Not quite #fridayflash fiction: Pondering the Rat King

The Rat King first came into our world three years and three moons ago. He brought a gift, but hid a barb. And in his wake, nothing was ever the same again...

This week I read The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman. After I cried for the fox and for the monk, what lingered were the dour words of Dream: 'Lessons were learnt." This is true also of the Rat King. Lessons were learnt. But at times, I can't help wondering:

Will the marks of his claws and his teeth ever heal completely?

Would it be wise to wish some of his trickery undone?

Who was he really?

The Rat King

The Rat King steals
from door to door
Across the wall
and through the floor
He nips your scars
scratching your pain
Because he wants
to make you bleed again

The Rat King sniffs
at your mistakes
He chews and chews
till something breaks
The Rat King rules
the underground
Where only tears
and misery's found

The Rat King tends
that patch of weeds
and waters all
the bitter seeds
and don't you laugh
at his modest size
The Rat King's plotting
your demise

The Rat King sans this wry introduction is one of the poems featured in Secret (a collection of nine poems) by Carine Engelbrecht (i.e. me). It is a free download.

An experiment in story-telling: How to make a wizard's spectacles

For several years, I have participated in the live reading event called Bloody Parchment, which makes up part of the literary component of the SA Horrorfest. Following the success of these readings, I have for some time been playing with the idea of using my youtube channel to launch an experiment in story-telling. Most writers are unaware of the potential of youtube to showcase their work. I thought it might be interesting to revive earlier traditions of verbally sharing fiction, albeit through a new platform.

The upload embedded within this blogpost, 'How to Make a Wizard's Spectacles' is my second attempt, but the first one I'm going public with. Following feedback on the first (unlisted) video, I decided to keep the format simple. Just voice and text.

As other members of the Adamastor Writer's Guild (of which I am a member) have expressed interest in the project, I am not ruling out the possibility of featuring stories by other writers. For the moment, I'm just seeing where this leads. Hope you enjoy it.

Bloody Parchment 2012: The troll apocalypse

Forget the Zombie Apocalypse. The Troll Apocalypse has come and gone and guess what - no one noticed...

They were all too busy on facebook or twitter...

The first wave of the invasion hit me when I opened a link to some story on blabbermouth dot net.

It sounded like this:
dumbass
retard
slut
douchebag...

My temperature shot up and my breathing became faster. I began to type 'attention whore'...

Then I looked down. Warts were forming on my hands. They leaked green puss onto the keyboard. It was too late. I was infected. My inner troll had taken over.

(This was my 4th year of participating in Bloody Parchment, the literary segment of the S.A Horrorfest - I better call it by that name, as this year for the first time, the event took place in two cities.

The horrorfest is the brainchild of Paul Andre Blom (formerly the drummer of Cape Town's legendary death metal band, Voice of Destruction and currently bass player for the industrial metal band Terminatrix) and his wife Sonja Ruppersberg (also of Terminatrix). It began purely as a film festival, but in 2009, Nerine Dorman, at Paul and Sonja's request, took charge of organizing a litarary component which has seen participation by a number of outstanding South African genre authors including Sarah Lotz, Lauren Beukes, Joan de la Haye, Cat Hellison and Nerine herself. Um, and also me... but as I said when I had to wrack my brainz over some introductory bio with barely a 25 minute warning, I tend to engage in guerrilla writing, rather than anything marketable.

For this year, we did drabbles. Definition of a drabble: a flash fiction that is exactly 100 words long. My story does have a serious side. It is scary how easily a normal rational person can turn into a troll. All it takes is the Internet and a little anonymity to separate you from the consequences of your words and your actions.)

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: The Muse

She was conceived in the heart of a song that contained about as much tears, blood and visceral matter as most births.

Her arrival surprised the composer, who had been expecting a melody only, not a whole woman with long drapes of birch colored hair streaming down her slightly stooped shoulders. "Are those wings?" he asked.

She blinked, staring at the motion of his lips. Then she parted hers and mouthed a pattern that was close to identical. Open, close, tongue brushing teeth, open again, close, open, close. No sound came. She did not appear to expect any.

"No," he said, rounding the O.

She imitated the motion. Still no sound.

"You cannot speak," he observed. "Can you hear? You are beautiful."'

He led her to the couch. Some of the hair slipped and he saw for certain why she was stooped. "They are wings," he said. "Are you an angel?"

She blinked, then got up and walked over to the piano. Some of the sheets of paper were filled with notes. She smiled, as if something about the melody delighted her. Then she found the pen and wrote, I DO NOT KNOW in large block letters. I DO NOT REMEMBER.

