Short Story Sunday.
All Bad Things Come in Threes.
I haven't written anything in a while and I wrote this one in the last three hours from a rough idea I had about five years ago, I've never written anything without writing it up on paper first before this. So apologies if it seems a bit unpolished, I was trying to get it done on time not done perfectly.
You want to know why I only sleep with the lights on? It is a weird story, you remember that time I was in hospital and lost all that weight but didn't have sex with any of the nurses even though I said I'd try? Well it all kind of started on the last night I was there.
You'll remember that the bike hit me pretty hard, the guy riding it hit the road pretty hard and was in a coma for about a month and a half, I personally ended up in hospital in a brain damage recovery ward for a few weeks while they waited to see if I was going to die. And took bets on what was going to kill me. My visiting friends were encouraging, you may recall the various get well balloons shaped like genitals and the general lack of compassion after they worked out I probably wouldn’t die but the hospital needed me to stick around just in case.
It was a pretty horrifying accident all around, the cyclists rear brakes failed on him going down the hill and hitting the front brakes just sent him flying over the handlebars while his bike became a missile on wheels heading towards me on the footpath waiting to cross the road. My girlfriend watched most of it happening and then had a panic attack while phoning for an ambulance. She did manage to instagram some pictures of the ambulance dragging me away.
Because of course she would.
We got married the next year, but that is a whole other story.
Now the hospital had pretty strict rules about the nurses and keeping us under observation every hour of the day, but occasionally they'd go away to help someone or they'd go to the toilet or something else equally innocent, leaving someone in the next bay over to keep an eye on us or an ear out just in case.
Because my injury wasn't so bad they often left me alone at the end of the ward in a room designed for four people but empty save for myself(the last three people who'd been in the room with me had all sadly died over the course of the week and not enough people had hurt themselves in the brain to fill up the gaps). The nurses name that night was Penny, she was a nice lady but she liked to take some time every night to go and sneak a quick snack from the staff fridge. Usually something chocolate, she sometimes bought some back for me when we weren't arguing about pop-culture and the role of war as a motivating factor in science fiction shows(she loved her Sci-fi more than was probably healthy). When I slept I would often get terrible nightmares and wake up slightly groggy and delusional, I thought I was in Paris at one point and Tasmania at another. It took about an hour for me to re-establish my location and centre myself. So the overnights I would stay awake and sleep during the daytime, usually just dozing a little bit because I would wake up more rational.
I was trying to sleep after a long conversation with Penny about why I didn't really like the Harry Potter books or movies and how she couldn't believe that such a thing was possible when I heard him come into the room. My eyes were shut and the lights were dimmed but I could smell him and hear the pace of his step and I don't know why but they intimidated the hell out of me.
And then, like a river bursting out of its banks I heard a voice sliver out of his mouth.
"Hello Penny. How's your night going?"
Penny made a clucking sound, the kind you make when you aren't 100% sure that you know the person who knows your name and replied. "Good so far..." she struggled to remember his name, probably hoping that some insane muscle memory would kick in and remind her at the end of the sentence. It was not to be. "Although this one is in a coma and isn't coming out anytime soon." I couldn't see her but I assumed she was pointing at me because unless they moved someone into the room while I wasn't paying attention(and when you've got a possible brain injury you really really need to pay attention to everything around you on the off chance that you forget something and they make you get another bloody scan to see why you forgot it).
She was being a bit cruel because she thought I was asleep and being in a coma was something I was terrified of. Stupid free nurses chocolate made me tell her all my secrets over the last week.
"He's in a coma. What are his chances of waking up?" Once again there was a chill in the voice of this stranger. I was assuming he was a doctor at the time, but he could have been a nurse or a wardy for all I knew at the time. Hell, I could have imagined it all, I did have a brain injury you know. Pretty much nothing from that time can be considered certain.
"Pretty slim. Basically he's a vegetable until they pull the plug." She was such a cow when she wanted to be. "Although from what I gather he wasn't that bright to start with. He didn't even like the Harry Potter books, can you believe that?"
"I can." Even with my eyes shut I could feel him looking at me. "Hey, do you want to take a few minutes break? Pop around and get some tea for yourself? Its 2am and you need to stay alert you know. I can watch him, I doubt he's going anywhere."
"Sounds like a plan..." She once again hoped to remember his name before giving up and going off to find her chocolate. "Just hit the button above his bed if literally anything happens. I don't care if he just sneezes, if we have four people die in here god alone knows what will happen, but it will probably involve a lot of questions and some angry families on television crying until the next commercial break."
He laughed at that. "Understood Penny. Don't worry, I'll be sure to keep him alive even if I have to electrocute him a few times with the old paddles."
"Ha! Clear!" I heard her laughing as she left the room, her footsteps fading into the distance, past all the other vegetables towards her chocolate.
The two of us were now alone.
"Right, I don't have long to do this my vegetable friend so I'll be brief." I nearly lept up and ran, despite my legs being a pile of rubber and my various parts being attached to various tubes and pipes. I figured I was about to get something unpleasant done to me by god only knows who. And he needed to hurry about it which worried me slightly more for some reason.
