Archive for the ‘Alex Dally MacFarlane’ Category
Only For Today
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
I’m red pen-marks on three orange post-it notes, but only for today. Yesterday I was a yoghurt carton, discarded on a roadside and licked clean by foxes. Tomorrow I could be anything–your staple-remover, perhaps, or a cobweb in a farmer’s barn.
I gave up trying to control the changes when I was seven. After two years of daily becoming something new, despite my concentration on the mental image of ‘little girl, brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin,’ I had to realise the truth.
It’s been six years now. I’ve been more things than I remember.
I wish I hadn’t sneaked a drink of one of my mum’s potions. All those bright liquids, some of them polka-dotted or striped, lined up in jars along the wall of her study–they looked like sweeties. The stripy green and blue one tasted like liquorice and I went and sat outside, feeling light-headed, and thought I would like to be a balloon so I could float above the village and see it laid out like a map.
And I became a balloon, and I saw the village.
The next day, I was a button on a telephone. I haven’t seen my village since.
I want to see my mum again. But I never shape-change into a painting in the living room, a cushion on her bed or a note written in lipstick across her bedroom wall.
Sometimes, though, I can pass on messages. Like today. I hope that someone will find one of these messages and take it to her, quickly, before I shape-change into something else, and she’ll take one of her potions from the shelf and pour it over me and I’ll be a girl again.
She lives at 3 Berrey Close, Windyham, W Sussex, England. Please hurry!
Dinner at ‘Gaststätte des Flußmädchen’
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Our food arrived quickly. My wife, still not quite well, had only ordered bread and water. For me, the waiter presented a plate of spaghetti with fish in a creamy sauce.
I twisted a mouthful onto my fork and, on eating it–saw a woman, pale hair falling waist-long down a tall figure, standing atop a cliff with a fair-haired man. They argued. The river rushed past below them, frothed white by rocks. The woman shouted of secret wives and lies, and threatened exposure.
The man pushed– tasted something good, I think, but barely remembered it after the strength of the hallucination. Trying to ignore the residual unsettled feeling, I ate a chunk of carp.
–and she fell, screaming. Cold struck her hard, so hard, or was that the rock? Flailing in the water, light and dark playing havoc in her eyes, her mind, and pain spreading from her chest. Water against her.
Water wrote eddies of curiosity across her skin as the pain slipped away. A whisper in her ear. A greeting.
The water is home now and the rock your seat, said the river. Sing for me, maiden, sing sweet songs, sing to fill me–
“Rob, are you all right?”
I realised it was Susan talking. “I… don’t know. I think I might have your flu.”
Concern coloured her voice. “You should try to eat a bit more. Then we’ll go back to the hotel.”
Nodding, I ate more of the pasta.
–A song on a stormy evening. A small fishing boat tossed by waves, fighting the white.
The teenaged boy paused in his terror-screams. The song laced his ears, stirred thoughts of home, bed, love.
He felt nothing as the rocks sliced his boat to pieces, as the river tongued him downwards. As the maiden wept.–
“We should go,” Susan said, and called for the bill.
Several minutes later we left. I stumbled into the street, as if feverous. The husband’s face lodged in my mind. And I thought of the woman, trapped in the river.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “we need to visit the Rhine.”