PIYE and Novel Extract

My writing is now available in America. Issue's #1 and #2 of PIYE (Party in you Eyesocket) are available in Sherwood Forest Zine Library in Austin, Texas.

http://sherwoodzinelibrary.tumblr.com/post/33370752941/101112

My friend, Ionie Ince, is the creator and editor of PIYE and she let me edit some of the short stories of issue #2. It's available for £4 from http://partyinyoureyesocket.tumblr.com/ where we are currently accepting submissions for issue #3. It's a new anthology for short prose mainly in black comedy, science fiction, fantasy, thriller genres.

It's available from News From Nowhere on Bold Street, Liverpool as well.

An extract from my newest novel:

"'I've got older, you haven't aged a bit,' Sally said.

'I'm ageing. Just slower, I guess.'

'But you look exactly the same. Have you found the fountain of eternal youth?'

'No.'

'How's life.'

'Boring. How's yours?'

'Okay. I'm so happy I'm an actress. Are you proud of me?'

'Yes.'

'I've just turned thirty.'

'I know. I remember your birthday. Would have sent you a card but to be honest I didn't think we'd see each other again.'

'Would you like some more coffee?'

'Please.'

Sally ordered more coffee. There was a silence for a moment. Then she said, 'I've been thinking about you, Catherine. That's why I called. And now I see you, I'm glad I did.' She sipped her coffee. She tore a paper sachet of sugar and slowly tipped it in. She stirred it with a wooden stirrer. She did this very methodically as if so practised in the art of coffee drinking. She sipped it again and gave a vague, sub-conscious smile. 'How old are you now?' she said.

'I'm forty-four,' Catherine said, somewhat embarrassed.

'But you look twenty-four. Why is that?'

'I don't know.'

'I wanted to ask you if you had a secret to your looks. Your skin. Your eyes. What is it you do?'

'I don't do anything.'

'Oh.' Sally sipped the coffee again and left a red lip-print on the cup.

'Sometimes,' Catherine said, 'I think I'm not going to die. Why is that?'

'I don't know.'

'I was almost killed in a car accident coming down here.'

'Oh my God.'

'But I didn't die. Would think I was crazy if I said I don't think I would have died.'

'I don't know.'

'For years I've never gone a day without thinking of David Milton. Ever since he died I've always wondered why that had to happen to him. And I know why. He was fixing the TV. The TV I'd told him to fix. Why didn't I fix it.'

'He was an engineer. He knew that kind of stuff.'

'I think I'm being punished.'

'Don't be stupid. There's no reason you would be punished.'

'I think I'm being punished for David's death and now I'm going to live forever.'

'Are you serious?'

Catherine sipped her coffee. It tasted good. They ordered some more. The rain stopped and the sun shone and reflected off the raindrops on the window. The light lit them both up.

'Where are you staying?' Sally asked.

'Some hotel.'

'Stay with me. I have a spare room. You should see my house anyway.'

'Okay.'

They got up to leave. Some people took a photograph of Sally as they walked out."

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Poems from the Beach - And Short Story

Morning on the Beach

It's uneven where I stand, the beach, mostly.

The world sways whenever I think.

And that thought, next to me, unravelled

and twisted, quivers the world in the river.

Five or six swans cross my path.

Each, white-feathered and tired-looking,

Breakfast table-ignorant, quacking,

Dropping into the water. There is no other sound.

Only they are not swans, they are geese,

And one watches me as I pass, not saying a word.

Its feathers whiter in morning light, its holiness

Diminished with a look of mutual awareness.

If I were a swan or a goose I, too, would

Stand and stare at me. Because what else

Is there to do? The sunlight grows.

This morning magpies its jewel sunshine.

I turn to the right, the roar of wind and earth,

There is a sense of absolutely everything beyond me.

I turn my head to the left,

There is silence but the waves.

This is an untitled poem.  I wrote both when I started jogging in the morning on the beach where I live. This one I used the leftover images from the previous one.

For me, when I run, I'm vacantly religious.

I don't have to think and I don't have to

live like I do when I'm slow.

Mediocre sand-colours swarm a bleak screen

Up to a point, blown like dust. A dog coughs.

When I run, I'm important elsewhere,

A mighty King of Nowhere, surrounded

By horizon, left soft overnight.

And the rocks, water-marked, breath-held

Like dead fish, present a familial presence

Somewhere. Back home, maybe.

When I run, the earth screams at me.

I love living when I don't have to think,

But I think I don't live when I love.

There is no sand so holy without me.

Back home, somewhere maybe, I am

Slow. A pregnant rat, its belly engorged

And stretched, pink and balloon-like.

She sees me and runs away,

She, too, is vacant. I see it

In her religious eyes. I see it in

Everyone I meet. Like a daydream.

I walk, most of the time, slow,

A lot less religious than I was,

And I think, perhaps, no less holy than sand.

I'm on Write Out Loud, a website that encourages performance poetry. Here's my profile: http://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/michaelholloway

Here is my short story The Young Man and the Old Man which appeared on the wall of FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) which is an art house cinema in Liverpool. It was on display there earlier this year.

The actual story is here:

The Young Man and The Old Man

He got on the train and said goodbye to her. Held her in his arms as she clung to his chest, reluctant to let go. She stood and waved from the platform.

He sat down. There was an old man sitting in the seat opposite and facing him. He had white receding hair which flopped over the rest of his scalp. A huge nose. Skin rough and thick like the soles of his feet. A woman with a crying baby got off the next stop and the train went silent.

'What are you?' the old man said.

'What?'

'Six foot?'

'I don't know,' the young man said. 'Yeah, something like that. Around five-nine.'

'Like me when I was your age. Tall lad. Nice girl you got. You look like me when I was your age.'

'Is that right?'

'Just think,' the old man said, 'you'll end up looking like this.' He pointed at his thick-skinned face, tobacco-coloured and wrinkled.

'I doubt it.'

'I know you do.'

'Yeah.'

'When I was your age I didn't listen.'

'Yeah.'

'When I was your age – '

'Okay,' the young man said. 'Okay. I get it.'

The train went silent once again, but for the rickety-rick of the wheels and the air whooshing in through an open window, from which a burning smell could be smelled from the factories.

'If I were you,' the old man said, 'I'd forget about myself. Just focus on her. On what you got right now. You don't matter.'

'Okay.'

'Women are rare. Love is hard to come by.'

'Okay.'

'You're not listening.'

'Hey,' the young man said, 'I don't know you. Why should I listen?'

'I'm just giving you some advice.'

'I don't need any.'

As the train picked up speed, the window created a pocket of air that roared like a fire, but then there was a fire outside. It was a person, burning alive as black smoke flew off her. And then they passed her by.

No one else saw her except the young man. The old man carried on giving him advice. But still the young man didn't listen. When the young man got off the train at his stop he was the only one to get off. He didn't smell any burning. Neither did anyone else.

Cold Coffee

Cold coffee while I write. I wear my glasses but they don't really help me focus. I wonder if I really need them or I need something else. I was reading Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I'd been told to read it ages ago. I bought it in News From Nowhere while I was looking for PIYE #2 which I'm in and I help edit. http://partyinyoureyesocket.tumblr.com/ I had to walk back to work in the rain. It was the first time in work I showed some people my writing. I guess they liked it. It was the short story called Man Smoking on a Wall, it's about a man who is sat on a wall, smoking a cigarette and talks to this other guy who seems curious about him. The smoking man then goes on about loneliness and feeling worthless. I was having these ideas of weird self-immolation fascinations and I read about the Buddhist monk who burned himself alive. The smoking man describes a man smoking on a wall who burns himself alive with a cigarette. Then the story ends. I like my short story style which I think I've adapted since I first read Hemingway in 2007. I've been told nothing happens in what I write, but I write scenes and they're like those real-life scenes, like talking to someone, where nothing happens but you and someone else talking. You can get so much out of those words than the actual actions.

