Scene 4
Lemon’s reverie is interrupted by a young woman (LOTTIE) jumping on him. They kiss and kiss. The camera is close. The boom is nuaced. We know the detail of the kiss.
Showing posts with label Lottie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lottie. Show all posts
Scene 11
The man and the woman lie naked together. The first part of the scene is shot from Lottie’s POV. In other words, we can’t yet see her face.
LEMON: I don’t have inner experience.
LOTTIE: Hmm?
Beat.
LEMON: It’s very hard to describe.
Beat.
LOTTIE: What is?
LEMON: Like. There is nobody “looking out of me.” I exhibit all the outer manner of human behaviour, including language and social interaction and so forth, but there is no consciousness to match. Inside me, all the lights are out.
Beat.
LOTTIE: All right.
Beat.
They kiss.
LEMON (within the kisses): Is it? I mean is it all right?
LOTTIE (within the kisses): Well I don’t quite know what you mean.
Lemon thinks or “thinks,” We could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible, seeing itself only in a mirror. Even now, by far the greatest portion of our life takes place in a mirror.
LEMON: You know how you infer what it’s like to be other people? By combining what it’s like to be you with what you see other people do? Well there’s nothing that it’s like to be me! There are no, uh . . . subjective facts about me.
LOTTIE: You’re nuts!
LEMON: Imagine . . . imagine a sophisticated, sort of, robot that you could make love to. It even groans and moans as if it were enjoying it. And it’s not thinking “God, when will this be over” – it isn’t thinking, or feeling, anything! Except as a kind of, well the way it’s programmed to behave, a particular set of subroutines to change the way it behaves it response to certain stimuli . . .
LEMON (within kisses): . . . like some of the things you do . . . like when your little mouth . . . goes around me . . . and your little hands . . .
Lottie laughs. But there is something in his manner. She moves away, turning her back on him.
We switch to some ordinary shot. There is a trail of still and smudged sperm on her cheek and her neck below the ear. He kisses her spine. He looks at her. He moves his head to speak into her ear.
LEMON: You’ll understand. Anyway I prefer someone looking out for me than someone looking out of me.
Beat.
LEMON: I’m sorry. We’ll talk about it later.
LOTTIE: It’s just a bit boring.
This goes towards establishing a mood.
The man and the woman lie naked together. The first part of the scene is shot from Lottie’s POV. In other words, we can’t yet see her face.
LEMON: I don’t have inner experience.
LOTTIE: Hmm?
Beat.
LEMON: It’s very hard to describe.
Beat.
LOTTIE: What is?
LEMON: Like. There is nobody “looking out of me.” I exhibit all the outer manner of human behaviour, including language and social interaction and so forth, but there is no consciousness to match. Inside me, all the lights are out.
Beat.
LOTTIE: All right.
Beat.
They kiss.
LEMON (within the kisses): Is it? I mean is it all right?
LOTTIE (within the kisses): Well I don’t quite know what you mean.
Lemon thinks or “thinks,” We could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible, seeing itself only in a mirror. Even now, by far the greatest portion of our life takes place in a mirror.
LEMON: You know how you infer what it’s like to be other people? By combining what it’s like to be you with what you see other people do? Well there’s nothing that it’s like to be me! There are no, uh . . . subjective facts about me.
LOTTIE: You’re nuts!
LEMON: Imagine . . . imagine a sophisticated, sort of, robot that you could make love to. It even groans and moans as if it were enjoying it. And it’s not thinking “God, when will this be over” – it isn’t thinking, or feeling, anything! Except as a kind of, well the way it’s programmed to behave, a particular set of subroutines to change the way it behaves it response to certain stimuli . . .
LEMON (within kisses): . . . like some of the things you do . . . like when your little mouth . . . goes around me . . . and your little hands . . .
Lottie laughs. But there is something in his manner. She moves away, turning her back on him.
We switch to some ordinary shot. There is a trail of still and smudged sperm on her cheek and her neck below the ear. He kisses her spine. He looks at her. He moves his head to speak into her ear.
LEMON: You’ll understand. Anyway I prefer someone looking out for me than someone looking out of me.
Beat.
LEMON: I’m sorry. We’ll talk about it later.
LOTTIE: It’s just a bit boring.
This goes towards establishing a mood.
Scene 13
Lemon is watching television and reading a book. Lottie lies with her head in his lap doing neither.
Without looking up from his book, Lemon changes the channel. Terminator II is showing, or perhaps Robocop.
Lottie turns her head and watches. In a moment, he watches too. We see a “Plot Trajectory” subtitle flash up – what the robot sees.
LEMON: When I was a little boy, I had trouble understanding the uh first-person camera shots. I watched on episode of McGyver with my mother and she knew that McGyver was being watched because the shot was low and through some tall grass, and the music had made a sinister switch, but I didn’t know that. I thought the program was just showing me what McGyver and his friend were doing.
LOTTIE: McGyver had duck tape.
ROBOCOP: We can't have that.
LEMON: It’s very difficult to speak properly about what I am. I seem just the same. My brain’s made of the same stuff, nervous cells, memory. Language evolved to serve the needs of people who experience things. Duct tape.
LOTTIE: You're as smooth as a moose on the loose. Have a crisp.
A shot from Lottie’s perspective. His face, up-side-down. He thinks. He smiles. He is inspired.
Lemon is watching television and reading a book. Lottie lies with her head in his lap doing neither.
Without looking up from his book, Lemon changes the channel. Terminator II is showing, or perhaps Robocop.
Lottie turns her head and watches. In a moment, he watches too. We see a “Plot Trajectory” subtitle flash up – what the robot sees.
LEMON: When I was a little boy, I had trouble understanding the uh first-person camera shots. I watched on episode of McGyver with my mother and she knew that McGyver was being watched because the shot was low and through some tall grass, and the music had made a sinister switch, but I didn’t know that. I thought the program was just showing me what McGyver and his friend were doing.
LOTTIE: McGyver had duck tape.
ROBOCOP: We can't have that.
LEMON: It’s very difficult to speak properly about what I am. I seem just the same. My brain’s made of the same stuff, nervous cells, memory. Language evolved to serve the needs of people who experience things. Duct tape.
LOTTIE: You're as smooth as a moose on the loose. Have a crisp.
A shot from Lottie’s perspective. His face, up-side-down. He thinks. He smiles. He is inspired.
The Scornful Ensemble
BY FRANCIS CROT
Lottie moisturised. Lottie toned. Lemon watched from his side. Tomorrow he would take his life. The notion was in him. He’d had difficulty making himself understood. If he’d known of the philosophical concept “zombie,” he might not have felt or “felt” the frustration which would intensify during that sleepless night and sublimate climactically in his suicide in the field the next day. He could have referred Lottie to the literature. In fact not knowing that particular philosophical term is probably what killed him. They had the downstairs of a sunny and pretty semi-detatched, very clean save for many sudden ladybirds, and a single virtuous-looking little mouse towards whom no policy had ever been quite agreed.
Lemon’s suicide would be its own elaborate suicide note: a linguistic treat which he hoped or “hoped” might – through its unorthodox emotional and legal significance – break into ordinarily inaccessible realms of propositional significance. The message was: lacking all subjectivity, Lemon’s life could be justly made the instrument of any value-generating discourse . . . his death could be used to win a five-a-side football game, or an anecdote game, and everyone should flock cheerily to pubs as if nothing had happened because nearly nothing had. His corpse lifted into a skip. That was the shifty and subtle point he would try to put across by trying to kill himself in that way. Lemon adjusted his pillow long-ways, the way he liked or “liked” it. On Lottie’s Facebook profile, he thought with regret or “thought with regret” it said: “About me: people like me cuz I’m cool as the other side of the pillow...”
