Original Sin.

[victorhadin]

My first complete short story in ages and ages, and written late last night. I should probably do it more often.

That said, this forum doesn't like original stuff and who knows; it might not actually be all that good, but there is but one way to find out.

(Comments would be nice.)




Original Sin.


The most powerful things in life are viral.

Watch them churn and mix, and run together and leave again.

See the guile of the disease.

And sit, and talk and breathe and wait...

For soon it will be your turn again.




I am Margaret Simmons.

I sit now on a park bench, on a perfect day under a perfect sky, with perfect sounds and perfect smells, and I think of perfect things.

I am Margaret Simmons.

I sit and look at grass and lakes, and the thin traces of fine clouds in a fine sky. I sit and gaze at fractal branches and frivolous leaves, and the hidden outlines of buildings beyond them, bright and uplifting.

I am Mediocre Sensibilities.

In front of me a man walks past, again for the third time this day. He walks with a long, bounding stride and I see the confidence in his face, his ease-of-being, to know he is in a perfect world that loves him. He is old and drably-dressed, in brown and rumpled clothes suited for colder weather, worn through to paleness by the regular use of years; flexible, comfortable and soaked with a faint personal scent which pleases the Labrador he walks with. His hair is grey and thinning, and it comes out at the sides of a lifeless cap in tangled mats and weaves, content with its carefree abandon. The dog has run on past me now, happy with the scents on the air as always, living in that ecstatic boundary between man and animal, with the glow of intelligence and the contentment of idiocy. The man strolls behind the dog with the same look on his face.

In a few seconds he will turn and nod to me, and will tip his hat and maybe wave, and when he does I will stroke the worn metal object in my hand, whose lines remind me of sentiment and of better times. I will forget to smile back, and will only remember once he has turned away and gone past.

And later he will complete his cycle and be back, and the same thing will happen again.

And later still, when I tire of repetition and sunshine, I will walk home, to a bright airy room in a bright airy city in a bright airy world, and the breeze will keep me cool as I walk. I will take it easy and stroll, and people will nod and smile at me as I go, and I will smile at them, and they will smile at each other.

For you see, this is a perfect world.

The people here are idealisations, and we talk to each other with informal politeness, never rude or blustering, never wrongfully presumptuous and never offensive. We will talk of small things, and talk in small ways with small gestures of hand and arms; a small, un-intrusive form of body-language that exists to be inoffensive.

And when we are bored or restless we will watch the television and see other people talk and act politely, in little dramas of little consequence, in which a small problem will inevitably be solved, quietly and coincidentally, by quiet people. Few people watch them, and we spend most of our time outdoors, or walking or enjoying the blue sky. It never rains here, and I like this.

I don’t know who cuts the grass, though.

-A silly thing to think about, isn’t it? But grass will grow and must be cut, else I would not be able to look ahead and see the lake, with its little ripples spreading out and around, moving out and further out from even the tiniest disturbance, for that is all it takes. Strange, that flat surfaces should look so strong.

I stroke my little metal charm again, and feel content at the good luck it brings me.

I found it in the garden one day, and I don’t know how it got there but I found it nonetheless, sitting in a sad little patch of mud and scattered soil, in grass that looked freshly-cut but shouldn’t have done. It was so sad and old and marred that I had to take it back inside, and fuss over it as if a wounded animal. -Odd, that.

I move one of the little bits on it and enjoy the chunky clicking sound it makes, though something inside me feels queer whenever I do that. It reminds me uncomfortably of my dreams.

My dreams are not nice.

I go to sleep every evening at nine o’ clock, -any later and I will quickly feel so tired that I might keel over wherever I stand, so I always do it at nine sharp. I go to sleep in a warm bed in a comfortable, friendly room and dream of unfriendly places, and I don’t know where I get the inspiration for that, as my waking world is far too nice to inspire me to think things like that, but I do anyway.

I dream of hard things, and cold machines and grease and slime, and a noxious smell of industry that fills the air and chokes all hope. It is dark and cold in my dreams, and I am always tired, exhausted by the end. I move through dark places and sit by cool machines, and I see people from the waking world in there too, people I have seen on the street or in the park. –Even the old man with the dog, but there is no dog and he does not smile in the dream; nobody smiles at all, and whenever I try to bring myself to nod or wave at one of them I just can’t, as if it is inappropriate or wrong somehow.

-And all is unfriendliness and chilling damp and scowls and a dank humid atmosphere that feels deathly somehow, and it wears slowly at your lungs and makes you cough… and the work! Sometimes I feel so tired that I fear I may fall, gasping, on the hard grey floor with its puddles of filth and oil, and die right there, in the dream.

But always I wake up, and hold my head and look around, wide-eyed and alarmed, before realising where I am; back in my bedroom on my own in the morning, safe. I will grasp my head and blink, as it will feel as if I had been sleeping for a week, and my mouth will taste of something awful, but somehow it always goes away within the hour.

I always tend to think at about this point that my head feels fuzzy, as if it was a ball of cotton wool, or as if reality was fuzzed-over in the corners. The feeling always goes away by lunchtime though, although it is possible that I might just have gotten used to it by then.

-And that was this morning, and now I am back in the park again, waiting for an afternoon to pass as I think to myself in the perfect sunshine.

In a perfect world, with perfect people.

I am Margaret Simmons.

