A wild slim alien

Monthly Archives: March 2013


by Leave a comment

300 words on not writing more than 300 words

Recently WordPress suggested that posts be tagged ‘longform’ to enable readers drawn to weightier fare to find it more easily.  What an ugly word.  I’m not doing that, even supposing it did mean losing countless visits.  But with all the competing verbiage around, I have wondered how well-read my longer posts are.  So I’ve decided to try writing shortform.  I learnt the discipline of working to word limits while writing reviews for a listings magazine.  If I remember correctly, I was paid £14 for 300 words.  Didn’t seem a fortune at the time.  Now it feels generous, for what it was.  Imagine if I got £14 for 300 words here!  My U alone would be worth £56.

Everything I’ve ever written has been thoroughly considered.  I need to force myself to give in to the here and now.  Any finessing will come in attempting to squeeze what I have to say into exactly 300 words.

Only me being me, I’m going do it 300 times.  Over time, to no particular deadline.  300 x 300 = 90,000.  By the end, I’ll have a book.  I can’t help thinking in terms of books.  They’re what I was bred on, what I always aspired to write.  So much of what I’ve written has been in the form of parts of something larger, a book to contain it all.  The web has changed everything.  Like water through all but the most watertight system, words find a way to their readers.  In comparison, a writer can start to believe that what books do is hide words away.  But I am still in love with the book, and I want one all of my own, like the Clash wanted a riot.

300 words.  That’s all.  No other prescription.  Anything as a subject.  How hard can it


by 2 Comments

The reader [u]

The writer can’t help imagining the reader of these words.  He hopes it’s not ill-mannered of him to poke his nose and the imagination which lies behind it into affairs which are none of his concern.  In his mind sirens call and he finds himself irresistibly drawn into another attempt to replicate a three-dimensional life from scratch, from nothing more than the cross a finely sharpened pencil might make on a map; a world from a grain of sand.

So he imagines her, or certainly alternately it might be a him… perhaps it might be safer in terms of not antagonising half his readership to think of this archetypal one as a non-gender-specific alien.  Yes, a race which doesn’t have sexes.  However, they do have sex; it’s the best of both worlds.  When they decide it’s time, they pass the calcified egg between them and go half and half on the rearing, like Emperor or King Aptenodytes.  In most other respects however they are like earthlings.  They enjoy a good breakfast, for example.  Poached eggs – they’re not averse to eating a reptile’s or bird’s – on wholemeal toast, with a pot of coffee.

So he imagines it in its kitchen.  Wait a moment; alien or otherwise, he doesn’t want to label his reader an ‘it’.  Perhaps it’s better after all if he says ‘she’.  Call it an attempt to redress the balance of the ages when it comes to denoting species as a whole by the male gender alone.  Earthlings and aliens in possession of the defining male characteristic will have to forgive him, and place their mind temporarily inside that of a female of the species.

So he imagines his reader first thing in the morning, scratching the scales of her nose with one set of highly developed fascicled toes, and with another clicking her way to this page on her technological device of choice; or perhaps if these stories ever find their way into a hard copy format she will simply take the bookmark from the book which at night resides on her bedside chest of drawers, and there at the kitchen table begin reading the next in the collection, namely this one.  Slowly, with the dawn, the realisation may arise that it concerns her, and the writer hopes that far from giving her a fright, this might make her smile.  As well as the poached eggs – which need exactly 180 seconds, as determined by the special perfect poached egg app on her technological device – she has the toast and coffee on the go, and these moments of waiting to sit at her kitchen table reading.  Really she only needs the app for its stopwatch; she’s cooked dozens and dozens of poached eggs in her time and knows to whisk the sea-salted, boiling water till it resembles a whirlpool before dropping the egg into the centre of the vortex, and that if it isn’t freshly laid, to crack the egg into a ramekin containing a drop of vinegar to aid the congealing process.