Lottie moisturised. Lottie toned. Lemon watched from his side. Tomorrow he would take his life. The notion was in him. He’d had difficulty making himself understood. If he’d known of the philosophical concept “zombie,” he might not have felt or “felt” the frustration which would intensify during that sleepless night and sublimate climactically in his suicide in the field the next day. He could have referred Lottie to the literature. In fact not knowing that particular philosophical term is probably what killed him. They had the downstairs of a sunny and pretty semi-detatched, very clean save for many sudden ladybirds, and a single virtuous-looking little mouse towards whom no policy had ever been quite agreed.
Lemon’s suicide would be its own elaborate suicide note: a linguistic treat which he hoped or “hoped” might – through its unorthodox emotional and legal significance – break into ordinarily inaccessible realms of propositional significance. The message was: lacking all subjectivity, Lemon’s life could be justly made the instrument of any value-generating discourse . . . his death could be used to win a five-a-side football game, or an anecdote game, and everyone should flock cheerily to pubs as if nothing had happened because nearly nothing had. His corpse lifted into a skip. That was the shifty and subtle point he would try to put across by trying to kill himself in that way. Lemon adjusted his pillow long-ways, the way he liked or “liked” it. On Lottie’s Facebook profile, he thought with regret or “thought with regret” it said: “About me: people like me cuz I’m cool as the other side of the pillow...”
Elsewhere, Julian shook a sieve. He was shirtless. It was a warm evening and he the central heating on. It had been on since Winter. In his sieve hills of flour crumbled. Purer hills grew, by layers and landslides.
Joe and Lisa walked. They walked along the curb – and one of them sometimes off it – from time to time glancing consciously at the other’s face. Then the moon came into view and mediated between them. They relaxed. They addressed themselves to the moon. Oh moon! So like a chef! And so useful to Lisa and Joe. When they arrived at Lisa’s, Joe hugged her. They hugged and they thought about things that were pretty obvious to both of them, like that one has just impulsively hugged the other and that here they were under the spry candy of the moon hugging at a gate and it was nice.
Elisha saw, “For example, feminist attempts to isolate a common experience of maternity feel the mountains tremble, did you hear the oceans roar.” Elisha stretched and rose from her desk. Her notes basked in lamplight something garish. Elisha highlighted every word Elisha read in one of three colours. It was “[her] way of working.”
Brenda struggled on her eiderdown. What if an animal, and its net, were evenly-muscled? Then we would have the measure of Brenda on her eiderdown.
She was not asleep. She only allowed herself to think of him for one hour an evening.
But put it this way, she had already been walking the pot-bellied daschund of his favours for some time without knowing it.
All her doubts converged on her wart. He hated her, she disgusted him! Nothing focuses a teenage woman’s vast insecurity quite like pubic fungus.
Chinwag’s collar was a dumb noose. He could relieve the chafe with a certain ponderous nod, as though passing under a low beam. His mouth was dry. Chinwag knew his neck was not really irritated by his collar, but by a nervous tic. If he varied his tic frequently, maybe no one would pick up on it. He would try and transfer it to a compulsive fist. Chinwag clenched and unclenched his right hand. He watched Chinwag. “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?”
Corntrough tested his body and spirit. He sat nude on the edge of his bed. By, ahem, pure thought he hardened and by, amen, pure thoughts softened himself once more. The rule was he could not touch it. He had done it for half an hour, hard, soft, hard, soft, hard, soft and now he was hard again. He’d do it for that again.
Miffed, joyous, spirit-walking: barnacles don’t share.
Julian’s Morris dancing clothes lay on the kitchen table, intricate patchwork, neatly folded. He drank cider from a pint glass. There was a thumb of flour on it. “G’day mate, I’m from Australia,” he said. “I’m from Austraylyia. What iz op, mon, I am from Jamacia.” Corntrough was damp with sweat. There would be buffer zones of prayer at either end of the fantasies, and complicated hybrids at the boundary between prayer and fantasy. Sex is always a boundary circumstance. In terms of sexual phantasy, Elisha’s practice was more easy-going and sustainable. She tended towards abstinence lobbying, the US import which let one speak in public venues about fucking, often about children fucking, and then in private, plan further such speaking. Elisha turned up the music and did star jumps until the end of the track. It was Elisha’s way of taking a break. Perhaps it upset the bald man next door but he poured sausage fat into their communal sink. She could smell his sizzling them even now. Lottie moved a ladybird. A girl of grave kindnesses, Elisha, with the rare condition of a frowning skull. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was lowering whole strings of cooked sausages into the drain, all the while listening nervously into the rapture of Delirious? for the faltering of her star thuds, the sc-rape of her door. Twisting on his fat neck while the sausages’ fat necks twisted down into the darkness. Brenda peered defiantly into her closet as she still always did each night at this moment. Lottie switched off the overhead light at the moment Lemon switched on the bedside lamp. Elisha chose neon green. Corntough thought, “He felt her warm, wet mouth close around his member.” Chinwag cracked his knuckles. Julian pulled apart an egg with his thumbs. Why are you even reading this crap? You could put it down right now. The Cam flowed and the Thames flowed. And Lisa stood in her hallway and hugged herself. Plenty of things are left unfinished. It’s not too late. Pestilence tensed. And Joe walked down the road and hugged himself. You could be at a surprisingly accurate re-creation of the golden years of Motown for example and either because you are swept up in it or because you are explicitly encouraged to so do by Marvin Gaye you could lay down your Kate Atkinson novel, and perhaps you might leave it there, or one of the other patrons might crawl under the rows of seats and rob you of it. Either way you might decide not to source another copy. That might be it. I do my best. Julian poured batter. Lottie dreamt you stopped reading now. That’s how serious I am. She dreamt it and purred and champed. My hatred for you is pretty astonishing. You, Mike, and you, Carlton, and you, Bradley, and you, Justin, and you, Jefferson, and you, Samantha, and by increments, by deductions from the earliest, by mutation of the earliest, all you readers, gobbling, snuffling, tailoring, testing, clogging reality with your attributes.
Joe and Lisa walked. They walked along the curb – and one of them sometimes off it – from time to time glancing consciously at the other’s face. Then the moon came into view and mediated between them. They relaxed. They addressed themselves to the moon. Oh moon! So like a chef! And so useful to Lisa and Joe. When they arrived at Lisa’s, Joe hugged her. They hugged and they thought about things that were pretty obvious to both of them, like that one has just impulsively hugged the other and that here they were under the spry candy of the moon hugging at a gate and it was nice.
Elisha saw, “For example, feminist attempts to isolate a common experience of maternity feel the mountains tremble, did you hear the oceans roar.” Elisha stretched and rose from her desk. Her notes basked in lamplight something garish. Elisha highlighted every word Elisha read in one of three colours. It was “[her] way of working.”
Brenda struggled on her eiderdown. What if an animal, and its net, were evenly-muscled? Then we would have the measure of Brenda on her eiderdown.
She was not asleep. She only allowed herself to think of him for one hour an evening.
But put it this way, she had already been walking the pot-bellied daschund of his favours for some time without knowing it.
All her doubts converged on her wart. He hated her, she disgusted him! Nothing focuses a teenage woman’s vast insecurity quite like pubic fungus.
Chinwag’s collar was a dumb noose. He could relieve the chafe with a certain ponderous nod, as though passing under a low beam. His mouth was dry. Chinwag knew his neck was not really irritated by his collar, but by a nervous tic. If he varied his tic frequently, maybe no one would pick up on it. He would try and transfer it to a compulsive fist. Chinwag clenched and unclenched his right hand. He watched Chinwag. “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?”
Corntrough tested his body and spirit. He sat nude on the edge of his bed. By, ahem, pure thought he hardened and by, amen, pure thoughts softened himself once more. The rule was he could not touch it. He had done it for half an hour, hard, soft, hard, soft, hard, soft and now he was hard again. He’d do it for that again.
Miffed, joyous, spirit-walking: barnacles don’t share.
