Talking To Plants

Damn bushes yowling at me again. I'll show 'em. Show those leafy motherfuckers who's boss.

"Run! Run! I'm a scary thing!"

That shut them up. They're still there; they haven't run away or anything. But they are plants and rooted into the very fabric of the Earth's surface, so I suppose you can't have everything. They can hang about wherever they like as far as I'm concerned. No skin off my nose. As long as they give me the respect to which I'm entitled.

Yes, literally entitled. My higher human rank puts me well above the likes of mere shrubs and they shall be brought into line. Mouthy little horticultural bastards, they are. Arrogant. Despite their pretensions, photosynthesis is nothing compared to sentience.

If they don't start toeing the line, I fear I shall have to resort to some form of dirty protest. I fear I shall piss on them. Pissing on them and berating them at loud length, then the screaming and the sirens and the big men with their bright needles full of sleep and blankness.

Plants are wankers.

The Quirks of Oracle Accounting

'Tadpoles and Portable Suns'; there's a category called just that. Yes, like strangelets in a carry case. Suns, with a 'u' - as in the orbs of burny gas. I think it refers to some sort of computing equipment.

I also enjoy the fact that, if you want to buy a goat, they are officially classified as 'capra'; that gives me an inordinate amount of joy.

And, of course, attempting to source orange juice and the top result being 'pancreatic juice, human' and the second being some sort of extract of cankerous mouse.

Anything - within reason, of course - to season one's day.

Aspiration Repository

A story of mine going by this name is featured in the October issue of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and this fact gives me quite a lot of joy. Subscription information can be found here.

Reality Birch

Tattered fragments of reality flutter in the breeze like papery birch skin, revealing the oozing pulp within and exposing it to the atmosphere of perception.

This is what dries it out. This is what allows a new husk to form.

Reality is just the outermost layer, desiccated and paralysed by familiarity and thus taking on a far more drab and bleachparched form from the interior. It is constantly renewed from within; from that rich reservoir of weird and bubbling molasses flecked with goldflake and laced with algal tendrils and the shadows of smoke.

The interior is constant in its inconstancy and the turbulent mass will continue in its state of flux. It will not be stopped until every mutable combination of ideas has been inscribed in its dry surface and then disintegrated into flakes of nothingness on the wind. It will not be stopped until it is all surface, until it achieves an infinite surface area and zero mass. And it certainly will not be stopped until a more sensible method of delineating the exact remit and mechanism of reality can be determined.

Dissecting the Giraffe

We have already learnt that the tissue that makes up the interior of a giraffe's neck resembles nothing so much as cheap kippers. Much work has been done on an analogue of the old African wives' tale that a single kick from such a creature can shatter a lion's skull; it was found that it takes a lion an average of 9.4 kicks to break the head of a giraffe.

Indeed, giraffoid skulls have yielded interesting fruit; we have carried out a long-running study into the antediluvian terror inspired by a giraffe's decorticated head. When such a specimen - dragonish, grinning and pared of meat - is presented then a reaction ranging from palpable unease to full psychotic breakdown is universally inspired (no less so in other, still-living giraffes).

However, it seems there is another pertinent piece of research to be done on the so-called cameleopard.

So we have taken the digestive system out of the giraffe and laid it out on the dissecting room floor. We will now sew the animal back up and send it about its business. We hope to garner answers to the following questions:

i) Will the animal notice its lack and refuse fodder, or will it continue to dump plant matter directly into its thoracic cavity regardless of the inevitable onset of rot, ulceration and eventual internal composting?

ii) Will it recognise its own extracted innards still steaming on the shiny blue floor? And if so, can it be persuaded to reinstate the organs by eating them, gulping down the fleshy tubes whole like bacon rinds and struggling against its own elongated gag reflex?

We have learnt much since the eighteenth century, but it will be difficult to improve upon Dr Johnson's definition of a giraffe as "an animal taller than an elephant, but not so thick."

Circular Breathing

A story written by a fifteen-year-old me.

I found it while looking through some old diaries. Of course, most of the stories I came across were pretentious miserablism speared through with the twisted skewers of arbitrary oddness and psychedelia (and it could easily be argued that little has changed on that score) but re-reading this one impressed me. It gave me the urge to travel back in time, ruffle my younger self’s hair and give an encouraging “keep at it, slugger” sort of speech. A speech my teenage self would no doubt have dismissed out of hand as being made of plastic or something, but that is hardly the point.

