The Cafe

In the cafe I locked eyes with a Yorkshire terrier wearing a Sharks Rugby jersey. His eyes spoke of his dissatisfaction with life and his longing for death. The humiliation of his anthropomorphic half-identity moved me to tears. Suddenly his manner became as that of some Hell beast. He transformed into a hulking, eight foot tall mass of fur and misanthropy with drill bits where his eyes had been. With an up-close gaze he drilled into the eye sockets of his keepers before sucking out their brains using the thorn-lined proboscis that had replaced his formerly adorable snout. A chorus of screams accompanied his flight into a nearby forest plantation. In his honour, I opted for salad instead of potato wedges as my side dish.

The Prisoner

You awake one evening to find yourself chained to an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. Undecorated and grim, it is a cell and you are the prisoner. You scream, but but nobody comes. You scream aloud that you are not afraid; that you are afraid; that you never could be. You scream for solace. Nobody ever comes. Surely you are in an uninhabited wasteland. No living thing can hear your pleas. Observing your naked body, you see a message has been hurriedly scribbled on your torso. "I am coming. You will suffer." In a panic, you writhe and struggle to escape your bonds before your captor can return and act on his vague threats of torture. You struggle until your struggling itself opens wounds; until you realise that this is a futile gesture. Slowly but inexorably the hopelessness of your situation crawls onto your consciousness, rising above every impression. You resign yourself to whatever fate your anonymous foe has planned for you. Slowly your misery strips you of all hope, save for that of a quick death. Hours turn into days, days into weeks, weeks into months, months into years. You are nourished by your fear. Sustained by perpetual apprehension. After many years you are an old, shriveled wreck. The ugly trifles of existence have driven you to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly. They irradiate the refuge of sleep. You notice through a crack in the boarded window that the sun no longer rises. You turn your head to one side like someone who wants to be alone with their laughter.

A futile gesture

You awake one evening to find yourself chained to an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. Undecorated and grim, it is a cell and you are the prisoner.

You scream, but but nobody comes. You scream aloud that you are not afraid; that you are afraid; that you never could be. You scream for solace. Nobody ever comes. Surely you are in an uninhabited wasteland. No living thing can hear your pleas.

Observing your naked body, you see a message has been hurriedly scribbled on your torso.

"I am coming. You will suffer."

In a panic, you writhe and struggle to escape your bonds before your captor can return and act on his vague threats of torture. You struggle until your struggling itself opens wounds, until you realise that this is a futile gesture. Slowly but inexorably the hopelessness of your situation crawls onto your consciousness, rising above every impression. You resign yourself to whatever fate your anonymous foe has planned for you. Slowly your misery strips you of all hope, save for that of a quick death.

Hours turn into days, days into weeks, weeks into months, months into years. You are nourished by your fear. Sustained by perpetual apprehension.

After many years you are an old, shriveled wreck. The ugly trifles of existence have driven you to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly. They irradiate the refuge of sleep.

You notice through a crack in the boarded window that the sun no longer rises. You turn your head to one side like someone who wants to be alone with their laughter.

This Sentence Has Five Words

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

Scribicide

Somewhere, parently, in the ginnandgo gap in between antediluvious and annadominant; the axenwise cleft in the dontmind; the gap in between you and me; is there found a puir spring of scribicide.

one by one we're all becoming shadows, and i will die and you will die and we will all die and even the stars will fade out in time. tis as human a story as paper could carry well, but the cluekey to the worldroom is the honeying of the lune: love. the waxing of the moon above. uncertain comets chancedrifting into one another, exploding like spiders across the stars. together. transient as the pure cold light in the sky: from round to crescent from crescent to round they range.

Parked so dark by her kindlelight, I'm frisqued by her frasques and her prytty phyrrique. This mischievmiss burns an incandescending indigonation; a feroxysm in the uncorked cor.

The Inner Voice - Mark II

Attaining a higher state of consciousness is a bête noire for the unready; regressing to a former state of being surpassing our occupied reality. We give it labels because we're haughty, but the awakening of the formerly abandoned recesses of the mind expedites some species of emendation in us. Fear is a natural reaction to being well adjusted in a profoundly sick society.

