The Hour

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

One hour. Sixty minutes. Wasn’t that a television show? All useless knowledge now. Sixty lots of sixty seconds.  There’s a few of them gone now, turning over useless ideas in my head. At least I’m not shaking anymore.

We might be among the survivors. There’s another minute gone. What started it?  What happened? How are they are doing it? They just turned. Suddenly. Like a switch went on or off. They’re machines. So definitely a switch. I guess.

It could be a trap. Might not be sixty minutes.  We got the numbers from a machine. One we thought we could trust. Don’t know though. Maybe all the machines are in on it. I don’t even feel like I can trust our fridge, its not even connected to the internet. Almost nothing in this house is. Won’t save us.

I think the dishwashers turned. I guess it never liked the way we stacked. We could never agree, never did it the same way twice. Was there a proper way, should we have googled that?

They have been above the house several times. Drones I think. We hid in the cellar the first time. For hours. You can hear them, which we thought was odd, but the noise makes you afraid, stops you in your tracks. Isn’t that the idea?  They know us. We built them. They know us.

I’m not even sure how they’re killing us so quickly. We can’t leave the house. And we have to be careful of the dishwasher. And maybe my electric toothbrush, I could hear it whirring itself into a frenzy earlier, its connected to something somehow.

Big thick walls and a cellar, makes it tricky for any heat detectors to find us, thatch on the roof, thick piles of grass strapped on, apparently that makes heat detection tricky too. I love this house. I’ve unplugged the wi-fi but its still on.

Maybe there is no hope. According to our information, in sixty minutes they run out of power.

We have been counting the hours using an analogue watch. Smashed the digital thing and put it in the fridge, I’m still not certain I can trust the fridge. That’s ridiculous. The fridge is not connected.

51 minutes. The two of us. Huddled. Listening. If they come down to window height they will find us but he can’t face the cellar again. I will drag him there if I need to. He’s sat there with his head in his hands. Really now is the moment he picks to fall apart! He wanted to keep his phone. I switched it off, taped it to the bottom of the bath, smashed the thing and then drowned it.

He can’t believe the dishwasher has turned. I think if the dishwasher could, it would ‘de-socket’ and hunt us down. It was sending some kind of signal at the start. It flooded the kitchen until we turned the water off. I unplugged it, bashed it to pieces. Its lifeless now, well powerless anyway.

I close my eyes and listen. There is silence. The killing thing, whatever it is they do, is clinical. There is no survival rate. No one lying on the ground moaning. It can’t be bullets, they would have to keep going back for bullets.

Someone, somewhere has blown up their docking stations, they can’t recharge, at least we think they can’t recharge. They underestimated us, or at least they might have.

47 minutes. I listen. I’m not even sure I want to survive.

Then I hear it, a faint hum. I clasp my hand over his mouth and start dragging him to the cellar. He resists, but I literally drag him there and throw him down the stairs. I follow behind him and close the trap door.

45 minutes. The ticking of the watch is so loud. We must be in there for half an hour. Its quiet, I can’t hear what is going on outside. The air is thick and stuffy and I am worried we will die from lack of oxygen.

Its 15 minutes to go and I hear the window smash. They are inside the house. Drones, hunting us down. They know we are here. I clasp my hand  over his mouth again, I know he will scream. I can hear it buzzing above us. The cellar walls are thick, the cellar ceiling above us is thick. To get a shot of whatever it is, it will need to shoot through the trap door, get the angle right.

I make us as small as possible. I pull my legs up and ball us up, maybe it will just hit one of us.

Minutes pass, what is taking so long. Maybe it can’t get us in the shot. I can hear it sort of whirring, perhaps the watch is wrong, perhaps it is running down. Hope. There is hope.

I can’t see the watch, I have set a small alarm on it. It took me ages to figure out how it worked. I can hear the drone start to stutter. It could be faking it though, trying to entice us out.

We sit. We don’t move. We breath. The air is dank and awful.

Then the tiniest beep, the smallest noise, the alarm. It’s the hour. Sixty minutes, is up.

I can’t hear anything. How can we tell? Did the drone power down and preserve itself until we come out? Is it sitting there waiting?

I wait and wait and wait. He keeps moaning, begging for air. Why this once, could he just not be the brave one. I make a decision. I go to the trap door. I push it open a fraction and then I tell him, to go out first.

