood on her top and on the floor from the gash where she has cut her own throat. She has a bloodied carving knife in her right hand and she is looking right at me and laughing silently.

This was disturbing enough but the dream then got worse. Another scene change and we are all dressed in black. I am sitting at the kitchen table. It is raining outside and I am looking at the rain through the window. I think it may be after the funeral. I can hear people talking but not to me. I blink and then I see the girl outside the window. Neck torn open. Eyes black and staring at me. The blood on her neck and clothes had turned black. She is grinning and laughing and she points the hand, still holding the knife, at me.

I turn to tell people she is there and they have all turned into her. Her face is on all of them and they are all laughing. As they laugh black blood runs from their mouths and is spat from their lips.

That is when I woke and I didn’t go back to sleep. It was just after four in the morning. The dream was clearly disturbing, but I don’t know what I am most upset about. The fact that someone killed themselves. The horrific style of the haunting. Or the fact that my brain was so clichéd and stereotyped it made the neurodivergent child into some horror protagonist.
I mean ffs brain, that trope surely is something you would normally rail against, it appearing in your dreams is so sad. Could you not have been more creative and less discriminatory? The horror was bad enough without the depressing social fears and historical bigotry.

Maybe they were haunting me because I assumed a role for them? Or maybeI was the only one not possessed because I didn’t give them that role and it wasn’t a horror but a plea from beyond the grave. That makes me out to be a much nicer person.
This was also part of the reason I couldn’t return to sleep…

‘It’s In Your Head’*

[This is the first of two stories written for the Lancaster and Cumbria Nanowrimo groups first creative writing challenge]

‘The Zombies are coming out of the sea, no need to breathe, won’t tire, don’t stop. They’re walking remorselessly up the beach as ther waves crash around them. There are thousands of them, the whole beach is swarming with them, maybe there are millions, some are crawling with limbs torn, twisted or missing, some merely the few remnants of flesh held together by a will to feed.’ Ed paused and looked into Lily’s eyes.

‘Don’t worry. Thankfully holding the Tower is key to the strategy devised to turn the tide of battle. The perfect place to hold from. We can defend the lower levels and if we need to we collapse stairwells and retreat to the top, if, and I mean really when, they breach our defences.’

Ed saw her look, ‘don’t worry, we don’t need to hold out for long, the answer will soon be discovered, the cure that will turn the tide of battle.’

‘Ed,’ she said softly, ‘I came here to talk about us.’

‘Us, this is bigger than us right now.’ he held her hand, ‘but it will soon be just us. This is so big, this changes everything, the whole world, after this no one will ever be able to see Blackpool the same way again.’

Lucy closed her eyes and looked down from the cafe on the fifth floor of the tower, out across the promenade towards the sea. The skies were grey with small white clouds skipping beneath, playful in the blustery winds.

‘We haven’t known each other long,’ she paused.

Ed smiled and filled the silence, ‘I know,’ he laughed, ‘it was great, I mean amazing, it’s why I had to bring you here, to see this.’

‘To see what?’

 ‘The setting for end of the film,’ he laughed and stood, ‘the first one. Its going to be awesome.’ Ed looked at her, ‘I still cannot believe it, yesterday I was just a struggling writer, then I get told I am going to be a movie writer and I celebrate and then, you. You are the most beautiful girl, this is perfect.’

‘Ed,’ Lucy looked at him, ‘sit down.’

‘What’s wrong,’ he smiled at her, ‘last night was perfect, don’t worry I won’t let fame split us up.’

‘Ed, stop,’ she looked around to see if anyone had heard her raised voice. An old couple and young parents with small children waiting for the soft play to open. They did not seem to care.

‘Ed,’ Lucy looked at him, ‘I was just,’ she looked out at the sea. ‘it was just that I was always interested by you, I like dreamers, I like people with ideas and so when I heard your news, and the music, the food, the drink. I was just swept up by it, on a tide I guess.’

‘It’s a tide that will build, baby,’ he laughed.

‘Tide’s go out.’ She sighed. ‘This isn’t Dawn of the Dead, the bloody tower is a bad defence, trap yourself in a single location with nowhere to go but up and limited supplies.’ Lucy let a breath escape in frustration, ‘and what about food, power, water, the bad place to be in the event of a bloody fire. Stupid. There is also no bloody point to the rest of your story.’ She shook her head, ‘I mean, zombies! Gods. No understanding in the bloody zombie apocalypse crap of either the word zombie or apocalypse.’

‘The only zombie story that came close to being worthwhile on film was the original, though I liked Shawn for the laughs and Dylan Morgan, who you look a bit like. In books, World War Z and I know that’s your favourite movie, you told me twenty times already, and I hated it.’

‘You see that’s where you fail. That’s why we are not meant to be and this was always just one night. Grasping for the fantastic instead of looking at the world with all its in-built complex wonder and seeing the true beauty in the mundane. Ed, what’s wrong with a simple story why does it have to be fantastic.’

‘Here is something for you to consider, you know my love of words so I looked things up. God bless Google and Wikipedia. Zombie isn’t undead, it is a sleeping draught used as a punishment, a toxin from a fish. It is a form of religious paraphenalia and nothing to do with animated corpses or fast moving infected people.’

‘On that note, how do you get a cure for being dead, surely the whole point is there is no cure, just to further pick at your story, not that I don’t think people will watch it, there’s about a million Resident Evils and they are beyond dumb.’

‘As for the other part of that couplet, apocalypse never meant end of the world, Ed. Not until the fourteenth century when a bunch of zealots used it to apply to Revelations. It wasn’t part of the Bible until we rewrote that book in English.’ She let a small smile pattern her features, ‘the beauty is in the word, apocalypse isn’t destruction it is knowledge. It is the lifting of the veil, a revelation, an understanding, not an ending. That’s why this, the whole story, this phantasmagoria is just facile. You are simply riding a zeitgeist with no real understanding of what things mean.’

She stood and looked at him, ‘it was why we were never really meant to be, you look only skin deep, beauty to you is astonishment, the amazing, exciting, brilliant,’ she looked out at the beach, ‘not the shifting twists of sand that flit on a windy morning. Not the ever changing skies that have more wonder than anything constructed in a Hollywood basement.’ She buttoned her coat and smiled at him once more, ‘it is why our brief affair is over, consider it an apocalypse where the only zombie was relationship.’

* Zombie, The Cranberries

2012 Christmas Story in 100 Words

On Christmas Eve the miser, Able, declared, “I will never receive gifts. They’re based on reciprocity. Once received you must return, continuing even when the other person does not.”

That night he heard a noise, a fat man in red stood above him, “ah, my replacement,” said the man, punching Able in the face.

Able awoke in a large, icy, cavern. Eleven reindeer looked at him. He was dressed in the man’s red clothes. Beside him were presents, billions of them, one for every person who had lived and who ever would. All addressed to Able by his new name.