I could hear a chair being moved around the room, right next to my bed. I decided to stay still and wait to see what he was going to do before I even tried to do anything to escape. "I have to confess to you my sins. From the very first to the very last, although I've found after a while I can kind of gloss over a few details for brevity. My real name isn't even pronounceable anymore. I'm not what I look like, dressed here and sitting like a civilised man in this wonderful hospital. I'm not a man, I'm a monster and this is my confession. It has been just under a year since my last confession.
"It all started a very very long time ago, I'm not even sure what year it was anymore, sometimes I forget details like that, it has been so long. So anyway, I was a young man, a soldier of sorts I guess and I was tasked with a simple job, my men and I had to go and kill the savage bastards who lived on the hill over the valley we lived in. They had done something or we needed the land for food or we just wanted to kill something for the sport of it. I once knew and it was the most important thing in the world to me but now it is just an old memory like the language of my people and the people we killed that day.
"We walked into the town during the dawn hours, slowly creeping from sleeper to sleeper and killing them in their sleep. It was over before the sun was high in the sky, we gathered to celebrate, covering ourselves in the blood, I remember that because I have to remember, it was while we were doing that that this old old man came upon us from one of the piles of bodies. He rose up covered in the waste of the bodies, what little meat we'd left on them, and attacked us with a fury I've never seen in my life. And believe me I've had a long life to see such fury. Everyone died but me. This old cripple of a man just killed us all. It was as he wrapped his hands around my throat that I saw the blade in his throat. He was trying to scream at me, trying to tell me something in the rambling guttural howls of his language. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was his smiling grin and I reached up to grab the stone in his neck.
"When I woke up the old man was on top of me, I think a few minutes had passed. He'd painted my naked body in his blood and said to me, in the tongue of my people. 'I curse you savage. I curse YOU!' I heard the words and laughed at his passing. His curse was for me to live forever, I would never age as long as I killed three people within each year. He wasn't very bright, he assumed that eventually I would kill everyone in my tribe, everyone I loved, just for another year of life. He didn't know about the wider world past the valley and the hill. The tens of thousands of lives out there for me to kill. He didn't know how hard I'd fight to stay alive, even after fighting so hard himself."
I heard him shift in his seat, as though a great burden was lifted from his shoulders. The truth from a madman. I worried about my own safety obviously, but I couldn't help but be compelled to stay perfectly still, hoping he'd finish and leave.
"I returned to my people and stayed there for a few years, killing three people and staying young. Such were the times that deaths were common enough and crime as a concept didn't exist back then. If you killed someone you killed someone. But eventually the people of my tribe learnt that while I would kill them without fear every year they couldn't kill me. Time and time again young men would steal into where I would sleep and try to brain me with a rock and time and time again the rock would shatter and I'd barely rise.
"Soon enough they cast me out, refusing to feed me and never letting me have the opportunity to kill again. They were, as far as I can remember, the only people to put together the details of my curse and find an actual solution. Not one member of a civilised nation has ever managed it so far.
"I travelled the world, at that time mankind was rising out of the dirt like a flower in a cowpat, spread everywhere, I somehow managed to keep my killing going during this time. The snows of winter hid me and the blood of those I found kept me. I forgot what I was and became very much the model of a savage. Acting on instinct and rage, killing more than was ever needed. Eventually I found the first cities, Babylon, Jerusalem, Rome and others. Here I could hide and live as I'd always needed to. By this stage I'd stopped eating food as I didn't need it to live, I'd stopped sleeping and was just never still. I was a Gladiator and a legionnaire, I was a soldier again marching on tribes of the innocent. And every year I had to measure my life against what I had to do to keep it.
"Soon Rome fell and I journeyed through the wars which followed, Charlemagne, The Crusades, the 100 year war. Always leaving bodies in my wake, mine was a drop in an ocean of blood. I fought for the French in the battle of Crecy, a rare loss for me I have to admit. I helped subjugate Africa and India and was almost tempted to just buy some slaves to stop myself from having to hunt as I did, but I couldn't do it. For some reason, even with the mountain of bodies behind me through history the idea of enslaving another seems... obscene.
"I was in the Holocaust, I was living with the Roma at the time of the war breaking out, travelling as they do helped to hide my condition, they and all the other Gypsies were gathered up and we were interned at the camps. I still killed as I needed to, just three a year, the bodies were hidden in the mess of the atrocities. I left the camps after the war and ended up in Siberia working in the gulags before I journeyed to China during the back end of the cultural revolution and then on to Vietnam for that slice of insanity and then I ended up in Australia with some refugees on a boat across the ocean.
"The look on the face of the officials when a white person came off the boat first. I've been here now for forty years or so. And I've a trail of bodies behind me that would terrify even the most hardened sadists.
"I've tried to stop, you know, I once went two years without killing anyone, but I started to feel the aging process, I could feel my skin stretching, I could feel my teeth getting looser, I could feel my joints clicking just a little bit more than they had before. I couldn't remember how to eat food or drink water properly, I had to relearn it all, my stomach couldn't bare the presence of food after so many years, the misery of aging and the pain of it all. I took a knife to a whores throat that evening and so on for a few months more before I was certain I wasn't aging anymore.