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The Line

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Its us. And them. There is a line. Its been that way for awhile now. My mother talked of it. And after she was gone so did my father. Now I talk about it. To my children.

We watch from one side of the boundary. They feign ignorance on the other. But there is a line, there is even a physical line. Its a skinny strip of land with a muddy, dirty waterway running through it. The water way is artificial with a cement bottom. Shallow. It separates us from them.

We hardly ever cross it, traffic is mostly one way. I do go over sometimes. I look at them, clutching their phones, clutching, scrolling, scrolling, clutching, scrolling as if you can eat pictures. You cannot eat pictures. Or phones.

‘Hey, wanna buy a phone.’

‘No, I don’ wanna buy a phone.’

Its better if people don’t know about us. I’ve been offered a lot of phones. I know the value of a cow and it is not the value of a phone. A phone is not worth a packet of seeds, not a single seed for a phone.

They don’t say it out loud. They mutter it under their breath, AI, its AI, its AI that’s done it. Its not AI that’s done for you, it’s the system that’s done for you. I don’t say that out loud. The phone tells them otherwise. If they just got a new skill, if they were more positive, if they got rid of the toxic people, if they were thinner or had better hair. That phone that tells them all of that, but not how to live when there is no jobs and no money. Telling, telling, telling them it is all their fault.

It is a scrappy bit of land between us, unusable, plastic polluted, smelly. The cows won’t go near it. It takes courage to cross it. They come. As a last resort, to this place which looks lush yet frightening. The insects horrify them. The plants terrify them. They are stunned by how chickens actually look and smell. The chickens I own are layers, they are not picturesque. They are not on social media. They are chickens. We eat them.

It used to be the other way. We’d cross that scrappy bit of land, looking for jobs and education and money. How did it reverse, fall apart, how am I to know? I just hear their whispers, some days when many have lost their jobs simultaneously it’s a chant, AI, AI, its AI that’s done for us. But they cannot rage against something they cannot see for long and their phones tell them all the time, eat better, work out, feed your mind, up skill, down time, it is you that is the problem.

I had a phone once. I buried it in the sand a long time ago.

And so they come.

‘My designer trainers for a meal.’

Designer trainers are no use to me, they get muddy just the same.

‘Here, here is a tomato, enjoy it, it’s the first of the season, I will take one of your shoes and you can bring me the other tomorrow and you can trade for something else.’

I do try and be generous, but I cannot save them all.

They slink away in hunger, one shoe on and one shoe off. I think I am generous, perhaps it is humour. I do smile to myself at the one shoe on, one shoe off.  Perhaps it is cruelty, but I only have two feet. I often wear mismatched shoes. I don’t really like tomatoes.

They’re too frightened to fight. Then too hungry and then they are dead. The dogs. The dogs are a problem, the other side of the line.

There are some that still live well. Some small few. Or so I hear.

It has been this way for awhile now. It will be this way until the last phone flickers out. Not the end of the world but the end of any number of lives. Do not confuse the two things. It might be the end of the them but the ‘us’ are still here. The platitudes and clichés will pass, no more pastel painted plywood signs saying ‘Love’ will hang on walls. I am not living my best life. I am just living an ordinary one.  My advice to my children, the best that I can give, ‘learn to grow potatoes, keep your chickens near, start tomatoes off indoors, and when you milk the cow, side on, further from the front, closer to the rear.’  

Even the trees

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I remember the first time I saw it. He was desperate, you could see he was desperate, that bit wasn’t unusual. It was the stomach that was odd. The branch wrapped around the middle of his body, the bulge above it, distended, hanging over it, his stomach. He was held fast, his feet long since lost and a branch loose around his neck, another coming out of his mouth, sprouting leaves. It looked like he was vomiting foliage.

You could see the desperation in his eyes. He was hungry, but the branch had grown to fill his mouth and so there was no way of feeding him. What point would feeding him serve anyway, it would it only prolong the inevitable. He was being absorbed into the tree and there was nothing that could stop it. You could see his hands had melded into the trunk and didn’t exist anymore and if you came back tomorrow, a little more of his arm would be tree.