Unfortunately I've become too good at ending suddenly, so it makes it difficult to write my novels. The chapters seem cut-up into vague scenes.

Here is an extract from my new novel, which is untitled:

"Two people sitting on wooden chairs holding hands. Outside fireworks, silent behind the window. Red, green. Flash-bangs without the bang, light up the room for one second every few seconds, revealing their hands drooped in a concave arch between the chairs, glowing, one part hairy and thick the other thin and girlish. The two sit fixedly in front of the television which lights them up just as the flashing of the fireworks outside. It flashes, blasting away the blueish dark now and again, and on the TV are the familiar viewing of the outside world. Red, green. The flash-bangs. War-like world on TV. The fireworks above Big Ben the new dome everyone talks about, in the papers, like some alien craft. Must be some alien things going on, the second millennium ends and what happens? War, death. They think something alien is afoot. They struggle to believe the world won't end now. But the world will end now. It will end for many people in many different ways and that strange, alien assumption they press on and on about is something like a bad dream. But some don't believe the bad dream has happened; some don't believe the bad dream will happen.

The TV, a fat Panasonic which had never been serviced once due to its flawlessness, showing the last of the fireworks, a red and green dissipating into the black of TV space, suddenly gives out and dies, revealing the black of TV space to them once again, now without the fireworks, only like ghosts, the reds and greens reflected from the outside and look almost sickeningly sweet as they bang in some false one-second sunlight.

'The television has gone off,' she said. 'What do we do now?' They parted hands. Their hands flopping to either side of the chairs, dangle like tree vines. Their fingers hooked in the same position as if remembering the previous embrace.

'What do we do now? We can watch from the window, I suppose,' he said. He went to the window to watch the fireworks light up the sky, the dark clouds lit up looked like scars. 'Catherine,' he said. 'Come to the window. It's just as good as the TV.'

'No, I don't want to look out the window. It doesn't interest me like the TV does. Can't you fix it? Can't you do something about it?'

'I'm not fixing the television on new years eve,' he said.

'But David,' she said, 'it's a minute after midnight. So it's not new year's eve any more, it's new year's day.'

'Oh, it's January now, isn't it. It's 2000.'

'That's right.'

'Has the world ended?'

'It has for me if you won't fix the television.'

Catherine sat and watched the blank screen, stubbornly glancing at the reflections on the black glass, wondering if this meant the end of her life or someone else’s. She was 35 years old and was losing the ability to stay happy at times, as if the world had sucked the life out of her before ending, and she hated being 35, not that she was older, the oldest she had ever been in her life, but that it was so confusing. She hadn't been this confused since she turned 15, an adolescent with the smells and looks of the earth that both disgusted and delighted her, but at thirty-five she had been through that and was a woman and the confusion just made her mind want to shut down and not work out any of the world any more, to just sit and watch the television. Only if it was on, mind. And it wasn't.

'Fix it,' she said. 'Fix it now.'

David, a tall man with thin hair and who always wore this tweed jacket indoors and outdoors, stood facing the window, ignoring her. Outside he saw three people stood at their gate across the road with what looked like small glasses of brandy in their hands, casually falling into mere movements of jest. One of them was Kate “L.A.” Wallace – the L.A. Meaning Los Angeles because she was an American, though she wasn't a Californian, she was from Chicago, David supposed Kate had been Hollywoodised in the eyes of the British, that all Americans were movie stars, and the fact that he thought of the word “movie” instead of “film” made him that slightly more Hollywoodised than he would have liked to think. The reason he looked at LA, stood in the dark, lit orange by a lamppost and an orange dot of a cigarette in the mouth of the man next to her, in a small dress, exposing each long bare leg, each curve of her, was that he was in love with her. He was unfortunately in love with an American. He was surely to be even more Hollywoodised if he did anything about it. So he didn't. Besides, he had Catherine. A 35 year old with the constant look of someone without a hope in the world.

'Why don't you listen to me?' she sulked. She had her hand pressed to her face, leaning into it and stuck out her lip.

David turned around. 'Sorry,' he said. 'What is it you want?'

'I want you to fix the television.'

'Why do you want me to fix it right now?'

'Because I don't have anything else. Now please fix the damn TV!'

David got on his hands and knees and in the early hours of the new millennium he fixed the broken television. It took him three hours, crossing over wires and checking the slight connections inside the box and opening up the screen to the television organs the colour of red and green spilled over the floor, the same colour as the fireworks, and the brown wires, the live wires, he separated with thumb and finger as if they were delicate worms filled with some humming danger of death, despite the neutral and earth wires being just as dangerous. He cut a wire with a pair of pliers and tried to cross thread the copper wire inside to a chock-block which he hooked up to a tester machine he had with his tools. The machine beeped and said the connection was good. If he was in work he would write a serial number and the date (1^st January) and stick it to the appliance to say it had passed an electrical safety test. It seemed the TV's electrical connection was fine so he hooked it back up to the mains, precisely like a puzzle, and made sure each wire was colour coordinated correctly, and it seemed they were, so when he had hold of one wire with one hand and another wire with the other, he didn't expect that when he plugged it back into the mains that he would have over 250 volts shoot through his body at the speed of light, throwing him back half as fast, allowing him, for the present time, to visualise his 34 years on this planet, 34 years of the 20^th century which had come to an end just like that, a fitting end, on his knees, fixing a TV."

Now and again I invoke David Foster Wallace but I try not to. Most writers will mimic what they read. It's almost impossible not to. I'm curious how I am as a writer and I suppose I'll only find that out once people read my writing, though I should neglect my laziness in place of some proactive publications and at least try to find an agent (I was turned down by Curtis Brown which seems to have put me off).

I have three complete novels written. One is a final draft. Though I've come to hate it, which I won't explain since it annoys me when I try to explain my hatred of the things I write and people don't get it, though I think it's something to do with having to read the same sentences over and over, reading what's not good so as to fix it, and now, in my head, it's a terrible piece of work. I suppose that's why I've been writing more and more, trying to finish another new book after another.

I recently read this poem out at The Pilgrim pub:

A Night at 2am

Your presence reminds me

How thin the air can be.

When I get drunk

Leaves grow out of me,

Branch at my arms,

My legs rooted to a chair.

Old Buddhas of temporary streets

Are looking at the time: 2:15am

This place is snoring.

Silent as ladybirds.

My eyes are moving,

I can feel them. 2:20am.

You change the taste of the air,

How dare you choose who you care about.

It was for In The Red Magazine which had been published in that magazine last year. It wasn't the best of reading I've done. I suppose I was put off by having not read out for six months and was just beginning to come down with the shingles virus which put me out of actions for two weeks. It was the most painful illness I've ever had. My whole body hurt. Terrible nerve pain. I was told I could have written something about it, but I never really use material like that straight away. I'll probably use it for some other piece of writing later on. I made a new collection of poems. I have 18 good, edited poems. Not much since they were taken from piles of about 100. I'd publish a collection of poetry but to be honest I'd rather publish fiction first.

