Instalment Seventy Seven

My wife’s chill worsened, becoming an unwaking trance. Doctors fled, claiming no cure. Impotent fury drove me from her bedside. I drunk my study dry, servants fetched more, which dutifully I finished. Enraged, I cussed the room, chairs, walls. The painting above the mantel bore my silique until I slumbered on the hearth

I awoke to a voice.

“Concern yourself not, take solace in my radiance.”

I supposed it were the painting, a woman.

Indeed you are beautiful, I said, believing myself frenzied of mind.

“As you,” I heard.

I blushed. We talked. Days passed.

My wife worsened, her skin like ice and still we talked. 

Servants believed the house haunted, furniture moved, jewellery missing.

Waking I found the painted woman nestled to me.

“Love me,” she said, “Not that cold wife.”

I sprung to the mantel. “We have been familiar but I love my wife,” I cried tearing down Rembrandt's portrait of a mistress, holding it to the fire.

“Burn me and I shall tell other paintings, never will you set eyes on their beauty,” she smouldered.

Gladly for one glimpse of my wife’s splendour, I replied turning the mistress to ashes.

My wife called, “You returned to me.”

Illustration: Alex Douglas

Instalment Seventy Six

Is there a master list of famous people that indicates if we are sad and respectful or make jokes when they die? Or do we just follow what other people are doing on social media?

If you get in first is it you that gets to choose the tone? Happy or sad?

Or is it down to if: “we” judge their death to be their own fault we can make jokes about them. Cancer and other external forces then we have to be quiet, respects will be paid and funerals will be attended, even if you never met them?
 

If a celebrity dies in the forest, do the trees crack jokes?

What about break downs? That seems to be a universally agreed free for all, especially if we had all “agreed” to dislike them enough to cause the break down. It is good when that happens, that they know how it feels to be small and sad, like you and me isn’t it? I hope they have learned something. Like that they are not so different from us, they aren’t better than me, they are just like me and I deserve respect. I am human too, just like them.

Oh.

Instalment Seventy Five

In days past, in a region know as Germania, there were two neighbouring villages, Schadenfreude and Schandfleck Verärgern. The residents of Schadenfreude were a horrible bunch of serfs and peasantry. As you would know, they never did much to help anyone, they just sat back, watching and waiting for others to try. Nothing brought them greater joy than watching their neighbour try something new and failing. Pretty soon though, with everyone laughing at one another, they all stopped trying. No one did anything for fear of failure. So they started watching Schandfleck Verärgern.

The villages of Schandfleck Verärgern were nothing like those in Schadenfreude. Every village could say that every person they passed in a day was their friend. They were all hard workers and through their perseverance they were each rewarded with fruitful lives. But not equally.

I love my neighbour as a brother, husband would remark to wife, I just wish my crops were plentiful as his.

His neighbour would be heard to remark, I wish my children were as handsome as his next door.

And so on around town. Consumed with bitterness over their friends’ success that might have been theirs. The villagers of Schadenfreude loved it.

Authors Note
The preceding story was written purely as a launching device for my newly invented word:

Schandverärgern (Scha-nd-ver-ärg-ern) Noun: 1. The anger and jealously one feels at the success of good fortune of a friend or a loved one because it didn’t happen to them. Often followed immediately by shame. “He always wins things. That will be a great help for his career. I feel so much Schandverärgern right now.”

Schandverärgern  is based on the German words Schandfleck and Verärgern, which literally translated mean shame and anger. Please go out into the world and use it in a sentence today or make up a better version and I will amend the story.

Instalment Seventy Four

I’m at capacity, I know it. I feel it. I have ideas, new ideas that is, but no room for them, no space no more. Too much of anything is poison. You can get drunk on water, I thought, and as I did it happened.

I had an itch.

A bad one.

Not a hard to reach itch, a bad itch.

An abnormal itch.

Under my skin.

Like there was something trying to get out.

I was sure I could feel something in there.

Wriggling free.

I found a nail sticking out of the wall and scrapped till I bleed. I scratched away that itch.

And I was fine.

Maybe.

I felt a hole, not in my back, even though I had just put one there, but a hole in what I knew, which was not whole.

What if I have no more room for thoughts, I thought, and that itch was a different thought leaving to make room.

I had an itch.

It wouldn’t go away.

I found a nail sticking out of the wall, not into the wall? There was blood on it already but it did the trick.

What if that itch was a thought, I thought.