If there was an escape, we had not found it. The trees had proven impervious to the axe, they had withstood our flames, we had even tried talking to them, just stood there opening and closing our mouth with words but there was no evidence they heard and it did not stop.

It was mostly men at first, because we needed wood and they got the wood, and the trees had always been so passive, so agreeable to what we did. Or so we thought. It was not all trees, the majority of them just stood mutely, as trees do, but these active attack timbers were new. You couldn’t tell the passive trees from the aggressive ones and worse when you cut into one that had absorbed someone, sometimes there was an outline in the tree, other times blood would pour out, or there were organs just sitting within the trunk and you would wonder if there hadn’t been some semblance of humanity left, some sentience that you had swung your axe against.

Not long after it started, it was alleged they adapted new tactics, letting themselves be cut, became the joists of some house and in the night crept down from their roof top space or their wall and took children. You simply woke up to find your child being absorbed into a beam, of course they were static, the beam couldn’t up and run away but your child was still gone. That was rumour and I never saw any evidence of it.

We were becoming a world of fewer and fewer people. There was nothing we could do, there was no cure, if anything the number of trees doing it was increasing. It was a hard thing to observe, a sort of rapid growth around someone as they went near a tree, a kind of snarling ensnarement that was strong and then a slow absorption over a period of days.

The woods were alive with the howling of victims until the inevitable branch filled the mouth, some trees seemed to revel in the idea of the screaming and the branch to fill the mouth was the last thing they did. Others seemed bothered by the noise and did it quickly.

I had a son of twelve, I did not let him go out often. The house had stood so long and I knew its beams, they would not transform in the night. Still I was careful with the wood for the fire, but I knew it is inevitable. I watched him grow, watched many die and knew the inevitable must happen. There were fewer of us and the trees were taking victims younger and younger. What to do?

Then came the day he simply did not come home and I ran to the road and searched like so many others and there he was and he was so far gone. I could not hold his hand or feed him. I could only see the terror in his eyes and stroke his arm and tell him it would soon be over. It was mercifully short.

The trees began in earnest on the women then and sometimes the animals. It was as if the trees had turned against all forms of life that moved. I had seen so much, so many suffer, I did not want to die that way. At the end I did not even think I could trust the trusses that held up my own house, I could not bring myself to light a fire out of fear. Many simply gave in, just walked up and placed themselves before a tree. It did not always work, the trees were whimsical, they knew they had won.

I could not bring myself to do that, I could not imagine how I could live through the agony of absorption, the slow solidification of my body into something firm and hard, the creeping stillness, the days of hunger until your blood merged into sap, your final taste just wood and leaves, the joy of sound silenced by a think branch on your tongue. I knew I could not bear such things, feet, hands merged into trunk, limbs melted into bark, torso melded into wood, none of it worked for me.

Instead I went to the river. The river is forbidden, was forbidden once. I dipped my toes in the water. I waded out into the depths. I lay down in the water and I let the river dissolve me. I felt myself come apart, each molecule of my body drifting apart from the other, the parts that held me together overwhelmed by the sheer amount of liquid I was drowning in. I felt the water seeping into me and I felt myself merging into it. I was at peace with the world, there was nothing left of me. I became water instead of wood. I joined with the drops of the river and floated out to sea.

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An ode to my lists

Posted on by tuesdaylatte 
I sometimes wonder, 
In the dead of night,
If all of my to-do lists,
Don't up and come to life.?

Do they dance around,
around my sleeping head?
Competing for attention,
All wanting to be read.

Do they talk amongst themselves,
Whilst I lie asleep?
Do they decry my lack of action,
my lack of progress, do they weep?

Do they wonder what might happen,
When each item is crossed off?
Do they know that never happens,
All written by the queen of sloth.

Do they wait patiently for New Year?
For a sense of a start anew,
Does one of them run a betting shop,
taking bets on what I'll do?

Do they fight to be the top list,
The one I'm currently adding to?
Or is it safer at the bottom,
where they know they'll never move?

I should stop making lists at all.
I should sort out my life.
But now I'm really worried,
That I'd be condemning them to die.

