Kneedles Writes Words
Jun 19, 2012 6:29:03 GMT -5
Post by kneedles on Jun 19, 2012 6:29:03 GMT -5
Hey guys, when I'm not roleplaying I like to do original fiction and the occasional spot of fanfiction (lets not talk about the twilight stuff) so I thought it might be neat to post a few of my short stories up that I have lurking about.
I might put a few poems up too, if I can get to a camera since I preform spoken word poetry with a traditional spin and they really are better to hear than read.
---------
I still remember the umbrella, even if the boy has faded to the faintest smudge of a memory.
Broad and black, I can just about see those metal bones stretched beneath dark material my mind’s eye. It was Billy’s dad’s and he loved it; pudgy pink fingers clasped over the arch of the wooden handle as he stood out in the rain, dry and safe like the warm comforting embrace of home. I might have tried to snatch it from him once; I think that at four years old I wanted to believe that there was something like magic in its steely structure.
Thirteen years ago they found that umbrella, sad and abandoned in the middle of the road just outside of our house, it’s metal bones broken and twisted as though something violent had happened.
The boy, however, was nowhere. He was six years old and he stayed that way for a very long time; a frozen image on the front of a paper or in the well thumbed family album.
In the pictures, he was small and made a better looking boy than I ever did; white and delicate with wispy black hair and crisp blue eyes that the press went crazy for, smiling in a way that was childlike, vacant and ageless.
The umbrella got locked in a closet and it wasn’t long before little Billy O’Shead became our neighbourhood’s cautionary tale, ‘don’t play out in the street past dark all you’ll end up like the O’Shead kid’, ‘don’t talk to strangers or you’ll go the same way as little Billy O’Shead,’.
Over time, he faded from memory to myth as we learned to get on with our lives.
Only Mrs O’Shead seemed to believe, by this point, that Billy was alive- a tiny glimmer of hope shining in the corner of her tired eyes or glinting when her grey hair caught the sun.
But they never found anything of him, except that umbrella, left out in the rain.
I used to wonder sometimes what my life would have been like if Billy O’Shead had never gone missing; would my father then, not have been so keen to ‘toughen me up’ in order to fight off would- be- kidnappers? Would my mother have extended our curfew by an extra hour because she wasn’t so worried about rapists in vans, and would my sister, Ally, then have not been in such a rush to go all the way with Norman O’Shead without wearing a condom that night?
Heck, if it wasn’t for Billy, maybe Norm wouldn’t have even found my sister attractive. Perhaps he saw some of six year old Billy in her, standing on the pavement gripping on tightly to that umbrella, trying to stop the wind from blowing her over.
I wonder, if, after what happened with the newspapers digging up everything they could find on our neighbourhood, and the search parties and the burnt cakes my mum would cook for Mrs O’Shead, there wasn’t a little of Billy in all of us.
There wasn’t much of him though, in the squealing baby my bellowing sister pushed and squeezed out of herself. A hot, wet mistake. She was, unfortunately, a remarkably ugly baby with a squashed pink face like a grape hit by a truck, tiny eyes and a permanently grumpy face.
Catrina was not a wanted baby; between Norm who cared more about horses and betting odds and the promise of a pint more than he did about children, and Ally who cared more about hair straightners and makeup and the promise of pint. Mrs O’Shead and I tried our best but Catrina seemed to know how her parents felt about her.
She reminded us of our mistakes.
It was strange, indecisive day when my life changed. The sky was a blue tinged with grey and the clouds were pure white and wispy, like the faint trace of an idea. I pushed the baby’s pram at arms length to protect my ears from her cries, admiring my newly painted nails before I had to bury them deep inside my pockets.
To stop her ugly little face from scrunching into a grimace the way it did, I tried singing in a hoarse, tuneless rasp to no great effect.
And that’s when I saw him.
And I knew it was him. Just like that, as though somebody had punched me in the gut.
He was standing there, not saying a word, staring up at the red brick O’Shead house, which dominated the neighbourhood.
The boy’s hair was black and thick, though it was styled differently to the other O’Shead boys, crumpled up top like a mess of discarded black papers with the sides cropped too close to the scalp. He was painfully thin too, a white sheet of paper with sharpened edges and pale skin that blurred him, almost like a faint spectre caught on camera.
The only solid things I could see about him was thick dark tribal tattoo creeping up his neck and a piercing on his lip. I thought to myself that Mrs O’Shead would have a fit when she first clapped eyes on what her son had become.
