The universe according to Maximillian

Sheep

2008-02-12T21:40:06Z

I went through a phase, while fleshing out the ideas of the boy's world in my head, of not being sure which parts of the universe he exists in to visit and discover. So I ran a series of requests, inviting people to give me titles which I'd then write a story from. I got three replies, which were the next three stories. After the third the story was trying to escape from even these little constraints, wanting to reflect the events in my life, and the characters were asking me to develop them in new and darker ways: naturally powerless to resist, after the third 'request' story I gave up on asking for more and instead began to take titles from my mind again.

Still the three request stories are quite important in their own way, reflecting on interesting issues, and they provide a good metaphor for that lull that always seems to set in my life about the time that I wrote these. It's a strange mish-mash: the feeling of boredom from no crises to deal with; the nagging feeling that one should be doing something; the worry that something's about to go really bad; the hidden frustration at having nothing to do; then comes the realisation that so many things have happened, that you've not noticed them happening, but they've all come up behind and underneath you, and now they're crashing over you and you're drowning in the mess and you curse the lull which you were in not five minutes ago and which you wasted not preparing for this eventuality and you strike out desperately to swim or sink.

It always happens.

"Sheep" was written for Alice Briggs (because it's better than her sister's idea which I recall was "Cinderella III") and was a more intellectual story. Less emotionally charged. Incidentally, the boy would later vote Alice as "Best New Friend of 2007".

Sheep

The boy's standing on the top of a wall which runs along a city road. Not much to do, he merely watches as people go past beneath him, which is a favourite pastime of his. People are always so interesting. Watching them, he can almost safely say they will never be of any consequence to him. There are six billion of them in the world, and all of them pass through this point at some time. A minuscule fraction hang around to make any difference to him, so for the most part, he can watch them and invent their life stories in his head. After all, in this city, they all are in his head, and what he imagines of their lives is true.

So the man who walks past with a big bulky overcoat on... he has something to hide. The boy watches him go and begins to imagine what he's hiding. A pistol? Nah, a coat like that requires something far greater. A sawn-off shotgun, he decides. He's off to... commit a robbery? No, he'll go and hold up a bank with his sawn-off shotgun. And that woman driving that beaten-up van there is his accomplice. And that man in the suit, hurrying to work.... he works at said bank, and will arrive scarce minutes before the criminal bursts in, pulls out his shotgun, fires a shot at the ceiling and yells for everyone to give him all their valuables. See that police car passing down the street, driving past the van? It's going the wrong way, it's going to miss all the action. It'll arrive too late... That television helicopter circling overhead will probably get the news before the police do. There are sirens in the distance now, but soon they will not be in the distance, they will be close... What of that young man who checks his wallet, standing almost directly beneath the boy, and then rushes off? He's blatantly going to the bank. Will he get there before the hold-up and become a hapless victim? Will he arrive as it happens? Will he try to do something brave? He looks strong and fit – cancel that, it's the boy's story. He has a blackbelt in karate, and he'll rush to the defence of the others in the bank as soon as the first shot is fired. He might have time, given that the man will have to reload the shotgun and will be relying on the shock of the people in the building... but no, that shock will also impede him... and then he'll rush the robber and get blasted off his feet, and his hideous death will stop anyone else from wanting to attack the burglar... The boy'd better get there to stop it happening. He turns and is about to race there, but then remembers something. It's all in his head.

So he thinks for five minutes. He thinks of a man who is about to enter a bank when a security guard leaves. The security guard isn't looking where he's going and bumps into the man. He's about to apologise, but the man goes berserk and whips out his shotgun. The security guard's eyes widen and he instantly grabs the weapon before it's even properly out of the coat. He disarms the man and pins him to the floor while his partner calls the police. Story solved.

