It wasn't a tree any longer. It was a tree-man. A man of wood.
*
So close, Alice, said the tree-man while she sanded and filed and smoothed the edges and made a man of hard edges soft to the touch.
Alice...
Don't say it, she told him. Not yet. Not...
I must.
Don't. Not yet?
Seven weeks and three days later, at around four in the morning, Alice began to polish tree-man, and she did love him. She hadn't made him. She didn't own him. No one did, because he wasn't a thing.
He reached out his hand and stroked her cheek and told her what she'd always wanted to hear. Then, he was still.
Silent.
A man made of wood, a wooden heart she no longer heard beat. Because he was finished.
*
Alice was obsessed. In the grip of compulsion and love and possibly insanity. But this man she'd released no longer spoke, did not move. He stood in the centre of a maelstrom of his shed flesh in her small and now filth-ridden flat.
He'd fallen in autumn. It was winter. Alice was beyond thin and through to gaunt. Starving, maybe - certainly suffering from malnutrition. Shaking and crying, too, because the one thing that had for a small time grown within her heart was no more than a piece of beautiful dead wood. Love furnished on it, yes, but no more than a man shaped ornament that would be worth little to anyone else but her. The labour of her life, the reason she'd been born, lived, toiled. Seven weeks and more she'd bled into him and sweated and stroked him and caressed him with every ounce of love she'd hidden away, long ago, deep inside her walls, buried in the moss and overgrown climbers and tall grass.
He was a dead thing, a gorgeous wooden corpse of a once-proud chestnut tree, and she was a haggard memory of a woman who'd once sold herself to get this thing she loved.
Fuck you, she told the tree.
The tree was silent.
Alice cried for a short time, but she knew she was done. Her heart was broken and there was no one to carve her afresh. The wind was blowing, her roots were loose, and she was ready to fall.
Alice pulled her top over her head, her pale breasts the only part of her not inked with animal or fable. Her ribs were stark and sharp.
She bit down so hard to keep from screaming that she cracked some teeth before she even began.
She placed her widest chisel against her ribs and tentatively, first, hit the splayed wooden handle with the rusted head of her fifth hammer. Her bloodied palm slipped and the chisel cut only flesh.
Alice gripped tighter to both hammer and chisel and aimed to break through her bone and tear out her own heart with her own hands and walk on dying feet and throwing the fucking thing twenty storeys to its death.
She was amazed at the blood and the pain involved in hammering through her own breast, but she maintained thought. Her implements were so slick with blood from her pale, bare chest she could hardly hold them. Bone was tougher than wood, but the chisel was sharp. With one strong hand, lend strength by insanity and disappointment and the dull, aching death of emptiness, she reached into her chest and stroked her own withered heart.
With one final look at the tree, implacable wood, she grasped her heart and wrenched it free.
*
Sometime later, Alice woke and felt something she didn't understand.
She felt no pain. She felt...alive. Conscious of herself. A hard winter after a hard summer. Dry, undernourished, barren - like a tree in winter.
But not dead.
Why am I not dead? she asked of nothing, because she was sure this was some kind of Heaven.
And an answer came, even though she was alone.
Look down.
She did. There, in the ragged, bone-torn hole of her chest. Pale skin, bloodied. Cracked bone. And within, a wooden heart.
Finally, her eyes, swimming, focused on something before her. A perfect, wooden man. But not the dead thing she'd worked on. No. This thing, it lived, and she saw why.
Within his chest, her heart beat just as his beat within hers.
You saved me, she said.
He leaned down and looked, with animation, into her eyes.
You carved me alive, he said. You saved me. You shaped me.
He kissed her, tasting of summer and spring and autumn and winter. He kissed her and her wooden heart pumped sap and earth and the feel of the seasons through her veins while the man with the wooden head pushed Alice's bones into place and sutured her wounds with fine stitches.
He cleaned the blood from her breast while she looked at him and watched his eyes.
The tree-man brushed Alice's hair, like the seasons brush the trees.
She kissed him, and her wooden heart bled sap. He kissed her back, and his human heart bled blood into him. They lived like people and trees do. Bending in the wind, until they break, or until the wind dies down, when they grow again.
The End
I don't often write 'Flash' fiction, but I wrote this, and it's short, so that's what it is. Not often the introduction to a short story is longer than the story itself. I was going to carry right on rambling to see if I could make up another hundred words or so and do that...but I didn't.
Come the End, I See
Blind from birth, I grew used to a world of sound and touch. People were never more than invisible voices.
You can see again, they said.
When the bandages came off, I opened my eyes to look for the first time. The room was empty but for me, a bed, my pale legs beneath a hospital gown, the walls a light, placid green. A lamp that bent down, peering at me.
He sees, they said.
Two, perhaps three voices in the room. Congratulatory, pleased. The monkey sees, I thought.
But I did not see them.
I stood, shook. Walking, I was not used to sight, just sound and stick. I found my way to clothes and the outside, all the while they spoke and clapped. To my ears the sound was sarcastic and slow - almost like derision at their hands.