Julian’s Morris dancing clothes lay on the kitchen table, intricate patchwork, neatly folded. He drank cider from a pint glass. There was a thumb of flour on it. “G’day mate, I’m from Australia,” he said. “I’m from Austraylyia. What iz op, mon, I am from Jamacia.” Corntrough was damp with sweat. There would be buffer zones of prayer at either end of the fantasies, and complicated hybrids at the boundary between prayer and fantasy. Sex is always a boundary circumstance. In terms of sexual phantasy, Elisha’s practice was more easy-going and sustainable. She tended towards abstinence lobbying, the US import which let one speak in public venues about fucking, often about children fucking, and then in private, plan further such speaking. Elisha turned up the music and did star jumps until the end of the track. It was Elisha’s way of taking a break. Perhaps it upset the bald man next door but he poured sausage fat into their communal sink. She could smell his sizzling them even now. Lottie moved a ladybird. A girl of grave kindnesses, Elisha, with the rare condition of a frowning skull. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was lowering whole strings of cooked sausages into the drain, all the while listening nervously into the rapture of Delirious? for the faltering of her star thuds, the sc-rape of her door. Twisting on his fat neck while the sausages’ fat necks twisted down into the darkness. Brenda peered defiantly into her closet as she still always did each night at this moment. Lottie switched off the overhead light at the moment Lemon switched on the bedside lamp. Elisha chose neon green. Corntough thought, “He felt her warm, wet mouth close around his member.” Chinwag cracked his knuckles. Julian pulled apart an egg with his thumbs. Why are you even reading this crap? You could put it down right now. The Cam flowed and the Thames flowed. And Lisa stood in her hallway and hugged herself. Plenty of things are left unfinished. It’s not too late. Pestilence tensed. And Joe walked down the road and hugged himself. You could be at a surprisingly accurate re-creation of the golden years of Motown for example and either because you are swept up in it or because you are explicitly encouraged to so do by Marvin Gaye you could lay down your Kate Atkinson novel, and perhaps you might leave it there, or one of the other patrons might crawl under the rows of seats and rob you of it. Either way you might decide not to source another copy. That might be it. I do my best. Julian poured batter. Lottie dreamt you stopped reading now. That’s how serious I am. She dreamt it and purred and champed. My hatred for you is pretty astonishing. You, Mike, and you, Carlton, and you, Bradley, and you, Justin, and you, Jefferson, and you, Samantha, and by increments, by deductions from the earliest, by mutation of the earliest, all you readers, gobbling, snuffling, tailoring, testing, clogging reality with your attributes.
The Lying Voiceover
BY FRANCIS CROT
Sunday. Parker’s Piece, which Lisa till lately had thought “Parker’s Peace.” The sky sweeping with chewy emblems of luminance. A charnel stack of bicycles, and the usual heap of Nike and Adidas “picnic baskets.” The game hadn’t begun. Hallucinatorily cheerful panorama. The boys stood in two groups about twenty yards apart, scuffing a few footballs among them. They didn’t wear bibs – they knew who was who.
Lemon jogged over to Chris. They spoke, Chris shrugged, Lemon shrugged, Chris laughed and patted him on the shoulder.
“What was that about?”
“Got something up my sleeve. Something to add to the secret weapon. He don’t know the half of it.”
The lads took kick-off by ignoring the ball and running around with their arms held firmly at their sides. Gradually they formed four lines traversing the pitch. They were not elegant or even in synch or even, let’s be honest, doing back-flips. Skipping. Aborted toast pops. Gaz was about sixteen stone, he was doing forward rolls. Gut Heathrow for Gaz’s personal dojo, I dare you, he’d hardly learn a grace. I want you to step forward and bear part of the responsibility for this brutal chaos.
Balls are peculiar signs of courage – the only pebbles which buckle. Guts by contrast, when you appreciate how elastic they are and how they pump, gasp with duty, even in the open air . . .
Sunday. Parker’s Piece, which Lisa till lately had thought “Parker’s Peace.” The sky sweeping with chewy emblems of luminance. A charnel stack of bicycles, and the usual heap of Nike and Adidas “picnic baskets.” The game hadn’t begun. Hallucinatorily cheerful panorama. The boys stood in two groups about twenty yards apart, scuffing a few footballs among them. They didn’t wear bibs – they knew who was who.
Lemon jogged over to Chris. They spoke, Chris shrugged, Lemon shrugged, Chris laughed and patted him on the shoulder.
“What was that about?”
“Got something up my sleeve. Something to add to the secret weapon. He don’t know the half of it.”
The lads took kick-off by ignoring the ball and running around with their arms held firmly at their sides. Gradually they formed four lines traversing the pitch. They were not elegant or even in synch or even, let’s be honest, doing back-flips. Skipping. Aborted toast pops. Gaz was about sixteen stone, he was doing forward rolls. Gut Heathrow for Gaz’s personal dojo, I dare you, he’d hardly learn a grace. I want you to step forward and bear part of the responsibility for this brutal chaos.
Balls are peculiar signs of courage – the only pebbles which buckle. Guts by contrast, when you appreciate how elastic they are and how they pump, gasp with duty, even in the open air . . .
Contempt Festival
BY FRANCIS CROT
. . . at that moment Lemon ran into the playing area, took a knife from his joggers and opened his throat. The blood leapt out all at once, like something waiting to be free, and he folded up. To put this into perspective, it was not as surprising as a sudden latticework of mellifluous dogs, a structure some fifty feet high, or anything like that. All players but one crowded around the corpse – the “injury” paradigm was what they had to deal with this. Chris, riven with hysterical panic, yet deft enough to braid a kettle, deft enough to snatch from you your iPod, but not its song from your ear, dribbled around the bloodshed. He faced an open goalmouth and tapped it in there.
. . . at that moment Lemon ran into the playing area, took a knife from his joggers and opened his throat. The blood leapt out all at once, like something waiting to be free, and he folded up. To put this into perspective, it was not as surprising as a sudden latticework of mellifluous dogs, a structure some fifty feet high, or anything like that. All players but one crowded around the corpse – the “injury” paradigm was what they had to deal with this. Chris, riven with hysterical panic, yet deft enough to braid a kettle, deft enough to snatch from you your iPod, but not its song from your ear, dribbled around the bloodshed. He faced an open goalmouth and tapped it in there.
All That Meat
BY FRANCIS CROT
And away in Malton Julian unpeeled the stock cube like it was his special nut.
And on Parker's Piece, Lottie’s woe was a little assauged when her love began to nibble her cheek.
And one of the kids, Seth, recognising what was happening, raced home to put his ninja costume on.
And in the chapel, the tide of flesh was herding Mrs. Williamson towards the exit. As the shadow of sunlight fell across her, her frail, uncertain feet encountered a streak of blood and she slipped violently. For a moment Brenda thought the stone floor would crack open her head but the flesh caught that and nestled it and kept seeping, with Mrs. Williamson as its figurehead, lifting up her shoulders, a bad mixture of ship and sea, peeling back her dress against the floor, despite her little fretting and patting and smoothing hands, and feeding her feet-first to a pack of dead doormen. As the blood began to whiz the floral sneer flipped up past her swollen thighs to reveal an adult nappy, an unexpectedly stark canvas, quickly painted with the red of Mrs. Williamson’s varicose sewers amid Mrs. Williamson’s dying whimpers.
The revolting anomaly winnowed their ranks by driving them into the undead killers at the door, by colliding them into stone so that their heads smacked hard against it, and if they survived those attentions, by flowing meanderingly into their heads and chests and by compressing and popping all their structure, closing fistlike about their bodies and rousing them like puppets then crunching them and deforming them like living Paintshop pixels and disseminating them into the flow.
Eight of them however survived by running past the fell guards whose carious and baneful gaze did not find them through the enormous floods of crimson juice they beckoned from the melting bodies of others, into the little church lawn.
