Surviving The Shadow

It’s time for another Friday writing session with my dear friend Texasblu.

Tex suggested the prompt this week. It is  a soft answer.

Bit of a tricky one, actually, but I finally got there. Before I start, I just have to say -

I got my laptop back and everything is A- OK.

Thank you laptop gods!!

Here’s my story -

{Image by Party Hat at DeviantART}

Everyone’s Mama is always supposed to be right, but I’ve come to the conclusion my Mama was wrong. About men, mostly.

She was a fool for every man she ever liked. Right from the start. She let them in to her heart, her soul, just like that without really knowing what they were about.

I know why she did it, she wanted them to heal her, to paint over the remnants of what my Daddy did. But they never did. How could they? They were just like him.

My mother could never resist looking into the darkness. It was a form of amorality she found titillating. I saw it, the delight she took in it, when they treated her badly. She complained about it, but she liked it too.

She liked having something to cry about on a beautiful day. She liked coating every room in the house with shadow. It was safe for her. It was more dangerous to let the light in.

It made me nervous for a lot of years. The shouting. The hard responses to my mother’s questions like nails being driven down a wall, gouging, splintering brick. I thought that men couldn’t respond to direct questions like: Would you like green beans with your meat? without flying off the handle.

I don’t like shouting. It doesn’t do anything but feed anger more and more until it becomes a beast hiding behind coats at the back of the cupboard, waiting to spring out when the door is opened.

But there is so much of it. When  I sit on my balcony at night I take in the chorus of conflict on every floor. A stranger to this world would be forgiven for thinking that no one in this city can agree, that the only way we get what we want is to shout about it. My Mama, at 56 years old, is still letting the men she loves show their disparagement at regular intervals.

I met Chili in the book store. He was looking at The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. He was reading The Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through by D.H. Lawrence. I felt it was a moment of prophesy -

A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me

If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh delicate, a winged gift

If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself…

Chili smiled at me. He asked me if I would like to join him for coffee. He had a tattoo of the sun on his hand and freshly polished Blundstone boots. I could smell the polish rising up through the morning like beeswax.

Chili and I got on. He worked in his father’s shop repairing old clocks. He liked clocks with pendulums the best. I told him I liked clocks with chimes, it was like hearing the bells on Christmas Day every single hour.

Chili and I went out. Over and over. Before we knew it we had been seeing one another for three months. He asked me to move in with him. I was elated and afraid. My Mama had a cut on her lip  from another man who was supposed to be different from the others.

I thought Chili was different but I didn’t trust my judgement. I was sure I had inherited my ability to assess someone’s character from my Mama. Chili could be a devil in disguise.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the day we had met. The poem about yielding to the wind. Surely I couldn’t be wrong about the measure of such a man.

I packed up my things. My poetry books. My clock with the chimes. My earplugs to drown out the shouting. I moved in with Chili.

Mama cried. She thought I was a moth drawn to the flame of destruction. You’re going to be just like me, she said. She had a slight smile at the corners of her mouth. Like mother, like daughter. She wasn’t unhappy at what she expected my fate to be. There is constancy in shadow.

After one month I grew tired of waiting. Chili’s flat was so quiet at night all I could hear was him turning the pages of his books and the stolid sweep of his pendulum clocks.

So I asked the question I was afraid to ask, clutching my ear plugs like life jackets : Would you like green beans with your meat?

The answer was the way rain sounds at the end of a drought. Soft, welcoming.

Whatever suits you, sweetheart, he said.

* Don’t forget to go and read Tex’s story. I know she would appreciate it.

Just Plug Me In…

The news from the Apple store is that I finally get my power adapter tomorrow so I get my laptop back. It has been two torturous weeks. Will all of my stuff still be on the hard drive? Will the new adapter also go on fire? Will I spontaneously combust with excitement?

I will be nervous to find out, but I can’t wait to plug that baby in.

I will begin to post regularly again tomorrow and will visit all of your blogs. It has been tricky to do so because Nick has needed this computer to do a huge amount of school assignments. Schoolwork schmoolwork – I need to blog!!!

See you in the morning….

Away From Tomorrow

Geraldine has started a Movie Musings prompt site where she posts a prompt once a month.

The prompt for June was   Sometimes The Runner Stumbles.

I wrote a screenplay about five years ago which I abandoned after two drafts because I thought it sounded too much like a cross between The Matrix and Bladerunner.

Anyhoo, as is my wont, I have decided to play around with it and see if I can turn it into a novel instead.

Geraldine’s prompt inspired me to give it another try.

Here’s one of the bits I’m fiddling with -

Image by fdolphin96 at Deviant Art

My name is Johnny Destructo. I am a hunter in the farthest reaches of the blue plateau. It is 2060AD and the earth has succumbed to environmental degradation. Our oceans are no longer life-sustaining. They are stagnant with polyurethane. Our population has been decimated by wave after wave of viral pandemic. Swine flu, avian flu, canine flu. The return of the bubonic plague.

Our remaining arable land is closely guarded. Our natural resources are controlled by the G2 – the two greatest superpowers in the world – Russchina, a merging of Russia and China and the United Kingdom of the States, a melding of what remains of the rest of the world.