I read that the poet Gillian Clarke wrote a poem for display in John Lewis Cardiff. http://www.literaturewales.org/news/i/142017/ It was penned in honour of the department store. It made me think, really, since I work in a John Lewis, why a poet would bother to write about such a place. I don't mind my job, but I wouldn't write a poem about the place. John Lewis run this weekly magazine for internal news and things and I was asked why I don't go in it, apparently I'd make an interesting story. I told them no. I just wouldn't want to compromise my image by aligning it with the store, or with any store, and I don't know why. I was told I'm too modest and I'm making it harder on myself to make it as a writer if I don't promote myself. I guess I'm more camera-shy than anything. I'd rather go unnoticed than celebrated.

Dog Snoring Like An Old Man [un-edited]

It was daylight at six in the morning. The dog was snoring like an old man. Before colour absorbed into the room, Wilton Mone sat and waited for the clock to reach seven. Two dead light bulbs in the ceiling, two lamps and a television all switched off, asleep. A musty smell of sleep came in the form of breath from up the stairs.

Wilton sat and thought about his life. He was afraid of dying. Terribly afraid. And he couldn't go running to mother about it since she couldn't prevent death. No one could. Still, he went through his memories of people that might be able to prevent his death, but they all seemed far too human to help.

By seven o'clock he left the house and got on the train into the city. It was even brighter and getting warm. A sparrow flew past before the train began to move.

Out of the window he saw a wide open space of dirt and further away were rows of terraced houses. He saw the wind blow a Union Flag. As he got closer to the city it got a lot more windy, trees silently danced side-to-side.

When he got to work he met his colleague, Nelson Buth, who was the editor of the newspaper they worked for. They were actually quite good friends, having known each other for little over two years. Nelson was an idiot who thought of himself first thing in the morning. He touched his face when he spoke, just to feel his own mouth working. 'Do you have the press release?' he said.

'Which?'

'The press release. For our client.'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'I didn't know how to write it.'

'You're useless.'

'I know.'

'I need it written up by this afternoon,' Nelson said. 'Can you manage that? Or shall I get someone else?'

'No no, I can manage,' Wilton said. He set about writing at his desk in an empty room. There was no colour in the room. Everything seemed grey. Trees slowly moved outside.

After work Wilton and Nelson went to The Farmer's Arms for a drink. The barmaid served them. She said: 'See that man over there?'

'Where?'

'There. By the window. With the hat.'

'Yeah.'

'He's been coming in here for fifteen years and used to be the life of this place. But now all he does is sit there, drinking til he's drunk stiff.

'What happened to him?'

'His dog committed suicide.'

'That's terrible.'

'I know. Hung itself with its own lead from the banister.'

'How did it manage that?'

'God knows,' she said. 'All's I know is that man's not been the same since.'

The two friends sat down near the door. It was cool there. The light was dissipating. There was no colour in anything. Nelson drank. 'Imagine that,' he said.

'What?'

'A dog killing itself.'

'Yeah,' Wilton said. 'I thought only humans did that. Not a dogs.'

'You're wrong, then. 'Cause his dog killed itself.'

'I know.'

'Makes you think how ridiculous it would be to kill yourself.'

'Or how ridiculous it is to die.'

'Dogs committing suicide,' Nelson said, shaking his head.

Later on, when it had become dark and there really was no colour, Wilton headed back home. The wind had picked up considerably. It blew his hair. Made his eyes water. On the train he saw the Union Flag in the dark. He doubted sunlight for a long time to come.

When he got home his family were asleep as if they'd never woken up. He somehow felt good about himself. He took out the shoelaces from his shoes and scrunched his tie into his pocket so the dog couldn't get hold of them. He walked into the living room and sat down. It was dark. Two lights, two lamps and the TV were off. The smell of his family, sleeping. The dog snoring like an old man.

Novel Extract pp.46-47 (unfinished/first draft)

For days I sat watching the turntable with record after record playing music through its scratchy sound. I heard a lot of early Beatles LP's and upon trying their patience by throwing myself against the wall and knocking myself unconscious three times, they changed it to Booker T and the MG's, only until they got me some later Beatles songs or maybe even some Dylan. But they never gave me what I wanted most of the time, and all I asked for was some good music – no Mozart no Beethoven, they said I'd heard too much of that and it had warped my cognitive thinking, by which they meant Mozart had driven me to the brink of madness and I had only Doctor to thank. D. was a Judas. He'd left me sitting in that room for so long, shivering with the cold, the room was just a while cube (the record player was black), and I began to believe, as no one came back, that I was in fact dead, and that I was either in Heaven or Hell, only I had to figure out when I died, up to which point in my life was I no longer living, and how it came to be that I was no longer of that world but another … It occurred to me, sitting in that room, as I then reverted to a lying-down position, that I was never alive at all, not really, my life (or whatever it was called) was just a moment of excess, a collection of drinks, pains, laughs and songs … I only had the fortune or un-fortune to experience such a moment in time because … Well, my parents had the displeasure of creating me … I then forgot, not that I knew, that I was not real, and so with being unreal, I was able to work a destructive way into myself, blind to the consequences, uncaring of anything beyond that life, for beyond it was a white room with a record player playing early Beatles songs, which go on and on and on, and you listen to them, without much of a care, because even this existence, though you may think in your head, is not real, because there is only you, and you are not there …

A woman came in. She had dirty blonde hair tied with a hairclip at the top of her head, I imagined wasn't very comfortable-looking, pulling the hair tight – everything about her seemed tight; I could snap her in two. She wore a white nurse's uniform. She pushed a metal trolley, on which sat a blue tissue with a large syringe filled with a pink-ish liquid, which she then squirted upwards to remove any air bubbles inside, which would give the recipient a heart attack if they actually reached the heart. She placed the needle back down. She read off a small chart that my ketone bodies were high (β[beta]-Hydroxybutyric acid, and Acetoacetic acid [CH3C(O)CH2CO2H], which, as an acid decomposes to both acetone and carbon dioxide like this: CH3C(O)CH2CO2H → CH3C(O)CH3 + CO2,), and that was a sign of ketosis from my not eating well, I was fasting, shall we say, and I had lost some weight, not a lot, just so you could see it in my cheeks. 'I did not see this as a problem per se, no, my dear, I was merely maintaining a disciplined regimen of meditation, like, aiding good health and spirit.'

'Okay,' she said. 'But, you see, you are quite underweight, and while you are here you must regain your physical health as well as your mental health.'

'Well, as I say, I was maintaining … '

'I heard, but you are wrong. You have done some damage to yourself. You are a sick boy.'

'I'm not a boy, I'm a man.'

'Yes, but you are a boy.

'Am I a real boy?'

'Look at yourself. Sitting there, legs crossed, listening to your records. Do you like how the record spins? Do you like it?'

'Don't patronise me.'

'I wasn't.'

'I want to leave this place right now.'

'I'm sorry, not just yet. The doctor would like to see you before you go.'

'Doctor. I hate the man. He is no Doctor! He is the Devil!'

'Yes yes, okay, my love, now I'll need to give you this needle.'

Off-Perfect Like Time (Short Story)

I am at the train station. It is cold and the sounds of trains are an off-perfect 15 mins. or so scream. This designated scream occurs when I least know, and wakes me up from a dream, where I sit slouched on this cold metal bench, which displaces the blood from my legs, absorbs into the atmosphere in the form of vapour and I become constricted and white/blue, shivering until it hurts my shoulders and cannot recover the muscle so I leave it spasming as some kind of electrode in me.

I slept here. I always sleep here. No one knows I sleep here. If they find out they wouldn't let me, but I'd find another place to sleep because I always have to sleep. No one else sleeps but me. The world keeps on moving and I keep still on this bench. I feel so tired. When I wake, on the off-perfect time every 15 or so mins. the devil bursts out of me with laughter and hopes to kamikaze in front of a moving train, but cannot since I must catch the train soon, and if I am dead then I cannot get the train. I only need to rest now. Just before the train gets here.