The composer's mind was conflicted. An excited you can write! battled with a protest that he used the music sheets for other types of writing. Trembling fingers, he found a notebook and passed it to her. He retrieved the sheets of paper, past her scribbling, he saw how the rest of the melody would go. The notes just seemed to fall into place and he wrote them down quite fast, lest he forget them, caught up as he was in the unexpected phenomenon of the winged woman.

"Why did you come?" he mused, more to himself.

I WAS DRAWN HERE, she wrote. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT MYSELF.

"Do you have a name?" he asked.

I DO NOT THINK SO, she replied.

"Do you need anything?"

A GLASS OF WATER.

The composer poured her a glass of water and went back to the business of music, which seemed to flow a lot easier in her presence than it did before.

She stayed and hours drifted into days, weeks, months and finally years. The composer wrote many songs, some of which he recorded himself, while licensing others to fellow musicians.

He became famous and aclaimed. The woman sometimes felt she could almost, but not quite remember a life before him, but she felt no need to return to it. Only two aspects blemished their happiness. The first was that no one seemed to notice the woman beside the composer. In the beginning, he tried to argue the reality of her presence, but he soon grew weary of persisting in a debate he never won anyway.

The second grief was hers. Although she fully comprehended him and could communicate fluently through writing, she never learnt to speak or hear anything. It was apparent to her, that their was some important factor in the composer's life that she could not take a part in. Sometimes, she would pore over his work with the intensity of an obsessive and would almost imagine that she could hear the melodies. She would press compact disks to her cheek bones or rub earphones against her lips or ear lobes, but nothing ever came out of these objects.

At the end of his life, as he lay dying, the composer said, "If one wish remains to me, it is this. That somehow you will now be able to share in my gift."

His body stilled and cooled and his spirit returned to the Source of all life. With tears in her eyes, she fingered one of those useless musical devices again. Something assaulted her mind with sharp pinpricks that went chi-chi-chi. There was a loud CRASH! that made her duck for cover and a SCREEEEEEEEEEEE! that grated her inside in a way that was very hard to deal with.

She sat up. Her ears worked. Suddenly these assaults on her nervous system became a joy as she realized that the composer's dying wish (and hers) had been granted.

"Are you the nearest of kin?" asked a nurse, and the words echoed in her ears before blossoming to comprehension in her mind.

"Yes... yes, I think so," her voice sounded odd to her own ears, although she experienced no difficulty producing those first words. That, too, surprised her.

She could not wait to be alone, to enjoy that which had been denied her throughout the composer's life. She stumbled outside and it took several moments before she worked out the reason for her lack of co-ordination. The wings were gone. Music flooded her being, intoxicated her, each note all but leaving her devastated. Was this the music of her beloved companion the composer? Why did it hurt so much? Was this what beauty does?

She kept walking into people, something that had never happened to her before. Each fresh note made her stagger, seemed to rip a hook into her soul, twisting the barb. Each note removed another layer of protection, until she felt naked in a hurricane of sound only. It hurt, and yet the beauty was not lost on her.

She wanted to write YES!!!! I HEAR IT NOW! I UNDERSTAND YOUR GENIUS! but there was no one at her back, no notepad and no composer. At that moment, she realized how truly alone she was within this storm of music.

She removed the earphones and pondered the device. For the first time she remembered the composer's wry smile and his kind blue-green eyes. She missed them. Balm for a wound was good, but being whole was better. Her hands squeezed the music player so hard it cracked. The noise around her became muted. She could not stop squeezing and each subsequent crack was softer than the last.

A vaguely remembered sentence surfaced briefly in her consciousness. You cannot go back.

And then, We are all on a path through life.

The shards of plastic and fibreglass were slowly turning to dust between her palms. She scattered them. Do we not all create out own path? The wind blew them into a line. Bits of copper glinted briefly...

If you want to make it
to this crazy world of mine
The secret's in the shine,
the magic's in the shine...

She began to follow the dust of the shattered music player. She could no longer hear her footsteps, but a path was being created.

After a while, her shoulder blades itched.

Blotches and shadows of people past through her, but she could no longer feel them. Sometimes their lips formed O's or their tongues brushed their teeth, but no sound accompanied the motions. She had become a ghost to their world.

She crossed a bridge that looked like a piano...

Soon her feet no longer touched the ground... She was flying home to wry smiles and kind blue-green eyes.

The secret's in the shine....

(t.y.m. - but this one hurt a lot to write, somehow.... i'm still recovering from it, emotionally)

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: After the Party

"Chaos is entirely a state of mind. So is order, for that matter."

"Hey, you're nuts."