The boy nods, satisfied with the lives he's saved, and then he looks around. What can he do to this part of town now? How about if all the people in it were animals... So that man there, walking with a girl, arm around her, he's a dog. He's loyal to her, to a fault, and wants to protect her from the world. But that girl herself, she's a cat. That man pleases her, and she desires him... but she's only going to hang around with him until she gets bored of him. Interesting situation. What about the rest of the couples? He looks, and in his head, they are all cats and dogs. Oddly, though, there's a lot of pairings between cats and dogs. Very few couples where both man and woman are dog, or cat for that matter. He considers that this probably means something, and shakes his head sadly at the possible implications.

This is a good game, he'll continue. Those four kids there, none of them older than six, are rabbits. Cute little bunnies, innocent and simply enjoying life for life's sake, running around and having fun. And the harassed-looking woman who is trying to control them is a hen, torn between wanting to be joining them and wanting them to stop so they're easier to protect. She's particularly scared of the gang of yobs who pass her... they are jackals, eyeing her and the children with an evil eye. But in their turn, they are scared of the two police officers walking down the street past them... two lions, powerful and imposing, scared of nothing, scaring only the wrongdoers and bolstering the spirits of the others. The lions are comparatively powerless, though, against this one foe which they see walking the streets. The vultures, lawyers and journalists and loan sharks and debt collectors, those who live off those the lions try to protect. Yet the vultures are untouchable, flying in places too high for the lions to reach. There's a constant sort of balance between all these animals, and a sudden thought strikes the boy. What does balance imply? It implies that from the right perspective, you can ignore individuals, and focus on the mass. He lifts his arms and floats upwards, riding a current in the wind, and sees the city from far out. Sometimes he likes to come up here and admire the city, but now he's just looking at the people he saw earlier. And his suspicions are correct.

Sheep. The further you get away from the actual city, the more the people in it stop looking like any other sort of animal, and the more they look like sheep. A tide of sheep, winding its way around the city. Although individually they are all their own animals, all completely and utterly different, it is nevertheless totally valid to zoom out and see the huge group of sheep which is the foundation of the city. The boy stares as he floats above the world, and shakes his head.

Sheep have good points. They're pretty predictable and not hard to deal with. Docile and not given to violence unduly. Amicable and generally right enough sorts, willing to go along with most things. But they'll go along with bad things too, and when roused into a stampede they're deadly. Too easily led by both bad and good. That's why a lot of this city is fighting between the dogs and the wolves over who will control the sheep. There's dogs down there, leaving the sheep to go about peaceably for the time being, but ready to marshal them when wolves attack. And if you're to define by animals, the boy is top dog. The city is his, he believes in it passionately, every last alley, corner, street, building, stone of it belongs to him. And he allows the sheep to live in it because they are necessary, but he much prefers the dogs. There's some of them now, heading down that street... they seem to be in a hurry. And whatever they're running towards, the sheep are fleeing from it... Ah.

Wolves. They've got to this part of the city. He'd hoped they'd stay away for longer, but the city is overrun with the things. Many parts still safe from them, many parts now full of them. They've obviously reached this sector. The sheep are running from them, and the dogs are running to them to do war with them. He'd better join them.

The boy crosses his arms and falls. As he falls, the sheep and dogs and wolves disappear and take their true forms. Throngs of panicking people, citizens of the city, are running from a battalion of tanks rolling into the city. Running alongside the tanks are soldiers, automatic rifles up and firing indiscriminately into the crowd. The boy's eyes narrow: no-one kills his citizens. He lands on the ground next to one of the soldiers and is already fighting.