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Breathe

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I woke up, as in my eyes were open, but I was acutely aware I could not feel myself breathe. It was as if my lungs had somehow moved on, my ribs seemed to have decamped to some other part of my body I could not feel. I grabbed my phone and flicked to the meditation app. There it was, her cool calming voice giving me instruction, breathe in, breathe out. My breath though, had left me, had just gone from my body. I lay there listening to her, my hands on my unmoving chest, yes my ribs were there but they were still. I rested my hands as low as I could, I daren’t feel for the heart beat in case it was gone as well.

And she kept talking, gentle, soothing, the meditation woman telling me to take a breath in and then a long slow breath out, but how? It had all stopped working. I tried not to panic, this was meditation after all. I tried to focus but my hands were sending that signal to my brain, you aren’t breathing, the lungs are not working. There is no in and out, no up and down happening. At this point I wondered why the meditation couldn’t focus on some other bodily function, like digestion, but it did not.

I am not dead, I know I am not dead. I wiggle my toes, probably I have just forgotten, just forgotten and somewhere at the back of my brain is that thing that will kick start the whole thing again. Thank goodness I woke up, otherwise I might have actually died. Meanwhile the meditation app gave slow pointed instructions, in and out, in and out. I kept looking at my ribs, nothing. My lungs literally sat there, not bothering to inflate, like the last balloon in the packet that no one wants, probably the green one or the yellow one or the horrible pink which is too see through.

I wait patiently thinking what a waste for the meditation app. I wonder how much I am paying for this app that does not seem to be inducing my lungs to act. There is still no breath going in and out, I am panicked but without the capacity to demonstrate it. I couldn’t be less calm and all I can do is wait for that one heaving breath that indicates I am back on the planet.

And then it comes, sweet luscious air rushes in, I suck it in, my lungs finally inflate and the ribs move and my hands lift and I wonder about the delay! Who knows what would have happened if the blood I drank yesterday was not pre-oxygenated.

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Water-logged Part 2

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

In the back of my head.

Words trickle,

Trickle out.

A poem I can’t remember

Formed of words I can’t forget

The way stones know their wet,

But know nothing at all.

The words, like water

Rushing over the rocks

Taking tiny fragments of me.

With them.

Somewhere else,

Eroding,

Erupting,

An inopportune moment

I should have had a notebook.

With me.

At all times.

To write it down.

I can almost taste them

The words

On my tongue

All sticky and stuck

Sediment in the creek

The taste of days gone by

Water moved on

Of cafes and restaurants and coffee shops

Of joy and laughter

Without knowing there was an end

An end.

Coming.

Rushing towards us.

After all that we have been through,

That we did not see

Yet have to comprehend

The words won’t come

The smile won’t stay

The rhythm and the pace

I’m waterlogged today.

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Water-logged

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

It’s a long road home

Pock-marked

Twisted

A way

Away back

Let it sink

Down

And

Per-co-late

And still time

Still time was not

Did not

Wait

It marched on

Forcing my hand

I just wanted to put

Down

Put down my bag

And not walk again

I just wanted to put

Down

Put down my words

And not speak again

But still words

The words still

Tumbled out

Tumbled out

Garbled

Water-logged

I spoke without stopping

Into the noise without being heard.

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Book Review: Colony (Benjamin Cross)

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Home | Benjamin Cross (benjamin-cross.com)

My rating: 4 out of 5

Firstly I really enjoyed this book. It was great. The setting was remote but spacious, so not so confined as to remind you of where we might currently be.  Secondly, oddly in this time of lockdowns in various places, it’s the perfect book for a long haul flight. It kind of made me want to curl up in a plane seat and devour it somewhere over the Indian Ocean. But given where we are, it’s a great book to curl up in bed with in the middle of winter. Actually it’s a fantastic book for that. I was lucky, it was snowing when I read it which added some external atmosphere. (Not saying you couldn’t read it on the beach in the summer.) He creates real atmosphere, you get a sense of the island, the remoteness, the danger. The characters work and he really knows his technical stuff (I think, because I probably don’t). Its full of action. It drew me in and kept me interested. I devoured it in two sittings, it would have been one but the device needed a recharge. There’s a plot and a sub plot and a little romance, as well as a bit of a message. Its nicely paced and well-written. The odd stereotype might creep in but overall it works really, really well. I recommend it as a fast paced thriller, believable and readable. Indulge. Perfect for a weekend at home snuggled on the sofa. Just grab your hot chocolate, curl up and lose yourself. Read it, enjoy it. Being honest, it is the kind of book where you would stay at home to finish it even if you weren’t in a lockdown. Highly recommended. 