Here they saw one who might have been Mrs. Williamson’s gentler elder sister who had perhaps had the good fortune to arrive late to the ceremony and thus never to have set foot inside the chapel spongebathed with a manhole cover by a revenant. The idea that the inwardly brittle formation of bone was a definitely limited union had taken the eight escapees with surprising force. Did the dead, come sprightly from their beds beside the chapel, motion to one another, as if with positive judgement? Surely they bade, one to the other, to carouse and prosecute the banquet.
A tithe of your leg. Different dead people waited at the entrance to the little lawn to eat them. Damned in concentric traps. Yet between frying pan and fire, a world of difference – for all that they each pitilessly asserted the priority of tactics. Curiously difficult and unsatisfactory was the bloody and grass green lawn, of funereal trenches, and sprinting and young in a sense worshippers. Inside there the meat had the upper hand and wouldn’t let you forget it.
Stained glass shattered. Now bodies within were pushed through the rafters. Out their bones came, crinkle-crankle, through the stained glass and the brickwork. The flesh posies from the chapel’s surface soon began to wave in no wind. These chaoses of human bodies, enormous, blood-woozy ganglia, soft tissue and bone sprouting somewhat like gore-soaked and filled clusters of ultra-thin flourescent tubes, were also possessed by the dark reanimating morphological field, but did not threaten the escapees.
The chapel was clogged, sealed off. A wall of invisible force marked the boundary and the evil meat flowed to exactly that line. The rotting gents slit blue sacks and whirling red rope from your warm screaming friends.
"You can't reap me," Brenda trilled, "I used to draw you!"
"Everyone's just running away," Corntrough called to her, "especially me!"
"Do you have a better idea? You suck at this!"
"Hallelujah!" called Father Jeremy archly.
The relation between aesthetics and ethics is both overtheorised and undertheorised. The key question is, alot of sentences are bad, but are any equally as bad as the holocaust? It is problematic because according to most people the question itself is in the same neighbourhood. The whole struggle is to go beyond satire and just be plain rude, like the chapel, 100% full of meat, did. Were the meat to tense, it could launch a spire like a rocket. That was so not revealing Himself through the beauty of His creation.
And away in Malton Julian unpeeled the stock cube like it was his special nut.
And on Parker's Piece, Lottie’s woe was a little assauged when her love began to nibble her cheek.
And one of the kids, Seth, recognising what was happening, raced home to put his ninja costume on.
And in the chapel, the tide of flesh was herding Mrs. Williamson towards the exit. As the shadow of sunlight fell across her, her frail, uncertain feet encountered a streak of blood and she slipped violently. For a moment Brenda thought the stone floor would crack open her head but the flesh caught that and nestled it and kept seeping, with Mrs. Williamson as its figurehead, lifting up her shoulders, a bad mixture of ship and sea, peeling back her dress against the floor, despite her little fretting and patting and smoothing hands, and feeding her feet-first to a pack of dead doormen. As the blood began to whiz the floral sneer flipped up past her swollen thighs to reveal an adult nappy, an unexpectedly stark canvas, quickly painted with the red of Mrs. Williamson’s varicose sewers amid Mrs. Williamson’s dying whimpers.
The revolting anomaly winnowed their ranks by driving them into the undead killers at the door, by colliding them into stone so that their heads smacked hard against it, and if they survived those attentions, by flowing meanderingly into their heads and chests and by compressing and popping all their structure, closing fistlike about their bodies and rousing them like puppets then crunching them and deforming them like living Paintshop pixels and disseminating them into the flow.
Eight of them however survived by running past the fell guards whose carious and baneful gaze did not find them through the enormous floods of crimson juice they beckoned from the melting bodies of others, into the little church lawn.
Here they saw one who might have been Mrs. Williamson’s gentler elder sister who had perhaps had the good fortune to arrive late to the ceremony and thus never to have set foot inside the chapel spongebathed with a manhole cover by a revenant. The idea that the inwardly brittle formation of bone was a definitely limited union had taken the eight escapees with surprising force. Did the dead, come sprightly from their beds beside the chapel, motion to one another, as if with positive judgement? Surely they bade, one to the other, to carouse and prosecute the banquet.
A tithe of your leg. Different dead people waited at the entrance to the little lawn to eat them. Damned in concentric traps. Yet between frying pan and fire, a world of difference – for all that they each pitilessly asserted the priority of tactics. Curiously difficult and unsatisfactory was the bloody and grass green lawn, of funereal trenches, and sprinting and young in a sense worshippers. Inside there the meat had the upper hand and wouldn’t let you forget it.
Stained glass shattered. Now bodies within were pushed through the rafters. Out their bones came, crinkle-crankle, through the stained glass and the brickwork. The flesh posies from the chapel’s surface soon began to wave in no wind. These chaoses of human bodies, enormous, blood-woozy ganglia, soft tissue and bone sprouting somewhat like gore-soaked and filled clusters of ultra-thin flourescent tubes, were also possessed by the dark reanimating morphological field, but did not threaten the escapees.
The chapel was clogged, sealed off. A wall of invisible force marked the boundary and the evil meat flowed to exactly that line. The rotting gents slit blue sacks and whirling red rope from your warm screaming friends.
"You can't reap me," Brenda trilled, "I used to draw you!"
"Everyone's just running away," Corntrough called to her, "especially me!"
"Do you have a better idea? You suck at this!"
"Hallelujah!" called Father Jeremy archly.
The relation between aesthetics and ethics is both overtheorised and undertheorised. The key question is, alot of sentences are bad, but are any equally as bad as the holocaust? It is problematic because according to most people the question itself is in the same neighbourhood. The whole struggle is to go beyond satire and just be plain rude, like the chapel, 100% full of meat, did. Were the meat to tense, it could launch a spire like a rocket. That was so not revealing Himself through the beauty of His creation.
Rom Zom Com
BY FRANCIS CROT
The manner in which Brenda receives this harmless pleasantry will convince you that she is mad. Let us leave her a moment where she is packed – she is quite safe – her impertinence snipped, and her mind glitching with God, and consider the figure of the zombie, whom by now you trust has inherited a good deal of sense with his zeal, and the figure – I mean the trope, or circumstance – of the pandemic. Generally if you splatter his brain everywhere the zombie will not get up. But the brain can seep into other parts of the corpse, so head-mashing is not a hard-and-fast rule – when is it ever? If you haven’t got the disdain for what passes as a humane thing yet you are basically my point. But I would also like you to consider the dynamics of pandemic, i.e. to bother about how many die and how. It is a difficult and paradoxical enterprise, to “get” the disdain but also to bother about how many die and how. What you can do is, write down your concerns on a bit of paper, walk about half a mile that way and just pop it off our suggestions cliff. Of you, I’ll ask more or less whatever I feel like. Smack yourself quite hard in the head. You’re more of an idiot if you don’t. The disdain, the plague, the smack. Carry on. “Hello! Hello!”
Joe halted in a general cloud of gravel and nearly overbalanced.
“Get away from it!”
“It’s OK!” said Brenda. “This is His body, which He gave for me. This is His blood, which He shed for me.”
Joe revved the engine tetchily. “Get in! For God’s sake get on!”
“Are you Saved?” Brenda gasped.
The glowing ashes of Joe commenced a vigorous search of their options. “Yes,” he said, and Brenda peeled out and straddled the seat behind him and wrapped her thin, stinking arms around his chest.
I said “chest” but my meaning is not thus fully conveyed. They rode entranced over the smashed glass of a row of shops. A large group of moved vaguely from among the dolls and Joe accelerated. Go cupids (I know ye were left here by the previous tenant) and scatter rose petals on their tombs. Better choose white. Here and there a devil torpidly drew out the intestinal perplexities, and beside each Joe slowed to see if anything could be done; beside each it could not.