The coffee’s percolations travel in scented arabican loops to her nose as this very paragraph is scanned and despite the many tasks she has on the go, her mind’s eye feels it has settled into the rhythm of the writer’s prose.  At the ding of the app, however, she stops reading to plate and begolden the toast, fish the eggs (she’s having two) from the pan with a slotted spoon, and decant herself some coffee.  With the plate before her, she slits the two snowy ovals with her knife and watches with keen appreciation as gooey yolk pools on the toast.  Her tail swishes between the rods which form the back of the wooden chair on which she sits, spiralling one of them in what is evidently a characteristic expression of content.

As she wipes a smear of yellow from her reptilian lips, the writer imagines – especially if she is reading the story on the web where it may be less apparent that it is constrained than he imagines will be the case with a printed version – that the reader has been paying close attention and is in on the raison d’être of these stories.  She knows, for example, that as well as each story missing a letter, each takes its lead from the title, and attempts to tease as it skirts employing typically chosen words, preferring instead less common, lipogrammatically permissible forms.  Paradoxically he also hopes that at the same time as she is aware of it, she is also not noticing that the letter highlighted by brackets in the title has been temporarily excised from written English.  For he hopes that these stories work either way, with the knowledge or in its absence.

Having imagined it, the writer himself can smell the coffee now.  She likes it strong, and he wishes he might have even a thimble of it to keep his brain sharp as he strives to avoid the letter which it is necessary to avoid.  Idly he wonders if she has read anything of the sort before, broadly speaking.  He imagines she is a well-read alien, and will at least know of If on a winter’s night a traveller and Ella Minnow Pea and La disparition – translated as A void – even if she has not read all of them.

It’s a spring morning after a long winter, and the alien carries her device to the back door to keep on reading as she opens it to the day and lets light warm her scales.  Blooms are beginning to appear on the wisteria, and the tips of its stems are starting to seek something to hold onto.  Once again she will smile, he thinks, as she sits down with her second coffee on one of the ironwork chairs at the filigree garden table to carry on reading, over all this metafictional nonsense.  He allows himself to imagine that she likes writers who play with words, who love making them dance to their satisfaction and that of their readers.  However, now that his shaggy alien tale is nearly at an end, he stops to wonder whether she might in fact have preferred a good old-fashioned proper story, and in a flash decides to see if he can incorporate one.  Had he gone down that path rather than this, he might have written something with the title ‘The horseshoe’ and had the aim of transferring to his reader something of the felicity that went into the writing of it.  In the shire where the writer spent his formative years, it was traditional to position a horseshoe over the door of a dwelling place, so as to catch all goodness and keep evil at bay.  From this detail, he begins to fashion a fairy story, one which describes the mishaps which befall a careless farrier who pooh-poohs old wives’ tales and deliberately challenges the Fates, and that’s what part two of this lipogrammatic clash of postmodernism and traditional narrative is going to relate, a click or a leafing of the page away from here.


by 3 Comments

We [r]

Anna lay dying.  The disease against which she thought she had immunity had at last eaten its way deep into a body unable to fend it off.  Not long dead themselves, the colleagues she had lost had now become ghosts alongside the people whom she had left behind at home.  They moonwalked the modules of the silo, and leant down to pillow level to speak quietly unsettling sentences about joining them into Anna’s pinnae.  She hadn’t sufficient pep now to close the blinds, and watched the days pass double quick, two against each slow one back home.  The leafy giantwoods outside cast shadows which sundialled the walls of the sleeping pod like speeded-up film.  She had the sense that time was scuttling to a point, and existence likewise – the full stop following which it would not be possible to say, I think, so I am.  She would not be thinking, she would be dead, although life on this odd planet would still go its seemingly infinite way.  No-one was left to put Anna in a box and the box in the soil, and eulogise beside the gaping hole.  But then millennia would see to it that Anna’s skeletal body was slowly compacted into a seam of fossil fuel which some subsequent colonising species might use to heat living spaces whose design she could only dimly imagine.