Because I was almost certain it was her son. Not because of the hair, or the wide, blinking blue eyes or even the fact that he seemed the right age.
No, for me, the clincher was the fact he had an umbrella, a long and sturdy one folded and hung over his arm.
That day, he fell down a rabbit hole.
Or perhaps I have it wrong, and Billy O’Shead had spent thirteen years in a Technicolor wonderland before it had spat him back out into a world filled with shades of grey and beige. Either way, the transition of Billy O’Shead back into the household was not a smooth one.
I watched from a safe distance, of course, as Billy O’Shead was once again inaugurated into the O’Shead family, the seventh of ten, lost in a sea of black hair and blue eyes.
Some, like Norm and more importantly the tabloid papers doubted this new Billy because history has shown us nothing if not the fact that boys like Billy O’Shead with blue eyes that drive the press wild don’t just walk back from thirteen years in limbo as though nothing apart from puberty had ever happened.
I believed in him, though. And I couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps I’d finally realised that it wasn’t that black umbrella that had magic in it, but the boy himself. Never had it been clearer in a nineteen year old Billy O’Shead, who’s smooth pale face seemed almost to have the same number of layers as a perfectly formed onion, and who seemed so far away.
There was talk of a paternity test and everybody and his wife wanted to know where he’d been, and something about his lost eyes made me wonder if he’d been anywhere at all; as if Billy O’Shead, the seventh of ten, had simply slipped into some in-between space somewhere before coming back as the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
We talked a little when I dropped of Catrina in the afternoons, exchanging glances and pleasantries, though I never pressed questions the way his father, the gruff bear-like Mr O’Shead would. To me, he reeked of mystery and other worlds, like the slightly acidic smell just before the rainfall. A paternity test, or a blow by blow account of his life up till the point where he’d stood, an umbrella hooked over his arm, in the street would have ruined his mystique.
It would have also ruined Mrs O’Shead’s hope, so the matter wasn’t pressed much further. Final.
At night I could see him out of my window, standing alone in the O’Shead yard staring up at a starless sky, clouded by pollution. I would rest my head on my hand, smearing vivid red lipstick onto my cheek, jut watching him. Waiting for him to do something.
I would have given anything to know what this new, lost, Billy O’Shead was thinking.
I related to the new Billy O’Shead. Because some days I wanted to just disappear too, to slip silently away like the shear tan stockings I would slide over my bare legs when the house was empty. My big black umbrella was powder and eye shadow and my sister’s clothes. And I kept it close to my chest, locked away secret and safe.
“Bejesus, Connor, what the fuck are you doing?”
I felt the slim tube slide from my fingers onto the floor, my bright pink mouth open in fear as he stood in the doorway. I’d over estimated the time I had left to myself and my Dad was there, face contracted into a look of disgust and disbelief like a wrinkled old prune.
“I can explain,” I said carefully, trying to take a step towards him, my feet catching and twisting in the high red shoes before falling with a mortified thump.
“How?” he thundered and I felt my face grow hot. “Take it off. Take it all off.”
I hesitated for a fraction of a millisecond too long and was rewarded with his fist crashing into my cheek bone.
“Grow some bollocks, Connor!” he snarled as I sniffed.
I spat on the floor by his feet. Saliva bubbled and frothed before sinking into the carpet as he punched me again. I spat again and this time there was blood swimming in it. I tightened my fist around the carpet as my cheek began to ache.
“I’ve got bollocks, Dad…what about you?” It was a question that I punctuated with a punch in his crotch.
He doubled over in pain as I scrambled up, my long limbs flailing. Hissing, my dad reached out for me but I was too quick for him.
The street outside was dark and damp, and I’d discarded the heels, so the stockings soaked up the water, sagging at the toe and slapping onto the pavement.
“Connor Fitzpatrick, what in the hell do you look like?” I knew there was some magic in Billy O’Shead. Turning around, I saw the faint glow of his cigarette and the faint outline of his face, a serpent of smoke curling from his mouth and the rain hadn’t seemed to have affected him at all, as though he had a fine water proof barrier around him.
“I’m wearing a dress and I just punched me dad in the nuts.”
He laughed breathily, showing a mouth that was missing three teeth on the right side. I wondered where those teeth had gone, perhaps he’d left them when he left his old life, as though Billy left a trail of teeth and umbrellas behind him, like the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretal.