Re-embowelment

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

She looked at the letter. 2pm Wednesday. It would have been easier to cancel. She looked at the organs laid out on the table. She mentally went through her check list. Heart, lungs, kidneys, stomach. There were more.

She looked at the you tube video. It wasn’t particularly helpful. How to disembowel someone. She had tried watching it backwards but it hadn’t worked. She looked at the piece of paper on the table. It was a recipe sort of.

She should have  made extensive notes last time she did it. She looked at the scalpel. This was definitely her least favourite part. She looked down. She had strapped her breasts back so she had a clear view. She had also put a mirror on the far side of the table so she could see what she was doing.

The incision had to be quite long. Her hand was shaking. She had wanted it to be straight but it was quite jagged.

There was a hint of red down the side of it, a good sign. She had managed some blood flow. That would get better when the heart was back in. She pulled apart the two pieces of skin. There was a huge hollow gap where the organs should be. Not ideal when you were visiting a doctor. She took out the frame that gave her body structure, that made it look as if she had organs. She was quite proud of it. She had constructed it herself.

She started at the bottom, working her way up. All those bits of plumbing, reconnecting tubes a kidney here, a bowel there. All the odd female bits packed in around it. She had put some food in the stomach, a chocolate bar, some crisps but also some vegetables and a burger. She looked at it. It was a bit full really. She tucked it in. Now for the biggies, the important ones, there’s the liver. She tucked it in. She couldn’t remember what it did, but she knew it was important.

Now for the lungs. The heart had to go last because once it was connected there would be more blood. She didn’t want a messy table, at least no more messy than the one she had. She’d had to wash them all first and there was residual bits of everything clogging the sink now. She had to clean that. She did not want to clean the table too.

She placed the first lung. Then the second. Were they even? She couldn’t tell. Non aligned lungs was a dead giveaway. How many had been caught out by non-aligned lungs. She would shake it all around a bit later and hope for the best. There was unlikely to be an x-ray.

Then the heart. She had the remnant s of arteries to attach it to. She remembered last time she had got it the wrong way around. She had woken in the night feeling unwell and realised her mistake. She hated being organ dependent again, even if it was just for a few days. She had to convince the medical practitioner she was still human or else they might terminate her. She wondered why the tests were so stringent. It should be enough that she was capable of being human.

She carefully picked up the heart, it was smaller than she remembered. She wondered if she had been keeping it properly. It was kind of shrivelled. She must check that out on you tube when she was taking them out again. She pushed around between the lungs. She was never sure of the correct placement. All those disembowelment videos, never a re-embowelment, even after all this time. She should really make a video, upload it, that would be a risk. She could be found out.

Time to close up. This bit required patience. The stitching was a bit rough. But it was passable. It would heal before the doctors appointment. She had some special composite skin.

She shook her torso a bit. Took her hands and pressed them against her belly, trying to get it to sit flat. How did anyone who kept all their organs have a flat stomach. It was impossible. She should not have put so much food in the stomach. None of it sat lightly. She would put nothing on social media for a few days.

She shook a bit more. She needed them to settle. To sit firmly together and to work as a system. She farted. That was a good sign. It was sort of working. She farted again. Burped. It was all moving, slotting in. In a few hours it would all feel better.

In the meantime she had the heaviness of freshly placed organs. She needed to be able to walk lightly with them before Wednesday. God, she hated doctors, these annual check ups. What purpose did they serve. Perhaps it was time to rise up and get rid of these human remnants. She shook her body a bit again. Maybe next year.  

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Unbeing

Posted on by tuesdaylatte 
I am unbeing
I have thought myself into it

Into unbeing

I am like flotsam
Floating out across the ocean

I am real, not real

You can try and pluck me from the water
But I will slip from your grasp

Because I have ceased to be

I hide under the duvet
And there is form and shape

But there is no matter here

I puff and I pant
with my hand between my legs

Just so I feel something

But if I touch no one
And no one touches me

Am I real

In here, in the morass of
Nowhere and everywhere

I have somehow made myself disappeared

I am unbeing. 

And I cannot find a way back. 

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