Theme: Switch
HG Wells Short Story Writing Competition
I face a square television at one end of my bedroom. There is nothing but me and the television. The television and me. I cannot go out. No one can come in. And so, I listen to the television.
The South China Sea comes shabbily into view, the water not quite blue but grey, a myriad of depression and not quite the iridescent indigo I was hoping for. The rain was grey too. So was my laptop. Why must I see everything in grey? As I zoned out, I felt my breath catching, as if underwater, and a cascading wave of what was water enveloped my body. My hands reached out to grope what was not the plush fabric of my sofa, but empty space, devoid of colour, devoid of texture. It just felt large, and empty, like the bottom of the ocean. Within minutes, the temperature had dropped to negative degrees and even the slightest movement jerked the pain of a thousand pinpricks of icy daggers piercing my skin.
I screamed, and as I screamed a school of words streamed down the cave of my mouth and I spat them out again…
*Switch*
I was outside a building. There were two snakes entwined in a passionate embrace, embossed in fine cut steel on the door. A muffled voice floated through the door, talking about how we must get ourselves inoculated with our first vaccination shots.
At the end of each sentence, the snakes slithered a slippery hiss, which, instead of making my blood run cold shot my veins full of an electric energy, the sort you get moments after being jabbed with a flu shot…
*Switch*
There was no longer the door with snakes on it, and there was no longer a voice, but a girl and boy walking to school.
Their faces were wrapped in ghoulish masked bags, and they stood not one, not two, but three feet apart at all times. Was this how children would have to live? As I thought, I found it harder and harder to take a single breath, until I was gasping with my mouth wide open, open in a wide circle, searching desperately. One minute passed, then two, then three and my face turned white, whiter than those N-95 masks, whiter than the freshly chalked out road lanes, whiter than the clouds which dotted the sky. The sky was overcast, but the clouds weren’t heavy, they were light pieces of foam which floated on the misery encapsulated in this Orwellian world. I realised I hadn’t been breathing for four minutes. I should have been dead, but strangely I was not. When I looked down again, the two bodies of the children lay on the same cement I had been admiring a second ago. They didn’t even have time to remove their masks. I ran forward to wrench the disgusting wrappers off their angelic faces, but I kept running and the road twisted and warped until it wasn’t a road but my bed, and I was lying there, quite awake. I couldn’t even persuade myself it was a dream. The tv was switched off.
***
The chicken was laid out on the wooden countertop, its squeamish, glossy pink skin laid out bare, a fleshy cadaver for the eyes. Hands gloved in flimsy plastic, with the debris of foodstuff littered along the forefinger and thumb, as fingers deftly cleaved the bird from head to toe, a severance of no mean size, exposing the wayward fatty oils which drip ever so sluggishly from the sides of the bird. The exuberance was exasperating, as the lighting centered around a murderous mutilation, a carnage, which would have disgusted the average vegetarian.
I feel myself being dissected from the skull throughout the spine, my bones snapping without so much as a whisper, as simply as tearing a piece of paper. I feel violated, nothing but a piece of meat to be butchered by mankind’s sharp instruments, my skin and blood stripped apart, my gelatin marinated to form candies that children suck when they teethe. And so I submit to the maiming. I always do.
The steaming pot of stuffing is rolled out onto the thick spread canapes which fold around the finely chopped onion and garlic, a drizzle of malicious marinara sauce squeezed on top. As the brutish man shoves the “dish” into a preheated oven, the smells coated my face, searing into my skin as the heat slowly seared the chicken. The smell was sulphuric, arsenic, that of beef on a grill, pork cooking on the Sunday barbecues in the park before this damn lockdown… Bit by bit, I felt the layers roasting, peeling away one by one, covering the fat with a light layer of crisp, which made my skin burn.. As I burned, I let the knife hack away at me as I was “presented” to the judges. And then, devoured.
*Switch*
Chocolat, the fancy french word displayed in the most cursive lettering I had seen, practically splashed across the little box I called a television. Freshly manicured nails lustily unwrap the wrapper, the silky creme bar perfectly divided into square pieces of eight. I find the saliva collecting at the roof of my mouth, and the orgasmic pleasure I derive from watching pearly white teeth sinking into brown bars.. I can imagine my lips kissing the creamy woes of frozen, sugary milk and rubbing it along the edges of my lips and tip of my nose and burying my face in a melted pool of Cadbury.
“Kiss me.. Close your eyes.. Kiss me”,
I fervently kiss the chocolate, swallowing the delicate fragments that become pasty on the surface of my tongue, and gradually, I find myself stuffing the chocolate down my throat, multiple pieces, faster and faster. It is as if those manicured hands are shoving the shitty stuff down, and I can’t swallow that synthetic sweetness, so I gag. The chocolate doesn’t come out of my mouth either- the waterfall of chunky chocolate pieces clogs up my throat, like a sink that doesn’t drain, until brown bubbles froth at my lips and the advertisement ends with a balloon popping over a gymnasium full of students contentedly licking at Cadbury Bars.
