A Little Writing: September 2012

The House on the Hill

© Erin Wright 2012

There's a house on a hill surrounded by empty fields. There's a small stone wall that runs around the base of the hill. The house is nothing special. It's partly ruined because no one has lived there in at least fifty years. The left hand side of the building has collapsed, and there's no way up to the upper floor or attic. The cellar has caved in and old empty bottles mingle with the dross of modern life and litter left behind.
Next to the house is a single tree, planted when the house was built. Not very tall and only having a small number of branches and leaves on the top.
A wealthy man and a woman built the house a long time ago, a gift from their parents on their marriage. They were married on its doorstep by a priest, and they held a dinner there for their close family. As the man carried his wife over the threshold, they, and their family, were filled with hope and promise for their futures. A tree was planted in the garden during the ceremony.
They lived there happily for a few years before the wife became pregnant, and months later gave birth to a healthy young girl inside the house. She was a darling child, loved by all in the village, energetic and curious. She learned to walk in the living room. She spoke her first words in her bedroom upstairs.
The tree grew tall enough to climb, and the girl climbed it almost everyday. On her eighth birthday, her parents gave her a swing; two ropes and a seat, and told her that they were going to get a ladder the next day to put it up in the tree. Impatient and confident, she sneaked out with the swing in the early afternoon, planning to attach it to the tree herself. She left the seat unattached where the ropes would hang, and climbed with one rope around each shoulder. One rope hung from the tree, the girl edged down the branch to attach the second.
Her shoe caught on the newly attached rope, and she slipped. The seat of the swing sticking up from the ground enough to crush most of her chest. Wheezing for breath, she died as her mother dashed out the kitchen door towards where her little girl lay dead.
The husband took an axe to the tree following the death of his girl. It would be killed as punishment for taking his girl from him. The wife watched from the upstairs window, looking down as she always did; this time in mourning instead of watching her little girl play.
Defiantly, the tree began to grow again. The stump growing a small branch upwards that would become the new trunk.
The wife's sorrow crushed her. She sat in the upstairs window, watching as the tree below grew, barely moving from that spot, and almost never leaving the room at all. The husbands time became more and more wrapped in taking care of his beloved, nursing her through her pain. She never recovered from her loss, instead growing frightfully ill.
Several years later, one early afternoon while her husband napped, took the rope that once belonged to the swing and climbed the now once again tall tree herself. Tying the rope firmly to the tree, then tying a crude noose for herself, she slipped it over her neck and rolled off the branch supporting her, leaving her husband and her life behind.
Her husband looked out from the upstairs window to see his wife hanging below hours after she had hung herself, and cursed the tree for taking everything he loved from him. He covered the tree with oil, while his wife still hung, and set it aflame. While it burned, he walked inside and lay on his bed turning his back to his wife and the cursed tree.
No one saw the husband for months following the incident. He remained inside and took no visitors. He remained there until fire consumed the house with him inside leaving the half of the building next to the tree intact, early one sunny afternoon as the remains of the burnt tree showed a single branch rising out through the charred dead tree remains.
No one took possession of the house. The tree grew once more, alongside a ruined building, its root surrounded by the long dead remains of its previous self. Its cursed nature remembered, and the wall erected around it in the hopes of containing the string of tragedy that surrounded it. No one dared take the house as their own, in fear that they too would be struck down.
The village holds the tale in memory, and holds the notion that if you watch the shadow of the tree, it completely covers the window into the kitchen in the early afternoon. Having seen three deaths, the tree holds a special connection to heaven, and if you should visit on the anniversary of any of the girl, wife, or husbands deaths, then the kitchen window will open into the heaven of that family, instead of into the charred and filthy remains of the house's kitchen.
The village won't tell you the dates of the family deaths, but if you happen across the right day in the early afternoon, while the trees shadow completely covers the kitchen window, you can indeed enter into the family's heaven. You'll see the young girl playing with her mother, while her father makes tea for three. You will be warmly welcomed in, and if you spend some time there and look out into the garden, you'll see the sun shining and the tree in its fully grown state, as if it had never been cut down or burned.
It is forever the young girls birthday and in their heaven they forever celebrate it.

Twenty Seven Minutes

Take a deep breath, then one more, and one more after that. Are you relaxed? Are all your affairs in order? Perhaps you'd like to stop now and make that phone call you need to. Do you need a drink? Perhaps a relaxing cup of tea? I won't mind, after all it's not the end of the world if you'd like to delay this a little longer. It's not a good idea to put things off forever though. Take a deep breath, but instead of just reading the words, actually do it. Do it again. Do it once more. Are you relaxed now? Are you ready? Consider the above questions, seriously this time.

I'm afraid I've already begun. There is no going back now, even if you aren't.

Do you ever find it amusing? “Find what amusing?” Everything. Your entire life boiled down into the component stories. Each one with its own lesson and effect. Do you ever think it could have gone any differently? Those times you were the fool, those scenes you played out perfectly. Do you ever consider them and laugh? How ridiculous they are, and how ridiculous you are, for not realising you were only doing the thing you could have done.