Despite falling from a height of hundreds of metres, and slamming into the ground leaving a crater and causing enough of a shockwave to knock soldiers to the ground, the boy is totally uninjured. He leaps up from the ground, towards the closest soldier. A bestial snarl escapes his throat as he grabs his enemy and slams his knee into the man's face. Pushing him aside, he spins around and kicks out with enough force to break his second foe's neck. Dropping to hands and feet as the first shots pass over him, he sweeps his legs around and knocks over a third man. Grabbing the soldier's discarded rifle, he fires back into the first wave of soldiers. A rocket whooshes over his head and hits one of the tanks, blowing it to pieces. Back-up shots from behind cross paths with return fire from the soldiers as he leaps into the cover of the tank ruin. Looking behind him, he grins. The friend is out of sight behind a shop corner, slamming a fresh rocket into his tube launcher. A half-track is driving up the street, with the kid at the wheel, skilfully avoiding the shells from the tank barrels. The girl is on the top behind an armoured AP machine gun, shooting down other soldiers. The boy rises up and races forwards. Imagining himself a sudden burst of strength, he picks up one tank as if it was made of paper and hurls it forwards. It flies thirty metres before crashing into a house and exploding. The soldiers pause and stare at the boy who has just lifted and thrown a tank. The boy walks forwards, his rifle pointed to the skies. He stares at the soldiers with hatred.

“This is my city, you fucktards! Mine!” he yells. “I'm giving you ten minutes to get out of here before I decide we need some target practice!”

The soldiers drop their guns and flee with their tails between their legs. The boy watches the wolves run and sighs. The sheep will need to move again. These pastures aren't safe for long...

When He Was Young

2007-12-01T17:40:14Z

Whoof...

Well, NaNoWriMo is over, and congratulations to all this year's winners, and for all those who didn't do it there are many more years to come ;-)

With "Nobody's Angel" then to its bloody, fiery and furious conclusion, I had a bit of a look over the boy's history before I launched myself into that 50,000 word goal. For those who read "The Watertight Box" which I think was the last one I posted, I did deliberately include a scene where he revisits the same location to find what's changed. There was more building on some themes that I'd raised in "Sheep" and "It Never Rains, But It Pours" (both unpublished) and obviously, NA really just is the very long sorting-out of all the issues that've been running through in a sequence from "At The Bottom Of My Garden" through "Broon's Bane" to "Good Enough?" (all similarly unpublished). But I couldn't find anything linking back to "When He Was Young" which was the first story to properly introduce all four of the other main characters, apart from the boy himself. And I did wonder about this for a little while, but then decided it perhaps wasn't so odd because basically this one I'm about to put up, "When He Was Young" is the first snapshot of the city and what's going on within it. It doesn't tell you as much as later stories do, but relative to the situation at the time it tells you more than all the others put together, because it's the very first one to tell you anything at all.

It's told through the kid's viewpoint, which is something I feel awkward doing and is hard to write convincingly sometimes, but I liked it more than perhaps any of the stories I've put together, mainly because I had such a strong and consistent mental image of the entire story. It also did teach me a lot about the world I'd created - don't ever claim that the author knows everything, because he doesn't, he creates worlds but then has to find out about them just the same as any reader - mainly through the comments that people left when I first Myspaced it. One in particular which was good was from Brendan:

"I particularly like the way they're fighting for the city as if it's theirs, and it's all they have left, and there's no-one left to fight for it but them..."

That resounded in me a lot and I've never quite forgotten that idea.

A lot more went into this story. My love for post-apocalyptic shooter games certainly shaped how I envisaged the city in its war-torn state, and the music of the first half of the album "Sam's Town" shaped it too, as you can probably tell from the title. It's shorter than I remember too - only 1332 words - but it gets across what I want it to. It's like a ten-minute snapshot of another reality.

But without more ado, here's the story.

When He Was Young

When He Was Young

Bullets zip overhead and thud into the brick walls, sending sparks flying and knocking small slivers of masonry into the air. The kid crouches behind a fallen statue until the patter of bullets has ceased, then he takes a cautious peek around the side of the stonework which protects him. A man across the street from him has ejected a clip of bullets from his sub-machine gun and is reaching for another in his belt. Quickly the kid points his pistol at this man and squeezes off two shots. One shot hits his head and the man topples backwards, his face a mess of blood and bone. Almost before he has hit the ground, the kid is up and running, out of his cover for a few precious seconds. Gunfire patters towards him from behind, but answering shots bark from the location he is heading for, covering him as he rushes in panic. He dives into the cover of an open doorway and hits the ground hard. Hands pick him up and dust him off, and he looks around.