"In all the years I've been alive I've aged maybe ten in total, I don't know exactly when I was born and when I started this, based on my memories I think I'm about eight to nine thousand years old. I've witnessed all of recorded history and remember events which pre-date even the oldest known fossils. I've seen mankind crawl up from the basest of creatures to the modern civilised world around us. I've watched as murder went from a daily thing to the greatest of all crimes. Once I would just kill and kill and kill again and no-one would stop me, now I'm afraid, everytime I leave the house I'm afraid that someone somewhere will put the pieces together and I'll be in jail, finally unable to kill, stuck growing older and older until finally I die.
"I've become cruel and petty, toying with the fates of people unaware of my influence over their families for generations sending them into ruin because of the most minor of slights and I've grown tired of humanity, the stink of the modern world, the buzz of the electromagnetic spectrum humming in my ears for fifty years and likely forevermore. I've been there when glorious battles were fought, watched heroes feast on flesh, both to eat and otherwise. I've seen fifty years pass and songs about those days turn into anthems turn into war cries turn into prayers.
"I've killed in every way that it is possible to kill, I've killed with every tool which could be put to use. I've killed with a hairbrush and a toothbrush. It has only been a recent fact that I found a way to kill every year without raising alarms, those at deaths door. My curse doesn't care if you have a long time or a short time left, I simply have to be the one to end it. Leaving us here, alone in this room. Three people in a week, not quite a personal record but close. And just before the due date my friendly vegetable."
"The last part of the curse was this urge to confess, this yearning to unburden myself. I sometimes wonder if it is human nature to want to be relieved of your secrets and not a part of this stupid curse. But the urge to talk grows every year, I have to unburden myself. I tried talking to priests in confession, back when they all spoke Latin, I was run out of town with a mob at my back. I tried telling children but they would just cry as I told them about the lakes of blood I've walked through and their parents would cast me out. I've told lovers and wives, girlfriends and even the occasional boyfriend. None would accept it, they'd think me mad or have me cast out. And yet the urge grows stronger every time I confess. Once I went decades, now I say it yearly. I find someone I can tell, someone who can't talk back. Someone like you my vegetable friend.
"I've killed twenty four thousand people my friend, these hands..." I could feel his hand touch mine for the first time. The cold, sandpaper texture of his flesh made my skin crawl. "... these hands have never built anything of consequence but have ended the potential of so many who could have.
"And now I've confessed my sins. I can hear Penny coming back, she has no idea but I met her when she was ten. I've met nearly everyone in this city at one point or another and I remember their names somehow. I think we met a long time ago, you would have been about twenty or so and I'd assume in a strip club for the first time. Don't worry I won't tell anyone about it. Penny will come back soon and she'll see you're still alive and that I'm gone. Maybe she'll be worried I vanished, maybe she'll assume I've gone to help someone else. Maybe she'll forget I was even here and will never think on it.
"You're the only friend I have in the world right now my vegetable, the last vegetable I talked to died a few months ago, I only regret I didn’t do it to him myself, his family pulled the plug on him. My family is long dead, my tribe gone, the tribe on the hill is gone and I’m the only legacy of my people, not even a footnote in an encyclopaedia or a Wikipedia entry . I'll let you go now, I might return one day, I know that people in a coma can hear something of what is happening outside themselves, I hope you've heard what I've done, what I am. I'm the monster in the darkness. And I hope you never wake up. Because I can't have my secrets walking around my friend. I can’t let that type of thing out into the world."
I heard him get up then, walking towards the door, and never heard another thing from him afterwards. A minute later Penny returned, the scent of chocolate mixing with the old smell of the man who just left. She prodded my leg a little bit to check if I was awake.
"I'm awake Penny. I'm awake." I felt like I had been holding my breath for an hour. I looked at the clock on the wall, ten minutes had passed.
She turned the lights up a little bit in the room. "My god you're as pale as a sheet. You look terrible. Where’d that guy go? Must have gone to get something, not to worry. Are you okay?"
I had a catheter in me at the time, otherwise I would have likely pissed myself as well. "I'm scared Penny, I'm scared of dying in this room. I'm scared for the first time since I came here. Those three guys just died in here while I was asleep and I could be next." I was also scared of the lunatic who’d just left the room, but as I’ve said before, I was prone to vivid dreams.
"Don't worry about it deary. You know that these things always come in threes. And you were lucky number four." She turned the lights back down and I started screaming. Bringing in every nurse and doctor on the floor.
I haven't slept with the lights off since.
My Day.
Sadly I didn't cycle to the game this morning, I slept in too late to do that, I got up and sprinted out the door to my car and then my GPS proceeded to have a fit trying to get to Nudgee road for some reason or another. My GPS is from 2007 and as a result it is missing some key locations in its big map of Brisbane. Chief amongst these are pretty much everything related to the ICB, which is a nightmare to drive on anyway, all of the tunnels and the Logan motorway which connects to the Western Freeway but didn't back when my GPS was made.
