Balloon Men - Pt.1

I sit patiently at my desk.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Sat with a book in front of me, I wait... wait for it to make its move... wait for it to make a mistake. My eyes drift listlessly to the bottom left corner of their peripheral vision, surveying the dust in the corners, watching detachedly as Hillary Clinton slinks carelessly into the room, making dirty tuba noises before clambering awkwardly into the fish tank and disappearing amongst the reeds.

*Rustle* *Rustle*

My eyes dart back to the book with the hideous immediacy of a hawk with lead feet falling on top of a newborn child. The book has not changed. A formidable opponent. This one will require the darkest depths of my cunning.

Silently, I slip out of the bedroom door, creeping down the stairs and into the kitchen. Reaching into one of the lower cupboards, I pull out six packs of Werther’s Originals and a watering can. I bring them back upstairs and arrange them enticingly at the far end of the desk and survey the book with a look of smug triumph. I know I have its balls in a vice.

All of a sudden, the book turns red and catches fire.

“AHA!” I shout in delirious victory, grabbing the book by the corner and Frisbeeing it out of the window, to avoid scorching the watering can. Almost content enough to dust my hands of the situation, I freeze, mid-hand-dusting, as I hear the book ricochet off of human skin and plop lifelessly into the pond. I crane my head around slowly and see a pink balloon float absently skywards, past the window.

Worry begins to creep coldly through my veins as I start to speculate over the cause of such abrupt balloon presence. Knowingly, I skulk to the other side of the room and rotate the dimmer switch on the wall until the bulb on the ceiling becomes no more than a dull ember. I slowly raise my head over the windowsill, already certain of what I will see.

Balloon Men.

Three of them. Four, if I were to include the one sprawled out on the floor, empty-handed, blood gushing from a book-shaped wound in his scalp. One stood by the pond, another stood near the shed and one stood half-buried in the vegetable patch up to his chest. They all hold a single, coloured balloon, left-handed, staring blankly at my bedroom window. They each wear ragged, formal suits, littered with coffee stains and bread crumbs. The one loitering around the shed turns to the pond-stander and begins to speak in loud trumpet noises, asserting its dominance as it spray-paints “Jumanji” on the fence, marking its territory. My worry is forgotten in a moment of white fury as David Attenborough sneaks out of some nearby long grass and begins to play Twister with a jaguar. The jaguar asks David to put his right foot on blue and it’s more than I can stand. The last straw.

I turn away, horrified, and slump against the wall beneath the windowsill, my mind bulging with questions. Why are they here? Why me? Who threw my book in the pond? Unhelpful questions all likely to have equally as unhelpful answers. I begin to pace the length of my room, pondering a way to rid myself of these unwanted guests. After what seems to be an eternity of pacing, I stop dead in my tracks, having walked straight into the fish tank, spilling tropical fish and Hillary Clinton all over the new carpet. I casually sweep the unlucky fish and the ex-president’s wife under the rug, when an idea hits me square in the jaw. Dazedly, I pick the idea off of the floor and jam it into my head, massaging my bruised chin. Sudden clarity begins to circulate around my brain. I know what must be done.

Exercising extreme caution, I snatch the watering can from its position as centrepiece in the tantalizing display of garden equipment and chewy, butterscotch toffee treats on my bedroom desk. I grab a side of the watering can in each hand and begin to stretch it – stretch it wide enough to fit a leg in.

Then I stretch it some more.

I stretch it far past the recommended stretching size written on the bottom of the can. The sides of the can stretch to the point of transparency as the warning siren begins to blare from the town centre. Village folk burst from their houses, ugly screams of panic shooting from their mouths and splashing all over the floor. They carry hastily packed bags under their arms, many of them wearing their children as slippers, too lazy to carry or wake them. They’re running for the emergency bunkers, used only in case of nuclear fallout, and the excessive elongation of gardening goods. I let go of the watering can... yet it continues to swell.