“You’re somethin’ else Connor Fitzpatrick, you know that?”
“And you’re somebody else, aren’t ya Billy?”
Billy’s smile was in another language, something dead like Latin I think and I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and touched him; his forearm was cold and slightly fuzzy.
Fuzzy because my eyes were blurring as the enormity of what I’d just done finally hit me. I wouldn’t be welcome at home after this.
He kissed me, then, right on the mouth with something that was both fearful and confident. Our colors ran in the rain, swirling and merging together as our teeth, hips and hands collided.
He whispered something against my mouth. Though I never knew what it was, it sounded warm and inviting enough that I was ready to follow wherever he lead me.
And where he led me was a room, frozen in time itself, decorated with blue wall paper and a nursery frieze of toy trains and teddy bears.
I gripped the Thomas the Tank Engine covers as his skin brushed purposely against mine, staring at an old crayon picture of a dark haired family as a powerful spike ran through me.
I gazed at them, thinking about how much they looked like a happy family with a –ooh- and a- here, let me.
And it was around that time that I stopped thinking.
Oh God, he gasped, a little later, oh god, oh god, thank you.
We fell asleep in each other’s arms. I dreamt of warm possibility and had an odd feeling as though, like Billy O’Shead, after thirteen years I had only just come home.
And in the morning he was gone. There was no umbrella left this time.
Something had happened to him, they said. He came back wrong, he’d been abused, he was confused.
Because, this time, when Billy O’Shead went missing, it took them less than thirteen hours to find him.
And when I try and picture him the way they said he would be; broken and shattered after falling from the roof of Galway shopping centre, all I can see is that umbrella left in the middle of the road.
The word why, coursed through my veins for the longest time. It still lurks there now, rising to the surface of my skin when I think for too long and too hard. I don’t think it was because he was ashamed of me and that gives me at least some comfort.
I left home after the funeral and never looked back. I still wear dresses, on occasion, though I’ll be the first to prove to you that I’ve plenty of bollocks, I send Christmas and birthday cards to Catrina, who has grown from an ugly unwanted little baby into an ugly unwanted little girl.
And I still remember the boy, the umbrella and how much I could have loved him if he’d given any of us another chance.[/blockquote][/size][/justify]
I might put a few poems up too, if I can get to a camera since I preform spoken word poetry with a traditional spin and they really are better to hear than read.
---------
[/u]The Most Miraculous Reappearance of Billy O’Shead
I don’t remember Little Billy O’Shead
I still remember the umbrella, even if the boy has faded to the faintest smudge of a memory.
Broad and black, I can just about see those metal bones stretched beneath dark material my mind’s eye. It was Billy’s dad’s and he loved it; pudgy pink fingers clasped over the arch of the wooden handle as he stood out in the rain, dry and safe like the warm comforting embrace of home. I might have tried to snatch it from him once; I think that at four years old I wanted to believe that there was something like magic in its steely structure.
Thirteen years ago they found that umbrella, sad and abandoned in the middle of the road just outside of our house, it’s metal bones broken and twisted as though something violent had happened.
The boy, however, was nowhere. He was six years old and he stayed that way for a very long time; a frozen image on the front of a paper or in the well thumbed family album.
In the pictures, he was small and made a better looking boy than I ever did; white and delicate with wispy black hair and crisp blue eyes that the press went crazy for, smiling in a way that was childlike, vacant and ageless.
The legacy of Little Billy O’Shead
The umbrella got locked in a closet and it wasn’t long before little Billy O’Shead became our neighbourhood’s cautionary tale, ‘don’t play out in the street past dark all you’ll end up like the O’Shead kid’, ‘don’t talk to strangers or you’ll go the same way as little Billy O’Shead,’.
Over time, he faded from memory to myth as we learned to get on with our lives.
Only Mrs O’Shead seemed to believe, by this point, that Billy was alive- a tiny glimmer of hope shining in the corner of her tired eyes or glinting when her grey hair caught the sun.
But they never found anything of him, except that umbrella, left out in the rain.
I used to wonder sometimes what my life would have been like if Billy O’Shead had never gone missing; would my father then, not have been so keen to ‘toughen me up’ in order to fight off would- be- kidnappers? Would my mother have extended our curfew by an extra hour because she wasn’t so worried about rapists in vans, and would my sister, Ally, then have not been in such a rush to go all the way with Norman O’Shead without wearing a condom that night?