It is night. It is cold. I am surrounded by unfortunate dreams of darkness in a medium of motion, always going away from someone's arms, and then the scream like this: Aaaaahhhhh! But kind of electrical, too, like Zchurkkkkk or something. The blue flash frightens me, lights up the whole world, reveals this unreal world of black and white lines like a broken TV – lasts a second and I relax and go back to sleep. I am so tired.

I'll catch the next train. There is someone I want to be with. When I get there I will hold her in my arms. I'll just rest first, then I'll go. I'll catch the next train. I don't know how long I've been here. The night seems to have been here forever. The night is my best friend, we've always known each other – I sleep and no one else sleeps, so we get along pretty well.

I had a conversation with the person I'm going to see. I remember it perfectly. It went like this:

'I do love you, you know.'

'Oh yes, I do know that.'

'Don't you think we should get married and all that?'

'Oh yes, I do think we should do all that.'

'Yes, why the hell not, eh?'

'That's just fantastic for me and for you.'

'Yes, it is fantastic.'

'We'll be together forever.'

' … '

' … Forever.'

'Forever?'

'Yes, forever. We'll be together forever. And we'll die together.'

'We'll die?'

'Yes, we'll die together.'

'We can't die if we're not together.'

'But – '

' – I have to go now. Bye.'

Oh that's right, I was going away. I'll catch this next train now. I hear it on the other side of my sleep. It's coming in an off-perfect time of 15 mins. or so. But I feel so tired. It is very cold here by myself.

Novel Extract (what I'd written today)

Sometimes I'd stare into the mirror for hours trying to decide what I look like. Whether I'm ugly or not or if by coincidence I look like someone I know, and by knowing nothing at all, see a face with cheekbone ridges and chlorophyll eyes buried deep within moments of anger that now seem so subdued as if the ripples on the pond have settled and now there is quiet. I could stand there not moving for so long and feeling sick in my head and stomach but the world dims through chrysanthemum window where outside is fighting and screaming and I am in a nightmare. The absolute powerlessness of it all was confusing, making me stand in one place unable to see things as they really were, which I did not understand anyway, making me stand in one place, unable to move, corrupted to the point of a kind of sense of humour: knock knock, who's there? Olivia, Olivia who? Olivia, so get out of my house. I heard a boom outside and I thought the sounds were getting closer and closer to me, and there wasn't a single thing I could do: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

I was so sick I couldn't eat, the cramps were cutting through me. I never knew how to handle these kind of things so I usually ignored them, usually attaining to a high-fibre diet, carbohydrates, protein and the other one, (50g fat, of which saturates: 4g), sugar; though my diet usually contained aspartame mostly made up of Carbon and Hydrogen in a methyl group (R----CH3). This information was usually pointless to me, yet it was stuck in my head, words upon words, numbers upon numbers.

I'd try to decide if I was real or not, like I did when Melissa asked me “There's nothing on TV” so I decided she couldn't possibly be real; all/ most thought now was based around TV, and so if I think therefore I am then and there is nothing on TV, then existence ceases to be – of course my sister took this the wrong way decided that our two separate existences were tangent to each other in relation to certain mathematical spaces. I didn't understand what she meant so I made some tea after she'd left and took it upon myself to make sure I knew I existed, but I didn't know how so I smoked in the back yard contemplating calling (--) who now hated my guts, and I had a vague idea why, though now it seemed impossible to set things straight since it was actually all her fault and not mine. She was somewhere else by now, probably weeping into a cup of tea, moaning like a fucking ghost, the propensity to attack one another for the sake of love, by which we come to the conclusion of “angry love” that exists furiously to one seeking to ability to forbid the other.

My Website: http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/mcamholl/

Things I Learnt From A Young Age #1

Things that I learnt from a young age are:
[…] That, what would begin as a game, certain ingredients would, in effect, result in the toxification of young people, and that it is actually possible to snort liquids through the nasal passage, notably Tabasco sauce and vodka, which you would think would induce a fast-acting effect upon the brain, but really the sensation is much like a simulation of vomit in the nose, and subsequently induces actual vomiting thereafter.

That on the way to class your school friend whom you've known and trusted since primary school and trust with all your heart (at the time) will offer you a small tin, the contents of which is a powder that he would snort in the business studies classroom before class had started and you would say no to that but accept pill he calls a Gary, which is named after Gary Ablett, but you don't know who that is, and we are later told he was a football player who played for Liverpool from 1983 – 1992, and still didn't understand (Ablett rhymes with tablet).

That, on the subject of toxicfication, at the age of fourteen you sneaked into a park near the Seaforth Docks, which had a peculiar smell of cabbage, and you smoked pot with with your brother and his friend and had to run away from a policeman who was only attracted to the effeminate giggles deriving from the dark bushes because the high which was induced is quite difficult to subdue once active.

That, during P.E., you opted out of any sporting activity on account of the exact same inflamed knee condition of your friend whom you've known since primary school, and the teacher, with disbelief, has no choice but to send a group of us to the other side of the school building were we smoked – or attempted to smoke as I coughed each time I inhaled and became very paranoid about my asthma and I panicked thinking I was going to die, so I gasped in lots and lots of air until I collapsed with the over-intake of oxygen and the group of boys laughed at me when I hit my head, which hurt for the rest of the day, and I subsequently told a girl in my next class, which was Spanish, that I was in a fight with a boy, but the attraction soon goes away once another boy asks who you had a fight with.

That during exam leave we decided to go to someone's house and get drunk for the first time in our lives, and I inhaled a solvent from a glass which was just deodorant and was like inhaling perfume, making me choke and spit. With the excess deodorant I sprayed it onto my friend's arm and set it on fire, I'm still not sure why I did that. The smell of cooked skin and hair roamed the house for several hours, it made us sick at first, then we got used to it. After three or four more hours of drinking I awoke half-naked in the front garden with a bloody nose as some kids were coming home from school.

That you chose, without any moral standings whatsoever, to draw penis shapes on the plastic bus stop window in black marker, you then drew some girls name on a park bench, you then wrote your name over the plastic outer-casing of a Jurassic Park poster outside a cinema, which you got in trouble for, but you didn't understand this was because you'd written your name on the poster.

That, although I was terrified of girls at that age, I liked to be around them when a group of us hung around this social club at night and then went inside to be a even more social, but as I said I was terrified and I felt more comfortable to hang around the streets at night when the girls had gone, and then the boys had gone too, and I'd have to go home because I'd get in trouble with the police who roamed the area like rats looking for kids doing nothing.

That when we'd skip school because we were bored and sometimes just go into town and walk around or buy a magazine and a coke and sit on the field near the school and read about what was happening in the music scene in the late 90's and early 2000's, discovered a tiny grave of a hamster with a cross made from sticks, although we only guessed it was for a hamster because I was too frightened when you tried to dig it up.

That even as a kid, women were mystifying creatures. And men were my dad with different voices.

That the mere mention of sex in school was only terrifying to those who had done it.

That being 'mathematically challenged' at a young age meant you were permanently made to believe you were a lesser species than the maths teacher, who degraded you to the lowest set, but at the same time rose in sets in English, improving grammar and stylistics, which improved grades, but also rose the ability for sarcasm and hatred of the mere fact of both words and people.

That love was a dangerous thing to be a part of, when one girl fell in love with me and I fell in love with her but she vanished from my life simply because I forgot about her. (This would recur more often in later years).

That drugs, alcohol and school mixed together was an hilarious combination marred only by the mere fact that doing these things resulted in premature depression leading to me to the ridiculous decision at one point in my life to take an art course in Lancashire, where I lived for three years, doing much the same thing.