The walls of the bedroom begin to buckle and creak as the monstrous, green balloon continues to bulge and distend. The large double windows shatter outwards and spray the Balloon Men in the garden with confused shards of glass. They squawk in their violent brass voices and begin to tear up the Twister mat. David Attenborough shoots a sharp, accusatory look at the Balloon Man in the vegetable patch (the only one unable to seize his beloved Twister mat) and explodes in a hectic shower of snakes. The snakes swarm up the walls of my house, oblivious to the gravity urging them kindly to stay on the ground. They begin to pour in through the open window and pile into the rapidly-growing can like clowns into a tiny car – a tiny car that has been turned into a giant watering can.

What have I done?

The roof of the house bursts, sending scraps of brick and tiles sprawling out into the road and garden. Despite the weight of its new residents, the ex-watering device begins to float upward and out of the room. Instinct seizes me. I was born for this moment. As the big green balloon takes flight, I leap into the open hatch and slump down into the pile of writhing snakes. The can ascends higher into the night sky and I peer over its edge, down at the rapidly shrinking garden. The plan has not gone entirely awry, after all: I’m leaving the Balloon Men behind. A strong sigh of relief escapes me as I slouch back into the slithering carpet that fills my new abode. Where to now? Wherever the can desires...

Old College Work!

The series of images that follow make up my English Language AS Creative Writing coursework. The story is a very loose re-write of the classic Fairytale "Snow White". It is written in a vaguely Sci-Fi style in a post-apocalyptic environment.

Unforseen Consequences

Sat at the computer, trawling through seemingly endless quagmires of dross; reams upon reams of porn. Girl on girl, girl on horse, girl on vintage accordion, girl on antique clock nailed to a cricket bat... I've seen it all before. I'm looking for something new. Something fresh. Something exciting. Something to make me feel alive. Yet in my haste to find something new, I feel as if I may have forgotten something old... something potentially vital.

As if to smugly justify my worries, a low rumbling begins at the bottom of the staircase and starts to wind its way upwards. I hear angry noises coming from the landing – picture frames being knocked from shelves, polar bears smashing pots together and rugs being snagged by the careless motions of unhappy feet. All at once, the rumbling culminates into a furious cadence right outside my bedroom door. The door bursts off its hinges, flying across the room and stapling the cat to the wall. My father stomps into the room, seemingly unphased by the door's sudden murderous impulse to impale the cat. I look into his face and see red-hot fury swimming in his eyes. He grits his teeth and holds out the pumpkin from last October.

“YOU LEFT THE PUMPKIN OUT TOO LONG!” spit flies from his mouth in angry tendrils “LOOK!” He removes the top of the Jack-O-lantern and I begin to understand. Beneath the seemingly innocent outer crust of the pumpkin, lies something hideous in its irrelevance.

A miniature carnival winks from inside the pumpkin's head. Dozens of tiny patrons line up to buy tickets for severely under-maintenanced amusement rides whilst others attempt to win shoddy prizes from games that are most likely rigged. My eyes grow wide as dim comprehension envelopes me. I can't begin to apologise enough. How could I have been so foolish? I'd had all the time in the world to dispose of that pumpkin before something like this could've happened... but I was selfish – I'd allowed myself to become distracted by the big blue vase I'd bought last Thursday. If only I'd bought a smaller vase to admire, perhaps I'd have been spared just enough time to beat the shit out of a pumpkin. But alas, no turning back now. I've made my bed on this one, now I must lie in it.

My father slams the pumpkin onto my desk and storms out of the room, playing cards and marbles falling haphazardly from his sleeves and onto my carpet as he flails his arms in snake-like motions.
“Fuck” I mutter under my breath, eyeing the carnival cautiously. I slip from my seat and slide under the desk in a perversely fluid motion. Once sheltered beneath the wooden fortress, I wrap myself in a thin, silk cocoon to hold myself over until April – perhaps the miniature Carnies would move on.

I wait.

Time slips around me like stale water. Boredom festers on my skin like yawn-inducing fungus. I struggle my hand down towards my pocket and turn loose its contents. Three Roman coins and a figurine of the Ready Brek dragon tumble from their denim prison and onto the surrounding silk. Most unhelpful. I lose track of how long I've been under; I decide to resurface.

