There’s so much love there. Two people who will literally sandwich me when I’m howling and bathed in eau du vomit. They will hold me fast against the strange forces that wreck my body. They will feed me, comfort me, walk for me, and help me scrape the bottom of the barrel for sticky dregs of laughter.
Home.
Time stops there. Away from the life I have built for myself, the people I have collected, the places I call my own. There live the ones who knew me first, from knee high upward. There are the ones who taught me, inspired me, keep me in their hearts even now. It is there that childhood memories are unpacked.
Home brings summer flowers and cool rooms, new grown frogs and an old purring lap blanket.
And yet a part of me asks, what then?
Is this forever?
Am I letting go of this life I’ve been building and falling a decade backward? Acceding to whatever it is that tears at my body?
Perhaps home must be given new lines to speak. I must dust it off, wipe away the sepia and see it in the light of the present.
Safe harbour in the midst of this ship-wrecking storm.
Enamel worn by the acid of life and the fracturing punches thrown by fate.
To you, who life has rubbed until all loss devastates, I’ll tell only tales of romance before it cracks, never stories of the broken pieces.
To you, so weighed down by clouds of darkness that you cannot carry mine too, I’ll give only the gossamer and tuck away dragging tendrils of sadness.
And to you, for whom feelings are glowing iron between icy teeth, I’ll give only carefully cultivated words to amuse, shorn of the emotions that tumble alongside.
I’ll brick away my broken pieces, my tendrils of sadness, my tumbling emotions, and keep each of you from harm.
But remember, there is more to me than meets your tooth.
*Just in case this comes across as a bit concerning, I’m okay! I wanted to explore the concepts below as speculative fiction, please note that there are potential triggers around suicide.
People come here to die.
When you’re unwanted, or too old, too helpless, too ill. When you feel like you’re a millstone around your family’s neck, when your mind begins to go and you don’t want your children to see your emptying shell, when you can’t bear to watch your parents try to smile as your body wastes, when you’ve bankrupted your family and can’t look in your wife’s eyes, when you’re too lonely and can’t stand the quiet for one more day. When you cannot try any longer.
This is where you come.
You press your hand to a digitised waiver. You walk down row upon row of brightly painted doors until you come to your assigned number.
The door opens at the touch of your palm to the plate, the lights flick on automatically. There’s a long chair in the middle, one that reclines all the way back with adjustable everything. There are monitor patches to stick on all over, so you have to strip off and slip one of their gowns over your head. There’s a box for your clothing and anything else you brought with you.
Most people have nothing else to put in it.
Next to the chair is a dark grey VR helmet, padded and ventilated through gills at the side. Cords run from the helmet to the wall, snaking away into the unknown. You sit and lean backward until you’re nearly horizontal. The helmet slips over your face and –
There are hundreds of these places all over the country. Whoever designs them always seems to choose primary colours for the doors. Maybe they think that’s more cheerful than beige.
Once a client has settled into their room and become fully immersed in their chosen virtual reality simulation, a team of begloved carers inserts catheters and feeding tubes and hooks up the monitors. That’s the way things stay until the client checks out. Terminally.
It’s meant to be a good way to go. You get to live in a virtual world that’s designed to avoid stressors and sources of misery, and they make it as gentle and pain-free as possible.
There have always been stories, of course. The one about the self-storage unit that got raided and they found nothing but empty beds and a whole lot of organ transport boxes.
Or the one where they didn’t bother with any of the body maintenance so emaciated people were dying in a lake of their own piss and faeces.
Or the one where they set up a side business and let people in to do whatever they wanted with the bodies while the minds were hooked up to the VR.
I guess there’s always some sicko looking to make an extra buck.
The thing is, even the units that operate under the law have a major snag. That waiver you sign says you’re not allowed to change your mind: you’re never allowed to check out or be checked out.
I wonder how many people this no takesie-backsies rule has left trapped inside.
The state likes self-storage though. Way cheaper to run than care homes or state facilities, easier to deliver medical assistance, and the state gets to claim any assets to pay for care. They’re trialling it ‘voluntarily’ in prisons, so offenders get to feel like they’re free, and prison staff no longer have to deal with violence or drug abuse.
There are more and more self-storage facilities springing up. Squat towers with corridors that wind around and around, each lined with an orderly array of doors.
Behind those primary coloured doors, a hundred minds spin away.
I, sixteen, and you sixteen in a pack – so strong, so reliable. You seemed so available back then.
I couldn’t get enough of you. Ignored the murmurs from my family, my friends.
I needed you.
But your sugar coating was skin deep.
You turned my bowels into burning pipes of doom.
O! The diarrhoea!
The tender eruptions of our love!