Novel Extract p.28

It's hard keeping up, I now write a novel and work 8 hours a day in work, I'm getting exhausted and I'm still doing the MA Writing. Not written any poems in a while but still on my novel. I've written over 22,000 words so far. Here is another extract:


I woke up on a hospital bed, my left arm wrapped up in a bandage with dots of red like a polka dot dress. There was a dark red/crimson colour in a triangular pointing-down arrow of the cubital fossa on my arm where the needle had intravenous access and burst through the tissue, and had kept on bleeding down to my hand. It was very warm, I remember. I'd woken up very tired and cold, my lips felt swollen and raw; the abscess under my tooth had taken ground after the lack of blood, and I wondered how much infection I'd succumb to after this escapade. It was dark in the room only because there was a heavy sky about to rain (it was afternoon). Melissa was sitting on a chair. She had a slightly miserable face, which I'd done, this having me feel the muddy effects of guilt. I thought of apologising to her, but thought against it. I didn't say anything, though I did look at her for as long as she looked at me without talking, her eyes on mine very cold like icy water – I began to shiver, breathing heavily through my nose, hoping that this headache was only from the vacuous space left in the superficial vein that was now a long dead worm that stretched up to my armpit where it ached – the skin all bruisy and tender, skin paraffin-white, skin very porous, cold and dry. Melissa looked away, glancing out of the window, now becoming the only light available, shining on my sister's face, a poor pathetic thing less pathetic than me – I looked at her for minutes longer, knowing she knew I was looking at her, could not find words with which to express whatever it was I wanted to express to my little sister, who, by now, had crossed a leg and her arms, sighed once and clenched her jaw. I looked away.

Novel Extract (p.18, without formatting)

When I am walking here with these noises in my head I feel dizzy with the effects of whatever is inside of me right now and cannot keep my eyes open, there is (–) who is probably shining like a holy thing, but I cannot see properly right now and my throat is on fire with the effects of something and someone is screaming and it gives me a headache – I wish this woman was not so full of lies as I think she is, because I cannot marry a liar – though I do not know what she has done just yet – I sit down (I am inside somewhere) D. was here but cannot see him – can I see at all? The time is 17:58; my home feels like a temple, round as a Stupa (a heap of power I have now used in the wrong way [18:01] whereby I dwelleth not in temples; he who does not believe dwells on himself).

'You are stupid,' (–) says, but I do not know why she thinks I am stupid as I find my body stood on the other side of the room, which is wider than normal – Oh, it is my room, I recognise the window, I recognise the mirror (not my reflection, but the Café Tabac menu) and pick up a book (heavy) and notice the bulging blue veins in my fingers constricting … something … there is a pain in my wrist, which causes a lump in the joint (or does that cause the pain?) which is an old injury that comes and goes, though it strangely notices the weight of books (Infinite Jest) … feels like I'm one of the Satori Mowri of the Inhubai Village who used bullet ants within a glove as initiation to become a man, the pain of which is unheard of, you'd want to gnaw your own hand off, rip it clean off the joint –

She called me stupid. I stand there with not a dickie bird in that I've no idea what she's on about – I think she may have said Stupa, the shape of my temple, although I've no idea what her face is saying to me – her stupid voice is saying something.

'You are so stupid, you know that?' she says. She has the look of someone who has licked a stinging nettle. Her clothes are the colour of tooth decay, which is going to rot itself into her skin – she's too sweet, rotten to the core, but I can't keep my hands away, I'm simply attracted to filth. I cannot help myself. I spoon-fed this one sugar after sugar and given myself my own healthy dose of a potent analgesic, though does nothing for the pain which resides in my lowerright molar (and the pain in my shoulder, and my headache) – doctor said I need more tests. Mouth dry, I see Christine's cat on the outside of my window, a little black and white thing saying Mao as if it is a Chinese Communist revolutionary, (specifically of the Hanzu ethnic group) who, by a cult of personality, has come to have it's picture hung in my living room, along with a million other households, by which he can uphold his own charismatic authority by way of hero worship. I hate that cat.

'Why?' I say, my eyes rolling underneath the drunken stupor I thought I was hiding very well, though I cannot – what, with me still stood, wearing my uniform-black coat, and unable to sit still, seeing through a mist of red/green/blue – 'Why am I stupid?' I ask her, but I know why and it's not how I'm acting, not at all, I know how I'm acting, I always do (up until the point I forget, but I always always know what I'm doing – not that that means I can control it), no, what she means is what I've said. This dialogue between ghosts is so difficult I'm unable to comprehend. I'd asked her to marry me.

'You idiot, you actually think that I'd say yes?'

'Yes.'

'Well no.'

'No?'

'Yes!'

'Damn.'

'Yeah. You can't marry me. We're hardly even together,' she says 'together' as if it tastes bad. I now have a bad taste in my mouth, it's a metallic taste, which is much more prominent because my mouth is as dry as cotton anyway, and my tongue is cracking and splitting in two.

'I'm going to have to go,' she says (I've offended her) 'I'll see you tomorrow,' (Just embarrassed) 'Maybe,' (she doesn't know).

She walks out of the flat, closing the door in slow motion so as not to hurt my feelings further, but it's okay because I'm so drunk I've forgotten the whole thing. I begin to laugh because I think I've been talking to D. since I thought he was here, but he's not. I suppose he's out in the street, up to his eyeballs in ketamine somewhere, probably near Canning by now, harassing the waitresses with false hopes of love by producing large amounts of money he obtained from his own shitty job, which pays much better than my own. There is no sign of him, except the one glass tumbler (lead crystal) browned to the sides with Jack Daniels and Coke, which, itself, smells of lead.

I suppose it is now September and the Summer leaves are on the ground (I see them through my window); sky is the colour of a gun. I feel sick to my stomach – feels the partial depression within the walls of my arteries pumping the 5.5 litres of blood pounding into my brain, which feels the after-effects D. has left me with: musculoskeletal relaxes. I am jelly. I turn my head away from the window and this knocks me dizzy – head jerks forward, and I vomit. I spit some blood.

Evil brain. What have you done? I must leave, I cannot bare this much longer. It is disgusting. Man dwelleth not in temples.

B. Is For Button

B. is seated next to You, his hands out in front of him as if playing the piano with Twiglet fingers, stained with tobacco.

You look at him more than once, and resolve to do so until B. catches You at the corner of his eye. He stops moving because You have fastened him to his seat, surrounded by thick, woven arms and animal pictures with stark, glassy eyes shining in a heavy summer light through caged windows. It takes him three seconds to look away. He settles back into his mind, facing forward and listening to whatever is going on (whatever this is does not matter).

The Twins are talking, You don't know which because they both sound similar. You describe one of them in your mind: an oval-shaped head, in which are pea-soup eyes with a these-are-facts-so-listen-to-me-talk expression; thin body with no attempt at constructing either shoulders or posture. This x 2.

B. begins to write something down, as if prompted by the other one sitting next to him, which both You and B. believe is called Olive. You show an expressionless smile, jaw pushed forward, eyes glancing around. The Twins are still talking, You hear their voices like a beating hum from a sub-woofer.

The Next one in the room sits between You and the Twins, and has a permanent smile of latex, curved through a weird blue/yellow bruise, which no one includes in the conversation for fear of offending the Next one, who is now bent over, almost prostrate from the chair, reaching at her ankle to scratch. She smells of over-cooked food for some reason. It's not terrible, You think it's like she's been left in the toaster too long and You look above her head for signs of black smoke. There is none, but still You shift over by a centimetre, stopped by the arm of the couch, unable to go anywhere else. Your eyes glance over at B., who sees You at the same time, his eyes like the eyes of your dog: big round things, uncontrollable and unaware.