I look out at the lake again and look at the ripples, marvelling at their geometric perfection in the calm water and their perfect balance, as one bit of lake takes on extra water for just an instant before passing it on, like a passed-on favour or a good mood shared with other people.

Or not.

I think to myself, as the clouds show their chaotic undersides and a dog distantly barks and a breeze passes invisibly through the canopy of a tree, that it might all be a little more complex than that. I think that maybe this could apply to people, and…

-And if you were to hurt a person, really hurt them, then they would carry that wound along with them, and would act differently because of it. And maybe if that person then acted harshly to another because of their own pain then it might hurt that other person too, and it would pass along between them like something virile and filthy, spreading itself by staining others with its own vile impulses.

The most powerful things in life are viral. –I wonder where I’ve heard that phrase before, or maybe I just made it up.

A sudden rustling, tearing sound makes me look to the side all of a sudden, and my eyes are dilated with surprise and alarm for an instant, but it’s only the Labrador from before. I look at it rustling through bushes and undergrowth, its big snout pressed to the ground and its tail wagging out a semaphore-shout of doggy nirvana, and for just an instant I find myself envying its easy bliss. –But the dog means that the old man will be walking around soon, having completed his circuit, and so I turn back to look at the lake.

And now I look upwards, at a setting sun and changing light. I think that it may soon be time to get up and return home, to prepare for the evening. This means sleep however, sooner or later, and there is something terrifying about that prospect somehow.

Oh yes, another day spent.

Another day wasted.

It is around this time in the day that I always feel bad about myself, sitting here as I do. With hard wood under me, warmed to my temperature, and a setting sun in front, it always seems as if I have wasted the day, and I can never figure out why it happens. It seems almost as though the days are shorter than they should be, as if the hours are stolen quietly away whenever I stop looking at my watch. My head will feel fuzzy as the evening draws in and I somehow feel incapable of sharpness or coherent thought as the remnants of the day drain away.

And in a little while I will be forced to get up and return home, and I will be surrounded again with those smiling, affable people. It could almost make me sick, and I grip my little metal amulet in my hands tighter for comfort. It’s smooth lines are somehow always a little bit cooler than the surrounding air, and I enjoy the sense of transference, as if by touching it I am somehow touching a boundary, with the possibility one day of crossing over.

Well, maybe one day I will. Maybe I will do it this day! My metal charm gives me the confidence I need to do it, I think.

It’s all so unfair!

Every day I wake up to pristine perfection, idealism in a porcelain cup, perfection in lake and tree and the constant inoffensiveness of every person around me. I walk through it and smile and nod and play the part that I think I am meant to play while inside me something grows old and tarnished with the awful repetitiveness of it all. Every day is the same here, and nothing gets done! We live with grass that is cut, unseen, in the night, food and provisions that come from nowhere and my little metal device that appeared one morning in the garden as if it had been there forever.

Nobody argues, nobody fights and nobody ever accomplishes anything, and yet when I turn off the lights and rest my head in the evening I am punished with the exact opposite, as grumbling toil stretches out and out and out and I suffer for every minute of a scorched and blackened dream that seems somehow more focused than the world I face when I wake up.

It’s so unfair. –I look and see the old man walking up the path again and I consider whether it could just be somehow different, and instead of my daytime utopia and night-time torment I could instead just opt to mix the two, to spread-out the goodness and the misery into an average quantity, something constant that I could actually live in.

I see the old man getting nearer and I know that he will soon turn to glance at me and smile and nod again as if he were some automaton, incapable of indifference. The banality of it all grates at me, and I wish that somehow, in some way, just one of us could do something different and new, to make the other person hurt a little so that they might actually act differently and split the whole thing up.

But I can’t. I have never been insulted, and neither has he. There is not enough in this daydream-reality to spoil our moods and cast our doubts onto others, and so we are paralysed, knowing that we cannot do anything but keep the balance, but I only wish we could. Only one disturbance would be necessary, just one and everything else could go from there. Just one act.

A flat surface is fragile.

He turns to look at me and I know that I must decide now, just like I try to every day, to disturb the balance and make things better. I squeeze my metal keepsake for courage and pray for the ability to do it, just once.

I think of the lake and the ripple, spreading out from just one disturbance, spreading out and out, farther and farther until it reaches the edge, and then it rebounds and comes back again to the source. That could be me.

But it’s too late. He turns and smiles at me, nodding pleasantly while his dog runs ahead and then turns to carry on walking. Reflexively I smile back, just as he turns away from me, and I curse my own cowardice.

I came so close this time!

Downcast, I let my head drop and touch my cold, functional metal charm for the courage it offers me. Maybe one day I’ll actually be brave enough to use it.

I run my fingers down the cool, antique barrel of the pistol and feel its weight, admiring its solidity in this world of daydream delusion. Gently I click the mechanism back into place and secure the safety-catch before pocketing the device and sighing.

I’ll get it right next time. There’s always another day.

I am Margaret Simmons.

[Zaia]

That said, this forum doesn't like original stuff...

I beg to differ; this forum likes all sorts of creative writing. *begins reading*

[Zaia]

It left me with a melancholy heart, and reminded me of a hybrid of Guy from Fahrenheit 451, Truman from The Truman Show and the stereotypical British straightjacket of polite graciousness, all rolled into one woman. Interesting.

And I wonder how Margaret Simmons knows about the safety of a gun and what it does...

[Kuja]

Creepy. It's nightmarish in a Matrix-esque sort of way.