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.)

Parallel Worlds: The double life of Sugarman

Reality. What a strange strange plaything of the gods. Allow me to tell you a tale of two worlds.

South Africa, 1986 - Sixto Rodriguez is dead and famous thanks to songs like the one below...
USA, 1986 - Sixto Rodriguez is alive but mostly forgotten



Parallel worlds, unaware of its other's existence... You can read the whole fascinating story here or, just go out and watch the music documentary 'Searching for Sugarman'.

Not Quite #Fridayflash Fiction: The Hours of Chronopolis

No one knows the hour... but if you have lived within the city of Chronopolis for a some time, there is a good chance that the hour knows you or at least has brushed past you in a busy street or waited behind you at the ice cream parlor or bought the last half dozen of freshly baked rolls just before you entered Maria's bakery.

This is your first lesson when arriving in Chronopolis. Each hour will surprise you.

There are hours that will fill you with unexpected melancholy for the boy who sat next to you in the ninth grade, you know, the one you last saw five years ago unpacking sacks of fertilizer in his dad's hardware store. Other hours will bring sudden inspiration about what to wear for the Halloween party in two weeks time. You get hours that will see you stripping off your coat to hand it to the woman begging outside the Fried Chicken joint and hours that will make you grasp your shoulder bag a little tighter for fear that it may be snatched away. Each hour is different.

No one is born in Chronopolis. That is your second lesson and it will take a while for this to sink in.

At first you will not notice this peculiarity, but when you do, it becomes a quest to find the one person that disproves what you suspect. You will search relentlessly, interrogating friends, acquaintances and even strangers, and they will smile tolerantly, as they too went through this stage. After a while it consumes you, wears you out and eats you up inside. The quest always remains bigger than you are. It is never met.

Nothing will prepare you for lesson number three and this is that everyone has their hour. No one knows this beforehand, but one day, a knock will come, or a nudge or a wink or a hand beckoning to you.

Whatever you were about to do, you will feel compelled to answer the summons and it will lead you towards the Tower of Chronopolis.

This building is perhaps the greatest of the city's mysteries. It dominates the skyline of Chronopolis from each wind direction and is impossible to miss. Everyone you know will have planned to visit it at some time, but to your knowledge no one has ever done this.

You will climb the tower, light-headed with wonder. You will admire the strange, gothic reliefwork carved into the walls, and secretly plan to return at some later date to make a detailed study of it. You realize instinctively that this is not possible now. Later, the need to return will fade like from your memory. No one comes to the tower of Chronopolis a second time.

You will arrive just before the hour at the summit and be welcomed. This is the last memory most people have before coming to their senses in the street below, roughly sixty five minutes later. One or two may recall being strapped into a pod-like column, but they are the crazy ones, who harbour other memories even more suspect.

No one remembers their hour.

This is the secret magic at the heart of Chronopolis. Each hour has a different soul. It may be a soul that delights in feeding ducks and swans in the pond at noon, or an hour that lights the next cigarette with the butt end of the previous one and then gulps down scalding black coffee to get rid of that dry, dry taste. You never can tell beforehand.

The final lesson of Chronopolis is that everyone goes home after their hour has come.

This is not the home you left behind when you settled in Chronopolis, or the home of your childhood. A key turns, something shifts and you are standing within the home that has always been there, at the very edge of your consciousness, the home you carry deep inside of you, always.

No one knows the hour...

The Child on the Tracks

Anyone who places him or herself within harm's way, will eventually have to deal with the approach of harm... Imagine a child playing on the railroad tracks and there is a train approaching... Let us make this the happiest of possible outcomes. The train driver spots the child, pulls the brakes and the train stops in time. The child continues to play. She has just learnt that in her world, she is more powerful than the train. It's a heady feeling. I can stop trains. Trains stop for me. I am the champion of the world. But, the tracks still belong to the train, and not the child. The train carries passengers and freight. It has a time table and a destination. Eventually, the child will have to move, so that the train can resume its journey and its purpose. Until she does, worlds, futures, realities are placed on hold...

Duality or insanity?

