Category Archives: Creative Writing

Skin Deep Part Three

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Just to finish it all off…

 

It’s the end that sticks most with me. The beginning is vague, the middle a convoluted mess of emotions, missed clues and regrets. But the end was so quick, so sharp, so tragic. It was an end that was impossible to see, yet I still don’t know how I missed it.

Where the months of recuperation and drama have blended into one big mess, I can remember the final day like it was only moments ago. Even though years have passed, I am still trying to understand how it happened. What happened.

I’ve spent hours staring at the piece of paper, trying to figure out how to write the next bit, how to tell this part of the story in a way that doesn’t tell you how it ends. That will give you a warning, but help you to understand that I just didn’t know. And honestly, I think that the best way to tell you this part of the story is to tell you as if it were happening again. The moments of confusion. The seconds that changed the trajectory of my life forever.

The door is open. Not just unlocked like it always is these days, but swinging open and closed in the slight wind that ruffles my hair. I’m hesitating – not sure what to do. The dogs aren’t barking. Finally, I know what it means when it’s so quiet that you can hear a pin drop.

The clacking of my boots on the lino bounces off of the hallway walls. Mum’s always hated how long her hallway is – such a waste of space. I think I finally understand what she means – the clacking is going on forever. The eerie silence building. Maybe I should have bought Rosco, anything to destroy this horrifying lack. Anything to bring life back into this lifeless walkway.

Into the kitchen, still no rambunctious greeting from the over excitable Labrador – maybe Mum has taken her on an adventure again?

The lights aren’t working. I stand there, flicking the switch back and forth for what feels like forever. Why isn’t the light working? Has something happened to the power? I’ll check the power box. Grandfather must be so confused, sitting here in the darkness, wondering where the power has gone. I’m not sure we’ve really managed to get him using a phone again. I guess with age, you struggle with new ideas, and it’s just worse when you’ve been so sick. Preoccupied (again) I head across the kitchen.

Bang!

Lucky my bum is so cushioned. Whoever spilt cordial on the floor is going to get in a lot of trouble. Not sure who would heat up cordial though. It’s warm. And sticky. It’s coating my jeans and hands. After a moment of sheer fury at the inconvenience of it all and the pain, I decided I may as well get up. The power box needs to be fixed after all.

Warm. Sticky. Matted fur. A tennis ball dislodged by my fumblings.

I ran towards the window, thrust the curtain aside. The scream that had been bubbling in my throat died on impact. My blood soaked hands flew to my mouth as I tasted the copper of death. Suddenly all of the scents of the room flooded through my head. My sister was flung behind her protective Labrador – the companion that she had always said would protect her.

Slipping and slidding – how could two bodies contain so much liquid? I ran into the lounge room, the games room. There’s nothing like the horror of anticipation to give one wings. I practically flew through the house in my quest to find someone. Anyone.

Bloody handprints trailed the wall after me as I searched aimlessly, hoping to find someone who had survived this massacre. Terror seeped through the very pores of the house.

Finally, quaking in horror, I hurled open the master bedroom.

Words can’t describe the sight that greeted me. I had finally found someone who had survived the massacre. It just so happened to be the one who had carried out the plundering and murdering. He stood there over my mother’s body, caressingly carving piece by piece out of her flesh. The knife glinting in the dancing sunlight that filtered through the gap in the curtain.

The scream that had been lingering in my throat burst forth. Startling the creature in front of me. With a grin in my direction, he bought the knife slashing downwards. Neatly severing her head from her shoulders.

Still grinning, he licked my mother’s cheek, dropped the knife and leapt out of the window.

As the sound of shattering glass reached my stunned brain, I ran forwards. Only to see his back disappearing down the street.

The sirens finally reached my ears, and with it came the realisation that had been threatening to break through my consciousness all along.

That man was NOT my Grandfather.

Skin Deep Part Two

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Still not happy with what’s been happening in the familial situations, and I don’t want to spew forth negatives.

