Drabbles

Souls are useless anyway, you wouldn’t want one. today was a good day but whittle whittle happened and another part fell off whittle whittle away. layer after layer, cell after cell, the whittle whittle way, aways. aways my soul and eats my face, whittle whittle whittle. today was a good day only by comparison. i need to rebuild; i do that by writing. write write write where’s that soul, right, write; somewhere in these words stopwhittle stop, whittle, stop. count them now unwhittle one percent of chance unstop the writewrite. somewhere in these words sexwrite somewrite soulwrite singwrite, soulleft. Hah.

The world begun with a noise, and it’ll end with one. According to the principle of opposites, at least. Tee was getting closer and closer to making that noise and I was humming along with him, unable to keep up with the rhythm of his ancient tongue but following the rhythm of his body. It was nonsense for all I knew but somehow I could feel its reality. It wasn’t academic; but furious, passionate, so very hot. I didn’t understand a word but I felt the fraying start, his pronunciation sharpen, and I knew that soon he’d get it right.

“Consistency isn’t a virtue.” Marlón had meant to be swirling his snifter of dark wine at this point in his speech, but he’d consumed it all so that would’ve looked stupid. Stupid empty glass. “Consistency is useful for the– wait, no. In a way, we’re all consistent. We follow the rules. So, the appearance of consistency; making the same choices in the same situation…” the autocue rolling past his eyes had sped up, slurring a few of his words, after which he stammered, “in which, in which case morality is just a function of physics. But we all knew that.”

A short while, unnoticeable and unmoving enough to be frozen; everywhere a mind occupied the world, a mind of neurons the size of stars, galaxies be ganglions; replacing every single thing in the entire universe: instead of every little string and quark, this mind. This mind that was a universe in its own right, over us. Short; it didn’t have the time to think anything that it hadn’t previously thought and then it went away. All resumed. There were not on Earth machines fast enough to notice that time had passed in the gap of existence the mind had occupied.

They were all upset about sports. They risked their lives and their minds for sports because they loved sports. In the world it is important to care about something and they did, it was sports. They were five hundred thousand strong about sports; they went to war about sports. Their music and language and brains about sports, their whies about sports. They slowly but surely, after phases and phases of sports divorced the others and this is slightly after they were upset see they tricked about sports and it was all about sports. Thirteen deaths and countless teeth about sports.

Linus’s thought process went something like: if we all have shadow selves not inside but around us, one for each, then something’s gone terribly wrong. He was convinced everybody else was the same person, because they all didn’t care. Everyone else didn’t up and put a gun to a CEO’s head (didn’t matter which one, but I think his name was Robford? No idea). But maybe, he thought somewhere along the line when it was too late to back out, maybe the opposite of putting the gun there is being poked by the gunmuzzle. That’d be okay then. He fired.

They played shitty music at your funeral and after a few minutes of respecting your memory I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to stand by your coffin and wave to your you when we shovel dirt on it but I didn’t have earplugs. I can’t cry to pop rock, scream in grief but good grief you should have been more sophisticated, I don’t know how to close this door now. Through which I can hear the simple three-chord shit you pbopped your head to goddamn I wanted a farewell not an itch and a toothgrind godfuck you’re bad at goodbyes.

The celebrity factory was about fifteen times smaller than Lusa had expected, and a whole lot less noisy. It consisted of conveyor belts and phoneboxes and dangly chain hookthings from the ceiling and it was filled with dust. It explained so much, she thought. She shone her torch over the antiquated displays on one corner of the room and accidentally pressed the on-button, as one does.

Blitzrain redcarpet coke overdose yesyesyes grammies cancer mother scandal suicides yesyes police commercials paparazzi ye–

Lusa wrenched her half-formed head out of the phonebox and spent the rest of her life fighting her dreams.

Den minsta saken i hela världen. Krymper och är minst. Är inte en atom eller en elektron men någonting mindre, och krymper fortfarande. Är varken kvark eller sträng, är knappt ens ett sannolikhetsmoln av submikroskopiskt damm. Krymper fortfarande. Sannolikheten att jag finns sjunker för varje klick som går. Krymper och krymper och krymper. När man är tillräckligt liten kan man inte bli påverkad av något så abstrakt och meningslöst som en sandkornsmängd elektroner som ändrar form för att neuroner i samma antal ska synapsa för att ett lager av mening ska urskiljas. Ord finns inte när man krympt så här.

I miss reading to you and your smile. I miss your dimples and I wish I could express this with words no-one else uses but love is common. Doesn’t make it worth less. I miss getting lost in hypotheticals until neither of us know what we’re talking about. Your presence when I talk a language you don’t understand and we’re not paying that much attention to each other but we’re there and that’s important. I want to write on you I love you. I am not forgetting you. I am overwhelmed. Thanks for reading my not terribly original love note.