These thoughts came in clipped pulses, and between them – as she phased in and out of consciousness – was white space onto which the annals of Anna’s mind flashed a slideshow of images.  Times past, landscapes she had walked.  A balloon against a sunset.  A dog and its dancing shadow as it jumped in a meadow with a deep blue sky above.  A pumpkin, its jagged teeth, nose and eyes alight with menace.  A headland and below it a beach, glistening wet in the sun.  A cove on the same wild and wind-smashed coastline.  A white sand beach and two caves; placed between them, Anna’s own walking boots.  She felt the feeling of naked feet and toes in sand as she stood in one of the two caves looking out; a keyhole of light doubled at the bottom by a pool left behind as the tide ebbed.  A snowscape with stone walls.  A small wooden shed in a lush, sloping field; the angles of the hillsides led the eye to that little building clinging to one of them.  A goat standing atop a dusty bank next to a stack of baled hay, upon which the animal was feasting.  At the goat she laughed, and the sound she made, so unlike a laugh, shocked Anna into consciousness again.

Then above the wind, a sonic boom.  In the last gasp of depleted faculties, Anna knew it must be the salvage mission.  Salvage, because they wouldn’t be expecting to find anyone left alive.  A blast of synaptic agitation emitted itself deep within a mind which had once been fine and difficult to shake.  Why now, just as she was about to die?  Couldn’t they have waited, have given these final moments the peace she wished them to have?  She didn’t want to be found mouth open and spit hanging and with clothes which smelt of shit and piss.  Would that she was instead simply a skeletal boo!  She thought of the duck-billed platypus in its glass case; Anton’s find, his joy on display.  Yes, that was what she now wanted to be.  With Anton, back home.

The noise should have faded as the ship touched down, but instead the tail of its descent seemed to be met with the exclamation point of an explosion.  It jolted Anna’s mind alive, and she had now one final chance to validate the Cogito.  But it was not so much thoughts as images which began assembling.  Again Anton came to mind, and without a shadow of doubt she knew he was on that flaming ship, come to save his one-time love.

Images of what they had seen hand in hand flooded Anna’s mind, as if they might be unspooling in his quaking consciousness and telepathically passed to Anna’s.  Six silhouetted ponies on a beach with the tide out.  Yes, that day!  A boy had been unseated and the spooked pony had bolted into the town, causing havoc.  If telepathy was somehow possible, then Anna could conceivably pass images back to Anton.  So she sent him jumping into the Blue Lagoon, focussing especially on those pulse-heightened moments in advance of stepping off the cliff.  He sent Anna an image snapped by his mind while they had stood high on the cliff above looking down on the lagoon.  This was like magic!  She sent him the moonscape of limestone paving they had once visited at the end of a solid day’s walking.  He came back with dunes in which they had made love, the lapping sea to the east, the flat of cultivated, quiet land and a distant temple to the west.  Next she gave him a mountain top, an island and the lapis lazuli in which it was set like a piece of jade.  The palette of this image must have made Anton think of that peacock, defiant atop the gable of an old stone building.  Then what about the peacock and peahen they had seen sitting face to face on a fence, effectively kissing?  She sent him that, and saw his smiling face.  Anna smiled too, but now the end was close.  She wanted – needed – to see these scenes again, to have new sights to hold in common.  It was so unjust; she wasn’t done yet.  She wanted obstinately to live, tight to the point at which she and Anton simultaneously died.


by 2 Comments

[w] and a memory of childhood

Only after she joined Circus Alekan did Marion learn to ride.  One spring morning, the trainer offered her lessons; at a loose end, she said yes, thinking nothing of it other than the chance to indulge the fascination horses had held for her since girlhood; the chance too to see life from saddleback height.  Besides that, she could not have simply articulated the hold they had on her.  Perhaps she loved them because they seemed at once unfettered and gently docile; free and excitable and dangerous yet all-embracing in their comfort and sugary amiability.  Once she had finished the course of lessons, the trainer revealed his thinking – that she had it in her to perform her acrobatics from the platform of the horse’s back.  She laughed him off but eventually he persuaded her, buttering her into an affirmative through saying he had never seen as natural a first-time rider.  That, added to her gifts as an acrobat, not to mention her petite beauty…