He's run into the lobby of a tenement building. There are three other people in here, all of them older, bigger, taller, stronger, wiser and smarter than him. The one poking a machine gun around the doorway firing off occasional shots at the mass of enemies behind them is the friend. Tall, strong and impressive, his bulk fills the doorway. Climbing up the stairs, assault rifle pointed at whatever may lurk up there, is the girl, dark hair tied back and a look of determination on her face. That means the one who picked him up and grins at him cheerfully, ruffles his hair and asks if he is alright, is the boy.

The kid idolises the boy. To him, the boy is as near perfection as can be reached. He's best friend, father figure, older brother, hero... everything the kid worships. Typically, the kid is only capable of doing so because of how comparatively little he knows about the boy. The girl and the friend between them know everything about the boy, and they love him for it. The kid knows comparatively little about the boy, and worships him. Such is life.

The four of them begin to move up the stairs in a group. The girl goes first, thrusting her weapon into doorways and constantly checking for enemies hiding. Following her is the boy, keeping a respectful distance, but it is obvious that he is constantly concerned for her. The kid tags along just behind the boy, scowling slightly. He doesn't like the girl much. Being only eleven, he becomes jealous very easily, and he sees that although the boy cares for him, he loves the girl far far more. The friend comes last, after setting up a trap across the doorway they are abandoning.

Up the stairs and onto the roof. The four warriors jump from building to building, easy enough to do in this crowded city. Flames crackle in the distance, explosions are still appearing twenty to the dozen everywhere, gunfire forms a constant backing track and screams and roars fill the air. The kid is too busy watching his feet to think about anything but his jumps, and so all this horror passes him by. Another explosion, slightly closer, occurs as someone tries to enter the door the friend has booby-trapped. This throws him a little off balance and as he makes his last leap onto the last in a series of roofs, his foot slips and he falls. A hand grabs him by the shoulder and hoists him back up onto the top of the three-storey house they are standing on. He looks up and is about to thank the boy for saving him, when he sees that the person who pulled him up is actually the girl. Confused by this and uncertain what to do, he stammers out a few indistinct sounds. She smirks and sticks her tongue out at him, but even at his age he's good enough at reading people to understand that she realises what he means and finds it sort of sweet. He is, however, the right age to feel offended by her almost condescending attitude towards him.

Looking around, the boy is walking around the edges of the roof. It's almost like a fortress, the flat plaza with raised walls around it. Not a very defensible one, with the raised edges only coming up to his waist, but he sees it's not a bad place to stop and consider what is happening. The boy is walking around and checking the surroundings, wanting to make certain that no-one will shoot them at the present moment. The friend has his heavy machine gun placed by the side and is studying what appears to be a map of the city. The girl is crouched in a corner with a sight attached to her rifle - it looks like she's using it to scan an area of the city where the gunfire is heavier than elsewhere. The kid has nothing to do with any of these three things, so he has the opportunity to watch the other three musketeers and think about them.

They are all so... superior? in his eyes. Cool, smart, funny, wise, brave, kind... in different ways, he idolises all of them. His feelings for the boy are nothing short of hero-worship. And he finds the friend so cool because of how close the boy and the friend are. And even though he dislikes the girl, he admires her because how much she loves the boy, and how much the boy loves her. And though he'd never realise it, and never admit it if he did, there's just the beginning of a teenage crush on her. He's only eleven, mind: as for the boy, the girl and the friend, their ages are indeterminate. They're somewhere between fourteen and twenty-two. The boy is older than the girl, and younger than the friend. Beyond that, it's not obvious. The kid is aware also that the friend and the girl keep changing, constantly looking different. The boy does not do so, at least not physically, and neither does the kid. This discrepancy - the fact that the girl might go to sleep with long red hair, tall and thin, and wake with short black hair, short and plump of figure, concerns neither of them. It does not concern the boy who understands why it happens, and it does not concern the kid who is young enough to just accept it, as long as it causes no problems.