Anyway, here it is - a piece of my juvenilia in all its unaltered glory:

The girl slowly inhaled the interior volume of the room. It was quiet as a tomb, in that the only sounds to be heard were the industrious ministrations of worms and a distant, joyless cackling. Old cigarette smoke jostled with itself for a place in the contained atmosphere. The girl sat, patiently avoiding the absorption of gases and thinking primarily about Trotsky’s beard. Would it look so inappropriate transplanted to lower anatomy, framing genitals like a horizontal pair of fuzzy brackets? Or maybe a set on each gluteal flank, a moustache portion cresting each buttock and pointed goatees protruding perpendicular from the hips like stunted wings? What of that? The implications made her head spin.

She sighed, the last breath of an ailing Labrador clogged with fat and too long a life, and gave up. It was time to talk to the old man. He had been perched atop the laundry basket for several days now, silently engaged in the task of polishing a marble statuette of a monkey with morose contemplation, and the girl decided that he had been ignored for long enough. The chances of his being a hallucination induced by lack of sleep had been gradually whittled by the passing of time and her recent intake of powerful hypnotics had only confirmed her suspicions, despite their apparent lack of effect. She emitted a gurgle to break the seal on her larynx, and spoke with what she hoped was an assured voice.

“I wanted to go like Jimi Hendrix,” she said, fixing the blue saucers of her eyes on the old man’s rheumy equivalents.

There was a pause as long as a priest’s memory before he replied.

“I was wondering as to the purpose of the fine Pinot Noir, along with all the barbiturates.” He swept his hand and gaze noncommittally across disorder of the room. “But that does not explain how you managed to acquire it, seeing as though you haven’t so much as left this room in many years. How long has it been?”

“Ooh, a good few. Four score and ten, to say the least. And in answer to your other question, I produced it in the micro-winery I’ve had installed in lieu of my left foot.” She lifted the frayed hem of her jeans to reveal the maze of pipes clustered around miniature carboys and demijohns.

“Don’t be flip with me, young lady,” retorted the pensioner, with the ruffled passions of a roused swan. “If you’ll remember rightly, I asked only one question. The matter of how you got hold of the sauce was merely a remark. It did not imply curiosity.”

“Oh, but it did; though not implicit, curiosity was implied. The facts still stand; cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. And there is also the matter of the soporifics…”

“Damn you, wench!” Rage filled even the pits on his skull. “You have no wine, no sleeping pills, no damned Hendrix. If so, you’d already be dead.”

“The presence of Jimi Hendrix is not a necessary requirement for death,” the girl countered, childishly contrary.

“It was for Jimi Hendrix.” The old man, calmed by this confirmation of his own wisdom, gave a wink intended to be profound and juddered out of existence.

After a time, the girl got up and nonchalantly examined the marmoreal monkey left behind in his hasty departure. She soon observed that it was not made of marble at all - the old man (or some other unknown agency, not necessary working on his behalf) had merely polished its body to such an extent that its epilated flesh had taken on a translucent, milky quality. It ooked softly at her touch. She picked it up and took it back to her armchair, cradling it and occasionally buffing it with a chamois.

Alone save for the marblesque monkey, she finally gave in to the lung-burning urge to exhale, closing her eyes as the room, the monkey and the universe at large evaporated into blank whiteness around her. Then, with agonising inevitability, the whole process began anew.

Puffin Honey

The holy island of Lindisfarne is saturated with puffins and the rock itself is honeycombed with their burrows. Puffin honey is a great delicacy, gathered in the traditional manner by local youths, the individual vigour and number of which are diminished yearly by the activity (the solemn ceremony is conducted in a manner akin to the initiation trials of Arboria from Flash Gordon, and with similar mortality rates.) The resultant crop is then jarred and sold at vastly inflated prices to pilgrims, leaving the puffins with no other option than to raise their young on regurgitated fish.

Courtly Love Amongst the Stalk-Eyed Flies

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Awesome weirdness brought about by the pragmatism of selection by arbitrary criteria.

Male stalk-eyed flies emerge as translucent yet broadly conventional flies from their pupae on Malaysian forest floors. Then, before their wings have even dried sufficiently for flight, they scamper up the nearest tree and hide amongst the leaves. They then occupy themselves with sucking bubbles of air into their heads and forcing them out into their eyestalks, which darken and extend laterally like party blowers ended with the enamelled burgundy finials of their glossy compound eyes. That done, they take flight and go about their day of maladroit flyly business.

When evening comes, males and females congregate on tree trunks. The favour of females is allocated via a dispassionately scientific comparision of eyespans. The extended stalks are not used for combat but for measurement, and every fly accepts his station. It is only when two males are found to have exactly the same distance between their eyes that skirmishes break out and these duels are conducted in a highly stylised and brutal manner.