"No, I'm not. It just never occurs to most people that all they have to do is flick a switch in their mind. They want to change things the long way round, because it's the only way they believe in."

The conversation was the only real thing in J's mind, although it may not have taken place at all. The voices were familiar, but no names or faces would claim them in his memory. It could have taken place between the large animal print cushion on the couch and the red kettle with the broken switching mechanism.

For some really strange reason, he could only think in objects as he lay there patterning his cheek to the ridges of the carpet. Even when he tried to think people, they quickly slipped back to expressing themselves as things. Ronda was a pale woven basket with a few strands of rafia at the top fraying. Selbourne was the DVD player that would never accurately play the same disk you inserted, however many times you checked the label beforehand. Ashley was this thin elegant vase with a bottom of water too far away from the stems of the flowers she was supposed to nourish.

Chaos. Order. Flicking a switch.

The words tasted like the heavy syrup of sambuca and smelt like somebody's saliva. They dried on his tongue without his ever using them. They throbbed inside his skull, happily jamming with the hammering on the front door.

It could have been thirty seconds or as long as an hour before he reached the door, but the woman's beauty was something that pierced even his post-inebriated state, but the golden translucence of her skin and the ears that protruded and ended in points not unlike those of Mr Spock must have been the booze still adding little bits to the picture.

She said, "I know this is an unusual request, but can I come in and clean your apartment for you?"

J blinked and glanced over his shoulder. He could not find it in him to deny that it needed cleaning. He sought and found a line half-remembered from a movie. "A fine lady like yourself?"

"This is awkward, but actually I have to do it. One of your guests last night stole something of mine and I have until noon to find it."

"What time is it now?" J asked.

"Eleven."

"What if it's not in there?"

"I can feel it."

J took a step back. He had seen stranger things. He made several half-hearted attempts to help her, but she seemed to have such a better grasp of what she was doing and proved totally unshockable, even in the face of several very strange discoveries.

One was that roughly half of the coffee table seemed to have turned into a tree. Roots frays bits of the carpet and the floor was actually lifting in a lumpy halfmoon shape. He could not immediately think of a way of fixing it, but the woman with the pointed ears ignored it.

There was a swarm of five miniature mermaids patrolling the aquarium. J opened his mouth to say 'Wow', but the word never quite got to his tongue. What he really wanted to verbalize was, 'See, THAT's why I drink."

The woman did not even glance at them. She was homing in on something that J now recognized as the epicenter of weirdness, a charred figure - was it a statue or a corpse? - that occupied the center of the couch.

"I found it," she said.

J looked over his shoulder at the mermaids - their tiny breasts actually bobbed - and then forced his eyes to return to the dead body. Yes, it really was a dead body. How was he going to explain that one to the landlord, to anyone?

"That?" he asked.

She reached out and pulled something from the burnt fingers. "This," she said. A few bones tumbled to the floor, smudging the carpet. The woman blew on the object in her hands. Some black dust flew off it. It was a ring.

"Oh," he said.

"Now I will clean the place up for you," she said.

She slipped the ring onto her finger and its shimmering became part of the golden sheen of her inhuman skin. The very air seemed to vibrate around them and for a few moments the throbbing of his head was truly unbearable.

Slowly, the motion of everything wound down. The corpse was gone. So were the smudges, the tree part of the coffee table and every single beer can or glass that had lain scattered across the living room floor. And the mermaids. He realized that, brief as their existence had been, the aquarium would never quite look right without them again.

He blinked.

"Oh yes," said the woman. She touched his forehead and the hangover was gone also.

He spend the rest of the afternoon hunting for something - anything - out of place. Everything was as it should be. Yet, in some strange way, not....

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: Flower

Holding onto the flower seemed to be the most illogical thing in the world - both practically and emotionally. Marianne had carried it with her every day of her life. The petals were white, parchment dry and brittle. It was not a particularly beautiful specimen. It came from her marriage bouquet.

According to Marianne, it lost its color on the day Frank first raised his hand to her. She would not tell him what it was originally.

Now, his ass stiff from too many hours on the hard edge of the sidewalk, damaging the flower was the least and most immediate of his worries.

The whitewashed walls of the house across the street betrayed nothing. Somewhere within, Frank Bain had a gun trained on the person of his estranged wife Marianne. Was she dead or alive? There had been several gunshots, one at three o'clock, two at four-thirty and another at a quarter to five, but at five oh five, the cops spoke to her. She sounded strained, emotional, but still very much alive. It was almost six now. There had been no more gunshots, but Frank could have used other means. There were so many. A hangman's noose, a sharp kitchen knife, his bare hands, a cocktail of domestic insecticides. All of those might be soundless.