The halls were long, bright and full of voices into which I did not bump, because I was used to skirting the feel of breath on the air, that hollowness through the wind on my skin. The door which led to the world opened and sound, coupled with sight, overwhelmed every part of me so that my legs grew weak and tears flowed from my new eyes as I saw for the first time the cars and stalls and shops and the sun light. As always, I heard those engines which drive cars and people, and the sounds they make.
Take them back, I wanted to say.
But why, when I had seen already, and do still? The people are only voices. Holes in the black air, sideways things whose voices come as though from some distant uncaring void. They clap and the sound comes from someplace beyond and I do not think they even know.
The End
This was first published in 'Bizarro Bizarro' from Bizarro Pulp Press. Good anthology, and it's still in print if you want it. They published some other people I like (David Bernstein, Max Booth III, Adam Millard among many) and the anthology is a pretty thing to look at.
Sleep and The End
Sometimes it's hard for a man to get a grasp of what's real and what's not. Bob Storm fell down that particular rabbit hole just before he fell asleep and killed the world.
Bob Storm was his real name and not a pseudonym. It was a good name for a writer. Memorable, easy on the tongue, and looked good on the spine of a book. He wrote novels, mainly. Dabbled in short fiction, tried his hand at poetry. Discovered he couldn't write poetry and that there was no money in it. But, as a novelist, he was OK. Not great. Just OK. He made some money from his books - enough to consider it a second job, even. He paid tax on his earnings, bought a car with money that came from books. He wasn't famous.
He went insane long before he fell asleep, and when he finally opened his eyes again the world just wasn't there.
*
The world ends. There's no one left to write the story. No one left to read it. But here it is. Right here.
Rig
ht?
Of course it is, because the world doesn't end when the man who writes your story sleeps. No. That's the job of the BIG EDITOR IN THE SKY.
It's not me that writes the story, or a man called Bob Storm. It's you.
Mind: fucked.
Just like Bob's. Sleepless nights do that to anyone. Go without sleep for long enough, and you'll start to slip. Sleep's a finger hold on a big, smooth cliff. People fall off all the time.
*
Bob read the email again.
Three books. Advance. Deadline.
He read it over and over but those three sentence fragments summed it up quite nicely. His dog sat on his lap. Maybe his dog read the email, too. Probably not, but this is Bob's story and the dog (Gerald, for some reason known only to Bob) may have been able to read with a little help on the longer words.
But yeah, probably not.
It was a big advance.
'Shit,' said Bob. Gerald's ears twitched, but he wasn't sure if Bob was talking to him, or the computer. Bob spoke to the computer often and passionately.
Carefully, the writer set the dog down on the floor, stood as best as he could with his perpetual stoop, and danced a strange little jig.
'Yes!' he said. The dog didn't say anything.
After a while the writer man sat back at his desk and replied to the email. It seemed like a good idea, and really, what was there to think about? His second job could now become his first, and probably only, job.
A full time writer. Bob Storm had finally MADE IT.
His first book, written at the tender age of thirty-seven, seemed so long ago. It was only thirteen years.
A blink of the eye to a man pushing fifty.
Thoughts of telling his boss to stick his job somewhere dark and musty popped into his head with a peculiar kind of glee, despite the fact that he liked his boss, and his job.
Giddy with excitement and wondering if maybe the email had gone to his head, he patted Gerald and took himself off to bed.
The next time, sleep would mean The End.
*
What Bob didn't realise is that it's not a story if no one reads it. It's just a thought, on paper, or in a computer on a cheap and impractical glass table.
It's not a story if no one hears it.
It's just a thought. People, ordinary people, like you and me, we have thoughts all the time. But they're not stories. We don't make worlds. People like Bob make worlds. Crazy ones, plain ones, ones with pictures, too. Ones where people turn boats upside down to sail on the sky, universes comprised of jelly and dark matter alone. That vision, that creation, needs to get from the story teller's mind into...yours.
That's where it lives. Not here, on the page. But in you. In your synapses, or soul, or plane of existence...whichever way you look at it, doesn't matter. What matters is transmission, I suppose. Yes, transmission. Infection. A way to keep on travelling beyond the boundaries of one man's mind.
I know. I know.
It doesn't have to make sense. Platypus, exoskeleton, television, life...none of it makes sense. It just is.
*
Bob wrote a story once, when he was just eleven years old.
It went, by and large, like this:
Trudy fell down the well with a sickening thump that she didn't hear because she was already dead by the time she hit the bottom. A man with a large gun with two barrels shot her in the head and she went over the edge of the well backwards falling into the well and broke her neck. But she didn't have much of a face after being shot. She was well dead. Then she got up. The man with the gun screamed after a long time when she reached the top of the well. She was covered in blood and didn't have a face. The man with the gun shot her again and took her head right off this time. Then he did not have any more bullets but even though she was headless she could still walk. Trudy chased after the bad man really fast. She chased him for a long time and when she caught him she stabbed him in the eye with her neck bone which stuck out and he died. The End.