The kid's not so naive, though. He knows there are problems. He sees the manic grin on the face of the friend when he fires his weapons and blows holes in human bodies. He's lain awake at night hearing the boy and the girl sobbing together. He knows that not all the scars on the girl were inflicted by others. Every so often, he looks up and sees a shadow pass over the face of the boy, a shadow that makes him stark terrified just to catch a glimpse of. Young as he is, he's old enough to realise that the problems these three face are far beyond his comprehension. In his young way, he loves them, and they love him back. He is a vital part of the boy's world. The girl cares for him because she cares for the boy, and she knows that without the kid, the boy would have nothing. The friend sees the kid is important to the boy, and finds him kind of amusing. So the four of them bond well together. Which, in this city going to hell, is important.

The friend looks up from his map and says something to the boy. The boy nods, and indicates a ladder down from the roof. The four take it and move off further into the city of death.

The Watertight Box

2007-10-22T21:25:49Z

The Catholic priest for Our Lady Of Victories' parish in Lutterworth, Father Feeley, has a number of phrases and complaints about the state of affairs today which he likes to bring out. One of these is the attitude of several Catholics and other Christians - indeed, a lot of supposedly religious people - towards God and their religion in general. I think the phrase is "putting God in a watertight box, bringing him out every Sunday for an hour of Mass, and then putting him away again." Despite probably being one of the people who he's complaining at here, I do feel his point strongly. You shut something away in a "watertight box" and only bring it out to fulfil obligations... you're not really treating it with any emotion, with any love, you're just using it either as a tool to fulfil a necessary purpose or worse, you're seeing it as a burden that you have to get over. Not how devout religious people are supposed to treat God (I guess there must be some leniency for those of us who have somewhat weak faith anyway...or at the least, weak religion).

I was thinking about this imagery about the same time that I was thinking about the "piece of my heart" metaphor. "Oh, you'll always have a special piece of my heart." Well, is that an actual physical piece? After all, your heart is a critical circulatory organ as well as the metaphor for your emotional centre. And then you have heartbreak, and a damaged heart, and heartburn, and emotional scars, and bla bla bla... Before you know, all these different imageries had combined, taken on a life of their own within the metaphor, and therefore formed the perfect basis for a story set in my usual surrealistic universe.

By the way, though "the girl" is a non-specific amalgam of all those that the boy has romantic and/or sexual feelings for, I did have a specific girl in mind when I thought of the scene involving the car, and I wrote it with that girl in mind.

The Watertight Box

The boy hurries down the passageway of steel walls. He has little or no time for the journey, and so doesn't pause to look at any of the scenery he passes on his way. His time is valuable and what he wishes to do when he reaches his destination will take some time, particularly seeing how close to his heart it is. All the wondrous sights outside of the passageway and inside are ignored by him in his hurry, but this is unimportant, as he has seen them a million times before. He slows as the passage suddenly reaches its end.

In front of him is a thick metal door. The door has no handle or keyhole: in fact, very little denotes the fact that it is a door at all. The boy knows it is, though. He designed the door. He placed it there, along with the other defences, after barely surviving the first attack. Since then, further threats have had to get past this defence to start with, although that has not always helped against the strongest - the weak link becomes the boy, and whether or not he will open the door. He's quite willing to, but the treasure inside is fragile, even so that often a stiff wind blowing down the corridor will necessitate the quick raising of defences before the contents of the room are damaged. Because of this, when it comes to this room the boy is an odd mix of naivety and paranoia. But that's unimportant. He's going there for a reason. He waves, and the giants guarding the door step aside. The door swishes open and he enters. It clangs shut again behind him.