He tried not to think about them, but the images flooded his thoughts, almost as if he was there in the room with her, listening to Frank Bain tormenting her with the possibilities, asking her to choose. Was he picking up her stream of consciousness somehow?

That had happened before, to the surprise of them both, somehow confirming that soul mate link they had been aware of from the first.

Don't die. His mind was pleading. Don't die.

Live. Take me with you. Live for me.

The words popped into his head. The voice was hers, although the acoustics echoing within his skull sounded odd, as if coming through a long, narrow tube or from underwater.

The very air around him seemed to come alive and it was as if he could feel every ant meandering across the sand, every blade of grass glistening as it unfolded, pushing up towards the sun. The flower in his hands was a deep, dark plum, the color of old blood and promises broken. But the whitewashed house across the street seemed to have given up its ghost.

That was the moment he knew, long before the SWAT team stormed the place and brought out both blanketed bodies.

Not quite #fridayflash fiction: Crows

"Look, crows," said the boy. His name was Aidan. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that advertised the amusement park they visited three days ago on his birthday. He had turned nine, which meant that he was exactly three-hundred and sixty-two days away from counting his age in double digits.

One thing puzzled him. His feet were bare. He felt sure he would have worn shoes in a place like this, with the wind continuously whipping up rust-colored leaves and the tarmac scattered with pieces of broken glass.

"Why are they so shiny?" his sister asked. She was five and her name was Courtney. Asking stupid questions was her number one occupation.

"Because their mommies always made them wash behind their ears," Aidan replied. He thought it odd, but quite peaceful that their parents were nowhere in sight. A little way off, some car wreck was burning. Aidan wanted to look at it. Later. Before their mother came back. She always made them turn the other way if there was an accident.

"I think they're scary," said Courtney.

"They're fine," said Aidan. "They're very smart and they live a long time and sometimes people tame them. The Indians believe they are very important."

"Why?" Courtney asked.

"Next time I see an Indian, I'll ask him. The only reason most people don't like them is because they eat carrion."

"What's carrion?"

Aidan sighed. "How must I know? Some junk I think... Or rotten meat." He peered at them. There were five crows. They pecked at something on the road.

"Why are they so close?"

She did have a point there. Most wild birds flew away when you walked up to them, but not these ones. They just kept working their beaks as if the two children weren't even there.

"I dunno," said Aidan.

"Palo says crows eat people's eyes," Courtney said. "Can you see what these ones are eating?"

"Somebody's eyes," said Aidan. He leaned forward. It was true. The orb, tattered with blood, was the size of a marble. The size of a little girl's thumb scrunched up and with the bone sticking out. Almost as big as a nine-year-old boy's big toe sticking out of his Ben-10 sock.

He walked. Closer and closer. Shiny black crow feathers passed through the soles of his feet, but he never felt them.

Not Quite #Friday Flash Fiction: Angels and Cupcakes

(dedicated to the memory of Matt La Porte)

Five hours of guitar practice, seven days a week, but you are nobody without the same amount of time devoted to a steady and equally repetitive round of virtual ass-kissing - also known as social networking. It was the latter that felt most like effort. The guitarist skipped it a little too often, which explained perhaps why he never really had too many covers of Guitar World or Guitar Player magazine to his name.

This day started out feeling like just more of the same...

The guitarist was in his familiar lesson room at the back behind that rickety set of stairs - a cramped, but happy place where students and friends often just dropped by without needing to. This time, though, the friend on the stool opposite him had been eighteen months dead, so he amended his reality. This is a dream, but it's good to see him again.

Yes and no said the friend. It is a dream, but the waking is a little different.

The guitarist stared. "You read my thoughts."

The friend laughed. Can't you read mine yet?

The guitarist discovered that he could. Definitely a dream. Even playing music was different. He found that merely looking at an instrument brought forth sounds. No effort. No finger work. Just think it and it happens.

The friend stood up and the walls faded. I've died and gone to heaven, haven't I?

More laughter. This time it crept into him and he felt the laughter from the inside out. You've died. Heaven is all in the mind.

So I can make heaven or hell? They've had this conversation before, over many beers. It felt strange to be revisiting the thoughts, but as a practical hands-on experience.

Whatever you will

My old school ground?

Kids walked over them and through them. No one noticed. The guitarist craned his head after each and every kid that came too close, something the friend found hilarious.

"Shouldn't I be wearing robes or wings or something?" the guitarist asked.

You are said the friend. He was practically bent double with laughter. At least, that's how the guitarist saw him.

"Shouldn't we be doing something?" the guitarist asked. "You know, helping people?"