They came through the market at the centre of town, where most of the stalls were overturned: the debris spread so there was no clear path, and Joe rode carefully over wares whose crying you would forgive and wares whose crying you would most certainly not. Flapping tarpaulin; spilt fruits, loaves and cakes; all dappled with gore; and limbs and heads smashed not much like, you could see, apples; and grand fans of secondhand books: Boykoff (Jules) & Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space. Palm 2008. 128pp incl. many b/w photos, reproductions of posters, signs, handouts, etc. pages sl. discoloured, wrprs sw., bloodstain at tail of sp., run through w/ little finger prob. of Lisa Morgan, £6.50, etc.; and Dr. Raphael Lyne, specialising in the Early Modern period, straightening abruptly from the stomach of the vendor of spicy cakes and breads still gnawing a rubbery tube of his offal and so drawing forth a placenta of organed gore, and a slick new flood as the corpse jerked free of it, maybe “the touch that did it,” as Beckett would have it. Dr. Lyne, who also had an interest in Beckett, lurched at them ready to hug but was tangled in the cryer’s offal, and he whipped the bike around him without trouble, sending up a diverse bloody spray. Joe remembered the banana bread had not been that good either. They went past a college; a body fell from one if its parapets onto the road behind them.
No, beside each it could not, and besides Joe wavered before the prospect of seating a third on his commandeered lime green (and red: it goes without saying) Kawasaki ER-6n. But he prepared himself to ram one of them, if he came upon an indeterminate altercation. It was not like domestic violence, Joe thought, it was better defined than that. The girl behind him – “Brenda” – shook more than his new bike. “Try and stay calm,” he said, to him it sounded like, “Do not be frightened.” Chris, Howler, Lisa and Lottie were all heading to their row of houses on Cavendish Avenue to warn the others. Nobody had signal. They were to regroup in the parking lot of Addenbrooke's, or if it proved impossible, in the Golf Course along Trumpington Road. Joe had originally left with Jealsie and Vanessa. What do you think of their screamed arrangements.
“I need a mallet,” said Brenda properly speaking to your surprise. “I’m not interested in a mild tool, as adapted for coaxing nails forth at it is for driving them down. I want a masher with approximately an anvil’s heft.”
They left the Kawasaki by the Cam. They found survivors finally near Addenbrooke’s. Chris, Lottie and Lisa were among those trying to drag someone from his weeping o’er scrubs and the endless rose within. Brenda tersely recounted the seeping belfry. There was a lively discussion, scant on logic. Some wanted to barricade themselves into the upper floor of hospital, silencers fitted to their cereal spoons. Others, petulantly arranging their tattered skirts and so on, thought it safer to strike out by foot in the countryside. Does not the pleasantness of this place carry in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it? Perhaps they should head for Malton.
“Did you go past the houses?” said Joe.
Chris nodded.
The manner in which Brenda receives this harmless pleasantry will convince you that she is mad. Let us leave her a moment where she is packed – she is quite safe – her impertinence snipped, and her mind glitching with God, and consider the figure of the zombie, whom by now you trust has inherited a good deal of sense with his zeal, and the figure – I mean the trope, or circumstance – of the pandemic. Generally if you splatter his brain everywhere the zombie will not get up. But the brain can seep into other parts of the corpse, so head-mashing is not a hard-and-fast rule – when is it ever? If you haven’t got the disdain for what passes as a humane thing yet you are basically my point. But I would also like you to consider the dynamics of pandemic, i.e. to bother about how many die and how. It is a difficult and paradoxical enterprise, to “get” the disdain but also to bother about how many die and how. What you can do is, write down your concerns on a bit of paper, walk about half a mile that way and just pop it off our suggestions cliff. Of you, I’ll ask more or less whatever I feel like. Smack yourself quite hard in the head. You’re more of an idiot if you don’t. The disdain, the plague, the smack. Carry on. “Hello! Hello!”
Joe halted in a general cloud of gravel and nearly overbalanced.
“Get away from it!”
“It’s OK!” said Brenda. “This is His body, which He gave for me. This is His blood, which He shed for me.”
Joe revved the engine tetchily. “Get in! For God’s sake get on!”
“Are you Saved?” Brenda gasped.
The glowing ashes of Joe commenced a vigorous search of their options. “Yes,” he said, and Brenda peeled out and straddled the seat behind him and wrapped her thin, stinking arms around his chest.
I said “chest” but my meaning is not thus fully conveyed. They rode entranced over the smashed glass of a row of shops. A large group of moved vaguely from among the dolls and Joe accelerated. Go cupids (I know ye were left here by the previous tenant) and scatter rose petals on their tombs. Better choose white. Here and there a devil torpidly drew out the intestinal perplexities, and beside each Joe slowed to see if anything could be done; beside each it could not.
They came through the market at the centre of town, where most of the stalls were overturned: the debris spread so there was no clear path, and Joe rode carefully over wares whose crying you would forgive and wares whose crying you would most certainly not. Flapping tarpaulin; spilt fruits, loaves and cakes; all dappled with gore; and limbs and heads smashed not much like, you could see, apples; and grand fans of secondhand books: Boykoff (Jules) & Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space. Palm 2008. 128pp incl. many b/w photos, reproductions of posters, signs, handouts, etc. pages sl. discoloured, wrprs sw., bloodstain at tail of sp., run through w/ little finger prob. of Lisa Morgan, £6.50, etc.; and Dr. Raphael Lyne, specialising in the Early Modern period, straightening abruptly from the stomach of the vendor of spicy cakes and breads still gnawing a rubbery tube of his offal and so drawing forth a placenta of organed gore, and a slick new flood as the corpse jerked free of it, maybe “the touch that did it,” as Beckett would have it. Dr. Lyne, who also had an interest in Beckett, lurched at them ready to hug but was tangled in the cryer’s offal, and he whipped the bike around him without trouble, sending up a diverse bloody spray. Joe remembered the banana bread had not been that good either. They went past a college; a body fell from one if its parapets onto the road behind them.
No, beside each it could not, and besides Joe wavered before the prospect of seating a third on his commandeered lime green (and red: it goes without saying) Kawasaki ER-6n. But he prepared himself to ram one of them, if he came upon an indeterminate altercation. It was not like domestic violence, Joe thought, it was better defined than that. The girl behind him – “Brenda” – shook more than his new bike. “Try and stay calm,” he said, to him it sounded like, “Do not be frightened.” Chris, Howler, Lisa and Lottie were all heading to their row of houses on Cavendish Avenue to warn the others. Nobody had signal. They were to regroup in the parking lot of Addenbrooke's, or if it proved impossible, in the Golf Course along Trumpington Road. Joe had originally left with Jealsie and Vanessa. What do you think of their screamed arrangements.
“I need a mallet,” said Brenda properly speaking to your surprise. “I’m not interested in a mild tool, as adapted for coaxing nails forth at it is for driving them down. I want a masher with approximately an anvil’s heft.”
They left the Kawasaki by the Cam. They found survivors finally near Addenbrooke’s. Chris, Lottie and Lisa were among those trying to drag someone from his weeping o’er scrubs and the endless rose within. Brenda tersely recounted the seeping belfry. There was a lively discussion, scant on logic. Some wanted to barricade themselves into the upper floor of hospital, silencers fitted to their cereal spoons. Others, petulantly arranging their tattered skirts and so on, thought it safer to strike out by foot in the countryside. Does not the pleasantness of this place carry in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it? Perhaps they should head for Malton.
“Did you go past the houses?” said Joe.
Chris nodded.
A Great Adventure
BY FRANCIS CROT
Faintly hilled farmland lay between Malton and the chums Chris, Joe, Brenda, Lisa and Lottie like a 50x100 grid numbered from the top left hand corner, I think it’s fair to say. The chums began at 25,1.
Chris informally led, rich with consultation. Deft enough to whittle a toy giraffe from a stick insect without even disturbing the critter’s ponder.
If we were to call one “turn” the time it took the chums to cross from one space to another, then – how to put it? Such a delicate matter. Despite their notorious feet-scuffing, the dead covered ground at the very same pace. Tenacity, don’t you know.