Instalment Seventy Three

He wasn’t sure why he had come to the beach, maybe to swim, maybe to drown, but that was when he found it. It was a shell of his former self, just sitting there in the sand, washed up by the high-tide.

It was striking in the overcast light, a milky pink colour, shimmering occasionally like a pearl as he walked towards it.

He slipped inside it and found it fit him still and he felt secure.

He took it home.

Over the next few weeks he spend more and more time in it, he found it comforting and safe inside, the sound of the ocean surrounding him, he was untroubled right down to his cockles.

“He’s gone back into his shell,” his mother would say when friends called by.

As years seem to do one passed almost without notice, causing everyone to remark, “Where did the year go!”

He had not been seen for some time.

“Don’t you think it’s time to come out of your shell?” his mother yelled into the opening.

Her voice echoed back at her. The shell of her son was empty.

“He’s finally outgrown us,” she shouted to her husband in the next room.

Instalment Seventy Two

An envelope is sitting on your front door matt. No stamp or address, just your name, typed.

You open it.

The World will end Thursday week. It is not anything that can be stopped. There is nothing anyone can do. There is nothing for you to do. You don’t know me but I had to tell someone. So I told you.

Keep it to yourself?

Tell someone?

 -----

You open the door to find your husband playing with the kids. “Let’s go away,” you say, “tomorrow, pull the kids from school and leave, just for a week or so.”

“Yes!” they scream.

On the hotel floor, amongst beach towels and board games your children sleep peacefully.

“They will remember this holiday for the rest of their lives,” your husband says.

“Yes they will,” you say.

The lights flicker briefly as he says, “I love you Shirk.”

-----

“You can’t tell anyone,” you say to your wife.

“What?”

“I got this letter..”

In a flash it’s out of your hands and she’s on the phone.

“He got this letter.. end of world.. government letterhead.”

This does stop the world. Fear, tears, chaos, tears, fighting, screaming, death.

Because of an envelope address to Drivel.

Instalment Seventy One

“They are like my babies,” he said with a laugh, scratching under a rib on his always shirtless frame.

“In fact they are more important to me than my children, if you think about it. Whatta you think it takes for me to have a kid, like five minutes? Maybe as much as half an hour if I have been out on it?  That’s all I have to do and then without any more effort, there is another kid, I put more thought into lunch.

The interviewer shifts uneasily in her chair, “But women carry your child for nine months, you have five!”

“But they don’t have to think about it! That stuff is all auto-pilot. They are not dreaming up a baby. And even if they were, it’s been done before, they’re not inventing a baby!”

He adjusts himself in his leather pants.

“My new self titled album, which I have been working on for two years, that is really my child, clearly more work and thought has gone into it than any baby. I put my soul into that, it is art, it’s me.”

“I have it here,” the interviewer says holding up a disc that reads Conceit.

Instalment Seventy

I used to think I was just selling one day at a time, working. Always the same increment - one day. Sold off. You want one day of my life, pony up the cash. The older I got the more they paid me for that day, it seemed like a sweet deal to me. I’m still only selling them my day, that hasn’t changed but the money has gone up. Not a lot, but it’s gone up. So I keep shaving off these paper thin slices, so thin I can’t even see them, not really, I don’t even notice what I am giving up. Looking at it flat, it’s a big square day but side on it’s so thin an amount of time it simply disappears.

I don’t know if the increment has changed or if I have changed, but what I do know is that one day is no longer just one day. 

Now I only have half of what I started with, so it’s not just a day, it’s more. Percentage wise, each day I carve off and sell for coin is a bigger and bigger hunk of what I started with. What is left. Of. My. Life.

Instalment Sixty Nine

You don’t need to worry about the past because that is exactly what it is, past. It has past. A bygone has gone!

What you need to learn to enjoy is the present, because that it what it is, a present, a present for you to enjoy, your present to you is what you can be!

I am going to have to stop you there.

But I haven’t told you about your future yet, your potential!

Yes?

Your potential is your power, how potent you can be….

No. No, no, no. We are not doing this.

Just saying no makes you look sad. Try saying yes, yeeessss! Like a smile.

No. No, no, it doesn’t. You sound like a snake.

Yessss, and I am young like a snake too. Have you ever seen an old looking snake? No you haven’t! And I’ll tell you why; they always have a fresh skin, that’s why, I tell you.

Are you selling something?

Selling? No! I am offering you, a new you! I have extracted essential minerals from new scales once reptiles have shed and I put it in this here jar, I went ahead and bottled youth!

You’re selling snake oil!

Yessssss.