I tear out of my sodden silk shell and punch a hole in the wall. Peering through my newly-punched peep-hole, I spy on the neighbours as they tear up the carpet and shout at mice. Real sportsmanship. Nobody shouts at mice quite like the Williams'. I manage to tear my gaze from the carpet-ripping mice-screamers in order to focus on less ridiculous matters – the pumpkin carnival. I pivot 180 degrees on the balls of my feet and shit myself in anger. The carnival has swollen – swollen to a ludicrous size. Tiny rollercoasters twist their way around my room, entwining themselves in the bookcase and ensnaring the curtain rails. Thriving masses of tiny guests queue in long, winding lines, as they squeak and chitter in tiny voices. Fury. How dare they maim my beautiful domicile? How dare they cut and hack until it becomes a twisted, orange, vegetable circus from hell? Trousers brimming with anger-induced faeces, I begin to smash my way through the amusements, bringing an end to this preposterous occupation.

The once proud carnival sinks into roaring, judicious flames as my unwelcome guests are extinguished, their stern joy melting to terrified sludge as their world collapses around them, the putrid stench of despair and burning flesh bidding them farewell on their exit from the living world. I hop nimbly over the small charred bodies to fetch the broom. What a mess. I sweep the rotting shambles under the bed and turn my attention to the source – the origin, the conduit, the alpha & omega... the pumpkin.

I seize it firmly in my right hand, staring it in its empty, orange eyes. Without another moment's thought, I turn around and launch the pumpkin out of the window, knocking out the milkman and sending shards of glass soaring around the room, all the while wondering why I didn't pause to open the window first. Dusting my hands off, a small smirk creeps across my face. Now that little problem has been disposed of, we can get back to the matter at hand.

Sat at the computer, trawling through seemingly endless quagmires of dross...

The Git Among the Pigeons

Sat on a sign on the edge of Baker Street – clearly a shit place to be. I gaze skyward and realise that I'm standing upside-down as freshly cut grass leaps unexpectedly across my field of vision. I right myself just in time to see Roy career off the rails and straight into a lamp post, like a twat. Roy makes a shit steam train, but you try telling that to a man that paid forty thousand pounds to have a cowcatcher surgically grafted to his shins. The man's living in well deserved denial. He smiles at me and begins to grind slowly through the pavement like a drill. I return his smile and watch him curiously as he disappears into the concrete. I begin to suspect that he does not have the appropriate planning permission for this. I must redirect his attention.

I don't stop to think. I barely even breathe. With the hectic speed of a dead badger hurtling to earth from atop the Eiffel Tower, I dash towards Roy, hoping against hope that I reach him in time. I trip over a tortoise and brain myself on the concrete. I'm out for the count.

I dream of Venice. I find myself floating carelessly in the canals, ploughing through gondolas as if they were made of wood. The locals scream in dismay as gondoliers leap from their sinking boats, only to land on the kitchen floor. They realise far too late in the game that they've moored their boats to the dishwasher. I grin smugly to myself as shards of broken gondola scatter wildly around the room, tearing at innocent Venetian faces and scratching the new paintwork on the cupboards. Suddenly I'm falling. Venice drops away and I'm left with a faint ringing in my ears and the smell of freshly-crushed tortoise clinging to my nostrils.

I come around and Roy's long-gone. If it weren't for the gaping chasm in the pavement and the teeth sticking out of the lamp post, it'd be as if he were never even here. I approach the freshly-drilled hole with wary steps. I peer over the edge and into the crushing darkness that Roy has left in his wake. The dark is Roy's weapon; he drags it limply behind him like a dead dog on a tattered leash, smearing the ground he covers with a long, foul stain. I stare into that cold darkness and feel it speak to my very soul. It asks me about that cold night in Brooklyn. I tell it that the subject is very personal and that is should mind its own business. The dark apologises for overstepping its boundaries.

Without further ado, I pinch my nostrils shut and cannonball into the thick dark that floods the chasm. I plummet through the vast black with the cold wind whipping at my face before crumpling in a messy heap at the bottom of the pit. My bones pierce my skin and my organs are turned to gelatinous sludge inside my body. As I lay mashed, gasping helplessly for air in the crushing black at the bottom of the pit, I think to myself how this has been a textbook example of how to ruin a perfectly good Tuesday afternoon. I remind myself not to invite Roy over to lunch for a very long time.