They saw birds, dogs, foxes, frogs and newts, insects and spiders, and one Muntjac deer. None seemed fucked. They went across a forecourt. Stiff peach children. Torn craws and blue prolapsed Lurpak. A rather nice neck, otherwise. Joe and Chris came out with carrier bags of fruit, bread, cheese and chocolate, their pockets full of lighters.
Generally the dead were still. Oh, their heads might roll back for a corrupted squint at the heavens: when’s it going to reign? My bon mot honours the dead’s little hobby. A few would reprise old habits, even shuffling a tractor over a patch. The “gas escaping” hypothesis must be unbelievably embarrassing by now. Old habits die hard. “Pvt. [Helen] Zemeckis! You & Mac secure the Ladies’ Room!” Their behaviour was more truthful than when they were alive – everything now done in long, fluid cringes.
Just fuck off. It was only when a chum stood in an adjacent space – or a space adjacent to one of those spaces – twenty four spaces in all – if you don’t count the one occupied by the zombie – and why would you count that? – that a zombie would cross into a new space. He would step invariably meatwards. No flanking, no retreating, your zombie on the move. You’ll find he prefers meaty latitudes to meaty longditudes. For example, in one little melodrama Lisa stood at 28,3 and dead don at 26,4. The don took himself to 27,3 – though rambling to 27,4 would have brought him just as near. It is a tradition in Cambridge that undergraduates may walk on the safeguarded grass if accompanying a don. Many undergraduates did so pursued by flesh-eating dons. This is the point isn’t it – flexible interpretation of our heritage. So, latitudes were preferred to longditudes, closer meat preferred to more distant meat, and in cases of equidistant meat, the meatier preferred. Thus a zombie would chase a space occupied by two chums before he would chase a space occupied by only one. He’d pursue Joe before he’d pursue Brenda, he’d pursue Brenda before he’d pursue Chris, he’d pursue Chris before he’d pursue Lisa. He would rather pursue poor old big-boned Lottie than any of them. She had a hell of a time of it (except hell goes on for a long time).
The first night they didn’t sleep. The second they fitted on a spongy bank, covered by trees whose boughs were full of cowslips and wildflowers, near some ancient-looking earthworks. When more experienced, they would join with the cowslips and wildflowers. More than once they awoke with visitors milling below. Lottie reckoned it was only sixty miles or so to Malton, but their route was an arabseque, circumstance its curling tongs. The ideal camp spot, as its notion evolved, was a small spinney affording five – then four, then three, and then two – high generous spots where the chums could roost without fear of rolling out, preferrably in a meadow, near a stream, surrounded by stiles to groan and bang as the dead bungled through. They attained this Eden only in fragments. They found anyway that, despite constant exertion, they needed less sleep. They made the most of the twilight and the dawnlight, and soon the starlight and moonlight too. When the world was distinctly lit they moved through it.
“I believe everything is matter. Yet I think there is a God,” said Joe embarrassed. “I don’t have any reasons but I believe it anyway.”
“That’s faith,” said Brenda.
“And that He’s some kind of creator. I don’t know how He relates to us. I don’t think it’s the way many of your evangelicals believe, that you pray hard, and you get what you want.”
“He got me my one thing,” said Brenda. “The only thing I ever asked for, He did. Don’t ask me what it is. He might stir-fry you, if you knew.”
“Could be dumb luck, Brenda. Either way we could use some more.”
They were being closed into a ravine. None of them liked it, and that’s why they fell silent. Overhead, the ribbon of afternoon sky was empty. Trees were starting out of the rocks on either side. When the ground began to climb a little, Brenda spoke again.
“Joe – Joe – Joe, the whole world changed so that I could have it – have my wish –”
“Yeah –”
Her voice dropped, “– my prayer – all this – all that – because of me. You explain that. And now my life belongs to Him.”
“For the love of God,” he said, but to these words he attached no meaning.
They saw greenery of that sort which is most set off by blood and sunshine. They saw gravel walks margined with flowers, and hedgerows, corn fields, and stone houses.
At first they made it their policy to set barriers in their wake, wedging shut the stiles, and dragging a heavy pipe, once used as a bridge, into the ditch it had lain over. But as Chris and Joe were trying to kick apart a rotted tree trunk fallen in a little stream, Lottie pointed out that they might simply be enclosing themselves in a more thickly-infested area. “It began in the chapel,” said Brenda, but, nonetheless, from then on they no longer bothered.
Joe and the others, except for Chris and Brenda, were all in their second year at Christ’s. Chris was a postgrad. Brenda was in Year 10 at a comprehensive in Impington, just north of Cambridge. Her GCSEs were to have been English Language and Literature, Maths, Double Science, ICT, Citizenship, RS, French, History, Art and Design, plus short courses in Italian and PE.
“Hey, I have a list to read to you,” Joe said during a brief firelit camp stop. “I think you’ll probably interpret it as the, you know, all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small thing. But I’d be interested to know how you feel. You ready?”
“OK,” said Brenda. Chris and Lisa slept. Lottie, upset, agitated the coals with a stick. Even if she could loot a Vision Express, how could she be sure it was the right prescription?
Lisa and Joe, thought Brenda. What a perfect match. Gown and gown. The argument from design.
“I saw one once where,” said Joe. “Wet vermilion injection of human penis. Cuttlefish mouthparts. Tibula and fibula with massive osteoma. Young crocodile viscera. Lion’s oesophagus. Honeycomb of first and second sheep tummies. Gravid uterus. Foetal armadillo ratusia. Seal colon. Wolverine rectum lymph nodes. Embryonic foal with membranes. Looks like a condom in soup. Sea mouse. Hen skeleton, without head. Partridge skeleton, intact. Rat spines. Encysted tumours. Thin-walled dermoid cyst. Sheep’s eyebrow. Lingual ribbon. Same seal colon from earlier, now inverted. Corrosion cast of stillborn’s arteries. The liver is a thick haze in that one. Six skulls of various rodents. Firm clot effused between ventricles, producing natural cast. Hydrocephalus skull salad bowl.”
He raised his hopeful head.
“No effect,” said Brenda. “I don’t get it.”
Joe was to have read Philosophy.
“Oh. Whenever I read it, I remember everything is just matter. Shall I go on?”
“That’s all right. I’d like to read to you from John.”
“All right,” he said, laying down.
Faintly hilled farmland lay between Malton and the chums Chris, Joe, Brenda, Lisa and Lottie like a 50x100 grid numbered from the top left hand corner, I think it’s fair to say. The chums began at 25,1.
Chris informally led, rich with consultation. Deft enough to whittle a toy giraffe from a stick insect without even disturbing the critter’s ponder.
If we were to call one “turn” the time it took the chums to cross from one space to another, then – how to put it? Such a delicate matter. Despite their notorious feet-scuffing, the dead covered ground at the very same pace. Tenacity, don’t you know.
They saw birds, dogs, foxes, frogs and newts, insects and spiders, and one Muntjac deer. None seemed fucked. They went across a forecourt. Stiff peach children. Torn craws and blue prolapsed Lurpak. A rather nice neck, otherwise. Joe and Chris came out with carrier bags of fruit, bread, cheese and chocolate, their pockets full of lighters.
Generally the dead were still. Oh, their heads might roll back for a corrupted squint at the heavens: when’s it going to reign? My bon mot honours the dead’s little hobby. A few would reprise old habits, even shuffling a tractor over a patch. The “gas escaping” hypothesis must be unbelievably embarrassing by now. Old habits die hard. “Pvt. [Helen] Zemeckis! You & Mac secure the Ladies’ Room!” Their behaviour was more truthful than when they were alive – everything now done in long, fluid cringes.