Finally, Olive throws a button to the floor, which lands onto a pile of buttons already there. You love how B.'s eyes follow it to the ground and bounce in synchronised motions. B. leaps forward to grab the buttons as he yells something along the lines of I've won, but Olive leaps too, and wrestles him on the ground, hits his body with a mechanic force and smashes his head against the floor. She does it again and blood squirts out, thick like soup. You smell him, it's like meat.

The Twins had stopped talking, but now resume talking, You don't know which. The Next one jumps out of her seat next to You and takes the button. It is green and orange like the iris of a smoker's eye. The Next one leaves. You are still sitting down. You don't often gamble, You are looking at Olive who sits on top of B. You think this is too bad, You liked B. His round dog-eyes were a bit like the buttons she killed him for.

You sit still and watch Olive now wrestled to the ground by three new men in white pyjamas. She kicks at the floor and the buttons stick to her bare feet. The Twins are still talking, You can hear them in your head. You are as still as B., who lies there with streaked blood footprints around his head. You are now smiling a little bit, and this is good, because it's good to smile. B. liked it when You smiled. You're smiling because You love it when this happens. You hug yourself and rest your head back against the soft, padded wall.

© 2010 Michael Holloway

This story was written along with Kouponophobia around June 2010. It was written as part of an exercise following the theme of "button" whereby anything could happen, only it has to involve a button in some way.

Kuponophobia was, obviously, about a fear of buttons and was largely praised for it's detail in such a small format, and I found that I was actually good at short fiction or 'flash fiction.'

B. is for Button is an experimental story. It was written with the intention that every character spells out the word "button" and that was how button appears in the story. ie., B., You, Twins (tt), Olive (O), and The Next One (N). It was appraised for the imagery and style, but was quite confusing to read. It wasn't really understood why B. was attacked for the button, of which is used as a type of poker chip in some betting game. In the workshop, I was able to come up with the idea - thanks to my friends - that B. is actually a mental patient who has created the entire game in his head. Revealed when he rests his head against the padded wall.

It was put on the website The Button Jar, which a friend from class had made. The stories/poems from which are being put on there.

http://www.staff.ljmu.ac.uk/ICDSHAYN/mywriting/buttonjar/pageofbuttons.html

V. Short Narrative

There was a young man who knew a girl and she was around the same age and were both very close friends, spending a lot of time together. One day, unprompted by anything, the man decided to ask her “Are you in love with me?”

After a short pause, in which she was stunned by the question and slightly embarrassed, she said “No.”

He said “Well then, I think you should keep away from me.”

And she did. They stopped talking, in effect stood back-to-back, no longer friends, no longer acquaintances, no longer anything; they didn't even see each other to speak. Soon they did not recognise each other on the street with the time they spent apart.

Ten years past. In their thirties, the girl soon marries, and not long after, the man, too, marries. One day, they past each other on the street, but this time the girl recognised him and she says: “You're – ”

To which he replied “Yes, and you're – ”

And she confirmed it was who she was.

After a short pause, she looked at him and said “You're in love with me, aren't you?”

To which the man replied “Yes.” And there was nothing either of them could do about it.

Koumpounophobia

Those plastic things hooked in a line, from her throat – the V of her collarbone – down to her stomach, like a list of eyes the colour of a dilated pupil. She looks at me and smiles with her teeth, and her teeth look like buttons, and there is no way I could get any closer to that, she'll taste of plastic and I'll choke on her as if she is a button herself.

It's strange how quick she moves compared to me. I cannot move, I'm fastened to the hardwood floor. Her hands are by her side but I don't move my hands. I pretend I am in control and I look at her clothing and the pieces of plastic holding them together, which are looking at me – little eyeballs of a CCTV biologically inserted intravenously with nerve endings and wires and veins into her body.

She says something about unbuttoning.

I say something like I'm not entirely sure that would be appropriate.

She frowns and takes to the motions of unbuttoning her clothes, as I rub my hands together so as not to touch the plastic discs, which I imagine feel smooth between my fingers. Black like coffee, white like cream – or cataract of a blind eye – I can taste the plastic in my mouth as the first button is undone and it's like coins sliding down my gullet, more and more, choking me with the acrylic taste, right at the back of my tongue, touching my tonsils and scraping at the bitter taste buds.

I want to be sick, I say.

She says something like, Oh no, is it me? What have I done wrong?

I say, Of course not. But I cannot carry on this conversation because I've been trying to hold my breath. The talking has brought a quick release of carbon dioxide and the reaction of oxygen in my head sends me blind for a second.

I am now sitting down, looking at her face, my dizziness giving her four eyes like a button. She tells me I look pale. The rest of what she says is white noise from a radio. She is sitting so close to me that the buttons are almost touching my hand, and I'm frozen again. Don't move, don't move, don't be sick, don't be sick.

I tell her it's okay, I'm fine, I just felt a bit dizzy. And then I sit back into the cool leather couch. The buttons are undone, I don't have to look at her now – but her eyes, great big black buttons, just staring at me.

© 2010 Michael Holloway

Death of a Clown [final version]

The Death of a Clown


I leave the dressing room door open as I walk in. The make-up is hot and heavy on my face. I sit in the chair, feeling the weight of my body pull downwards and I smell a funny smell in the air. It could be the mop in the corner, or the greasy paints and make-up in front of me, but all the smells are mixed together. In the mirror, a clown's face is looking at me – ugly as a germ, magnified a hundred times under a microscope; an old, crawling thing; blue, white, and red.

The single light bulb hanging from the ceiling burns thin streaks of

light into the room allowing me to see where the thick mascara has bled, leaving inky crow's feet near my eyes. My dry, ridiculous mouth, stuck in a permanent grin, is thick over the lips with the powdery consistency of eye-liner. I lick my lips, tasting the greasy paint. I roll it on my tongue, it tastes a bit like wax crayon. The metallic smell is getting up my nose and begins to sting and gives me a headache. My tired eyes are kept open with painted-on plus signs near my corpse-white cheeks. Green hair shoots out past my ears. It's my real hair, I don't wear wigs. All this make-up makes me feel heavy. But my reflection seems to like it a lot with that mad, crooked smile.

A cold draft blows in through the open door and a small fly buzzes in.

Its sexless, compound eyes watching me. It says:
– First she took off her clothes, undressing with the slow precision of a machinist, dropping a thin layer of fabric showing muscle discharge and afferent, the articles of clothing like shedded skin … Always drinking … Always drinking … Lips no use for kissing; tongue like a rat's tail …

The fly buzzes around my head and dips in and out near my ears, the

sound rising and falling as it does. It's small and sickening. It's a little black dot moving from side to side like the pupil of an eye. I look back to the mirror and I see myself, cleaning off the make-up. I apply Pond's Cold Cream with my hands and rub it in an upward motion over my cheeks, then in circular patterns, then under my nose and over the thin skin of my eyelids. I rub it over my forehead, moving towards the centre of the glabella between my eyebrows. It's freezing to touch at first, but then it goes cool and my skin becomes sensitive so I can feel the draft coming in through the open door behind me. The colours melt. I wipe the cream off with a tissue, and now it looks like my eyes have burst as black goo runs down my cheeks. My lips are swollen. The white skin wipes off. I am a ghost. I look terrible. My eyes are bloodshot as if I have been strangled and my head is pounding, still, from that horrible metallic smell. My stomach contracts. My hands clench and relax. I feel sick. I want to be sick. Am I wearing clothes? Yes, I'm wearing clothes. The door is open. There is no one there.

