Five matches (ongoing standalone)

[kneedles]

1

The beauty that can be found in the science that makes up all of our lives sometimes takes my breath away. The threading webs of our blood vessels could be like masterpieces when presented on the page of a textbook, and even the vivid hot slickness as it slips across my fingers contrasted against sterile white gloves has something so like art when it is ripped fresh from a human being. I have never been cultured; my grandmother has never taught me to appreciate song, there is little art or sculpture to be found in nine if you don’t count the grim metallic twisting of pipes and of grey slabbed buildings, and the only literature I am permitted to read has only to do with childbirth so there were no bedtimes stories to be found in my youth, no soft metaphors and expertly styled words to allow me to escape from my prison. So I find the beauty where I can, to stop myself from going mad. In the way that a socket in a joint rolls as it bends like a flower unfurling towards the sun and the gently sweeping soft curve of a sternum, there is a loveliness that is so real and yet so otherworldly that the accidental forming of us all like separate pearls cupped within an oyster, made solely from time and the trapped particles of dust both perplexes and delights me.

Tonight though I am finding beauty in the names, like great works of prose or stunning poetry. Fenatil, laudanum, dihydromorphine, hydromorphone, nicomorphine, methadone, dihydrocodeine, buprenorphine, dihydroetorphine, piritramide, levo-alpha-acetylmethadol the individual bottles tell me. Take sparingly; do not operate heavy machinery afterwards. All these words could be a song or an epic ballad. My fingers slide around the lid of the bottle, pressing together to easily infiltrate the child-lock and I pour them into my hand, each tiny white pill touches my hand like a gentle kiss from a front. I do not take sparingly. I will not be operating heavy machinery afterwards, but I may make another offering to that grim ever turning machine that rules us all. Ripred help the people that entrust me with their lives and the lives of their children. I cannot be relied upon to be strong, to stay calm for them or speak soothingly, I cannot make promises that my system will not be so full of opiates that my heart won’t flutter like trapped, angry and frantic sparrows and my pupils won’t dilate to the size of dinner plates as I am the first person to ever look upon your child. Most of all, I cannot be relied upon to care. There is beauty in the science, but no beauty behind it, just as there is with all things. A human body is just as useless as a painting or a song at the end of it. Even the world as it spins on its access is as beautiful as it is pointless. The only thing is the machine, and even it isn’t real. There is no intelligent design, no gods in our machine. Only this and only the sweet names of drugs that curl and twist like tendrils of smoke as they drip from my tongue.

The hour is late and the day has been long; hot heavy smog beating into my lungs, smelling of burnt plastics and crude oils. I sit my chair, my grandmother sits in hers and together we mark time with our tuts and our sighs, our side ways glances and the acerbic, quiet shards of glass that slip out from under our breath. Hating her is enough to drain my energy because it requires every part of me; down to the last atom, the last molecule and every last particle. We are both alone and both festering inside of our hatred for each other, her so outwardly that she is rotting where she sits; skin like dried animal meat hung over a smoker to make beef or pork jerky, me at my opiate riddled core. I pray for someone to deliver me from her though I do not know how or what will happen to me after they do. But in the dim, straining flicker of candle light that barely illuminates the sparse, unfriendly living room it is still a desire that I offer up into the ether. There is no one there to listen though; there are no gods to be found in our machine.

The frantic, desperate rapping on the door is enough to make me jump, a reminder that in this place thought it might feel as if it had, time doesn’t actually stop and that the world outside of our window, its air far lighter and less hate filled than ours , is ever turning. My grandmother makes no move, only snorts and gets further down into her chair so I know that it will fall to me to answer the door. I move from my chair across the threadbare carpeting towards the door. I know from the outside that our house will seem an uninviting one, dark and fire brick with weeds twisting through the yard and a path made of old concrete slabbing seemingly thrown down into the earth with little care or consideration the fragments of gray barely even visible over the long grass anymore. From the street, no light will be visible save for one, haunting, trembling glow; my grandmother prefers not to waste the candles, prefers our home to match the darkness in her soul. The rapping begins again, as though I cannot answer it quick enough and that is enough not to endear me to the person waiting on the other side. I do not take kindly to orders, to being rushed; I get that enough from my grandmother that I am pushed to the brink, to the point that I will snap if another so much as even thinks of doing it. I snap and I scream at them because I cannot snap and scream at my grandmother even though I want desperately to.

“Help,” a voice gasps at me at the very moment I open the door. “Oh please help.”