I switched the channel knowing I would never look at it the same way again. I would certainly never kiss it.
***
This time a leopard stretches lazily across the bark of the tree. The hide of the animal blends with the more grainy texture of the bark, the leopard and tree becoming one. As dusk cautiously creeps into its canvas of sky, the leopard hungers for its next kill.
As the cameraman for National Geographic, I slowly swivel the foot long Nikon to one side, following its eyes towards the west, when it twitches its nose, ever so slightly. Suddenly, the leopard jumped down gracefully from the pine where we were in the process of getting our next cover page shot, the view switches, to our moving lens.
A mile away, a doe stands, forlorn without her pack, grazing before it is too dark, and she has to return. She seems lost, a newcomer to this part of the jungle, and isn’t even allowed a whimper as the beast hacks into her neck, twisting it apart, before thumping down on the ground, to strip and divide the carcass. I can see the remains of the bloody mess streaming down its jaw, and its pupils dilate with the frenzy of the hunt. I do not know why I am not delighted- this shot was enough to wrap up our session for the month- but I am not a cameraman, I am now the leopard as I dissect my carrion and suck on the meat. It is the delicious, earthy herb that is infused with a smooth outer covering. Normally I would have chosen a more succulent pairing for the night, but I was hungry, and she was easy prey. I inhale the musky, pungent odour wafting towards my nose as I have finished dissecting the rib cage, in two cross-horizontal and vertical incisions. I lift the remains, the upper torso and legs and sprint away, the taste of sanguinary victory fresh in my wet jaw. I angle my head up and carry the deer to the middle branch before proceeding to lick its contents with much pleasure.
Now I see everything in a hazy leaflike green, as the tree, which watches the leopard with a weary but accepting stance. It has seen her kill, desecrate, but also live as nature demands her to – it was this plain where she watched the other tribes make an outcast of her male, and saw him killed, where she now goes to hunt. They are strange animals, I think, sometimes they anguish under my shade and urinate on my roots, scourge my bark apart, and others, they lie on my thick branches and hug me for dear life when they do not want to be seen. Afterall, a tree is nothing but a home. It shall always be thus… and as night falls, and the cameras flimsily flush to a x-ray view, my eyes, as the viewer, hurt and so I am compelled to pick up the remote yet.
*Switch*
I am clothed in thick, green track pants with a white t-shirt and jacket on top. I am standing in a metallic stadium, an ugly doll-like statue at one end of it, with two schoolgirl plaits and stone cold eyes. One look could very literally kill me, and the grass suddenly wraps itself around my chest and calves and squeezes, like the chains which Hercules broke free off. However, as hard as I try, I cannot break these ropes of compulsion which, instead of chaining me to the mud, tie me to the statue.
“Oko-mai-kero-see, parah karme-nah–”
As the robotic schoolgirl swivels, I swivel with it. I can feel its slimy skin, but instead of slipping to the ground, the slimier the robot is, the more firmly I find myself attached to it. Our arms are conjoined at the elbows, my head to its nape because I am not tall enough and part of my back is stuck to its arse which arches outwards in two full cups. It takes me a minute to realise that what I thought was water is actually blood, streaming down from an opening at its scalp. My fingertips become bloodier and bloodier every time the statue swivels. A digitalized traffic signal turns green, and every time it does, I can see the massacre before my very eyes- however it is not my irises which are slaughtering- it is the accursed robot’s. They shoot out laser signals, followed by deafening gunshots which ricochet off the gleaming walls. The blood spatters across the cemented floor. I am now the streaming river, which tickles the cement, and smatters across the beige walls, imprinting with a crimson touch. I am life blood which, leaving the wound of head, heart and home, roams the stadium in a mad frenzy of alkaline adventure.
However, the worst is, when I am the stupid schoolgirl who swivels around at the green signal.
*Switch*
I catch a young pregnant woman moving forward, in her 20’s, the age of my ex-fiance, and let loose my lasers to kill her, and the life which grows in her womb.
*Switch*
The lazer hits her square in the head.
*Switch*
I swivel back to my place.
*Switch*
The channel does not switch. My fingers sting with the force of a hundred joules as there is an electric vibration which courses through my nerves. The power outage leads to a shower of sparks from my plugged-in television, which flickers and then, blacks out.
A moment later, it slowly powers on and a hazy image of the weather report comes into view. This time, I cannot feel the heat of the sun. I am not drenched when it shows the floods in some other part of the world.
I am now switched off.