Flying through the air on a trapeze had not been her ambition till late in her childhood. She had been something of a dreamer, scorning colouring books and pens – these could not match the colours generated by letters and phrases as she spoke them out loud or in her mind.  Out of fairy tales she span lengthier yarns featuring herself as their core character.  Her ever-extending vocabulary paraded across endless skies and each item in it competed for the most vibrant colours, or at violet hour the most delicate, the palest.  Because of her size, because she often seemed lost on a planet far from others, she fell subject to being labelled an oddity.  She didn’t care, for happiness came from perceiving ‘fingertips’ as silver, ‘horse’ as butterscotch and ‘leaf’ as an amber, autumnal hue; ‘star’ burned sapphire and ‘field’ revealed itself as an undulating sea of flax.  Soon she thought she might like to be a poet, only she fretted that the poems could never be as colourful to others as to their author.

Routinely the young Marion hid herself beneath the curtain-like tresses of a Salix Chrysocoma, there to dream and bring colours into being.  Besides nature only the circus could match the richness of the colours she perceived in her head.  It had begun the year they first pitched their tent nearby her home.  The red and the blue of the big top, the ginger spraying from the sides of the auguste’s face, the silver sequinned costume of the Russian funambulist sparkling in the spotlight as he danced the length of the tightrope eliciting intakes of breath.  From then on she had only one undeclared object in mind.  Circus skill training not being an option, she settled for gymnastics and spent all her unscheduled hours tumbling.

It started then, the living of a double life, the life all live to a greater or lesser extent – a double one, that of the interior and the exterior.  But hers by any measure had been an extreme case of the dominance of the interior.  If she looked back along the path her life had taken, she could see she had been happiest at those moments of conjunction – lighthouse flashes of love for another human being, the expressive movement of her handsprung body through the air, the age-old gliding of a bird of prey above a hillside hanger.  But rarely did she share anything of that interior life.  Her synaesthesia seemed itself a perfect conjunction of art and science, of magical colour and a predictable exactitude, yet instinctively she felt no-one could understand its meaning, except perhaps another poetic synaesthete, and she never met one of those.  She moved through her life either in languorous, ethereal motion or as a blur of elusive colour.  The others largely avoided her.

In the circus ring Marion and her horse Quicksilver spiralled the air into a life-affirming breeze.  The music and gasps and applause from the audience came as from afar, much like the rhythms of her heart – she heard them as a series of pulses on top of the galloping horse’s hooves, such familiar sounds that by them she could set her tempo as she performed near-miraculous feats.

She had been the horse trainer’s since the day he first picked her up all covered in bruises from the floor of the ring.  But though she loved the man he didn’t complete her and she felt obliged to look beyond him.  For a time she admired the taut muscles of the strong man, but he never made her heart sing.  The auguste brought forth music and made her laugh, but theirs could only ever be a brief encounter.  Then there had been the impalement artist; in the end she had cut him more deeply than he had her.  The day the lion tamer joined the circus, the horse trainer finally had his hegemony seriously challenged.  She had never felt such a thrust through her heart as in the moment Isaac first set his eyes on her.  Mute, she stood transfixed, oblivious to all else.  He carried his difference about him; instinctively she could see that he too had once been scorned and labelled a freak but had risen above it.  Livid red streaks scarred one side of his face; the result of flashing talons on the one and only occasion he had been careless.  Never before had she been attracted so magnetically.  And so the living of a different kind of double life began, one lived in both the interior and the exterior, conjoining them at last.  She tamed the lion tamer, and in so doing set him free, and vice versa.  Both in its command and spectrum of colours, Isaac’s strong, deep, accented voice thrilled her.  In an outlying caravan in the depths of the night, he became her horse and she his lion and together they merged the grace of acrobatic flight and the anticipation of formal strictures.

You could never be certain about the future, but time gave Marion to understand that Isaac loved her more than his lions.  He too had an interior like hers, and since he did, regardless of separation or loss, she could no longer envisage dying of a broken heart.  ‘Broken heart’ – she heard that phrase as the intermingled colours of a bruise.  ‘Heart’ by itself – a different matter.  One night in the caravan she told Isaac its colour as she perceived it and never loved her lion tamer more than for his immediate reply – ‘may your heart stay vermillion forever’.