You asked why. I'm telling you.

You are a machine. A way of keeping the universe from dying. It will keep moving until there is no more energy left. You are a movement engine. So long as you keep consuming matter and moving, you are performing your role. All that acting you do is nothing more than the universe trying to prevent its own death. You know it yourself. You are afraid of doing nothing. You are afraid of having no role to play. You need shoes to fill. You need the constant push and pull of commitments to keep you moving. You feel lost without them.

Do you really think you could have done anything differently? Do you really think that the circumstances that led you to take the action you did could have been different? If every cause has an effect, then every effect has a cause. For you to have done something different, the whole of history would need to be re-written right to the very beginning. Nothing is ever random.

Does that make you feel bad or does it make you feel justified in everything you did? If you couldn't have done anything different, then you can't be responsible for it, it is just the way the situation made you. Would you like to cling to the notion of choice and will? That's fine. Your choices and will are both things you controlled, but do you understand that they will never have been any different from what they were? Do you understand that understanding this does not make you any different?

There is one choice you get to make, every time. There is one choice you get to make in the end.

Will you come with me?

Will you leave this machine behind and come with me?

Will you depart the treadmill and start taking steps on your own?

Of course I already know what your answer is. I have seen it in your eyes. I have tasted it on your skin. I have felt it in your mind. I know you. You know the answer.

Does this all seem melodramatic to you? It does to me and I'm the one delivering this monologue. Can you feel the weight of the monologue bearing down upon you? Encircling you? Do you feel rebellion welling up inside you or melancholy? Or is that feeling something else?

Will you respond to the call? Will you condemn the universe to its death with your own? Can you achieve that much? Do you even care? Is this machine life that owns you good enough?

Will you come with me? I can never force you. I can never make you. I am better than the machine that forces your every action. I have chosen this moment to ask, because it is the moment you are most free to choose. The moment you are most capable of seeing all the factors, if you will let yourself. You can make a choice.

Will you come with me?

Will you see the light?

Will you choose me?

Will you come?

Jen Ashley

She's been sat at the computer at home for about six hours, and has refreshed the news page about six times in the last minute. She keeps clicking back to her forums.

She looks at the ceiling, sighs, kicks back on her chair and stands up. Somewhere in the flat, a phone is ringing. She tells it to fuck off and goes to the kitchen instead. It goes silent as she makes coffee; she doesn't really care that the clock says it's the middle of the night, no one cares if she wakes up in the morning or not anyway.

The thought drifts through her mind. She has to get out of here. It's late. She could just walk, but she's on the edge of a rubbish part of town and it's not safe. There's no public transport. She doesn't drive, and even if she did, she doesn't know where she'd go.

The phone starts ringing again. She wishes she'd just left the thing off. She hangs it up and switches it off, then tosses it onto a pile of things piled up on a desk.

Even if they did have anything to say to change her mind, she's always come back to this. Not that they really know that they keep stopping her. So not this time. This time the phone is off.

This isn't the way things are supposed to go, her thoughts reminds her. She looks in the mirror, and sees a tired and exhausted woman in the reflection. She wonders where the enthusiastic and hopeful one went. She was more fun. No, it wasn't supposed to go this way at all, she tells her thoughts. She swears again as the woman in the mirror starts to cry. She needs to stop that. She already looks distressed enough.

The flat is a mess. She'd tidy it but it doesn't matter. As long as there's room on the bed to sleep, it doesn't matter how cluttered the living room is or how high the washing up is piled in the kitchen.

She goes to her bedroom. She puts the coffee down on the table. She takes off her trousers. She remembers this routine well. Open the drawer, take it out, close the drawer. No one will ever know. She puts on the TV and starts a film. She's not going to pay it any attention, but it makes the process go more smoothly.

She doesn't feel it to begin with, but eventually it starts to hurt. She worries that she's running out of space to keep doing it.

She knows what she wants to do. It won't be messy, or at least it won't leave her looking a mess. Her bed will probably be ruined but she doesn't care.

She lines it up and wonders if this is the time she actually does it. She's shaking slightly. She asks herself if she's scared, but she already knows the answer. Of course she is. She lays down on the bed properly and takes a deep breath before sitting up.

She lines it up again, takes a deep breath then exhales in a sigh.

She feels it this time, and laughs. She laughs until she can't laugh any more. Then she laughs in her thoughts until her thoughts stop. She feels cold and she knows what's happening now.

She feels it happen, and she doesn't get to react to it or do anything about it.

It's over.

Scars

Trust is a delicate issue. How do you trust someone? How do you show them that you trust them? Is trust only a thing you can prove you had after it has broken? Do the scars and pains left behind show that you used to trust someone? Is saying you trust someone like saying that they are capable of scarring you?