Sure said the friend. Millions of people out there that need help. All you've got to do is pick one.

The school ground faded a little. The guitarist hesitated. He felt like he was being pulled out of shape by a barrage of needs and wishes. "Oh my," he said. "Oh my."

The friend shrugged. It hits everyone at first. You get over it.

"And then?" the guitarist asked.

There's a trick to it. Make a choice. Boy or girl.

"Girl, I suppose," said the guitarist.

Then you follow the pain.

The guitarist found that his eyes adjusted to see things that didn't used to be visible. What color is pain? How can you tell anyone who hasn't seen it?

"It's all over," the guitarist said. "What do I do? Wait - I know. I can tell, now. Some of it's thicker, brighter, more intense."

There you go said the friend. The guitarist caught another stray thought that the friend might not have meant to share. Wonder what mine looked like? Or maybe he did.

The slashes of pain intensified. It became a girl weeping on the grass, a half-eaten cupcake discarded beside her. "Look," said the guitarist. They watched pain ungrowing into its roots. "Fat," said the guitarist. "That's what they called her. Such a small word."

Small words pack the most poison said the friend.

The guitarist said, "Maybe we should just.... no wait! I know what to do!"

He strode across the grass, still in robes and wings. The girl looked up startled and started to back away.

"Don't be afraid," said the guitarist.

The girl began to hyperventilate. "You're not real, are you? I mean, you don't look real, I mean - touch me -wait, don't touch me, just maybe leave me alone, okay? All the others do."

"Relax," said the guitarist. "I just wanna let you in on a little secret. Are you gonna listen to me carefully?"

The girl nodded. "Uh-huh."

"And you promise, pinky swear, not to tell anyone else?"

"Uh-huh. I promise."

"Okay, here's the secret. When God makes people and puts the spirit part in them, well, some of them, the spirit part is so beautiful that they might just float all the way back up to heaven. You got me so far?"

"Uh-huh."

"Now here's the important part," said the guitarist. "Because of, well, this problem with the beautiful spirit, see, what God does is he makes those ones a little heavier than normal. You got me on that?"

"Uh-huh."

"Cause if he didn't make them heavier, they would just float all the way back up to heaven as quickly as you can say cupcake."

The girl smiled. "Yeah, I got that." She did not notice at once that she was now floating about a foot above the grass.

Now look what you've done said the friend.

"I don't think that was supposed to happen," said the guitarist.

The friend touched the cupcake. It liquified into whorls of color before changing into a small flower.

The playground faded. Or maybe the two angels did. I leave that up to your imagination...

#Friday Flash - For Two

Alice was phoning around for quotes to get the coffee machine fixed when they came in. It had been two days. Some of the regulars, like Hank and Darla, were good about drinking cola instead, but Marv had to be difficult. It had to be tea, and done just right (which was the way only his dead mother Savoury Lil could do it.)

She hated the device at the best of times. Like a newborn, something always needed feeding or changing. Of late it had gotten so cantankerous that Pete the Sneak had actually gone over to Millie's to have a NO COFFEE sign printed out.

Glancing over from the phone, she saw that the man, mid-thirties, ex-metalhead, was already lighting up.

Now that pissed her off. Why did she have to go out back whenever she felt for a puff?

Slamming the receiver down, she marched over and said, "None of that. No smoking. Don't you know the rules?"

He inhaled deep and blew smoke into her face. "This is an imaginary cigarette," he said, brows raised slightly, eyes beaming mischief. Another time she might have appreciated the attitude along with the not-so-obvious good looks.

His girlfriend giggled. On her own time, Alice might have snapped, "I wouldn't laugh, if my stylist died and left me with half a dye job like that."

On Pete the Sneak's time, she took a deep breath and said, "What will it be?"

The man smiled. "Two coffees, filter, hot milk and sugar. Got that? C for coffee, T for two."

She looked back pointedly towards the machine where the sign was up in five inch capital letters. Were they blind? Illiterate?

Then she thought Imaginary cigarette my ass, I'll show you.

Revived into activity by the thought of a sweet return, she marched straight to the drying shelf where a neat row of empty white coffee cups waited. She took two, supplied them with saucers and tea spoons and whirled around to deliver the order.

That'll show them.

Here you go, two imaginary cuppa's of the best brew.

The guy winked. She smelt it. And saw it. Both cups were filled to the brim with rich brown java.

"Thank you Alice," said the man.

"Thank you Alice," echoed the girlfriend.

She looked down at her chest. She wasn't wearing her name badge. When she look back at the two barstools, they were empty. Only the aroma of filter coffee lingered.

(t.y.m. - dedicated, as always to the one who has become all of my stories)