Bob hadn't been very good with commas when he was eleven. He got better.
He was a horror writer at heart, and with his three book deal safely under his low-slung belt (largely hidden by a writer's low-slung belly), he began to write the first book. And it was horrible.
'Fuck,' he told Gerald, hitting the backspace key over and over again. 'This is utter shit. Fucking utter fucking shit.'
Gerald had heard worse. He rolled over at Bob's feet. Because he was old, and because Bob spoiled him with sausages and cheese, Gerald also farted.
*
It wasn't strictly writer's block. Not at first. More a kind of performance anxiety. He didn't know why, now, he couldn't write. He'd written plenty. In an attempt to kick start some creative juices, he stood for a while and counted the spines of his books on his 'Bob Storm' shelf.
There were sixteen novels on there, and a few magazines with short stories from the 'early' days.
Sixteen novels. He could do it.
'You can do it,' he said that night in the comfort of his double bed. That day he'd stared at the screen, the keyboard, a mug of cold coffee, the cursor...anywhere but where the worlds lived. The thing you're looking for is always in the last place you look...but only if you find it.
'You can do it,' he told himself again as he turned on his side and closed his eyes. After some time words began, unbidden, to drift across his field of vision, like a ticker tape at the bottom of a news channel on the television.
He wasn't sleeping. He wasn't dreaming. He followed the story that was playing out across the inside of his eyelids. It was brilliant. Genius.
Write it.
A voice, not unlike his own, inside his head. Like the words that would make the greatest story he would ever tell.
He grinned.
When he sat at the computer it was three in the morning. He didn't even bother with the coffee. Gerald looked at him with a suspicious raised eyebrow before snorting and returning to his own doggy dreams.
Bob wrote and wrote all through the night. Satisfied by six am that he had done his share of work for the day, he used the word count feature on his writing program to tot up his night's work.
The word count told him that he had written a grand total of no words at all.
0.
Unequivocal. Like a crash when you're fast asleep and something heavy hits the floor and you think fuck someone's in the house but it's just a mirror and you don't have time for commas when you speak with the voice in your head.
Like a breathless eleven year old boy, telling his first story, maybe. Transmitting it, from his mind, his imagination, to yours.
0. The computer told him so. It must be true. But the words...he'd spent all night typing...the words...
Were not there.
*
Gerald was just a dog. Of course, he couldn't read. But he could smell crazy.
Bob smelled crazy.
*
Is it crazy to think that if you sleep the world will end? Doesn't it do that anyway, with each passing moment? The things that were cease to be and become something new with the passing of each moment...don't they?
Are you asking me? thought Gerald.
Bob shrugged. His hair was unkempt and he'd lost a fair amount of weight. He was unshaven and his stubble was grey and very coarse.
'I don't know,' said Bob to his dog. 'Fuck it, I don't know why I'm talking to you. You're just a dog,' he said.
Gerald didn't take offense. He ambled, nails clacking, down the wooden stairway to the kitchen to see if he could find some sausages.
Bob watched his dog go, turned back to the screen, and wrote a sentence. The same sentence he'd seen not a few minutes ago in his head. He felt the keys, heard the mechanical keyboard's tapping as he struck the keys. Watched the screen the whole time and nothing appeared at all.
The words, it seemed, were stuck inside his head.
Paper, thought Bob.
Gerald came back happy and full. What did he ca
re if Bob went mad? He was just a dog, and he knew where the sausages were kept.
*
'Leave me alone! I'm doing it, OK? I'm doing it. I'm writing, writing like a fucking madman! I can't write any faster. You'll have it when I'm done!'
Bob shouted this into the telephone when his editor called him to enquire, quite politely, how the novel was progressing. It was the first call the editor had made since Bob's signature on the contract. The first call in four weeks.
In that four weeks, Bob had not slept. Not even for one minute. Every time he closed his eyes, the story played out, just as though he was reading, across his vision. But the story would not come out. It was stuck. Shy. Fucking hiding.
Four weeks with no sleep, no shaving, no shower, barely any food.
The upstairs study where Bob worked with the slat blinds drawn down stank. The man smells didn't worry Gerald the dog in the slightest. He liked smells. But not the crazy smell. He didn't like that. Not at all.
And Bob wasn't just crazy anymore. He was FUCKING crazy. Gerald knew lots of swear words. Bob said that one quite a lot. Gerald had no concept of swearing, but understood words with power. SIT. STAY. FETCH. FUCKING CUNT COMPUTER.
Things like that.
Around that time, four weeks into his mammoth stint of insomnia, Bob wondered if he would break the story if he actually got it out of his head. He wondered if he would break the world. Maybe, he thought, he was really the keeper of the world in his head.
It had to stay in there. It didn't, shouldn't, couldn't be written because it wasn't a story. It was true. Of course it was true.
The Cold Inside (Horror Short Stories) Page 6