Much of the world has been swallowed up by the sea or by what was our true enemy all along – our own garbage. A green haze covers the sun, methane gas rising from the tracts of land which used to be countries but are now garbage dumps.

As I said, our natural resources are controlled by the G2. So we have had to create our own sources of power. The Stewards of the States laughingly call it people power. They say what an honour it is to give yourself in service to your state. To become a wind runner.

I say it would have been better to have contracted the plague.

Our energy is sourced from the wind. It is the only technology we have left. Except that there is no wind. That’s where the runners come in. They are criminals, miscreants, the disenfranchised, the poor, thrown into laboratories and genetically modified so they can run and run and run.

They run in the relay tunnels. Thousands of them like rats turning wheels, powering our cities.

It is not a life. It is not even a death. It is nothing.

The Modifiers say the wind runners wish only to run. They crave it, but I have been down to the tunnels where their feet pound like a lament and I see their eyes pleading for peace.

As I said, I am a hunter. My official name is Venator which is Latin for hunter. The stewards like things to have a mythic connotation, but let me tell you, there is nothing mythic about hunting down a wind runner.

Sometimes they escape. They snap out of their catatonia and strive for freedom. They run. Blindly. Their pale limbs shuddering in the green heat. They hesitate, but they have been conditioned to run, it is all they know, so they keep on running. Always to the sea. Where all paths lead. But there is no respite there. The sea has spent a lifetime dying.

I do not chase them. I watch and wait in my RPV. My Reconnaissance and Pursuit Vehicle which has been powered by the very feet of the runners I am hunting. The irony is not lost on me.

My mission is to capture them, to return them to the Modifiers for re-programming, but sometimes they beg me for mercy. Let me run, they say. Let me run until the end.

My instructions are to obliterate under such circumstances, but I cannot. I have seen their eyes. So I let them run.

Sometimes the runner is swift. He runs to the sea, holding his arms aloft in victory before plunging in. He doesn’t realise he has been programmed to do this as punishment for his urge to escape.The acidic water rips him to the bone but there is joy in his face. He has died a free man.

Sometimes the runner pauses. He is afraid I will shoot him in the back or toy with him as some of the Venator do. I point those runners away from the sea towards the place where some of us believe the forests still grow. Don’t stop till you see the trees, I say.

Sometimes the runner stumbles. His humanity returns in a rush, striking him in the face. It is too much. That’s how I met the boy. That’s how I met all the others who now live in a warehouse at the edge of the city.

He was a boy. Running. For a brief moment – free. I should have done what I was meant to do which was to shoot him in the back, but I couldn’t. He was just a boy.

He couldn’t remember his own name. I took him to the warehouse where I have taken all the others. Over 2oo former wind runners along with butterflies, fish and songbirds.

I have never seen a bird, said the boy. He smiled awkwardly as if his face was being pulled by strings. The next day he could remember his name. It was Max.

Every morning and evening I come and sit with the runners. They touch me like I am their saviour. They do not know that if we are discovered we will all be obliterated.

It occurs to me as I look at their faces that hope is a simple miracle, that it is always there buried in the hearts of men. No matter what. Collectively, we are all running away from tomorrow. From the brutality of it. We dream of rebuilding all that has been lost.

We hold tiny fragments of what was in our hands and wait for them to reform. It is our vigil.

We link hands in the morning and at night. The warmth of our skin is our armour. The day begins and ends in our eyes. It is all we have but it is more than we expected.

I am Johnny Destructo. I am a hunter of men. One day I will see those men run free. The winds will return. Westerlies, easterlies, southerlies, northerlies, tradewinds, mistrals soft as feathers. The winds will come, turning the sun to gold. And we will begin again.

Riding Painted Ponies

Remember that Blood, Sweat & Tears song (well, some of you young ‘uns might not) Spinning Wheel?

What goes up must come down
spinning wheel got to go round
Talking about your troubles it’s a crying sin
Ride a painted pony
Let the spinning wheel spin

Sometimes my life is like a song and lately it has been Spinning Wheel. I have always loved this song. It has a killer arrangement, fabulous horn section and psychedelic lyrics. Pretty much ticks all the boxes for me.

But it’s the sentiment expressed in the lyrics that fit me at the moment.

Everything comes full circle. To experience real emotional pain is difficult to write about. You actually get tired of going on about it.

You also get tired of constantly employing all the little strategies that help you deal with it. The long walks, the yoga, the vitamin supplements, the positive headspeak, the taking things day by day, the letting things go. The waiting. The endless waiting.

Keeping a breakdown at bay is a full time job. You teeter on the brink of a cliff with barely a foothold. The black sea below looks incredibly inviting.

You feel like taking an axe to people with their constant positive affirmations and assurances that things can only get better. Tell that to my fragile psyche, you feel like shouting. This is a daily battle for me that’s been going on for years and I’m tired of it. I just want some peace from constantly trying to stop myself from descending into full metal jacket insanity.

When you’re deep within the swirling vortex of mental agony that has a half-life longer than plutonium you do not believe you will ever make it back up to the sunlight. But you do. Because the wheel turns whether you want it to or not. For good or for bad things just cannot stay the same.

So when the sun is out but you can’t see it no matter how hard you try – don’t give up. For the wheel is turning as you look. Do what you have to do to get through the day. Hold on. Ride that painted pony and let the spinning wheel fly….