My stomach filled with the broken shards of our promises, and inflated till it tried to escape my chest. Vomit stained my nights.
My stomach in my mouth, I had to let you go.
Many years have grown between us now. I watch others flirt with you and bite back warnings. They will learn.
He sleeps now, my Morpheus, he doesn’t know I once loved another. He is a gentle tonic after your burning love, for all that he is slow to respond when I call him.
You, oh, you were my first love.
I wonder sometimes, if I were to meet you again, would we be as once we were?
Sweet sixteen and the pain of the world washed away.
I walk into my wardrobe each morning and select my meat coat.
It barely takes me a minute. The bones and sinews of my hand reach toward the well worn coat in the middle of the array. Like the others on display, it shines pale in the cool light of the wardrobe – amphibiously pale, as someone once pointed out, though sadly lacking in mucus. It is somewhere in the middle of the other meat coats, heavier than those that are more wetsuit than meat coat, but less bulky than those at the far end.
The meat coat I choose bears more signs of wear than the others. Faint tan lines around the neck and shoulders, a spatter of freckles at the elbows, slightly better skin from all that moisturising. I should really moisturise the others more often, but the topography of even the thinnest coat is tricky without a body inside it. Every time I nick this meat coat, I faithfully replicate the slice on each of the others, and pay close attention to ensure the healing scars match. Wouldn’t want to cause a scandal.
My mother, of course, thinks I’ve made a foolish choice and should swap my current coat for a lighter one, one that doesn’t come with a range of risks for disease and ridicule. My mother and brother are both wearers of leaner coats, tan skin taut over veined muscle. I can see her bite back words of worry when she looks at me, when she spies the lack of gap between thighs, the lip of belly, the softness beneath chin. She doesn’t always manage to bite back successfully.
This meat coat comes with a lack of expectation. It doesn’t play the game that the thinner coats would have to play, and isn’t a target for the flak that the heavier coats would receive: it is happily on the sidelines. It comforts rather than threatens, and it remains invisible to most. It feels safe.
I’ve never worn the thinner coats. I wonder if I would feel like a child wobbling in high heeled shoes. A newborn colt, suddenly exposed to the world’s gaze. I’ve crawled into the meat coats at the far end, the ones that don’t like to move, their softness both comforting and claustrophobic.
Venturing out without a meat coat is the greatest taboo, of course. But I thirst for a morning where the meat coat I choose is of no consequence. It signifies nothing. Holds no import in comparison to the person it covers. That isn’t how we work, of course. We constantly seek a reflection of our insides on our outsides, uncaring of whether it actually is a reflection or not.
If the world were blinded, it wouldn’t be long before those with the sweetest voices were sanctified.
It’s around 30 feet across, covered in the springy grass that only grows atop really peaty soil. About two feet in from the edges are thick metal loops that have been hammered into the ground, each as thick as my wrist and veined with faint reddish streaks. They’re buried at one foot intervals around the circumference of the island, and while some lie empty, others hum and spark.
The one nearest me is barely visible beneath a mass of shining, seething threads, each stretching and intertwining with its sisters to form a single thronging rope that throws itself beyond the island and out into the mist. This is by far the busiest hive of threads.
It leads to my mother’s island.
Every thread is a message, a photo, a phonecall, a hug, a shared laugh, a rushed journey to comfort, a warm meal, an eye roll, a word to the wise. The threads dash from my end to hers and back, the rope between us now too thick to grasp in both hands and electric with activity.
A short walk away lies another loop. This one empty but for a single sparking thread that noses the air, then tentatively slips away into the mist.
Let us watch and wait.
After minutes-days-weeks, the thread begins to vibrate, and from beyond the island comes another line, intertwining with mine until it reaches the metal loop. As it does, the filaments grow brighter, stronger. This is the birth of a friendship, the tentative creation of a relationship that will grow stronger as the threads continue to weave between the islands.
On the other side of the island are the loops I avoid, letting my eyes slide away as I walk past and tend the others. They still have thick bundles of threads tied to them, but they are withered and grey. There is no spark, no movement, and if you stand and watch, you see only fraying and splintering. Some of those cords still stretch in vain out beyond the island’s edge, but others hang limply over the side, severed and flailing helplessly in the wind.
The threads of these relationships stopped flowing: one too many missed calls or failed replies, a long forgotten argument, a barrier of pride.
One too many cancellation.
Every time I cancel – a dinner, a birthday, a meeting, a concert, a rehearsal – I watch a nascent thread falter and fall still. For newborn relationships, it can be fatal; with established relationships, I can see a thickened scar of burnt out threads.
I tend to my island with love, haunted by the burnt out cords that flap failure in my wake.
Medically Unexplained 