Just fuck off. It was only when a chum stood in an adjacent space – or a space adjacent to one of those spaces – twenty four spaces in all – if you don’t count the one occupied by the zombie – and why would you count that? – that a zombie would cross into a new space. He would step invariably meatwards. No flanking, no retreating, your zombie on the move. You’ll find he prefers meaty latitudes to meaty longditudes. For example, in one little melodrama Lisa stood at 28,3 and dead don at 26,4. The don took himself to 27,3 – though rambling to 27,4 would have brought him just as near. It is a tradition in Cambridge that undergraduates may walk on the safeguarded grass if accompanying a don. Many undergraduates did so pursued by flesh-eating dons. This is the point isn’t it – flexible interpretation of our heritage. So, latitudes were preferred to longditudes, closer meat preferred to more distant meat, and in cases of equidistant meat, the meatier preferred. Thus a zombie would chase a space occupied by two chums before he would chase a space occupied by only one. He’d pursue Joe before he’d pursue Brenda, he’d pursue Brenda before he’d pursue Chris, he’d pursue Chris before he’d pursue Lisa. He would rather pursue poor old big-boned Lottie than any of them. She had a hell of a time of it (except hell goes on for a long time).
The first night they didn’t sleep. The second they fitted on a spongy bank, covered by trees whose boughs were full of cowslips and wildflowers, near some ancient-looking earthworks. When more experienced, they would join with the cowslips and wildflowers. More than once they awoke with visitors milling below. Lottie reckoned it was only sixty miles or so to Malton, but their route was an arabseque, circumstance its curling tongs. The ideal camp spot, as its notion evolved, was a small spinney affording five – then four, then three, and then two – high generous spots where the chums could roost without fear of rolling out, preferrably in a meadow, near a stream, surrounded by stiles to groan and bang as the dead bungled through. They attained this Eden only in fragments. They found anyway that, despite constant exertion, they needed less sleep. They made the most of the twilight and the dawnlight, and soon the starlight and moonlight too. When the world was distinctly lit they moved through it.
“I believe everything is matter. Yet I think there is a God,” said Joe embarrassed. “I don’t have any reasons but I believe it anyway.”
“That’s faith,” said Brenda.
“And that He’s some kind of creator. I don’t know how He relates to us. I don’t think it’s the way many of your evangelicals believe, that you pray hard, and you get what you want.”
“He got me my one thing,” said Brenda. “The only thing I ever asked for, He did. Don’t ask me what it is. He might stir-fry you, if you knew.”
“Could be dumb luck, Brenda. Either way we could use some more.”
They were being closed into a ravine. None of them liked it, and that’s why they fell silent. Overhead, the ribbon of afternoon sky was empty. Trees were starting out of the rocks on either side. When the ground began to climb a little, Brenda spoke again.
“Joe – Joe – Joe, the whole world changed so that I could have it – have my wish –”
“Yeah –”
Her voice dropped, “– my prayer – all this – all that – because of me. You explain that. And now my life belongs to Him.”
“For the love of God,” he said, but to these words he attached no meaning.
They saw greenery of that sort which is most set off by blood and sunshine. They saw gravel walks margined with flowers, and hedgerows, corn fields, and stone houses.
At first they made it their policy to set barriers in their wake, wedging shut the stiles, and dragging a heavy pipe, once used as a bridge, into the ditch it had lain over. But as Chris and Joe were trying to kick apart a rotted tree trunk fallen in a little stream, Lottie pointed out that they might simply be enclosing themselves in a more thickly-infested area. “It began in the chapel,” said Brenda, but, nonetheless, from then on they no longer bothered.
Joe and the others, except for Chris and Brenda, were all in their second year at Christ’s. Chris was a postgrad. Brenda was in Year 10 at a comprehensive in Impington, just north of Cambridge. Her GCSEs were to have been English Language and Literature, Maths, Double Science, ICT, Citizenship, RS, French, History, Art and Design, plus short courses in Italian and PE.
“Hey, I have a list to read to you,” Joe said during a brief firelit camp stop. “I think you’ll probably interpret it as the, you know, all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small thing. But I’d be interested to know how you feel. You ready?”
“OK,” said Brenda. Chris and Lisa slept. Lottie, upset, agitated the coals with a stick. Even if she could loot a Vision Express, how could she be sure it was the right prescription?
Lisa and Joe, thought Brenda. What a perfect match. Gown and gown. The argument from design.
“I saw one once where,” said Joe. “Wet vermilion injection of human penis. Cuttlefish mouthparts. Tibula and fibula with massive osteoma. Young crocodile viscera. Lion’s oesophagus. Honeycomb of first and second sheep tummies. Gravid uterus. Foetal armadillo ratusia. Seal colon. Wolverine rectum lymph nodes. Embryonic foal with membranes. Looks like a condom in soup. Sea mouse. Hen skeleton, without head. Partridge skeleton, intact. Rat spines. Encysted tumours. Thin-walled dermoid cyst. Sheep’s eyebrow. Lingual ribbon. Same seal colon from earlier, now inverted. Corrosion cast of stillborn’s arteries. The liver is a thick haze in that one. Six skulls of various rodents. Firm clot effused between ventricles, producing natural cast. Hydrocephalus skull salad bowl.”
He raised his hopeful head.
“No effect,” said Brenda. “I don’t get it.”
Joe was to have read Philosophy.
“Oh. Whenever I read it, I remember everything is just matter. Shall I go on?”
“That’s all right. I’d like to read to you from John.”
“All right,” he said, laying down.
The Condescending Summation
BY FRANCIS CROT
Late that same afternoon they crossed an abandoned farmstead filled with strangely serene animals, and made a tense raid of the farmhouse, for viaticum. A night came of very mild moonlight and the creature came so suddenly on Chris he near shat both their pants.
God spoke to Brenda often. Was it Mark E. Smith who first pointed out that every culture has some concept of a large invisible man in the sky with moons and stars on his hat who says “I WILL DESTROY YOU” in a vast, booming voice? It was not thus. It was not that person riding around on her, it was not any vulgar transposition of public sensation onto private sensation; but nor was it abject internal monologue. It was unmistakeable; it did not come from her and was not of her.
It was linguistic but not what she would call language. It was in the world. As she learned to listen for it, it changed the way she knew language.
Mostly He comforted her, and showed her how she might comfort Joe and for a time the others. He spoke to her through Joe as well. He told her He had a plan for them.
Once in the reserve, the path led initially through woodland and then through more open boggy land along the bank of an unmarked river. The otters, though characteristically reticent, could be seen splashing dazedly towards them. The miracle had jumped the species barrier.
After 200m they saw a brick pillbox, topped by another little gathering of otters eating what looked like a screaming teenage boy. Seeing it was getting too late for him, they crossed by a little bridge. After about 100m they were on the the plateau proper and the views opened up.
After about half a mile they spotted him again, approaching a pair of – survivors begs the question, a girl it seemed lugged a boy, who waved to them half-heartedly – and from the ridge they saw the blue sacks of their stomachs gleam, plop plop, in the lightly wooded fancy barrows visible to the left. Otter minions shuffled from the woods add their rabid hands to the frenzy. A worthwhile detour led right for 150m (marked with a Countryside Commission sign), through a kissing gate and then curved through open park lands designed by Capability Brown.
Late that same afternoon they crossed an abandoned farmstead filled with strangely serene animals, and made a tense raid of the farmhouse, for viaticum. A night came of very mild moonlight and the creature came so suddenly on Chris he near shat both their pants.
God spoke to Brenda often. Was it Mark E. Smith who first pointed out that every culture has some concept of a large invisible man in the sky with moons and stars on his hat who says “I WILL DESTROY YOU” in a vast, booming voice? It was not thus. It was not that person riding around on her, it was not any vulgar transposition of public sensation onto private sensation; but nor was it abject internal monologue. It was unmistakeable; it did not come from her and was not of her.
It was linguistic but not what she would call language. It was in the world. As she learned to listen for it, it changed the way she knew language.
Mostly He comforted her, and showed her how she might comfort Joe and for a time the others. He spoke to her through Joe as well. He told her He had a plan for them.