– You look ridiculous … Always drinking … Slow muscles, the clothing,

the skin … You look as bad as her … Covered in paint, poor old thing … Creaks and moans, struck down with sick grins, the moaning catches a glimpse in the mirror, undressing with slow precision, ruined her body … Stuck, you go back and forth … Wipe your face, you look terrible …

Now my make-up is ruined and I look ridiculous. More ridiculous than I

did before. I'm so tired and I just want to sleep but I can't with that fly buzzing over my head. Why are you so attracted to me? I say to the fly. I turn and my spine cracks and there is the odd moment when my spine makes the only sound in the world, like gunfire behind a pillowcase. I lean forward and bang my fists against the dressing table and the lamp jingles and everything rattles, the rubber chicken squeaks, one juggling ball rolls and drops to the floor with a muted thud as the fly flies around the room watching my every thought.

– You look terrible. You look ridiculous. Put that make-up back on …

Always drinking … Covered in paint … Stupid thing, used up … Struck down with a knife, with slow precision of a … Poor thing, she was, her sick grin, no clothes, painted face, you look … Muscles, the clothing, the skin …
Why should I put the face back on? I say.
Because you look terrible without it. So did she, that's why she wore it. Haha!

In front of me are a number of face paints and some make-up with

coloured thumb prints on the lids. I apply a red paint over my mouth, which feels so thick it's like lard, and now my lips are thick and swollen again like a woman's. The red has gotten onto my teeth. The carmine hook I call a mouth is stuck in a permanent grin. I am tired. I … I am … this flesh-thing sits … face like some dead creature … face white … face like melted oils, morphed into an animal … I can smell the danger like a dog.

I look into the mirror. I hate having to clean my face, and I haven't

even finished cleaning it; pale with red lips, I look like a dead woman. The fly buzzes around my head. It says:

– You are old and used up, just like she was, poor old slut … poor and

old … I know you're thinking of her, it's all over your face …

– I hate you. I was never old.
– Poor old thing … Hate was such a strong word, throwing them back and

forth, back and forth … Your body is old, it creaks and moans, she was a scorpion's tail stuck suddenly like a knife, but it doesn't hurt … Aren't you going to clean your face? You look funny … She looks funny … Poor old thing she was, stuck suddenly, but it didn't hurt though, it didn't hurt … It didn't hurt, not really, not like you did … Old thing … Sick grin, the slut, smells of oil … Throws the knives back and forth … Your mouth looks funny, she said, stuck in a permanent grin …

I wave my hand through the air to shoo it away and I catch a glimpse of

my half-done face in the mirror and I feel like laughing at it. I should clean the rest of it off to get ready for the next performance in the theatre, but I see this sick grin over my lips beneath low hung eyes caked in blue powder, and I don't want to lose it.

– Pay attention to me … Why aren't you paying attention to me?

– No, go away. You get on my nerves. I say. I think I'm smiling.

– Stuck suddenly like a knife, the scorpion throws strong words … She creaks

and moans … Poor old thing, moaning, back and forth, back and forth … It didn't hurt though, she looked ridiculous with that sick grin, hardly one to clean her face … Such strong words, weren't they? … Poor old thing, poor slut … Put that make-up back on! Haha! Makes me think of her, old thing, dead as a body …

– Can't you stop that?

– From the left ear to the right, through that old shilling you call a brain

… Makes me laugh sometimes, when I think back … Back and forth … Throwing those old strong words … It didn't hurt, though … Remember her, do you? She would draw attention in the same way you would empty rooms … You still do empty rooms … Stings suddenly, stuck like a knife, forth and back, she throws them, hardly ever wiping clean her face … cleaning, cleaning, but still the flies, like me, flies round you … She catches a glimpse in the mirror … The poor old ridiculous thing …

I dab the Cold Cream over my face again, rubbing over the lips and then

wiping the paint off with a tissue. I toss the scrunched up tissue aside and wipe my face with facial wipes, making weird, contorted mouth shapes as I do. My skin is slightly pink now, but quite soft. I might get a rash on my cheeks if I don't moisturise, but I don't feel like doing that right now. The pores in my skin still feel clogged up. So, that's what I look like. I'd forgotten what I looked like. I'm looking in the mirror and my eye sockets are huge black dents with green circlets inside. It's this skeletal figure with a cubic jawbone looking at me, the faded red smile almost entirely gone. I'm hardly recognisable at all without the make-up. I feel the cooling effects of the cream on my skin and smell a mixture of antiseptic and grease. There is that metallic smell, too, coming from either the metal aerosol cans or the pigments in the colours, the vapour sucking up all the air in the room; my head is so painful now, making me wince. I don't have any painkillers, just make-up and paint and more greasy colours all over the table. Used tissues with black and red smudges, and empty spray cans mixed in with the full ones.

The fly buzzes around my head, almost hitting me. Once it hits the

mirror, making a papery sound and it almost falls down, but it carries on flying, dipping up and down, getting so close to me I can almost smell it. I am still sitting on the chair. I am smiling. I say:

– Why don't you just go away and leave me alone?

– Left ear to the right ear, back and forth … She would draw attention, but not anymore … She would creak and moan, but not anymore … She used to sting, not anymore …

– She did this, she did that. Is there anything she didn't do?

– She used to wear that make-up like you do, remember? That would draw attention, not like you … Poor old thing … Stuck a knife in her, that happened, didn't it?

– Poor damn thing … Damn thing, damn thing, I say.

– Stuck suddenly, you didn't think it could happen, did you? Stings like a

knife … She moans, she moves back and forth, back and forth. God, don't you love it?

– No. Of course not. Shut up, now, I don't want to hear anymore of it.

– But she's not here anymore.

– I didn't do it.

In this little dressing room, I feel a chill on my naked face, and I realise

I have taken off my face. I feel so bare. I turn my head away from my reflection at last, and stand up. She protrudes like fingers when I reach the door, and there is the icy breath of the draft on my damp face. It makes me shiver. I begin to smile a lot wider and a small giggle hiccups out of my throat. The fly buzzes over my head and I start laughing, I can't help it. It's almost like a seizure in my diaphragm and it hurts; the sound of a horrible mechanical thing as I think Two clowns walk into a bar and I burst into a fit of laughter, holding onto my stomach. The fly watches me and I can't stop laughing. I knock over a bottle of moisturising lotion and the rubber chicken and I laugh so hard I feel the blood pound in my forehead. My stomach begins to cramp. I can hear the buzzing above me and I just can't stop laughing. I smell the medicinal smell of soap and creams and a metallic smell and the laughter is coming out of me like vomit.

– What's so funny? It says.

– We're just clowns. That's what's funny.

But the fly doesn't laugh, it has no sense of humour. I take in a huge

breath and let out a long, relieving sigh, still grinning, knowing she won't be coming back. What's funny is that I'm still dressed as a clown with my baggy pants and suspenders. I still have green hair, too. There's no escaping it. I think I'm always going to be a clown whether I wipe it all off or not, and I find this hilarious. But what's really funny is that she's still here, on the floor, where she died. The blood is still warm on her arms, half-congealed over the floor and her baggy pants. There is a fly buzzing round her smell. Her rainbow-coloured hair hanging off with her head hung down. I realise the noise I must be making down the corridor when I begin to laugh again, and I hear the manic echo of my voice, going on and on. The fly leaves and there is silence. I close the door shut.