I got to the game and didn't have much of a showing this week, we had 15 players show up so I didn't get much of a run at all. I was briefly in Midfield, I wasn't bad in that position but I was puffed pretty quickly for some reason, probably because I'm still out of shape, I got some good work done in the limited time I had on the field I guess. The final score was 2-2 which was a bit of a shame because we had some good runs at goal but just couldn't complete them. It was a friendly game anyway so it wasn't such a big deal. We might be playing against them again next week if they can get a team together and we can get enough people interested in going. If we do get another game on for next weekend then I'm going to have to cycle because I talked it up so much today that I'd be shamed if I didn't at least try to.
After the game I got a call from James asking if I wanted to go out to look at his block of land. So I went home to get changed and then he came over to my parents place with his two sons to pick me up. Finally, after two years my best friends kids have met my nieces, I honestly have been trying to line this up for two years but every time my brother is in town he's too busy or James is too busy or something else gets in the way. So it was nice to see them together. Sadly James son is shy and doesn't really like people when he meets them the first time until he's relaxed a bit, and our dogs are a bit possessive every time someone new comes in to the house so they were nipping at him while he tried to hide behind his dad. My brother and James caught up a little bit and then we were off on our way. I grabbed my Laptop as I left the house because I figured I might as well go to university that afternoon to get some work done and we set off down to Ipswich.
Back when I was in primary school I used to have a friend who lived down in and around that part of the city. He lived down past Colleges Crossing, which currently looks awesome thanks to all the floods in the last few years, trees and debris are just spread out everywhere, I had no idea. Driving down there with James was interesting because I remember a lot of it from the last time I drove that way back in around 1994. The trees were shorter back then. Once we got to his house, still under construction, we found out that his eldest son has wet himself. They're trying to get him out of his nappies right now so this wasn't unexpected. I was given the younger child and James went about cleaning up the babyseat(it had a pee catcher seat cover for this exact situation, my god they think of everything when it comes to baby stuff). If I had decent internet where I am right now I'd post some pictures(I'm going to try and post pictures every day as well as write as much as I can because maintaining a wall of text is difficult enough but pretty pictures tends to soothe criticism). After that was all sorted out I was given a tour by a James who had gum boots on so his shoes wouldn't be ruined by the mud. It looks really nice out there, they're close to the river as well but above the flood line or something. The only problem I could see is that while they're close to the river they don't have access to the river so they can't get a boat or go swimming in it or anything like that. Aside from that it was nice. As we were leaving I started asking James if he would be up for walking Kokoda and I think he wasn't entirely being sarcastic when he said he might do that after he'd finished literally every other thing he had to do in his life right now.
The side of James house, with the clouds coming in.
As we started to drive off I asked James where he'd put the Pee Cushion thing, which had been on the roof of the car earlier. He jumped out of the car and grabbed it, put it in one of the dozen plastic bags that all parents have to carry around with them at all times, and dumped it in the boot. Would have been embarrassing to have that fly off the roof of the car down a freeway.
Safely back on the road I got a lift to Indooroopilly where I was going to catch a bus to the city to go to university and get my ever crippling work done, I stopped to get a Chicken Terriyaki first(I have a system for food after every Soccer game, Chicken Curry if we win, Chicken Terriyaki if we draw and Hungry Jacks if we lose) and then took a bus into the city and then walked to QUT. After getting out of the bus I stumbled on a protest at the end of King George Square about Venezuela and democracy, they were right next to the loud preacher singer guy who used to sing in the great court at UQ. That guy never gives up.
The Protesters kept screaming for democracy in their homelands. Trying to outchant the Preacher.
I made it to the Library and got a little bit of work done, but kept getting phone calls from my mum who is currently trying to organise my brothers schedule for the month now that his main morning carer is on holidays and she and my dad are going away next week. Its turning out to be difficult for her despite the fact that I'm pretty much willing to work every extra hour without much complaint(having working internet at his house is probably my only complaint). After the library closed I was going to go into the 24 hour lab but the line was stupid long and I didn't like my chances of getting a spot so I went home.
The line was crazy long.
I ended up catching a bus and having to wait 53 minutes for the next one because I missed my bus by 7 minutes(I shouldn't have stopped at Mos Burger to get a burger, but they're so tasty how could I resist?).
I decided to start writing my short story at Mos Burger and then kept writing on the bus, stopped when I got to mums house to grabs some clean clothes and my car and then finished it up at Matts house where I am right now.
He's fast asleep and I'm pretty sure I'll be passing out soon myself so I'm going to close up now.
I hope everyone is had a great weekend!
Also Orphan Black was great. Can't wait for next year.
Theme Weeks!
I've decided this year to try writing my daily entries with a general theme.
This week will be Things I Treasure. I'll look at some of the things I treasure, the history of them and why they mean so much to me.
Monday: My Little Notebook.
Tuesday: My comic book Collection.
Wednesday: The Wardrobe.
Thursday: My Social Media.
Friday: My Laptop.
Saturday: The Painting.
Sunday: Short Story: The Quiet Young Ladies Guide to Multiple Personalities.
Next week I think I'll do something about things I enjoy doing. Then maybe after that the things I learnt from my two degrees and follow that up with things I've learnt about libraries in the last three years. I might change them later, but right now that is my plan. Unless I can think of some crazy number of topics about libraries to talk about.
The Saddest Penguin in the World. Because if you weren't depressed before you read the 5052 words which make up todays entry you will be now.