Their ways remind me of an Arthurian romance and, in my opinion, a pair of knights forcing bubbles of gas into their heads and comparing the lengths of the resultant eyestalks is the only thing missing from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

If I Had Been An Advertising Executive

A herd of wild bay horses sweeps majestically across chocolate steppes. The camera pans across then lurches sickening onto a single mare who has stopped to drink. She bends her delicate head to lap at the pool of chocolate milk. A bulge starts to form at the apex of the neck’s bend, marring the graceful lines with obscene twitching convexity. The horse continues to drink, seemingly unaware of the furious growth of the furuncle. The pressure grows. The bay velvet of her skin splits at the tautness, unveiling a mewling figure festooned with ropes of brown mucus. It remains for a moment - semi-emerged, tiny hands aloft - like a disproportionate and gooey centaur. It then hauls its haunches free of the opening; fortunately, the extent of the wound left behind is hidden by the loose flaps of pinklined suede and the host horse remains oblivious.

The creature drops to the ground with a wet plop and shakes translucent matter from its wet fur, splattering the mare’s smoothrippled flank. At this she looks up slowly, eyes comprehending though resigned, as the apoid homunculus begins its odd dance. It moves at the disjointed yet deliberate pace of a drunkard going through well-practiced motions and the movements captivate their equine observer. She stares impassive until it performs a particularly feckless shimmy, at which point her eyes widen to white-rimmed saucers and she begins to shudder violently. The creature dances on regardless as the horse shakes the structure of her body to pieces, connective lines crumbling and leaving nothing but the smooth brown ovoids of its teach-yourself-drawing-book constitution.

Eventually the pieces notice they are hovering in midair, unsupported by the physical community of an extant horse, and fall to the ground. The creature, breath rasping through clogged lungs, breaks off his dance and approaches the pile of rounded shapes. A tentative poke yields no signs of life, so he bites into one with his tiny needleteeth, reducing the shape to dust. He selects another and this time only the outer layer crumbles. A viscous brown jelly leaks out, dribbling down the creature’s chin and forming wormy curls on the surface of the milky pools, like chocolate sauce on melted ice cream.

A drooling simian maw fills the screen, before the camera performs another vertiginous lurch and swoops upwards at incredible speed. The creature is reduced to a dot and eventually to nothing by the retracting distances. Only the brown ovoids retain their integrity, embedded as they are revealed to be in an opaque brown hemisphere set atop a vast plain of varnished pine. The grinning face of an enormous child appears over the rim, a keen spoon poised in chubby fingers.

Multi-grain Coco Rocks: what goes on in that bowl?

Geographical Slash

Not some sort of special move, but an idea for a new pornographic literary genre. Possibly one involving sex acts stretching over large tracts of South West Uganda; the huge, prone bear of Lake Edward eagerly receiving a thorough yet tender rutting from the plucky Lake George using the Kazinga Channel as a watery and hippo-filled wang.

Or even a more tectonic eroticism. Eternal grinding in rocky crevices. Deep frictions. Cataclysmic sliding of plate over plate; lubricated by magma, superheated molasses easing the passage. Lithospheric frottage, leading to the orgasmic shudder of earthquake, of tsunami ejaculation. Le petite morte and land pushed up. The self-perpetuation of lust and land, glorious in its unecessary messiness.

The Cacti Set

"Come on, man; you want to throw your lot in with us. We stand out in the desert with our arms outstretched, doing all we can to develop defensive spikes and a greenish waxy coating."

"Are you able?"

"It's coming along."

He looked at him, his face like a bearded baked potato squintily set with two distant milky eyes.

"Coming along, oh yes."

Lion

It was feeding time for our clutch of big, broad-faced cats. With their pacing, they silently demanded a meat feast; we loaded up the truck. But one of them - a big lad called Bernard - would rather go for the tyres than the segments of sheep we proffered through the hatch. He was a feline oddball and quite vicious to boot, but I had no choice but to dislodge him; he was already little more than a furry blur, a spinning disc of yellowbrown under the wheelarches. And lions are prohibitively expensive; a fact that can be testified to equally by Roman emperors with Christians to be munched down and Chinese businessmen with mistresses to be munched on. I signalled the truck to a stop. After a cursory poke with a broom handle - an attempt I held little hope for, given Bernard’s penchant for inconvenience and tenacity - I stepped out onto the mock savannah.

I was immediately struck by the difference in atmosphere; the air was hot and wet. It enveloped me meatily, as though solid. Solid and studded with spiked pegs. It reduced my headskin to lines of sharp pain. Pressure. I popped out of my body like a champagne cork.

And thus I was silent spectator of my own death. Rather quickly, however, I saw that there was nothing at the end of it. There was no light at the end of the tunnel; just more and more tunnel, with little to recommend it over the tooth-fringed fleshtube I had recently vacated. So I thought, “Bugger that,” and tucked myself back into my mauled body.

In any case, Bernard had dropped me by now - I think he had been shot - and the sky bustled with medical shapes. I asked one of them if I was dying.

“Do you know,” it gurgled, “I think you are. Best take a look at you first, eh?”