Another Unfinished Piece of Fiction

I waited for 1000 years, I counted precisely 1000 years, 3 months, and 6 days. And now I have lost my mind, but I'm still alive as you are alive in your skin. And I'm trying to be mental, my face stretched open my eyes, pulled skin open and explode – pieces of me disperse into the air. I feel like a nail presses against my skull into a vein, a nerve, the brain himself.

She is being touched. I look at where she is being touched. She laughs and shivels up, looking at me. Where am I? Holding back a laugh, face touches his face – she wants to move away. Her hair reaches down to her breasts, my eyes like a robot's eyes scan her face, throat, armpit, scar on arm, and the breasts I dream next to.

The thing is about her is what she never says. I'm looking into her eyes, these light brown walnut-coloured eyes; her eyes say to me: Come and get me if you want me. Get this fool away from me. Go on. Come get me.

Satan is in the background. The red skin is shiny. Black horns protrude from emaciated head of reptilian demeanour. She begins to grin and she has no soul. She kisses him and imagines the rest of the night. I try not to think too far ahead. Her fox-like mouth laughs at me now. Why aren't you on me?

She is in love with her body. So am I – hers no mine. I can see how her hair touches naked shoulder and spikes of wool. Eyes closed, she screams the song. One strap has falled carelessly off her left shoulder. She thinks she looks beautiful. Too bad for her. With a body like that she could have the entire male population of the country.

And all that ever derides her, the skeleton claws at her back, then the three cans of Carlsberg left untouched on the counter. Buttoned up, she grins and pulls her tongue out, arousing every man in the room; her horns stick up like red arched torsos.

Short Piece of Fiction - Unfinished

She is on my mind like a murderer. Stinging in the back as if the sting of a wasp sting my back, piercing the nerves with nails and teeth, biting and tearing away at me, clawing at my body with her claws of the devil. What is on my mind doesn't matter as I am singing a song in front of about a hundred people and I don't even know what I'm singing. Am I singing? I have to check, to see if there is a sound emitting from my mouth. There is. I feel it more than hear it. But I'm using it, my mouth is working on it's own. Oh my God, my mouth is working on its own. What if it stops halfway? I don't know where I'm up to.

I'm singing a Lead Belly song, I will soon begin to scream like Kurt Cobain did when he covered the song in 1993, a year before his death, and when I scream it will feel like this is a year before my death. As if it's a death scream, a warning before I die. One year to go.

She is on my mind and she shouldn't be, hanging on like someone feining suicide, and I am pretending, also, that I can sing. I can't sing. I'm using this weird falsetto that scratches from my throat so its like I'm singing with this weird anger in me. I can't sing. I have a singing voice. But I can't sing. My voice goes low and high. My eyes burst with salt tears as the force of the song pushes through the valve of my throat. She is sitting directly in front of me, leaning forward so that her back doesn't rest on the solid wooden back. She has her legs crossed. Her body is in a dress. Her body is slim and petite. Her legs make her look taller than she really is.

The Death of a Clown

My make-up is dry and it clags on my chin
I'm drowning my sorrows in whiskey and gin.

The Kinks

I leave the door open. My make-up is dry on my skin. It feels hard and tight like fish scales, and I can't find anything to clean my face with so I just sit down in a chair, facing the mirror, and wait. I see half of my reflection; I'm sitting a little off-centre. My mascara had bled a little and it looks like a crow has stood on my face. I lick my red lips tasting the wax. I am like a cartoon, as if someone has drawn me, my mouth is ridiculous. It's a massive thing over my teeth. My eyes are big; everything seems so big, as if it's all been magnified a hundred times.

I see fleshy light bulbs burning thin streaks of yellow light into the room. The lights around my mirror make me want to flutter my eyelashes at myself, and I do, but it doesn't look pretty. I look like a child has found it's mother's make-up and applied thick coats of lipstick over and over again and slapped layers of deathly-white foundation over the skin. I feel heavy.

There is an old sense of madness with this face, which I'm wearing on my skin for everyone to see. There is a cold draft coming in through the door, there is probably a face at the door, its sexless eyes watching like the compound eyes of a fly. I watch it change into a fly – I watch you change into a fly – you first take off your clothes, undressing with the slow precision of a toolmaker, dropping your thin layer of clothes showing muscle discharge and afferent in relation to slow moving articles of clothing like shedded skin. And you fly away back out of the door, with a silent buzz that rings in my ears as if it was a scream.

The door is open and I am freezing cold, I can't see or hear anyone, I can still hear the tiny buzzing of a fly, I sometimes see it, or I think I see it, flying around the room. I am sitting down. I am drinking gin. I am waiting for something, I can't remember what it is, but here I am, waiting. My make-up is solid on my face, my skin feels like it's made out of rock, I am made out of rock, it is why I am not moving. A fly comes in and buzzes around my head, a thin, sickening buzz screeching in my ear.

I find a cloth and wet it under the tap at the small sink in the room. I see myself in the mirror again, cleaning my make-up off like a woman. It melts. It looks like my eyes have burst and secrete black goo down my cheeks. My lips are swollen. The white skin wipes off with cold cream. I am so white I am a ghost. I can't finish. My arms are heavy and I feel so lazy that I could just sit back and sleep. I look terrible. I look ridiculous. My eyes are bloodshot as if I have been strangled, savagely cut in half, one part English one part alien. My stomach contracts. My hands seize and relax. Seize and relax. I feel … sick. I want to be sick. Am I wearing clothes? Yes, I'm wearing clothes. The door is open. There is no one there.

My make-up is ruined, I look ridiculous. I look terrible. I'm tired. I doubt I am here. There is no one here. There is a fly here, somewhere, it is you. Why are you so attracted to me? Like a magnet. There seems to be a strange amount of magnetism in madness. I turn and my spine cracks and there is the odd moment when my spine makes the only sound in the world, and it's like gunfire behind a pillowcase. I lean forward and bang my fists against the dressing table and the light bulbs jingle and everything rattles and the rubber chicken squeaks and one juggling ball rolls and drops to the floor with a muted thud as the fly flies around the room watching my every thought. I find the lipstick and apply a new coat of red over my lips until they are thick and swollen again, like a woman's, but I can't finish the paint without someone to help me. Where is the help? I need my paint. My mouth is distorted like seeing a blood clot in a broken mirror. I am tired. I … I am … this flesh-thing sits … face like some dead creature … face white … face like melted oils, morphed into animals and various creatures … I can smell the danger like a dog.

My clown make-up is cold on my face, my eyes see my face in mirror. The light bulbs light up my face as if I am an actress. I am a boy. A room like flesh, and horrible, terrible things – when boy asks what kills the eyes you reply …

My face … my make-up gives me an enormous sense of power, as if I am larger than I really am, magnified a hundred times under a microscope – an old, crawling thing, blue and white and red, and black, and waxy and old … my face sees my face in the mirror.

My body is old and dishevelled, it creaks and moans, she is like the scorpion's stinging tail stuck suddenly like a knife, and it doesn't hurt, more like it burns and there is a fly buzzing around me, I hear it, but there is no fly, the room is empty, I don't hear a thing. I am sitting on a chair. Something truly big comes in the room like a shadow. I am forced to stand up and led away. I smile. I do a dance. I attach my big red nose that squeaks when you squeeze it. Although I am innocent in all of this, away from my reflection at last, my other half is like the devil, and she protrudes like fingers and when I reach the door, feeling the cold draft on my damp face, like icy breath, you almost kill me, but by the time I feel the expected nothing, I fall against the door. It's like being another person, don't you understand I'm not actually you? You are laughing … you are laughing … I am laughing … the gin has kicked in … I fall against the door and spoil my make-up, I fall against the door and nobody needs clowns anymore. I fall against the door as it slams shut.

© Michael Holloway