Stoat Gambling

It wasn't until I shot a momentary glance into Frankie Marcello's gunmetal grey eyes that I realised this game had the unsettling potential to be my last if I didn't play my cards right. I remembered far too late into the game that Frankie Marcello is not a man to be fucked with. When you fuck Frankie, he fucks you twice as hard; allegedly with the barrel end of a .44, or so the stories go. I tear my eyes away from my cards and see the dimly-lit basement swim in and out of focus behind a grim haze of cigar smoke. Sat on the other side of the smokescreen, Frankie and his boys (Nico & Gino), watch me carefully. The thick Cuban smoke veil is a Godsend; it obscures the truth of my hand more than even my best poker-face could. I quell the faint wriggling in my jacket pocket and try to pull myself together.


I meet the eyes of the dull figures buried behind the smoke screen and decide it's time to bite the bullet. Shit or get off the pot; and when dealing with Frankie Marcello, it's imperative that you don't get off the pot. You shit, man. You fucking shit and then you fucking run.


I reach slowly into my jacket pocket and grab my bet by its tail. I pull the stoat out and slide it across the table. It blinks dumbly in the swirling Cuban haze but makes no attempt to run – it's been bred for the purpose of gambling. Frankie eyes my stoat carefully and sees that it is good. Pure-bred, short-tailed Eurasian Ermine. It's good quality merchandise. Nico & Gino see that I mean business. They both fold; they know better than to fuck with high-quality stoats. Frankie, however, shuffles in his seat as he reaches into a bucket under the table. He sees my stoat and raises me five of his own. Gino's cigar falls from his mouth and onto the mottled, hardwood floor as Nico stifles a small whimper. Five stoats, man. Impressive. God damn impressive. Frankie's poker face is even more impressive still but all the stoats in the world couldn't fool me. I flick my eyes up to meet Marcello's.

"These are weasels, Frank." He realises I've got his number. Piping hot rage wells in his eyes, but somehow he stays cool. The man's got power and I'll be damned if he doesn't know it. The man's got connections. He's got a .44 in his pocket and a bucket of weasels at his feet; he's on top of the world.


With blinding speed he grabs the bucket from underneath the table and launches it across the room at me. Utter pandemonium. Weasels in the air vents, stoats in the rafters. Gino runs blindly into the wall, batting the weasels from his face and knocks himself out. Nico is nowhere to be seen underneath the wriggling stoat carpet. In the midst of the weasel-induced chaos, Frankie makes a break for the fire exit. I don't hesitate. I plunge my hand deep into my stoat pocket and grab myself some ammunition. I'm gripped by a deep cold as I lock my vision onto Frankie's back – I've only got one chance. I hurl the furry projectiles towards him. My aim is true.


WHACK.

WHACK.

WHACK.


Nailed to the wall by stoats. Frankie Marcello's air of authority is lost as the steady scarlet flow trickles from his stoat-inflicted wounds, staining his best jacket. I move slowly towards him on the conveyor belt-like floor of weasels and stoats. I pull the .44 from his pocket and feel its weight in my hand. It's heavy – heavy is good. I crack his jaw with the handle of the revolver and shoot a nearby stoat in the face just for the sexual thrill. Frankie whimpers slightly as I turn back towards him. The stoats in his shoulders are boring deep. An odd pity grips me as I see his face writhing in pain. I put a bullet in his skull and shield my eyes from the mist of crimson and brain matter that ricochets off the wall behind him. The police would have heard the ruckus – they'll be here soon. I scrape myself a modest handful of stoats from the moving rodent carpet and stuff them into my jacket pocket before heading out the fire exit. Same time next week.

Planned Obsolescence

It's quite natural for you to feel this way. Don't you worry your fragile head, Sir. Nobody's blaming you for such an unexpected outcome – I'm sure they can piece her back together. These things just take time; which is exactly your problem. Time. It's all around.

It surrounds us.

It chokes us.