I haven't written anything in a while and I wrote this one in the last three hours from a rough idea I had about five years ago, I've never written anything without writing it up on paper first before this. So apologies if it seems a bit unpolished, I was trying to get it done on time not done perfectly.
You want to know why I only sleep with the lights on? It is a weird story, you remember that time I was in hospital and lost all that weight but didn't have sex with any of the nurses even though I said I'd try? Well it all kind of started on the last night I was there.
You'll remember that the bike hit me pretty hard, the guy riding it hit the road pretty hard and was in a coma for about a month and a half, I personally ended up in hospital in a brain damage recovery ward for a few weeks while they waited to see if I was going to die. And took bets on what was going to kill me. My visiting friends were encouraging, you may recall the various get well balloons shaped like genitals and the general lack of compassion after they worked out I probably wouldn’t die but the hospital needed me to stick around just in case.
It was a pretty horrifying accident all around, the cyclists rear brakes failed on him going down the hill and hitting the front brakes just sent him flying over the handlebars while his bike became a missile on wheels heading towards me on the footpath waiting to cross the road. My girlfriend watched most of it happening and then had a panic attack while phoning for an ambulance. She did manage to instagram some pictures of the ambulance dragging me away.
Because of course she would.
We got married the next year, but that is a whole other story.
Now the hospital had pretty strict rules about the nurses and keeping us under observation every hour of the day, but occasionally they'd go away to help someone or they'd go to the toilet or something else equally innocent, leaving someone in the next bay over to keep an eye on us or an ear out just in case.
Because my injury wasn't so bad they often left me alone at the end of the ward in a room designed for four people but empty save for myself(the last three people who'd been in the room with me had all sadly died over the course of the week and not enough people had hurt themselves in the brain to fill up the gaps). The nurses name that night was Penny, she was a nice lady but she liked to take some time every night to go and sneak a quick snack from the staff fridge. Usually something chocolate, she sometimes bought some back for me when we weren't arguing about pop-culture and the role of war as a motivating factor in science fiction shows(she loved her Sci-fi more than was probably healthy). When I slept I would often get terrible nightmares and wake up slightly groggy and delusional, I thought I was in Paris at one point and Tasmania at another. It took about an hour for me to re-establish my location and centre myself. So the overnights I would stay awake and sleep during the daytime, usually just dozing a little bit because I would wake up more rational.
I was trying to sleep after a long conversation with Penny about why I didn't really like the Harry Potter books or movies and how she couldn't believe that such a thing was possible when I heard him come into the room. My eyes were shut and the lights were dimmed but I could smell him and hear the pace of his step and I don't know why but they intimidated the hell out of me.
And then, like a river bursting out of its banks I heard a voice sliver out of his mouth.
"Hello Penny. How's your night going?"
Penny made a clucking sound, the kind you make when you aren't 100% sure that you know the person who knows your name and replied. "Good so far..." she struggled to remember his name, probably hoping that some insane muscle memory would kick in and remind her at the end of the sentence. It was not to be. "Although this one is in a coma and isn't coming out anytime soon." I couldn't see her but I assumed she was pointing at me because unless they moved someone into the room while I wasn't paying attention(and when you've got a possible brain injury you really really need to pay attention to everything around you on the off chance that you forget something and they make you get another bloody scan to see why you forgot it).
She was being a bit cruel because she thought I was asleep and being in a coma was something I was terrified of. Stupid free nurses chocolate made me tell her all my secrets over the last week.
"He's in a coma. What are his chances of waking up?" Once again there was a chill in the voice of this stranger. I was assuming he was a doctor at the time, but he could have been a nurse or a wardy for all I knew at the time. Hell, I could have imagined it all, I did have a brain injury you know. Pretty much nothing from that time can be considered certain.
"Pretty slim. Basically he's a vegetable until they pull the plug." She was such a cow when she wanted to be. "Although from what I gather he wasn't that bright to start with. He didn't even like the Harry Potter books, can you believe that?"
"I can." Even with my eyes shut I could feel him looking at me. "Hey, do you want to take a few minutes break? Pop around and get some tea for yourself? Its 2am and you need to stay alert you know. I can watch him, I doubt he's going anywhere."
"Sounds like a plan..." She once again hoped to remember his name before giving up and going off to find her chocolate. "Just hit the button above his bed if literally anything happens. I don't care if he just sneezes, if we have four people die in here god alone knows what will happen, but it will probably involve a lot of questions and some angry families on television crying until the next commercial break."
He laughed at that. "Understood Penny. Don't worry, I'll be sure to keep him alive even if I have to electrocute him a few times with the old paddles."
"Ha! Clear!" I heard her laughing as she left the room, her footsteps fading into the distance, past all the other vegetables towards her chocolate.
The two of us were now alone.
"Right, I don't have long to do this my vegetable friend so I'll be brief." I nearly lept up and ran, despite my legs being a pile of rubber and my various parts being attached to various tubes and pipes. I figured I was about to get something unpleasant done to me by god only knows who. And he needed to hurry about it which worried me slightly more for some reason.