She is in her early twenties, only a little older than me I think, bedraggled and afraid. Her eyes are the color of the gray slabs of concrete that pierce the sky and pump smoke into our lungs, her hair is a bedraggled mess of brown knotting tree roots and limp paler strands spaghetti- she is gray before her time and some of the strands have become stuck to her forehead with the sweat that beads and shimmers as it runs down her face and neck. She is pink and ruddy colored, trembling at her narrow shoulders and she is thin as a tack but for the protrusion around her stomach. Blood has soaked through the fabric of her dress and fans out in front of her like a Rorschach test and I know immediately what this is. After almost ten years I would hope that I could tell, or I would probably be some kind of moron.

I am about to invite her in, get her settled and comfortable before finding out what position we are in when my grandmother wheezes behind me, “You have the money?” in her croaking, unfeeling sort of way, hunched over and staring at the woman through her cold milky colored eyes before she’s even got a chance to sit down.

Wringing her hands, the tears start to fall from the woman’s eyes, “Not ..not right now, but I…I will, I swear to you, I’ll get you the money. Just help me! Please, I’m begging you.”

“Shut the door, girl,” says my grandmother to me, shaking her head and coughing deeply, hawking up a disgusting amount of phlegm from between her brittle twig lips. I turn and look to the woman, trying to let her know that this isn’t right. I should help even if I don’t have the pay and she catches me wavering, knows that I might still be swayed to her point of view, that my bleeding heart might get in the way. Poor thing, she really doesn’t know me that well. Doesn’t know my grandmother that well and how tight a hold that this woman already has over me.

All the same , though, she grips at me with her hand. One of them is rimed lightly with a layer of bright red, almost orange looking blood which smears against my skin. Her knuckles turn white as she grips in an iron lock refusing to let go. “Oh please, oh please, please please please please please,” she repeats over and over and over to me. Perhaps I want to help her, perhaps I do think that its wrong. Or perhaps I only want to seem like the good guy, the hero to my grandmother’s villain. The human being to her monster when we are both the same really; she has twisted me to my core.

Well, we aren’t running a charity- I hear whispered rasping in my ear, so I pull my hand away slowly, unpeeling her fingers as I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. I don’t know if I mean it, but saying it is enough to still my grief so I guess that must mean that I don’t. She wails and she screams, clutches her belly but I do not hear her. I do not hear anything above the door slamming in her face and the old, rotting wood that makes up the space between us, muffling the noise, muffling my heart and muffling anything that might have made me human. That woman wasn’t a person; she was a coin purse that had no promising jangle when I held her upside down a shook her. She wasn’t a person so I took her and I flung her aside. Only, I can hear her clawing at the window for a few seconds before she finally decides to leave. That the situation is no good and that my grandmother and I are not good people.

“Now you’re getting it,” my grandmother croaks, not shaken, not bothered by what has happened. I want to ask her what she thinks will become of the woman and her baby but I know that the old bitch will not waste the time to speculate, live or die the woman and her child have ceased to exist as far as my grandmother is concerned. They ceased to exist the minute that the woman said that she didn’t have the money to pay for the birthing. I say nothing instead, thinking less of her- if that is at all possible- even though I know deep down that I am no better. I know that I could offer to cover the costs of the woman, barter our services on the promise that I will get tesserae to my grandmother. But I won’t do that- to me my life is more important this strangers even if she carries another one with her.

My grandmother announces to the room that she is very tired and going to bed, gathering up her ratty old blanket and breathing heavily. I sink into my chair and do not even move or react as she blows the lamp out, plunging me into darkness.

“Not wasting the lamp,” is the mutter that I hear. No she wouldn’t, when my grandmother isn’t using something it becomes wasteful for me to do so too. I’m not worth the paraffin, or the wick or the candle wax.

It takes a while for me to get used to the gloom, especially as the opiates begin to take effect. I can feel them swirling around inside my stomach, coursing through my blood and into my vein, running along every channel and every synapse of me, their names, their beautiful names coiling and twisting through thud and stutter of my rapidly beating heart. I think I’ve taken enough to kill a small horse this time as the room begins to twist and turn, as the shapes in the darkness stretch and warp. So I have no idea what’s going to become of me.

My stomach lurches uncomfortably as I feel the muscles in my mouth droop a little, it’s strange a sensation but there is an indescribable warmth to be found within it too, an energy, a comfort that spreads the prickling of pins and needles throughout my body, along each of my limbs and across every one of my fingers, across the skin, across the bone and the blood and right down into the very marrow at the core of me. Sitting back I let out the most satisfied of sighs, rumbling and vibrating through the whole of my body. But still I can’t see a hand in front of my face.

My sigh is interrupted by a faint rustling from behind me, perhaps a mouse or a great grey sewage rat, seeing the lack of light and believeing that the coast is clear. It is large whatever the creature is ,larger than a mouse, the largest of rats perhaps.

And then scratching starts.