PLUS, getting my PhD paperwork sorted (Yay!) So not really in the mental space to do thinking things…

Here is the next part of last week’s to be worked on story… I’ll publish the final part the following week.

 

Another day. Another battle. Another night of exhausted tossing and turning. Toing and froing. Endless rounds of questions and answers. Wondering what I could do to help. Wondering how I could ever help fix something that I couldn’t understand. If you can’t see the cracks, how can you tape it back together?

Weeks of frustration lent my hand to a different pursuit… gauche just no longer entrapped my imagination. Looking at my fingers after yet another long day with my family I noticed that my new medium had become ingrained into my skin. Its lingering presence a reminder of all that had changed in such a short time. Years of the same relationships, the idea that one man could be invincible had come crashing own about my ears.

After all of the painful discussions and emotions of the day, I had decided that tonight was the night that I would pull down all of my old paintings. There was something about flowing willows and the peace that felt wrong. Their very presence had become painful and aggravating. They mocked me with their very presence. Already my fingers were twitching to pick up my charcoal stick and try my new creation. Luckily I wasn’t in a rental, this project would definitely lose me my bond if I was.

Rosco was a little perplexed by my new method of art – the dust got in his nose, and I was a lot more active in this pursuit than I ever had been in landscape painting. That didn’t stop him from creating his own sketch across the floor of my living room though. There’s still the faint marks across the beige carpets to remind me of his help. It just takes looking at them to bring a smile to my face, even now, after everything happened, after the end – there has to be some kind of light in every moment of darkness.

I actually don’t remember much of these days… it was months and months of confusion and rage. Pain and anger. Days when none of us knew who we were anymore, or what the future would hold. But there is one moment in the middle of all of this that I remember the most. I still don’t know what instigated the problem, and honestly, I don’t really care – it’s not important. What’s important is that it happened. That it was yet another moment that hinted at what was to become. Another second in time when I really should have realised that there was more wrong than a simple sickness.

There are moments in your life when you walk through the door and realise that something is just wrong. It might be an unusual silence, a lingering feeling or the absence of a joyous Labrador greeting you by the door. But there is a hint, a reminder that not everything is as it should be. Dad was at the vegetable patch, Mum was in her bedroom, and my sister, as was usual of late, was nowhere to be found. Everything seemed normal. But it wasn’t.

Hours after arriving, I left, my heart heavy, the pain of my family weighing heavily on my soul. Dad raged and Mum cried – that’s how they’d always been. Just not like this. Never like this.

I was used to Dad being pissy and moody – unable to communicate, but willing to tolerate my presence. Mine alone. He would potter and pout until he’d worked whatever it was out of his system. I’d incessantly chatter about my artwork, Rosco, the latest outrageous human stupidity that I had come across…. But not then. He swore. He ranted. He raved. And then, when all had been said and done, he just walked away, shoulders slumped in dejection. He even apologised for speaking that way about my Grandfather. My Dad never apologises.

Normally I would understand why my sister was constantly gone – her relationship with our Grandfather had never been great. He had become a little more senile by the time she was old enough to create that bond that had so effortlessly been formed for me. But today, today it was frustrating. I never knew what to do with Mum’s tears. I’d always been great at creating them, but not so much at alleviating them. Unsettled by Dad’s unusual attitude, I wasn’t nearly prepared for the hours of salty water that I then had to endure. Every time we began to make progress, a small sound, a small word would set her off again. I longed again and again for my sister’s counsel, my faithful Rosco, tying me back to the world of the living. Not this strange twilight that we had all been existing in – there was no living here.

Skin Deep Part One

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With all of the family drama that has been happening lately, this short story I wrote last year has been lingering in my mind. It needs a little work, but here is Part One of Skin Deep.

The beginning is always the hardest part. After all, who is to say where the story begins? Sometimes there is an obvious, definitive eureka! moment, but more often than not you’re left feeling like I am right now… I know what my story is, I know how it ended, but where did it begin? At what point did I realise that this was a story that was worth telling? When did my tale begin?