Inside the room is suspended a gigantic human heart. It pumps and spasms, connected to a multitude of tubes and wires which keep it aloft and working. The heart is gigantic - roughly two and a half metres around at its thickest point, and in perfect proportions. The boy steps into the room fully and stares at it, then he looks around the room again. The room is full of pictures and mementoes of the girl. He cannot stare anywhere without meeting her eyes and her smile, except if he stares directly at the heart. That will be done later, though: for now, he is content to look at the girl and her images. And as he does so, memories flood back into his head.

Memories of stolen kisses on hot summer nights underneath trees. Memories of shared tales told lying together in bed. Memories of giggling awkward love in hidden and not-so-hidden places. Memories of simply sitting together talking and feeling closeness and being happy. He continues to look at the photographs. Here is the girl, plump and red-headed. Here is the girl, tall and thin and magnificently blonde. Here is the girl, short and dark-haired and cheeky and constantly smiling. Here is the girl as a boy. Here is the girl in a million different forms. Each close to him. He looks at one particular photo of the girl, and a strong memory hits him...

They had been in the car on the way to somewhere... he couldn't even remember where exactly. Originally, a sortie of four or five had been planned, but it had ended up being just the boy and the girl. This was when the boy and the girl had not been officially together, even. Anyway, they had been driving down a comparatively quiet country road when a tire had blown, and after a few wild moments of uncontrolled skidding he had pulled the car into a layby. They had both gotten out, and the boy had walked up and down cursing, while the girl had stood by the side trying not to laugh at how silly he looked... after some minutes of swearing, the boy had retrieved a tire pump. The two of them together had struggled to pump it up, but barely had they started than the valve broke free and swung around, decking the boy in the face... He collapsed and came to with the girl chuckling quietly and wiping blood from the cut on his forehead. When she saw he had awoken, she smiled at him and kissed his forehead, then stood up and ran off, giggling. He had chased her and cornered her against the hedge, they began to playfight and stopped suddenly. They stood for what seemed like an age, clasping each other, and she had smiled once. Then suddenly, they were kissing each other passionately as if there was no tomorrow, toppling backwards onto the ground. She gasped once as he entered her. Then they had both gasped as they climaxed...

The boy shakes his head and moves away. This memory, or dream, will not serve him. With a last, wistful look towards the pictures, he moves towards the heart in the centre. Standing inches from its surface, he examines it. Here are the bullet wounds and scrapes, scratches, teeth marks and cuts left over from the first attack. This section of the heart is shrivelled and blackened, although happily it has begun to show signs of life again. It may never recover to what it was before it was wounded, but it is nevertheless healing. He travels around its side, tracing his finger along each pit, each scar, each scorch. Taken together, they read like a map of a love life. That's what they are, in fact: the heart maps love. The damage is the bad times, and the places where the damage has healed or the heart has grown stronger and larger denote the good times.

The boy walks around fully to the other side, the side facing completely away from the door. On this side, a huge chunk of the heart is missing. Sawn off in a fit of madness by the boy himself, the mass of scar tissue where this piece of heart used to be is healing slowly, but nevertheless the gaping wound left by the removal of this piece is still visible. Not when the room is first entered, though: the boy has carefully set things up so that it is only visible from the other side, and quite easy to hide. He stares at this scar in the heart for a long time, and then turns away and picks up a large, sharp knife. Stepping back to the heart, he chooses a different section and begins to cut.

Slicing away, blood drips onto the floor and drains away. The heart shudders as he does so, but does not break free of the restraints holding it above the ground. As the boy cuts further through, it becomes harder work, but he keeps it up, panting with the exertion. Finally, his blade pushes through, and an entire chunk of heart peels off and slaps to the floor. Replacing the knife where he found it, the boy picks the piece of his heart up and carries it away to a table in the side of the room. He wraps it in brown paper, ties it up, and attaches a note:

"To the girl. With love, compliments, and gratitude."

He then picks up his package and leaves the room. The door slides shut behind him, and his heart is guarded again.

A Room Full Of Everything

2007-10-19T20:42:16Z

This one was really very short. It was me bored in front of a computer thinking about the human imagination, and how when I closed my eyes everything went black... then considering that it wasn't exactly black because my memory and my imagination would always imprint images onto the blackness, and then my usual random wanderings through the world of insanity.