It's in the rafters, it's 'neath the staircase. It's 'twixt the drywall and it clutters the pantry. Try as you might, you just can't scrape the time out of the drain. It coagulates in the U-bend like old blood, gushed forth from a particularly nasty haemorrhage. Time. It's taken its embarrassingly steep toll on you. Your consequential problem is that you've been obsolete for a very long time, my friend. Your services are no longer required in an age of hand-held telephones and colour televisions. Your dated skills quake and cower in the herculean shadows of self-service checkouts, they stumble dimly in the colossal footprints left in the wake of electrical sewing machines and other such technological marvels. Your antiquated equipment is unfashionable to say the very least.


For starters, your compass is rusty and it always points towards Denmark. Let's face it; you don't want to go to Denmark – you've only just gotten back. Think of the mess you left at the airport. The screaming of the children as you took the power drill to that zebra. How you ever successfully smuggled a zebra through customs to begin with is a mystery best left unplumbed. It's going to take them weeks to clean up all the apricot pulp. Rest assured, they're not going to be in any sort of hurry to let you back into the country, Squire, believe me. The Danes have rules about this sort of thing.


Let's not get started on your wardrobe. In fact, let's. Your trousers are shameful. A corduroy nightmare; they shrink and swell with the eternal shifting of the tide. This is somewhat of an unwelcome complication. You find yourself wearing clothes that just don't match. You'd like to remedy this but you can't; your trousers are far too tight. You can't take them off, no sir-ee. Don't dare to think you can, not even for a moment. Wishful thinking is a dangerous tool, a by-product of hope. You can't afford to hope, not on your budget. You just spent all that money on Danish apricots. Your reckless disregard for judicious spending has, once again, left you in the wrong trousers.


Try as you may, you cannot claw your way back to the top. The times have passed you by and you need to make way for a brighter future. But there's little need to stew in the caustic swill of your welling self-pity. Things could be unfathomably worse. There are debauched levels of archaism esoteric to the average mind. Take, for instance, the Colossus of Rhodes. The lazy lamp-holding dick couldn't even stand up properly. Not that I'd expect much more from a man whose son managed to set the entire planet on fire. What an idiot.

The Last Man/Perpetual Motion

This is a work in progress and much of it is subject to change. A fair chunk of it (the ending) was also written under the weight of alcohol's heavy hand, so the last paragraph or so is in need of some serious reworking.

I hear the moan of tired gears grinding to a peculiar halt amidst the shrouds of dank, jade mist. The pounding heartbeat of the Earth deteriorates into a distant din, a soft hum… silence. The frayed veneer peels away and as the mechanism dies, the fog retreats to reveal the ancient plains of impossible motion. Primordial fields of over-grown emerald struggle their way through the thinning haze and bloom callously beneath my feet. This is the world behind our eyes. This is the space between the walls. This is where the road began.

I tread cautiously through this alien dreamscape, taking extreme precaution not to disturb the thick silence that clutters the air. I notice the squalid aroma of empyreuma clinging inexorably to my nostrils, but the timeworn wheel of the sky overhead remains unscathed by smoke. Scanning the horizon of the surrealist landscape, I notice a hulking, gothic structure, far in the distance, where the land meets the sky, seeming to pin the two together. Being the only object, other than myself, to so brazenly intrude upon the emptiness of the vast plains for miles around, the importance of the structure seems immovable. It swims in and out of focus, dancing on the edge of the earth as if it were simmering in the heat of some mid-afternoon sun.

I make my way towards the building, hoping to find refuge from the unfamiliarity that surrounds me; the construct seems to be the only thing human in this world beneath worlds. The small comfort it offers is enough to entice me towards it. I begin to close the distance between the building and I, carving my way through the vast ocean of emerald as the cosmic wheel of the sky continues to turn above me, indifferent from my growing feeling of displacement. Its apathy unsettles me. My pace quickens.

I wade noiselessly through the swamps of jade; inexplicable anxiety wells in my heart and my eyes dart frantically back and forth over the empty plains. Darkness begins to fester in the sky. Time feels broken here. It fluctuates back and forth in long, warbling arcs like a pendulum at the bottom of the ocean. It holds no surprise for me that the foundations on which our beliefs were built would be so unstable; so maddeningly unintelligible. The sky grows darker still, and I become aware of a creeping, incongruous presence. I realise that it’s my own. My pace quickens further. I begin to run.