I suppose you could say that it started when Grandfather got back from his adventure to faraway lands. Honestly, when he goes off on an adventure, none of us are sure exactly where he goes. But really, although he was sick when he returned, my story and experiences didn’t happen until much later. Although, it is incredibly hard to pinpoint the exact moment that I thought that something was wrong… that something was seriously different, and that nothing would ever go back to the way that it was… but, really, I should probably stop getting ahead of myself. I think that the beginning was the phone call. That moment when I first felt like the world was crashing around my ears, I just had no idea how truly horrible the following months would be. How much it would change everything in my life, from my everyday experience to the rose-coloured way in which I viewed the world. From blue and green landscapes to the red and black dreams capes that covered my canvases.

None of us were sure what had happened to him, in fact, we’re still in the shadows about what his adventures entailed. Yet, on his arrival home, instead of ringing Mum to organise his welcome-home-visit, a doctor from the local hospital was forced to make that call. Standing in the middle of my lounge room, phone dangling from my fingers, the idea that my infallible, supportive grandfather had succumbed to an illness was unimaginable. Rosco’s constant pressure against my thigh was all that kept me from falling over. The reverberating shock of my Mum’s distraught voice echoing through my sluggish brain. I was convinced that it was all just a horrible joke. But it wasn’t the 1st of April.

It was the not knowing, the not understanding just what had happened that was the worst. After all, it is impossible to create a plan of attack, a way to manage the situation if you’re not entirely sure what the situation even is. I’m honestly not sure if hours passed, or just seconds as I stood, absorbing the information in horror. Yet, eventually Rosco decided that I had stayed frozen for long enough, his insistence that it was time for his dinner finally broke through the reprieve and bought me crashing back to reality. It was his trusting love and ability to give me his unerring loyalty and love that helped to see me through the dusk that followed.

Finally, we started to get news from the doctors, I will never forget the moment that I walked into the hospital room. The towering giant was a feeble midget, unable to see, hear or experience anything that was happening around him. I could never understand how someone of so much mass could fit into such a small space. It took everything that I had to not burst into tears the moment I saw him prone in the middle of a sterile, unfeeling room. It wasn’t long after that afternoon that the anger started – no matter what the nursing staff did to help, nothing was ever good enough. I would come almost every day with my Mum, but I was never around enough. The only person he didn’t constantly berate was Mum.

As with everything in life, the more you do something, the more it feels like a routine. The appointments began to blur into one, the endless monotony of hospital hallways – normal. I spent the nights attempting to create the calming gauche landscapes that had always been my bread and butter. Yet, those beautiful moments that I had always captured so easily lingered at the tip of my brush – there was no way to transfer them onto the stretched material on the easel. Nights flashed by as I stared at my blank future.

Two weeks flashed past my eyes, Rosco continued to rouse me from my artistic frustration – eating became a chore, yet, we all plodded on. I made it my mission to force food down my mother’s throat – regardless of how hungry she felt. The kilos were just falling off of her, the haggard look of the unhealthy carving out the terror she was living with. Forcing colour into her cheeks was an obtainable goal and my focus quickly narrowed down to that very existence. Even my paintings start to take on elements of the necessity of food – starving creatures lingering amongst the trees of orchards, fields of food walled in by human degradation. Everything was illuminated by the presence of despair.

Even though we were constantly dealing with the shuck of a creature that had been left by his unknown accident, it wasn’t until the week after we finally got him home that I started to truly wonder when things would get back to normal. After all, it was six weeks to the day since he had returned. His pallor had returned. His ability to talk in complete sentences. Even his ability to get up and walk around everyday had increased so drastically that we weren’t even worried about leaving him alone for an hour or two (eventually). The temperature of the room seemed to drop whenever he entered – he was incapable of doing anything for himself.

Maybe that’s the true beginning of my story. It’s not about what came before, it’s not even about what happened over there. It’s about those weeks leading up to that one, final horrific event. That realisation that the truth was staring me in the face the entire time. And I did nothing to stop it.