Once in the reserve, the path led initially through woodland and then through more open boggy land along the bank of an unmarked river. The otters, though characteristically reticent, could be seen splashing dazedly towards them. The miracle had jumped the species barrier.
After 200m they saw a brick pillbox, topped by another little gathering of otters eating what looked like a screaming teenage boy. Seeing it was getting too late for him, they crossed by a little bridge. After about 100m they were on the the plateau proper and the views opened up.
After about half a mile they spotted him again, approaching a pair of – survivors begs the question, a girl it seemed lugged a boy, who waved to them half-heartedly – and from the ridge they saw the blue sacks of their stomachs gleam, plop plop, in the lightly wooded fancy barrows visible to the left. Otter minions shuffled from the woods add their rabid hands to the frenzy. A worthwhile detour led right for 150m (marked with a Countryside Commission sign), through a kissing gate and then curved through open park lands designed by Capability Brown.
Gouge Addiction, or, The True History of Brenda True: Who Was Seduced By A Zombie, To Which Is Appended, A Concise Allegory of the Bird Flu Pandemic
BY FRANCIS CROT
They picked up the M11 for half a day. Only two cars passed in that period, the first going away from Malton and the other towards it. As they were resting in a dip, they didn’t notice the second car in time to get a good look, and be sure if it wasn’t the same again. Lottie thought so. Still-flaming husks, and the welcoming victims of those accidents, shepherded them West across the countryside.
“I saw one where a spaceship explodes in orbit, raining billions of tonnes of toxic sludge onto the planet. Everyone north of the equator becomes one of them.”
“I saw one where the virus only works on adults. So it’s effectively kids and teenagers trying to survive in their world.”
“Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him!”
“I saw one where they rose and layed down again without ever committing a single act of violence.”
It is hardly possible to express the ardour of it. There was plenty of courage, and before long, plenty of certain chums sacrificing their lives to facilitate the continuance of other chums’ lives (in the considered opinions of the survivors). There is a piece of cinema which is important for anyone who burns to know, but know safely, from an armchair, what Lisa looked like in her final moments. It is the bit in the Coen brothers’ Fargo in which the character played by Steve Buschemi is shoved relentlessly into a wood chipper. If you look at the state of Steve Buschemi at the end of Coen brothers’ films, you will see there is a tendency to divide him into increasingly tiny pieces.
Their main themes were God and the infection. A peculiar manners developed within the transmission of practical information. Quite a lot was said very clearly but very indirectly. The pronouns “they” and “them” had unmistakeable reference.
“I saw one where a hot pink meteorite plunges from the sky in the middle of a drive-in movie. Any woman who smells the rock becomes one of them, except sex-crazed.”
“I saw one where the only thing worse than the corny ‘the dead take over’ concept, or the ‘the dead become a metaphor for consumerism’ trope, which would have been poignant, like, forty years ago, was its twee hipster equivalent. You know, the I-know-I’m-writing-a-story-about-the-dead-because-I’m-making-a-comment-about-the-dead-stories. Look, you can make a ‘comment’ about whatever you want, but the ultimate take-away is that in the course of doing so, you just wasted a considerable amount of your creative life for the sake of giving the world another goddamn zombie story. And yes, my qualifications for a zed moratorium include zed love stories, zed noirs, zed mysteries, zombie teen lit, zed westerns, zed dramas, zed comedies-of-error, zed with cance-AAAAAARGH! AAARGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. Eugh.”
Where they could they followed they waterways. They drank from the streams, and the infected proved a little less swift at crossing than they.
One river, unmarked where they followed it, was their companion for two days. Light grasses wrapped round Joe’s legs. Lazy foam gathered at its quieter edges. “I’d be interested to know,” he once said carefully by its banks, “what you think of the modern church’s dependence on relationship language for our experience of God.”
“I don’t know about dependence,” said Brenda. “You’re so fucking aggressive about God.”
“Preference, whatever. Show me the scripture where it says, ‘A personal relationship with the proprietor – that’s how you get into the Kingdom of Heaven.’”
“Ephesians 5. The church as the bride of Christ.”
Joe grinned, his tongue between his teeth, and waved his head side-to-side. “Yeah, OK, OK! But it seems possible to me that it’s a very cultural, you know, twentieth century thing, helpful for a lot of people, but not necessarily the key to like understanding experience of God for everyone, and possibly even alienating for some?”
“I dunno Joe, God knows you so intimately … all knitted together all Joe-ish … it’d be almost rude of Him not to give you the opportunity to know Him.”
“God as creepy social media stalker.”
“Hmm.”
They picked up the M11 for half a day. Only two cars passed in that period, the first going away from Malton and the other towards it. As they were resting in a dip, they didn’t notice the second car in time to get a good look, and be sure if it wasn’t the same again. Lottie thought so. Still-flaming husks, and the welcoming victims of those accidents, shepherded them West across the countryside.
“I saw one where a spaceship explodes in orbit, raining billions of tonnes of toxic sludge onto the planet. Everyone north of the equator becomes one of them.”
“I saw one where the virus only works on adults. So it’s effectively kids and teenagers trying to survive in their world.”
“Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him!”
“I saw one where they rose and layed down again without ever committing a single act of violence.”
It is hardly possible to express the ardour of it. There was plenty of courage, and before long, plenty of certain chums sacrificing their lives to facilitate the continuance of other chums’ lives (in the considered opinions of the survivors). There is a piece of cinema which is important for anyone who burns to know, but know safely, from an armchair, what Lisa looked like in her final moments. It is the bit in the Coen brothers’ Fargo in which the character played by Steve Buschemi is shoved relentlessly into a wood chipper. If you look at the state of Steve Buschemi at the end of Coen brothers’ films, you will see there is a tendency to divide him into increasingly tiny pieces.
Their main themes were God and the infection. A peculiar manners developed within the transmission of practical information. Quite a lot was said very clearly but very indirectly. The pronouns “they” and “them” had unmistakeable reference.
“I saw one where a hot pink meteorite plunges from the sky in the middle of a drive-in movie. Any woman who smells the rock becomes one of them, except sex-crazed.”
“I saw one where the only thing worse than the corny ‘the dead take over’ concept, or the ‘the dead become a metaphor for consumerism’ trope, which would have been poignant, like, forty years ago, was its twee hipster equivalent. You know, the I-know-I’m-writing-a-story-about-the-dead-because-I’m-making-a-comment-about-the-dead-stories. Look, you can make a ‘comment’ about whatever you want, but the ultimate take-away is that in the course of doing so, you just wasted a considerable amount of your creative life for the sake of giving the world another goddamn zombie story. And yes, my qualifications for a zed moratorium include zed love stories, zed noirs, zed mysteries, zombie teen lit, zed westerns, zed dramas, zed comedies-of-error, zed with cance-AAAAAARGH! AAARGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. Eugh.”
Where they could they followed they waterways. They drank from the streams, and the infected proved a little less swift at crossing than they.
One river, unmarked where they followed it, was their companion for two days. Light grasses wrapped round Joe’s legs. Lazy foam gathered at its quieter edges. “I’d be interested to know,” he once said carefully by its banks, “what you think of the modern church’s dependence on relationship language for our experience of God.”
“I don’t know about dependence,” said Brenda. “You’re so fucking aggressive about God.”
“Preference, whatever. Show me the scripture where it says, ‘A personal relationship with the proprietor – that’s how you get into the Kingdom of Heaven.’”
“Ephesians 5. The church as the bride of Christ.”
Joe grinned, his tongue between his teeth, and waved his head side-to-side. “Yeah, OK, OK! But it seems possible to me that it’s a very cultural, you know, twentieth century thing, helpful for a lot of people, but not necessarily the key to like understanding experience of God for everyone, and possibly even alienating for some?”
“I dunno Joe, God knows you so intimately … all knitted together all Joe-ish … it’d be almost rude of Him not to give you the opportunity to know Him.”
“God as creepy social media stalker.”
“Hmm.”
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