Tag Archives: Fiction

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Posted by darkling eye on

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Birth Day
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Careful, my dear. Careful.

CAREFUL, I SAID. It’s for your own good. You know that I might be right, I can see it through your eyes. No matter where or who you are this night will be rounded in a frame, flash-gunned and shuttered in and changeless for once. And painless, that’d be a treat. My birth day gift to you.

Why do you always cry on your birth day? That’s not for you. It’s supposed to be the one day when you don’t have to give, only to be. I’d have thought that it would be the perfect day for you, but maybe that’s the point that sticks you still. For one day a year a looking-glass is held up just for you, with no blurs or distortions to distract. Is that why you cry? Is that why you are so hopeless at hiding?

When you were young there was always the chance that this year would be different, not enough had passed to dull the sharp edges of your delight. Yet unwrapping after unwrapping only delivers a shaken parade of the clumsy and the mean, but even then hardship or neglect – or the thought that maybe it was your fault – hovered like forgiveness in the wings. But that was a long time ago now; the child learns lessons hard taught.

Untied by string your fingers shake without anticipation for fear of what you are unfolding, of how others see you. The good gift writes relief not happiness into your face, the bad gift strips you bare. Is that why you cry? Is that why thank-you-cards are painted in sodden lipstick and mascara?  The paper is soaked and offered by hands that know what they hold; little reliquaries of recognition are never lightly given, smudged or torn.

The false memory of glee may hide in your eyes, cosseted and cheated as a favoured phantom-limb, but it is the wasting figure wrapped in ribbons that pricks you open and naked. Crowded by the illegitimate desires of those around you can never be on your own this day, a day without passion only sentiment. Is that why you could never lie?

So happy birth day, my dear. But be careful, everyone bought you mirrors this year.

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[JC/2001]

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Posted by darkling eye on

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In Search of Sweetness (2000)
john luke chapman

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The circling air turns the sweat on the back of his bowed head into tiny cold droplets that he follows, in his mind, as they intimately trace down the braille of his spine.

From above the spinning blades slice up the seated figure, like a film reel running frantically too slow, as a darkening line of sweat soaks through his cotton shirt. Frame by frame: the Rorschach geometry of the growing stain cuts through the kiss-cross of his braces and blooms like a butterfly-bruise across his back.

[~fragment]

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Posted by darkling eye on

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Prenzl’berg (1998)
john luke chapman

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… a slice of pflaumenkuchen: a plum tart with a sweet pastry base, firm underneath but soft and sticky in the middle, and a clear gelatinous glaze over the halved plums, ripe and soft, that when bitten caused the sharp sour taste of plum-skin to flood through the claggy sweetness. It was like biting into a piece of mercury-filled fudge, only stranger and ever-so-slightly better. He’d eaten a slice the day after he’d moved to Berlin and knew in that moment that this city was where he belonged. He’d never had a slice since, just that once, for fear that the experience wouldn’t be the same. How could it? No experience can ever be re-lived, only sullied, through meagre repetition.

[~fragment]

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Posted by darkling eye on

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In the bottle-glass light of the room the air takes on the dull luminescent quality of dark water, of a deep ocean world lit by the glowing organs of fish who have never sensed the sun, where the living are illuminated by their own cells. Creaklessly rocking in the twilight the room feels sunken and tenuous and cold. The table, chair and body are intimately held in a cradle of wood and air while picked out in the gloom two pale trailing hands hang limply like clawed chicken legs in a butcher’s window. The skin of these hands, carelessly coruscated with rust, looks like cold marbled tallow with empty fingers curling around objects that have long since dissolved. Memory is the last sense to leave the body; the body is left grasping for something it knows to be gone.

[~fragment]

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The Persistance of Vision (2012)
john luke chapman

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Posted by darkling eye on

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Lotte’s Song

In the folds of the unkempt eve of her birthday she sat all blossom and warm ashes. She gave herself with lipstick, dark and standing cold and stiff Lotte walked as if she were trying to swallow.
It wasn’t a mask for that one wasn’t left. But her eyes were deep night-dresses from which she would absently pull her hair half back from the drawstrings at the front of her mother who years later, after sex, would always talk about apartments. But that was still to come.
With a kind of innocence that has no place her grandmother had such a smooth strong purity of being. Give her whiskey in the afternoon; you could touch her. The room was dark musty and so unfathomable as to be almost arcane. As always a disturbingly biting draught flapping at the door. As the old woman took off all her own clothes and danced she stared at her toes, her careless ritual would leave her tired and the motes of dust floated awake cold and guilty. The fire before -lying back petulantly her night-gown leaving itself just tepid- and ashes behind. Dressing hurriedly she sat on the bed in a long white drunken slumber. Lotte wore the stiff cloth around her. Tugging, she hadn’t moved for hours. she told me of her childhood. A night on dear granny’s bed but being a child in woman’s lacquered eyes she saw she was Lotte Döll.
red and her eyes smudged.
Out into the burning light she had grown up with her mother an alcoholic peasant woman who was looking at her now. Again finishing the bottle that looked different every time, oppressively warm, and yet it had a fluid quality to it which slipped in through undisguised. You never quite knew who heavily slept in Lotte, gray and young. And never around the bed. Naked and silent her face told of her warm mother. Falling exhausted she would bleed to death in a small Berlin hearth.
She was so beautiful and innocent. Naiveté or calm has slipped off her shoulders and at her heart nothing walked with sadness except the sheets. They smelt of a peach little cough and breathed deeply as perched on the edge of the bed she swung her legs and gently kicked the swirl in a solid shaft of light.

[JC]

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Posted by darkling eye on

A Wakening

He shivered awake in bed. His legs were slick and gulping for air. He opened his eyes. Ice water slowly fought against the chill sweetness tingling in his groin. The room was dark and only partially cramped with breath, bottled up inside and around for warmth, for he was bare of comfort. He had gathered the blankets around him whilst he had slept, and uncovered where She had been stowed.

[JC]