I could hear a chair being moved around the room, right next to my bed. I decided to stay still and wait to see what he was going to do before I even tried to do anything to escape. "I have to confess to you my sins. From the very first to the very last, although I've found after a while I can kind of gloss over a few details for brevity. My real name isn't even pronounceable anymore. I'm not what I look like, dressed here and sitting like a civilised man in this wonderful hospital. I'm not a man, I'm a monster and this is my confession. It has been just under a year since my last confession.
"It all started a very very long time ago, I'm not even sure what year it was anymore, sometimes I forget details like that, it has been so long. So anyway, I was a young man, a soldier of sorts I guess and I was tasked with a simple job, my men and I had to go and kill the savage bastards who lived on the hill over the valley we lived in. They had done something or we needed the land for food or we just wanted to kill something for the sport of it. I once knew and it was the most important thing in the world to me but now it is just an old memory like the language of my people and the people we killed that day.
"We walked into the town during the dawn hours, slowly creeping from sleeper to sleeper and killing them in their sleep. It was over before the sun was high in the sky, we gathered to celebrate, covering ourselves in the blood, I remember that because I have to remember, it was while we were doing that that this old old man came upon us from one of the piles of bodies. He rose up covered in the waste of the bodies, what little meat we'd left on them, and attacked us with a fury I've never seen in my life. And believe me I've had a long life to see such fury. Everyone died but me. This old cripple of a man just killed us all. It was as he wrapped his hands around my throat that I saw the blade in his throat. He was trying to scream at me, trying to tell me something in the rambling guttural howls of his language. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was his smiling grin and I reached up to grab the stone in his neck.
"When I woke up the old man was on top of me, I think a few minutes had passed. He'd painted my naked body in his blood and said to me, in the tongue of my people. 'I curse you savage. I curse YOU!' I heard the words and laughed at his passing. His curse was for me to live forever, I would never age as long as I killed three people within each year. He wasn't very bright, he assumed that eventually I would kill everyone in my tribe, everyone I loved, just for another year of life. He didn't know about the wider world past the valley and the hill. The tens of thousands of lives out there for me to kill. He didn't know how hard I'd fight to stay alive, even after fighting so hard himself."
I heard him shift in his seat, as though a great burden was lifted from his shoulders. The truth from a madman. I worried about my own safety obviously, but I couldn't help but be compelled to stay perfectly still, hoping he'd finish and leave.
"I returned to my people and stayed there for a few years, killing three people and staying young. Such were the times that deaths were common enough and crime as a concept didn't exist back then. If you killed someone you killed someone. But eventually the people of my tribe learnt that while I would kill them without fear every year they couldn't kill me. Time and time again young men would steal into where I would sleep and try to brain me with a rock and time and time again the rock would shatter and I'd barely rise.
"Soon enough they cast me out, refusing to feed me and never letting me have the opportunity to kill again. They were, as far as I can remember, the only people to put together the details of my curse and find an actual solution. Not one member of a civilised nation has ever managed it so far.
"I travelled the world, at that time mankind was rising out of the dirt like a flower in a cowpat, spread everywhere, I somehow managed to keep my killing going during this time. The snows of winter hid me and the blood of those I found kept me. I forgot what I was and became very much the model of a savage. Acting on instinct and rage, killing more than was ever needed. Eventually I found the first cities, Babylon, Jerusalem, Rome and others. Here I could hide and live as I'd always needed to. By this stage I'd stopped eating food as I didn't need it to live, I'd stopped sleeping and was just never still. I was a Gladiator and a legionnaire, I was a soldier again marching on tribes of the innocent. And every year I had to measure my life against what I had to do to keep it.
"Soon Rome fell and I journeyed through the wars which followed, Charlemagne, The Crusades, the 100 year war. Always leaving bodies in my wake, mine was a drop in an ocean of blood. I fought for the French in the battle of Crecy, a rare loss for me I have to admit. I helped subjugate Africa and India and was almost tempted to just buy some slaves to stop myself from having to hunt as I did, but I couldn't do it. For some reason, even with the mountain of bodies behind me through history the idea of enslaving another seems... obscene.
"I was in the Holocaust, I was living with the Roma at the time of the war breaking out, travelling as they do helped to hide my condition, they and all the other Gypsies were gathered up and we were interned at the camps. I still killed as I needed to, just three a year, the bodies were hidden in the mess of the atrocities. I left the camps after the war and ended up in Siberia working in the gulags before I journeyed to China during the back end of the cultural revolution and then on to Vietnam for that slice of insanity and then I ended up in Australia with some refugees on a boat across the ocean.
"The look on the face of the officials when a white person came off the boat first. I've been here now for forty years or so. And I've a trail of bodies behind me that would terrify even the most hardened sadists.
"I've tried to stop, you know, I once went two years without killing anyone, but I started to feel the aging process, I could feel my skin stretching, I could feel my teeth getting looser, I could feel my joints clicking just a little bit more than they had before. I couldn't remember how to eat food or drink water properly, I had to relearn it all, my stomach couldn't bare the presence of food after so many years, the misery of aging and the pain of it all. I took a knife to a whores throat that evening and so on for a few months more before I was certain I wasn't aging anymore.