So here you go, for completeness's sake...

A Room Full Of Everything.

The boy sits cross-legged in the room. How did he get there? What's he doing there? What's the room like? Well, he doesn't know. He's just sitting there. His legs are crossed, his hands are folded in his lap. He's wearing what he usually wears. His hair its usual length and tidiness (or lack of). He's... well, why do I need to describe him? You know the boy!

What's interesting is the room. And what's interesting about it is that he doesn't know anything about it. His eyes are closed, but even if he opened them it wouldn't help, because the room is in pitch darkness. He can't see a single thing. He could wave his hand in front of his face and not see it. A million spiders could be crawling through the room and he'd never see them. The room could be square, or rectangular, or hexagonal, or even spherical. Or totally irregular. He can't possibly tell. He has every other sense, but his sight is totally gone. So he sits. He listens, he smells, he tastes and he feels the air.

Monsters roam the room around him. Except it's no longer a room, it's a planet. Dark lightning crackles in the sky above him, casting no light but snapping out the sound of destruction. Gigantic humanoids with gigantic axes held in gigantic hands duel across the terrain. Great winged monsters wheel and swoop in the sky, every now and then diving and playing fire against the Earth, leaving long streams of burning waste scorching the ground. Forests march to war, maple and elm and oak trees smashing each other and providing more fuel for the flames threatening to consume the horizon. Mages ride skeletons of horses firing blue magic at anything that moves. Gods and superheroes battle. Worlds implode. Stars drop from the sky and crash into the Earth.

Somewhere, an alarm clock goes off, and the boy opens his eyes. Another school day. He sits at his desk and bits of information go into his mind, but inside the room the monsters and gods and heroes are still warring. And when he goes back into the room, they'll still be there.

Stories

2007-10-11T17:31:34Z

For those of you who don't know (some of you might) I write quite a lot of stories. They're generally set in their own, somewhat vague and surrealistic universe. It's now about a year since I wrote the first one, an anniversary which I am celebrating by writing a very long and complex one called "Nobody's Angel" which'll be my entry into NaNoWriMo.

These stories usually have a prompt which'll be something that happened in my life which I decided to express in a creative fashion... although there are less emotionally charged ones which came about purely because I wanted to write a story and asked someone for a title for one. They are almost entirely metaphor, but it's a metaphor so deep and complex that it has its own twisted reality. And there is a key to decode all the metaphors... but the key is my mind, which none of you can really ever access fully. So sorry. You'll have to read and draw your own conclusions as to what each thing means...hopefully, though, that's something some of you at least will enjoy.

Without further ado, anyway, here is what is technically the first one. It somewhat sets the scene for all the later ones though it doesn't quite fit in with them. The prompt was me considering if I could actually be insane - or at least severely mentally ill - without realising it, and this short story grew out of it.

(And yes, most of these can be found on my Myspace page... but not all of them, and as time goes on that'll become even less, as this is a rather more fitting place to keep them online.)

Untitled Zero

There's a kid who's not really quite normal. Something is delicately wrong inside his head. The thing is, no-one really notices. His parents love him, which is truly admirably, but they take this love to the extreme of not being able to see what's wrong with him. He is the oldest child - his siblings first idolise him, then envy him, then just respect him. When he first goes to school, people see him as being strange, but his strangeness manifests itself as intelligence and geekiness. He has some friends, but an awful lot of them just think he's weird and pass him by, or taunt him (as kids that age do). His best friend is actually very much like him, except with more severe autistic tendencies. He goes through infant school not really realising how strange he is. He's a bit of an attention seeker, often increasing his problems so that people will give him more sympathy. He doesn't realise how this makes him less likely to get given sympathy. At junior school he is no better off; he lacks even a truly good friend, and instead tags along in the year as the geeky one in any given social group. Some years later, he realises he was more appreciated than he ever knew, but by then it is too late to do anything with it.