It’s softly at first, like something brushing against the ceiling of the basement downstairs that is barely used for storage nowadays, so given over is it to the mould and the damp, echoing through the empty room and then growing more frantic just like a rat’s feet slipping across the floor with a hungry urgency. I fumble for my matchbox telling myself to stop being so silly though I can’t help the way that my heart is pounding and not just from the drugs, or at least I don’t think it’s from the drugs. I can’t be sure anymore.

The scratching stops as my fingers find the matchbox, feeling it’s shape, the grooves of the tinder paper and the part where the box opens for me like a gaping mouth. And with trembling fingers I pry the box open and grope for a single match to light and to guide me in this oppressive heavy darkness. There is a hiss in the air and the first match illuminates the air around me, flickering as my breath is heavy.

And it illuminates a shadow, staring straight in front of me, through cold eyes the same color as the grey slabs of concrete that peirce the sky in district nine. In the glow, the facial features become dark and shadowy, twisting into grotesque shapes. My heart has dropped out of me, it was panting too hard and from somewhere a yelp escapes me though I couldn’t tell you how. The fear, my own jump makes the match leap from the air and hit the floor, extinguishing it immediately.

I can’t be sure if what I’ve just seen is a dream, a hallucination or real. Steeling myself, telling myself to just breathe, just keep breathing, I stumble and I fumble and I want to cry, but instead I force myself to open the box, rootle around inside and strike the second match

[/blockquote]

[kneedles]

2

What becomes illuminated is not my grandmother’s house. The room is smaller for a start, more boxy and without windows. Gone is the threadbare rug, only to be replaced by plastic, peeling linoleum stained with various sauces in the usual, unfortunate browns and red colors. The walls are a dirty but sickly shade of yellow as if someone had smeared congealing butter cream all along it though the place has been feebly decorated in a poor attempt at cheering it up.

I recognize the drawings, crude macaroni shapes glued onto think, flaking paper and messily colored with poster paints so zealously applied that it has dripped along the dried pasta and all of the colors have simply swirled into brown in certain points of the paintings. In bold backwards letters each of the artworks have been titled simplistically with catchy names like ‘Momma with house and cat’ or ‘Me and daddy and fat momma’. I recognize them too well, all of it too well; that plastic peeling linoleum stained with various sauces, those dirty sickly yellow walls, and the girl that has so seriously chewed her lips and frowned like a serious artist as she reallocates the macaroni shapes into something that is pleasing to her wide, pale green eyes with her small brown little fingers.

She sits cross legged on the linoleum in front of me with paint down her pinny and two knots either side of her head. Across her round cheeks there are a galaxy of freckles swirling along her small snub nose and out to the sea shell curves of little ears. She is me at five or six years old and I crouch down to look at her, see the gaps in her mouth where milk teeth have fallen clear as day itself, clear as the flame that I still hold in my hand and which has yet to burn out. She is me and I am watching her, about ready to freak the frick out. Take sparingly the bottles said, but did I listen? Did I fuck.

The whistling that rises through the air of the kitchen reaches both my ears and the ears of younger me, though it makes the younger version of me smile while I can only feel a trill at my very core. That tune, that whistling has been relegated to the deepest echelons of my memory, untouched for years and growing moss and thick with dust. If you would have asked me that tune yesterday I would never have known it off the top of my head, never in a million years and now I hear it as clear as a bell ringing inside of my heart.

He steps inside of the kitchen and he’s the way that he always was; large and stout with thick arms, his shirt always rolled up to the forearms; his light titian colored hair speckling his arms and his face like flecks of gold; those pond water green eyes of his standing out beneath pale brows and lashes. I can feel my heart in my throat, my lungs in my shoes; the entirety of my body rearranged like some cubist painting or the crude out of proportion macaroni pictures that the six year old me is still making.

“Daddy!” I say at six years old, smiling and running towards him.

“Dad,” I whisper. Did I really love him that much? I thought that I could barely remember him, hardly enough to miss him at all. But the six year old me looks devoted to her father, as though she would grieve the way that he picked her up and swung her on his arm making her giggle with delight for many years, as though losing him would break her heart. Tears start to fall down my face where they haven’t done in years.

“It’s me,” I say, stepping forward, trying to walk into his eye line and to make him notice me. “Dad, it’s Birrin…I…can’t believe I’m seeing you…”

“He can’t hear you,” says a lazy voice from somewhere behind me and I turn to find that my grandmother’s chair has somehow appeared in my childhood kitchen, velveteen and ratty looking, totally out of place in this warm scene. The chair however is not occupied by my grandmother but by a woman who I recognize. Her face is not so red now, has turned instead to an ashy, deathly white color so pale that her cracked lips have become purple and I can see each threading blue vein in her face. It’s beautiful like twisting tributaries but it also fills me full of unmentionable dread.