"In all the years I've been alive I've aged maybe ten in total, I don't know exactly when I was born and when I started this, based on my memories I think I'm about eight to nine thousand years old. I've witnessed all of recorded history and remember events which pre-date even the oldest known fossils. I've seen mankind crawl up from the basest of creatures to the modern civilised world around us. I've watched as murder went from a daily thing to the greatest of all crimes. Once I would just kill and kill and kill again and no-one would stop me, now I'm afraid, everytime I leave the house I'm afraid that someone somewhere will put the pieces together and I'll be in jail, finally unable to kill, stuck growing older and older until finally I die.
"I've become cruel and petty, toying with the fates of people unaware of my influence over their families for generations sending them into ruin because of the most minor of slights and I've grown tired of humanity, the stink of the modern world, the buzz of the electromagnetic spectrum humming in my ears for fifty years and likely forevermore. I've been there when glorious battles were fought, watched heroes feast on flesh, both to eat and otherwise. I've seen fifty years pass and songs about those days turn into anthems turn into war cries turn into prayers.
"I've killed in every way that it is possible to kill, I've killed with every tool which could be put to use. I've killed with a hairbrush and a toothbrush. It has only been a recent fact that I found a way to kill every year without raising alarms, those at deaths door. My curse doesn't care if you have a long time or a short time left, I simply have to be the one to end it. Leaving us here, alone in this room. Three people in a week, not quite a personal record but close. And just before the due date my friendly vegetable."
"The last part of the curse was this urge to confess, this yearning to unburden myself. I sometimes wonder if it is human nature to want to be relieved of your secrets and not a part of this stupid curse. But the urge to talk grows every year, I have to unburden myself. I tried talking to priests in confession, back when they all spoke Latin, I was run out of town with a mob at my back. I tried telling children but they would just cry as I told them about the lakes of blood I've walked through and their parents would cast me out. I've told lovers and wives, girlfriends and even the occasional boyfriend. None would accept it, they'd think me mad or have me cast out. And yet the urge grows stronger every time I confess. Once I went decades, now I say it yearly. I find someone I can tell, someone who can't talk back. Someone like you my vegetable friend.
"I've killed twenty four thousand people my friend, these hands..." I could feel his hand touch mine for the first time. The cold, sandpaper texture of his flesh made my skin crawl. "... these hands have never built anything of consequence but have ended the potential of so many who could have.
"And now I've confessed my sins. I can hear Penny coming back, she has no idea but I met her when she was ten. I've met nearly everyone in this city at one point or another and I remember their names somehow. I think we met a long time ago, you would have been about twenty or so and I'd assume in a strip club for the first time. Don't worry I won't tell anyone about it. Penny will come back soon and she'll see you're still alive and that I'm gone. Maybe she'll be worried I vanished, maybe she'll assume I've gone to help someone else. Maybe she'll forget I was even here and will never think on it.
"You're the only friend I have in the world right now my vegetable, the last vegetable I talked to died a few months ago, I only regret I didn’t do it to him myself, his family pulled the plug on him. My family is long dead, my tribe gone, the tribe on the hill is gone and I’m the only legacy of my people, not even a footnote in an encyclopaedia or a Wikipedia entry . I'll let you go now, I might return one day, I know that people in a coma can hear something of what is happening outside themselves, I hope you've heard what I've done, what I am. I'm the monster in the darkness. And I hope you never wake up. Because I can't have my secrets walking around my friend. I can’t let that type of thing out into the world."
I heard him get up then, walking towards the door, and never heard another thing from him afterwards. A minute later Penny returned, the scent of chocolate mixing with the old smell of the man who just left. She prodded my leg a little bit to check if I was awake.
"I'm awake Penny. I'm awake." I felt like I had been holding my breath for an hour. I looked at the clock on the wall, ten minutes had passed.
She turned the lights up a little bit in the room. "My god you're as pale as a sheet. You look terrible. Where’d that guy go? Must have gone to get something, not to worry. Are you okay?"
I had a catheter in me at the time, otherwise I would have likely pissed myself as well. "I'm scared Penny, I'm scared of dying in this room. I'm scared for the first time since I came here. Those three guys just died in here while I was asleep and I could be next." I was also scared of the lunatic who’d just left the room, but as I’ve said before, I was prone to vivid dreams.
"Don't worry about it deary. You know that these things always come in threes. And you were lucky number four." She turned the lights back down and I started screaming. Bringing in every nurse and doctor on the floor.
I haven't slept with the lights off since.
My Day.
Sadly I didn't cycle to the game this morning, I slept in too late to do that, I got up and sprinted out the door to my car and then my GPS proceeded to have a fit trying to get to Nudgee road for some reason or another. My GPS is from 2007 and as a result it is missing some key locations in its big map of Brisbane. Chief amongst these are pretty much everything related to the ICB, which is a nightmare to drive on anyway, all of the tunnels and the Logan motorway which connects to the Western Freeway but didn't back when my GPS was made.