Heck, if it wasn’t for Billy, maybe Norm wouldn’t have even found my sister attractive. Perhaps he saw some of six year old Billy in her, standing on the pavement gripping on tightly to that umbrella, trying to stop the wind from blowing her over.
I wonder, if, after what happened with the newspapers digging up everything they could find on our neighbourhood, and the search parties and the burnt cakes my mum would cook for Mrs O’Shead, there wasn’t a little of Billy in all of us.
There wasn’t much of him though, in the squealing baby my bellowing sister pushed and squeezed out of herself. A hot, wet mistake. She was, unfortunately, a remarkably ugly baby with a squashed pink face like a grape hit by a truck, tiny eyes and a permanently grumpy face.
Catrina was not a wanted baby; between Norm who cared more about horses and betting odds and the promise of a pint more than he did about children, and Ally who cared more about hair straightners and makeup and the promise of pint. Mrs O’Shead and I tried our best but Catrina seemed to know how her parents felt about her.
She reminded us of our mistakes.
The most miraculous reappearance of Billy O’Shead
It was strange, indecisive day when my life changed. The sky was a blue tinged with grey and the clouds were pure white and wispy, like the faint trace of an idea. I pushed the baby’s pram at arms length to protect my ears from her cries, admiring my newly painted nails before I had to bury them deep inside my pockets.
To stop her ugly little face from scrunching into a grimace the way it did, I tried singing in a hoarse, tuneless rasp to no great effect.
And that’s when I saw him.
And I knew it was him. Just like that, as though somebody had punched me in the gut.
He was standing there, not saying a word, staring up at the red brick O’Shead house, which dominated the neighbourhood.
The boy’s hair was black and thick, though it was styled differently to the other O’Shead boys, crumpled up top like a mess of discarded black papers with the sides cropped too close to the scalp. He was painfully thin too, a white sheet of paper with sharpened edges and pale skin that blurred him, almost like a faint spectre caught on camera.
The only solid things I could see about him was thick dark tribal tattoo creeping up his neck and a piercing on his lip. I thought to myself that Mrs O’Shead would have a fit when she first clapped eyes on what her son had become.
Because I was almost certain it was her son. Not because of the hair, or the wide, blinking blue eyes or even the fact that he seemed the right age.
No, for me, the clincher was the fact he had an umbrella, a long and sturdy one folded and hung over his arm.
Billy O’Shead loses himself
That day, he fell down a rabbit hole.
Or perhaps I have it wrong, and Billy O’Shead had spent thirteen years in a Technicolor wonderland before it had spat him back out into a world filled with shades of grey and beige. Either way, the transition of Billy O’Shead back into the household was not a smooth one.
I watched from a safe distance, of course, as Billy O’Shead was once again inaugurated into the O’Shead family, the seventh of ten, lost in a sea of black hair and blue eyes.
Some, like Norm and more importantly the tabloid papers doubted this new Billy because history has shown us nothing if not the fact that boys like Billy O’Shead with blue eyes that drive the press wild don’t just walk back from thirteen years in limbo as though nothing apart from puberty had ever happened.
I believed in him, though. And I couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps I’d finally realised that it wasn’t that black umbrella that had magic in it, but the boy himself. Never had it been clearer in a nineteen year old Billy O’Shead, who’s smooth pale face seemed almost to have the same number of layers as a perfectly formed onion, and who seemed so far away.
There was talk of a paternity test and everybody and his wife wanted to know where he’d been, and something about his lost eyes made me wonder if he’d been anywhere at all; as if Billy O’Shead, the seventh of ten, had simply slipped into some in-between space somewhere before coming back as the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
We talked a little when I dropped of Catrina in the afternoons, exchanging glances and pleasantries, though I never pressed questions the way his father, the gruff bear-like Mr O’Shead would. To me, he reeked of mystery and other worlds, like the slightly acidic smell just before the rainfall. A paternity test, or a blow by blow account of his life up till the point where he’d stood, an umbrella hooked over his arm, in the street would have ruined his mystique.
It would have also ruined Mrs O’Shead’s hope, so the matter wasn’t pressed much further. Final.
At night I could see him out of my window, standing alone in the O’Shead yard staring up at a starless sky, clouded by pollution. I would rest my head on my hand, smearing vivid red lipstick onto my cheek, jut watching him. Waiting for him to do something.
I would have given anything to know what this new, lost, Billy O’Shead was thinking.