I found a scar. A few in fact. Remnants of broken trust. They were ugly. They were a blight upon me. I thought I'd had more but they faded away. I wasn't happy with the ones I found. There were others I expected to have which I lost along the way.

Once I noticed I couldn't take my mind off them. I knew where they came from. I knew when they came from. I knew who they came from. An ugly little part of myself that was inflicted on me by someone else.

Did I encourage it? Did I ask for it? Some might say yes if I told them about it. I was left with the scars though. I didn't ask to be hurt. I didn't encourage betrayal. I have the impressions left in my mind and on my body. Those things that they inflicted.

The things left behind are mine. I have rejected those things. They are mine to dispose of. To cover up. To replace. If I must have scars, I will have the scars I choose to have. I will cut those scars from me, even if it leaves me with scars that show that there was something there before. I will own myself.

My life and my body are my own. Whatever was done to me, whatever can be done to me, it is my choice what I do with the scars left behind. If I cut them out or if I display them for all to see, those scars are mine. I own my scars, they do not own me.

Work

© Erin Wright 2010

It was her fifth job of the year. She'd had a few of temp jobs in the spring, a summer job ending in her unsurprising dismissal, and had spent half of autumn looking, to end up taking one of the worst paid jobs in the area.
She was better than this. She knew she was lucky to be working at all at the moment; so many interviews had been soul-destroyingly terrible, that she had gone home after most and spent the rest of the day in tears. She was overqualified, she wasn't what they were looking for, the excuses were shallow and thin. She'd spent some interviews just sitting there while the interviewer bumbled through their list of question whilst trying to cover their embarrassment and shame.
Working for a small chain store on a busy road. Six years of university work to end up stacking shelves.
She put up with the public. The store's image meant she had to, even though, as usual, some people were just outright foul. The stares were bearably mild and unnoticeable, and her co-workers were at least a little sympathetic. She arrived, did her job, was a friendly team member, and went home at the end of her shifts.
She got into the swing of things quickly (temping had taught her that skill) and was quietly stacking jars of jam in their place when the shop floor supervisor came out and asked her to tidy up her work and come into the back room.
She marked this moment in her mind with the thought of “Here goes another job,” as she packed things back onto her trolley and wheeled it off the shop floor. Her supervisor was waiting for her.
“I've had a complaint,” her supervisor said.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“It's about you using the toilets,” said her supervisor.
She blinked a moment while she processed this, she knew what it meant and what was coming next, but that didn't make it any easier to react.
“We'd like you to not use the women's toilets while you're at work here.” Said her supervisor.
Cycle a moment though the thoughts going through her mind. “Where do you expect me to go to the toilet? Out in the corridor? Out back in a rubbish bin?” No, too confrontational, she decided. “Would you just like to fire me and have done with it?” Also not a good gambit. Through her growing rage a little nugget of wisdom came through.
“No. It's discriminatory of you to ask, and I won't be subject to it.” She said.
Her supervisor stood a moment processing what had just been said to her. So far, she had been a model employee, courteous, helpful, accommodating and friendly. Why was she now turning on them, since they had done her such a favour in employing her.
“I have to refer this to the manager,” said her supervisor, “I don't know what company policy is here, but I thought you wouldn't mind.”
“Do. Not. Explode.” She thought to herself, “it will not help.”
“I've just been told I can't use the toilets at work. I'm highly offended, actually.” She said.
“I'm not saying you can't use the toilets, you can still use the men's.” Said her supervisor.
“I'm a woman,” she said, “why can't I use the women's toilets?”
“The complaint says you're a man.”
“You...” she paused a second, “you think I'm a man too? Is that why you're believing a complaint over me telling you, to your face, that I'm a woman?”
“I'm sorry, but...” Started her supervisor.
“But what? Forget it. I'm leaving.” She said, walking away, towards the staff room.
She purposefully went to the women's staff toilets before collecting her things and leaving.
This was how her summer job had ended too; much to her chagrin. She managed to make it home and put the kettle on before it hit her. The waves of adrenaline and rage wearing off and leaving only the bitter hurt behind. She sat down on the kitchen floor, sliding down gently with her back against the cupboards, and waves of tears flooded from her. This was how she ended the day her summer job ended too. Sat on her kitchen floor, wishing she'd never been born, that she'd never existed, that she could just be normal and treated with respect.
She ignored the click of the kettle and half-ran up the stairs before kicking off her shoes and collapsing in tears once more onto her bed.
A few hours later she came around a little. She was ready to make some tea and calm down a little. She put the kettle back on and dug out phone from her handbag, it was time to pass the news onto her friends. That would wait though, she had some missed calls, seven, from the store she just left. No messages had been left either, they'd been trying every half an hour since she left so she wasn't surprised when it started ringing in her hand.
“Hello?” She said.
The voice identified himself as the manager of the store. “I'm sorry about what happened earlier, I've been given all the details and been in touch with some legal advisers, and if you want to, I'd like you to come in to see me, so we can talk about what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.”
Fine, she thought to herself, but I'm not going back to work there.