As I dash across the rolling plains, the world around me seems to shift. The radiating humanity of the approaching construct grows cold and dies. The angles of its architecture grow incomprehensible. The colours become all wrong. I make pains to drag my eyes away from the new, sick majesty of the monolithic structure looming on the horizon and find myself gazing into the sprawling heavens above. The stars are out, but these are not my stars. Polaris has been doused. Orion has been swept away. The sky is littered with lunatic spheres of light, clung together in twisted constellations. I close my eyes against them and my steady dash quickens to a frantic sprint.

As I tear closer, the structure reveals itself to be a colossal cathedral, ludicrously overrun with coarse ivy of innumerable eternities. The roof of the building teems with sodden moss and broken gargoyles. Dead eyes, sunken deep into malformed stone heads, perched atop hideously carved perversions of the human form gape at me from the dizzying heights of the gargantuan cathedral’s slanted roof. I run blindly towards the cathedral and throw my weight against the contorted, oak doorway. The doors give begrudgingly as its prehistoric, rusted hinges shriek in silent pain. Once inside, I slam the doors shut behind me – they do not make a sound – locking it all out; the hot malevolence of the gargoyle’s vacant stare and the cold unconcern of the ancient sky. My breath rips out in short, rasping tears. I stare at the large oak slabs blocking the entrance way. The gargoyles avert their gaze and the sky takes its indifference elsewhere. They dare not touch this place. It’s all I can do to prevent myself from asking why. I dust myself off, though there is no filth to be dusted, and turn my eyes upon the interior of the cathedral.

The cathedral is not, as I had expected (hoped) abandoned. The pews are occupied. My breath is momentarily confiscated as a silent congregation fills my vision. Frozen in disturbing tableaux, they sit, transfixed, staring eternally towards the rotten pulpit with eyes that have withered to black pulp in their sockets. Their peculiar tranquillity has allowed the same creeping vines that have swamped the exterior of the cathedral to grow over them, ensnaring their withered bodies to the stiff, knotted wood of the pews and cutting ruthlessly into their gnarled flesh. I wonder who (what) in the name of God would allow such calamities to go on living; and to what avail? I stagger awkwardly up the nave, unable to keep from gawking at the peculiar cavalcade of loyal followers. I draw closer to the head of the room and a dark figure swims into view, partially obscured by some unexplainable veil. I feel the silence deepen around me and I tremble under its weight. I soon approach the pulpit and weakly raise my head to meet the eyes of the flock’s shepherd.

I find that she owns no eyes.

I find myself staring straight through her - into a shadow of pure lunacy.

Her form has been cut from reality. What remains is neither black, nor white – a resonating, God-shaped fracture in existence. I am staring behind the darkness of space. My eyes cannot relay the immense density of the information it is receiving to my mind and my head begins to throb in dull, pulsating thuds. It throbs underneath the stress of unlimited knowledge. A searing pain cracks down my skull as I feel my brain buckle and creak. My head swarms with questions that know no bounds – and she answers them.

Every

Last

One

I scream.

Countless millennia’s worth of pent-up silence is shattered in one single moment. The shards come crashing down and every eyeless, time-trodden face in the cathedral turns upon me. They stare dumbly through the darkness in their sockets, their eternity-long oration interrupted. One by one, slick, twisted grins creep across their faces. A gnarled face in the fourth row begins to bleed from its mouth as it bites down on its own tongue in a wretched effort to sport its own malignant smirk. The flow thickens and turns to a bubbling spray as the jagged blades in its rotten fissure of a maw sever its tongue into two scarlet-sputtering halves. The dead half of the tongue drops to the floor with a wet thump and lays lifeless on the cold stone, oozing thick, black bile into the pew in front.

I return my attention back towards the Piper and find myself struck rigid by her presence, unable to move. She turns her featureless face towards me and shrieks in noiseless outrage. I take a glimpse through her and into the world that lies in her pestilent shadow. My sanity snaps like a thread and reality falls away.

I sit in the Halls of Perpetual Motion, bound helplessly amongst the throngs of rotten worshippers and shattered time. She stands at the altar, bleating her sermon in harsh, frenzied, silent yelps…

And we weep for her.

This is where the road began.