Falling for Billy O’Shead
I related to the new Billy O’Shead. Because some days I wanted to just disappear too, to slip silently away like the shear tan stockings I would slide over my bare legs when the house was empty. My big black umbrella was powder and eye shadow and my sister’s clothes. And I kept it close to my chest, locked away secret and safe.
“Bejesus, Connor, what the fuck are you doing?”
I felt the slim tube slide from my fingers onto the floor, my bright pink mouth open in fear as he stood in the doorway. I’d over estimated the time I had left to myself and my Dad was there, face contracted into a look of disgust and disbelief like a wrinkled old prune.
“I can explain,” I said carefully, trying to take a step towards him, my feet catching and twisting in the high red shoes before falling with a mortified thump.
“How?” he thundered and I felt my face grow hot. “Take it off. Take it all off.”
I hesitated for a fraction of a millisecond too long and was rewarded with his fist crashing into my cheek bone.
“Grow some bollocks, Connor!” he snarled as I sniffed.
I spat on the floor by his feet. Saliva bubbled and frothed before sinking into the carpet as he punched me again. I spat again and this time there was blood swimming in it. I tightened my fist around the carpet as my cheek began to ache.
“I’ve got bollocks, Dad…what about you?” It was a question that I punctuated with a punch in his crotch.
He doubled over in pain as I scrambled up, my long limbs flailing. Hissing, my dad reached out for me but I was too quick for him.
The street outside was dark and damp, and I’d discarded the heels, so the stockings soaked up the water, sagging at the toe and slapping onto the pavement.
“Connor Fitzpatrick, what in the hell do you look like?” I knew there was some magic in Billy O’Shead. Turning around, I saw the faint glow of his cigarette and the faint outline of his face, a serpent of smoke curling from his mouth and the rain hadn’t seemed to have affected him at all, as though he had a fine water proof barrier around him.
“I’m wearing a dress and I just punched me dad in the nuts.”
He laughed breathily, showing a mouth that was missing three teeth on the right side. I wondered where those teeth had gone, perhaps he’d left them when he left his old life, as though Billy left a trail of teeth and umbrellas behind him, like the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretal.
“You’re somethin’ else Connor Fitzpatrick, you know that?”
“And you’re somebody else, aren’t ya Billy?”
Billy’s smile was in another language, something dead like Latin I think and I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and touched him; his forearm was cold and slightly fuzzy.
Fuzzy because my eyes were blurring as the enormity of what I’d just done finally hit me. I wouldn’t be welcome at home after this.
He kissed me, then, right on the mouth with something that was both fearful and confident. Our colors ran in the rain, swirling and merging together as our teeth, hips and hands collided.
He whispered something against my mouth. Though I never knew what it was, it sounded warm and inviting enough that I was ready to follow wherever he lead me.
And where he led me was a room, frozen in time itself, decorated with blue wall paper and a nursery frieze of toy trains and teddy bears.
I gripped the Thomas the Tank Engine covers as his skin brushed purposely against mine, staring at an old crayon picture of a dark haired family as a powerful spike ran through me.
I gazed at them, thinking about how much they looked like a happy family with a –ooh- and a- here, let me.
And it was around that time that I stopped thinking.
Oh God, he gasped, a little later, oh god, oh god, thank you.
We fell asleep in each other’s arms. I dreamt of warm possibility and had an odd feeling as though, like Billy O’Shead, after thirteen years I had only just come home.
And in the morning he was gone. There was no umbrella left this time.
Remembering Billy O’Shead
Something had happened to him, they said. He came back wrong, he’d been abused, he was confused.
Because, this time, when Billy O’Shead went missing, it took them less than thirteen hours to find him.
And when I try and picture him the way they said he would be; broken and shattered after falling from the roof of Galway shopping centre, all I can see is that umbrella left in the middle of the road.
The word why, coursed through my veins for the longest time. It still lurks there now, rising to the surface of my skin when I think for too long and too hard. I don’t think it was because he was ashamed of me and that gives me at least some comfort.
I left home after the funeral and never looked back. I still wear dresses, on occasion, though I’ll be the first to prove to you that I’ve plenty of bollocks, I send Christmas and birthday cards to Catrina, who has grown from an ugly unwanted little baby into an ugly unwanted little girl.
And I still remember the boy, the umbrella and how much I could have loved him if he’d given any of us another chance.[/blockquote][/size][/justify]