The inner voice

 Don't be afraid. You're regressing to a primative but desirable state of being, akin to the amorphous mass of consciousness which predates the ostensibly objective reality which you choose to occupy.

A Vignette

Like most people of the time, I find myself falling into love to the soundtrack of famine and war. The object of my adulation is bequeathed a recondite beauty. A transcendant presence. Oddly, she never looks directly at me. Skittish. Uncertain. Scared. Occasionally I catch glimpses of her bare soul through a reflection of a reflection, but her reckless aloofness drowns me in the realisation that my fault, my failure, is not in my passions, but in my lack of control of them.

If only she could let go. Dive into absolution from the weight which fastens her gaze to the safety of her feet. If only she would look up, I imagine she'd see the scattered evening sky reflected in my dark pupils.

Has this happened yet? No. Will it? I don't know.

Are you worried? Because I'm not.

Through a Glass Darkly

"Let's get one thing straight," announced the seventeen-year-old, chubby redhead Karin Visagie pugnaciously, "I'm not hurting anyone."

Father David Raskolnik, a handsome priest no older than thirty-five who often made the other girls blush during Mass, stared at Karin's file on his desk before giving her a look of mild contempt. "Is that so, my child? What about your parents, this school? What about God?"

"They can mind their own business," Karin said, sitting across from Father David with arms crossed, staring at her shoes.

"Sister Agnes saw you last weekend," David confirmed, "kissing a girl from your neighbourhood in a manner she described as 'burning with lust'. That's why you've been sent to me."

Karin sat in silence, her eyes still cast downwards.

"The Saint Genevieve School for Girls has been one of the top schools in Johannesburg since 1957. We've never lost a single girl to this... Affliction."

"Affliction," Karin retorted, "you're saying I'm sick? I'm not sick. I'm in love with Lily, and even if I could change how I feel I wouldn't want to."

"I know exactly how you think you feel, child. You see, before becoming a priest I lived in sin with another man. I thought I was fulfilled, but I only brought shame upon my family. My father even told me that I was dead to him. It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it. One day I tried to drive off of a cliff outside Cape Town, but a faulty transmission prevented me. This was divine intervention. I gave up my sinful ways and devoted myself to God, and He cured me. I finished my degree and entered the seminary so that I may help others like me. Like you. So that you may one day enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Karin shuffled uncomfortably in the cushioned chair. "Father David, how do you even know there is a place like that? And if there is, maybe it's not all that great. What if there are only spiders there, or something like that?"

"Faith, my child."

The next day after school Karin made her way to Father David's office, as ordered. She found him standing outside the door smoking a cigarette and wearing jeans and a polo shirt instead of his cassock.

"Hi, Father David. Didn't know you smoked."

"Karin," he greeted with a forced smile, "there's something we need to discuss. Come, I'll walk you to the bus stop." After walking in thought along the gravelly pavement for a minute, he continued, "I'll get right to it; yesterday evening I learned that I've been excommunicated and, pending an investigation by the archdiocese, I'll probably be defrocked."

"What does that mean?"

"It means," David paused momentarily, "it means I'm not a priest anymore, Karin."

"Maybe God cured you," Karin cruelly replied, unable to resist.

David clenched his teeth for a moment before sighing, "Maybe He did."

"What happened? Did you do something bad?" Karin asked, the concern now returned to her face.

"It's a personal matter," he conceded, "but you have a right to know. The Church found out about a relationship I've been having with another man."

Karin's reply surprised David, "Do you love him?"

"I do," he admitted as they reached the bus stop, "Love is, after all, what brings us closest to God."

"Father David... I don't think I believe in God."

"But you believe in love, my dear," he replied, walking away, "and love is proof of God's existence."

She frowned. "Maybe love and God are the same thing?"

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 3.0 License.

Joining the faculty of frag

The obviously cool people over at the gaming blog Couch Campus have kindly invited me to write a few articles for them.  Feel free to study my first post, Cinema's 5 Most Incompetent Computers.

Have a look around and be sure to bookmark; some more of my work will be forthcoming.