I got to the game and didn't have much of a showing this week, we had 15 players show up so I didn't get much of a run at all. I was briefly in Midfield, I wasn't bad in that position but I was puffed pretty quickly for some reason, probably because I'm still out of shape, I got some good work done in the limited time I had on the field I guess. The final score was 2-2 which was a bit of a shame because we had some good runs at goal but just couldn't complete them. It was a friendly game anyway so it wasn't such a big deal. We might be playing against them again next week if they can get a team together and we can get enough people interested in going. If we do get another game on for next weekend then I'm going to have to cycle because I talked it up so much today that I'd be shamed if I didn't at least try to.
After the game I got a call from James asking if I wanted to go out to look at his block of land. So I went home to get changed and then he came over to my parents place with his two sons to pick me up. Finally, after two years my best friends kids have met my nieces, I honestly have been trying to line this up for two years but every time my brother is in town he's too busy or James is too busy or something else gets in the way. So it was nice to see them together. Sadly James son is shy and doesn't really like people when he meets them the first time until he's relaxed a bit, and our dogs are a bit possessive every time someone new comes in to the house so they were nipping at him while he tried to hide behind his dad. My brother and James caught up a little bit and then we were off on our way. I grabbed my Laptop as I left the house because I figured I might as well go to university that afternoon to get some work done and we set off down to Ipswich.
Back when I was in primary school I used to have a friend who lived down in and around that part of the city. He lived down past Colleges Crossing, which currently looks awesome thanks to all the floods in the last few years, trees and debris are just spread out everywhere, I had no idea. Driving down there with James was interesting because I remember a lot of it from the last time I drove that way back in around 1994. The trees were shorter back then. Once we got to his house, still under construction, we found out that his eldest son has wet himself. They're trying to get him out of his nappies right now so this wasn't unexpected. I was given the younger child and James went about cleaning up the babyseat(it had a pee catcher seat cover for this exact situation, my god they think of everything when it comes to baby stuff). If I had decent internet where I am right now I'd post some pictures(I'm going to try and post pictures every day as well as write as much as I can because maintaining a wall of text is difficult enough but pretty pictures tends to soothe criticism). After that was all sorted out I was given a tour by a James who had gum boots on so his shoes wouldn't be ruined by the mud. It looks really nice out there, they're close to the river as well but above the flood line or something. The only problem I could see is that while they're close to the river they don't have access to the river so they can't get a boat or go swimming in it or anything like that. Aside from that it was nice. As we were leaving I started asking James if he would be up for walking Kokoda and I think he wasn't entirely being sarcastic when he said he might do that after he'd finished literally every other thing he had to do in his life right now.
The side of James house, with the clouds coming in.
As we started to drive off I asked James where he'd put the Pee Cushion thing, which had been on the roof of the car earlier. He jumped out of the car and grabbed it, put it in one of the dozen plastic bags that all parents have to carry around with them at all times, and dumped it in the boot. Would have been embarrassing to have that fly off the roof of the car down a freeway.
Safely back on the road I got a lift to Indooroopilly where I was going to catch a bus to the city to go to university and get my ever crippling work done, I stopped to get a Chicken Terriyaki first(I have a system for food after every Soccer game, Chicken Curry if we win, Chicken Terriyaki if we draw and Hungry Jacks if we lose) and then took a bus into the city and then walked to QUT. After getting out of the bus I stumbled on a protest at the end of King George Square about Venezuela and democracy, they were right next to the loud preacher singer guy who used to sing in the great court at UQ. That guy never gives up.
The Protesters kept screaming for democracy in their homelands. Trying to outchant the Preacher.
I made it to the Library and got a little bit of work done, but kept getting phone calls from my mum who is currently trying to organise my brothers schedule for the month now that his main morning carer is on holidays and she and my dad are going away next week. Its turning out to be difficult for her despite the fact that I'm pretty much willing to work every extra hour without much complaint(having working internet at his house is probably my only complaint). After the library closed I was going to go into the 24 hour lab but the line was stupid long and I didn't like my chances of getting a spot so I went home.
The line was crazy long.
I ended up catching a bus and having to wait 53 minutes for the next one because I missed my bus by 7 minutes(I shouldn't have stopped at Mos Burger to get a burger, but they're so tasty how could I resist?).
I decided to start writing my short story at Mos Burger and then kept writing on the bus, stopped when I got to mums house to grabs some clean clothes and my car and then finished it up at Matts house where I am right now.
He's fast asleep and I'm pretty sure I'll be passing out soon myself so I'm going to close up now.
I hope everyone is had a great weekend!
Also Orphan Black was great. Can't wait for next year.
Theme Weeks!
I've decided this year to try writing my daily entries with a general theme.
This week will be Things I Treasure. I'll look at some of the things I treasure, the history of them and why they mean so much to me.
Monday: My Little Notebook.
Tuesday: My comic book Collection.
Wednesday: The Wardrobe.
Thursday: My Social Media.
Friday: My Laptop.
Saturday: The Painting.
Sunday: Short Story: The Quiet Young Ladies Guide to Multiple Personalities.
Next week I think I'll do something about things I enjoy doing. Then maybe after that the things I learnt from my two degrees and follow that up with things I've learnt about libraries in the last three years. I might change them later, but right now that is my plan. Unless I can think of some crazy number of topics about libraries to talk about.
The Saddest Penguin in the World. Because if you weren't depressed before you read the 5052 words which make up todays entry you will be now.
Click to view