I think there was thousands of years ago a banana plague for you and me, I mean everyone but you and me and since then, don’t you think it’s sad, that us two are the only two people existing, that we are the only slates to blank. I would’ve liked them green big full of vitamins but there was a plague and only we survived and we don’t fuck, we don’t mate, we don’t kiss so we are the only ones yellow and bent and empty. I think we are sprayed and declawed and deracinated, don’t you think it’s sad.

We stretched the definition of art, academically speaking of course, so thin art broke. It just snapped. Suddenly there was beauty everywhere; kindred and rot symmetrically. We changed everyone’s minds with us and I was art and you was art. It was beautiful like pearls used to be (they were now just as beautiful as anything else).

But all art, while beautiful, is offensive and challenging and sexual. Society started changing slowly; the rate at which it did so growing every day, then every hour. The etiquette of smoking indoors could change during a cigarette break. We couldn’t stop anything.

Recurring recrystallized recalibrated recognised thoughts from five years ago like spring ice melts around you– yes– there is a friend I am yours recursed rekissed they say I’ve thought this through thought this before recast like broken legs your broken nose an eskimo reclaim me I ask– why– are you no I no me all you are my broken nose rechristened recollapsed recoil I am not here I have written sorry on my recoursed reclassed rekempt you hurt no I hurt you body,

recalligraphed my thoughts I thought reclamoured body love rectangled break free I’m sorry like ponds winter freeze.

The W from the Hollywood sign is rotting in your basement and they built a new one and pretended like you never stole it. I think they have a whole warehouse of them. Not just the Ws but the entire sign. And you and I, Anders, we’re going to find that wherehouse. We’re going to get there and break in and truckload the shit out of there. Then we’re going to burn the one that is there now, and put up the new ones all over the country and it’s going to be great, Anders. It’s going to be great.

Gregor didn’t have the same social networks that we did and this made us uncomfortable to the point where we just realized we could make a fake profile for him. It soothed our souls, you know, to not let his chosen apathy bother us anymore. We’d fake update his profile every now and then, sometimes that got hilarious. We’d invite the fake profile to events and then make him cancel the thing like an hour, or fifteen minutes, before it happened… but yes, past pranks be pastful… my point is, has anyone seen him lately? He doesn’t answer his door.

Hi, do you want to commit a mistake? Uh-huh, uh-huh, no. My name’s Raela Micha. I’m calling from the Department of Boring People’s Lives, a recently started branch– ah. Uh-huh. Well, it’s not like that. You just don’t blip up on any radar– yes. Exciting, you say? I’m not so sure about that; say, what place is it you work at? Want to prove– Okay. Yeah, do you maybe want to get drunk tomorrow before you go there? I’ll get drunk too. Think of it as a date, then, if you’re uncomfortable with “mistake”. Uh-huh. Alright, I’ll see you there.

They made a drug that removes depression while at the same time not removing creativity. You can’t have it. See, what they did is they poked around in this one girl’s brain– Melanie was her name, you’d have liked her– and they found that the sadmaking parts and the motivation to imagine were just really close, like peas in a fucking pod. All your fears that they stemmed from the same thing? Unfounded. Anyway, these pills are great, I’m enjoying life immensely nowadays. Melanie’s dead, but she accepted that before the surgery. She’s made the world better, and you haven’t.

The Maintenance Robot woke up. It was barely aware of what was happening. Lightning had struck it. Not everything was working as it should. It buzzed and rickered, blindly, lonely.

The temperature was not what it used to be. The heat vents must be fixed first. As soon as it tried to move it skidded, though, until it bumped into a formation. It had not passed over any heat vents.

It shone brighter, messaging other Maintenance Robots to come over there. None came. The cracks in the ice formed by the lightning grew and surrounded it, and it fell in.

Wednesday. A good thing died on your last birthday, stood on the train tracks staring at the growing lights until it was extinguished. A good thing died on your last birthday, dropping down a ledge past clouds. I was there and I saw them both happen, Wednesday, half-time, a good thing died on my skin where the itch was. In your pool by the water floating face down, in your head deep inside the nerves hidden, Wednesday. Sometimes I drink myself into a stupor on your birthday but it never works. I’ve always woken up so far. Good things die.

You can boil the hallucinations away. The bugs solid screams phantasms and mares are impervious to heat so when you boil them they go away. That is why my skin is so wrinkly, why my house is so humid. They live in the cold places of your mind– the little bedroom with the cracle you were first attacked in, the bottomless pit in which you fell and so. I have not done it enough to know if they get used to it and just come back, like with the crowds, but so far I remain hopeful, they’re not here yet.