At secondary school he begins to learn what friendship truly is. It takes him nearly five years. Five years where he struggles to conform to more of a social norm. He gains friends who he thinks are his best friends. He has crushes. He has hormones. He begins to "experiment" sexually, as they all do. He becomes, to most outsiders, normal. Only those who know him well can see he's still not really normal.

But here's the 'tragedy': left alone at this state, he probably would be normal. He'd have done it fully in another couple of years. He had planned his whole life out, and it would have gone that way - or, better, if it had, it would have worked. Broken dreams.

Like a lot of teenage boys, he takes several years between his first crush and his first relationship. It's the power of puppy love, convincing him he feels a way he doesn't. When she breaks up with him, he's stunned, and even though he finds someone new, someone even better, he continues to struggle with the fallout. He may not have actually suffered anything worth writing home about from an objective view, nothing worse than what most people get - but how can he know? He has no-one's experience but his own. He is the only person whose emotions he knows. To him, what happens is terrible, it is almost more than he can bear, and although he thinks he's ok, when the first girl he ever actually loved later leaves him, he proves to himself he has not recovered. He goes almost insane, hurling abuse at everyone he knows, making a complete idiot of himself and breaking friendships he's held for years, making an enemy of all those he loves. He sinks further and further into depravity and hate.

Four things save him, and those four things turn out to be the most important things in his life. Interestingly, they save him in the same order as he first found them. When he needs them most, they come as they did when he first gained their presence.

First on the scene is his family. They do not know what has happened to the son, the brother, they love. But the parents can begin to guess at the wider causes. Only able to help to a point, they nevertheless do everything they know how to - beginning with a shock punishment, designed to push him out of his depression. The punishment works, because it is more of a cure, taking away from him in a single stroke his major addiction and his major method of harming people.

Secondly comes God. God comes to this boy and shows him his existence and his love. From then on, the boy does not doubt God. And it doesn't matter if you, reading this story, believe in God or not. He does, and it's his story: therefore God exists. God opens the boy's eyes. He teaches him the beauty of life. Though the boy will stumble and even fall from the path of happiness a million times more before his life is done, at least he knows the path exists now.

Third are his friends. The weekend after God comes is the best of his life so far. He realises what his friends mean to him, and what he means to them. It is true to say that he loves his friends, because there is no other word strong enough to explain the emotions between them. The best life of his weekend is one where he spends his entire time with friends, and this sticks in his mind. His friends become even more important than he'd have thought before. He learns what true friendship is. True friendship, it becomes clear, is the willingness to lose everything just so you can stay someone's friend - and he receives and gives it now in abundance.

Fourth is love. True love. It comes from an unexpected corner, and at first, broken and burned and weary, he does not recognise its touch when it comes. But it comes, and eventually, he can recognise it and accept it. The girl who loves him has problems of her own, but he is now strong enough to help her, and as he does all in his power to help her, so she helps him. Together, they can grow in happiness and love - isn't that what love is supposed to be?

Those who contributed to his mental state often do not know who they are. And, sadly, he may never see those who hurt him get hurt themselves, just as he may never see those who helped him get helped themselves. But it is enough to know he has what he needs to be happy. Come what may, he now believes he will never again fall so far. He will struggle. It will be hard. Many days he doubts what he knows. But he will succeed now. He has faced more than he ever thought could have assailed him, and triumphed over a problem far greater than himself. Future struggles may be greater in magnitude, but not in proportion.

He may be weird: but to be honest, he's not so abnormal. He's only human.

Comments welcome. There's quite a bit of me in this somewhat pointless story, but there's an awful lot of a lot of other people too.

WOO HOOOOOOO!

2007-10-07T14:53:43Z

I can now finally post to LiveJournal!

It's like my birthday came early. Two days early, as LiveJournal so kindly pointed out to me... :-p

So yeah, that's all. I'll work out how this particular social networking site varies from all the others and then start posting stuff...