“How did you…” I ask, thinking of the room, my past as clear if not clearer than my present in front me as well as how she came to be here after my grandmother and I had thrown her out.
She doesn’t say anything, only fixes her cold gray eyes on my father.

“He was a good man,” she says pointing to my father and I only have to look at him, at how he’s now crouching down to look at the picture that the six year old me is showing him- oohing and ahhing in all the right places, seeming genuinely interested.

“He was,” I say reverently.

The woman tips her head, “But you barely remember him at all. And not often fondly,” she chastises and I don’t know why, since I have no idea who the hell she is or how she got into my—I guess these are dreams—but for some reason I have an extradorinary need to please her, despite having thrown her out on the street not an hour before. Or at least I think it has been an hour…time seems oddly fluid and I have just skipped eleven years into the past, so who knows what time it really is.

“We were poor,” I say, curling around myself and chewing on my thumbnail. “He wasn’t a good provider.”

“He loved you,” said the woman pointing to my father and yes, yes of course I believe her. But she’s right- I do barely remember him being kind and loving. But I’m sure that I can remember being hungry and being skinny and wearing dirty clothes and never having anything.

“It wasn’t enough,” I whisper and the woman winces, looking at me as though I were dirt under her shoes.

“She looks as though it is enough for her,” says the woman pointing to my six year old self, smiling through the gaps in her pearly white, tiny teeth. “But I suppose that’s behind you. You aren’t hungry anymore are you…your grandmother keeps you fed, keeps you clothed. You’re happier now than that little girl ever was.”

This woman doesn’t know me but both of us know that this isn’t the truth. Now in my life there is money for bread, money for clothes and cigarettes and shelter- money that has been earned by turning away young women like the one in the room with me away from our door because they don’t have to pay. But it isn’t enough, and I don’t think I have smiled the way that the six year old girl in front of me is smiling for a very long time. Folding my arms around myself I feel the urge to run to my father and throw my arms around his broad tree trunk body, feel the warmth in him that has long left me.

But I can’t, I know that somehow. That my mind has created all of this around me and he is nothing but a shadow. He was always a shadow, full of love and kindness but nothing solid and real. I am not happy with my grandmother but at least I am alive.

“It wasn’t enough,” I repeat firmly more to myself than to the ghostly presence in front of me, though I am unable to take my eyes away from my father. But he is dead and he is gone and there is nothing left of his smile and the happiness that this six year old girl felt. Everything he ever had to offer me was transient and impermanent and in death he has only proven it. Proven that I am better off with my grandmother, better off in this world of hate because at least I am alive. “It was just love.”

“Yes. Just,” says the woman sadly. “Flimsy like one of the pressed flowers a boy gives to his sweetheart wedged between papers in a notebook filled with poems. Just love.”

They are my own words escaping her lips, thoughts and memories that I have jotted down into journals when collecting my thoughts about my father and somehow this woman has stolen them. My lips part and I wonder how she has taken them from me, before I remember that she is just a construct of my imagination, feebly pieced together by fenatil, laudanum, dihydromorphine and hydromorphone. I remember this and I start to laugh, uncontrollably, my shoulders shaking so hard that the scene; my father and myself almost seems to quake and shudder. The woman however appears in front of me deathly serious.

“This come down is going to be a bitch,” I say, wiping a tear from my eyes. “I am loving these hallucinations though.”

Smiling, the woman raises her eyes to me and I am unnerved by the sinister twist of it, the hollow of her eyes. “You are dead, Birrin Ceps. Your match is burning out.”

I frown at her. What does she mean I am dead? I am here and I can feel…well, I can’t feel the linoleum beneath my feet or the air in the kitchen but that is because they are simply my hallucinations, the rest I feel like the shuddering of my heart in my rib cage that juts through the paper thin skin of my chest and the pounding of blood in my pulse points.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” is all I can reply, my voice defensive as though her saying it is some kind of threat to my existence, which I know is still in occurrence. I am still alive.

“Your match is burning out,” she repeats pointing to my chest.
At that, I look down and see that the match in my hands is indeed burning out and that the flame has actually reached my fingers. Worst of all, I haven’t felt it when by rights a burning sensation should have started to coarse through my fingers long ago. So when I yelp and drop the match it is more out of feeling as though I should than actually needing to.

It hits the floor and once again I am plunged into darkness. My father is gone and I want to cry out to him, taking all of my happiness along with that strange too real memory. There is nothing now, only half visible shapes twisting before my eyes and the words of the ghost woman before my eyes. Somehow though, I manage to find my jacket pocket and the matchbook and my fingers find a third match.

Striking it, I expect now to be acquainted with my grandmothers room though some part of me hopes that the match will once again illuminate my father’s face and the gold flecks of his beard.

I am greeted with neither.

((tbc))