(this is a conversation that happens inside my head) She said, "Why do I imagine that I am two persons?" He countered, "Why do you imagine that you have two hands? Because they are more useful than having just one..." (maybe i should stop wasting energy on trying to act sane)

Review: The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot

Dreams and ideals are as important as what happens to us. In fact, they are more important. What happens to us, batters us against some breakwater over and over, until we bleed. We go Whew, I hope that never happens again. Once was enough. But dreams are the eternal companions of our soul, the wise guides we trust with an instinct that goes beyond this world, spanning across the multi-dimensional truth of who and what we really are.

In The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot, Helen is cast adrift by the toxically dysfunctional aspects of her family, long before she runs away to become the girl behind the 'Homeless, please help' placard. The only thread that guides her through a maze of hidden scars and secret pain, is a fantasy and a dream. In the struggle against incest and child abuse, the monsters stay invisible. Therefore, the soul's champion too must come from a source that hides beyond the physical world. And so Helen follows the signs and prompts from the imaginary world like a trail of bread crumbs, each one providing a moment's nourishment to keep her going until she reaches the home of her soul.

This is probably why the world needs stories like this and many more. Stories cast out a lifeline when no one in the 'real world' wants to get their feet wet to save someone who is drowning. The world says No, that child is fine (I've once read somewhere that No, I'm fine is probably the most common lie in the world) or She is just acting out. So often an unspoken truce is formed with the abuser, where the victim actually feels bad about each honest thought he or she has. As if somehow embarrassing the abuser would be a worse crime than what was already done to him or her.

To quote from the afterword of the book: The utter selfishness of the abuser is the common denominator - not class, race or creed. The psychological aftereffects - despair and withdrawal; low self-esteem; feeling worthless, dirty and bad - can last for life. The children take the badness onto themselves.

The Field ("stories" or "infinity")

Last week, when my sister was out of town, I was looking after her two cats for a few days. Because it was rainy, I took a taxi there (I don't have a driver's licence or car - another story of my failings but I'm not telling that now). On day two, as I got out the money to pay the driver, there was a tiny slip of paper in between. What was on the slip of paper was the following quote by William Blake:

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

So, being me (i.e. a little weird) I gave the taxi driver the piece of paper with the quote along with his money.

On the way back the sun was out, so I decided to walk. My sister stays just on the edge of that large empty piece of field that still contains a few of the remnants of streets and foundations that had been District Six in the 1960s. It's empty now. Drug dealers and copper wires thieves hide their wares there. At one time there were a few shacks, but the truth is, the authorities had forgotten who (which department or whatever) owned this piece of field so it just lay there...

As I walked this length, my inner muse said Go on, throw it. I knew instantly what he referred to. In my bag, I've got an old A4 sized diary in which I write my story ideas.

Every page, till the middle of March was filled, some with several different ideas on the same page... my creative wealth, it seems (although, to be honest, I've accepted that at least half of it will probably never get written)... now my mischievous muse was challenging me to throw it into the field, for the pages to scatter and be lost... I felt a mix of panic and longing... because part of me did see the attraction of clearing the slate, starting again... being empty... Then he said, I couldn't do it either. But he didn't need to say it for me to know one day, I will toss the book... when my bones no longer has the capacity to house my soul and my spirit would rise and the pages would scatter like seagulls... off to seek other horizons..

Later that day, my muse said... I could have given you twenty new stories if you did throw the book... now I can only give you ten...

And today... I was drifting into a dream, an imagining, surprised by what I 'saw' with other eyes and going cool I wanna put that into a story. I yanked myself back to the here and now to write it down.. and part of me realized that, my 'being a writer' was sometimes a little counter productive to the other needs of my soul. This impulse to go hey, that would make a good story sometimes slashed like a whip through my stream of consciousness, halting it...disturbing it... where perhaps it should not have halted...

Being a writer is wonderful, but am i really putting my imagination to the best use, by just mining it for ideas? By snatching the very first flowers along the path home and going heh-heh, got them, when perhaps instead I should be travelling further along those paths... perhaps this compulsion to take 'field notes' of every momentary dream is really an interrupt. Infinity is out there. I don't need to stuff it all in a chest until it loses its shine... it will be there till the end of me...