Magenta Monster

Once upon a time there was a little toddler called Mary, who was given a small pink case by her cousin Annabelle. Within the case was a sparkly thing with lace and some silky pink shoes.

Mary loved the dress and put it on straight away, then she put on the shoes and got daddy to lace them up. She announced to the cats, ‘I’s a pretty princess!’the cats ignored her and continued bathing in the sunlight on the window sill.

Mummy saw the dress and said, ‘oh Mary your a little ballerina.’ But Mary didn’t know what a ballerina was, Daddy explained ballerina’s were ballet dancers and Mary got very excited, she loved dancing. She began to twirl and swirl, giggling and telling the cats to watch.

Then Mummy suggested that Mary should get changed as today was climbing day, with lots of rough and tumble at the climbing centre. Mary shock her head, ‘I’m a CLIMBING PRINCESS!’ she said and tried to escape out of the door before Mummy could catch her and make her change.

Mummy gave up as Daddy was going to be late for work if they hung around anymore. Mary thought this was great and smiled and scrunched her fluffy, glittery, lacy skirt – after all it was a magic dress.

At the climbing centre, everybody loved Mary’s dress and asked her about it. She told them all how she was a climbing princess and ran to the slide, she had to climb up a little climbing wall to get into the top of the slide.

Her ballet shoes did not slow her down one bit, in fact they were quiet like the climbing shoes she liked to wear. Mummy appeared with the climbing shoes and Mary changed her shoes after it was explained the climbing would damage her silky shoes.

Mary hurtled about rescuing teddy bears and dinosaurs from different parts of the bouldering room. She would climb up to them and then cuddle them down to safety. The dinosaurs only some times where scary and chased her and her friend around. Then it was time for big climbing – with a harness!

Mary climbed up and up and up, all the way to the top of the wall.

She then shouted, ‘I’s a fairy, look! I flying!’ as she let go of the wall and drifted down to the ground once more.

Then she climbed back up and fluttered down as a fairy, again and again and again, until all the other children had grown tired. It was then lunch time and Mary had a ham sandwich with no butter – special just for her, pom bears, raisins and juice.

After all the excitement Mary decided she was a tired princess and sat and read books.

Mary couldn’t wait to be a climbing princess or fairy or ballerina, again but she also wanted to be a panda and sleepily asked Mummy if she could be a climbing panda next time.

1) Why had he agreed to this? Joe was only a trainee dentist after all, not like proper or anything but it was too late now, he was strapped into the chair.

2) The watch was gold and silver and it filled him with a sense of dread, it was nice he supposed and his dad set a lot of store by it, but…

3) The detective watched the professor, and the professor knew it, he also knew that there was a very real problem with his lab, he just couldn’t work out where.

4) Paying attention she leaned forward, watching intently her fluffy jumpered elbows resting slightly agressively on her knees.

5) He wobbled out of the wicca box all arms and no bones, his mouth was gapping and he seemed to be arrrging in pain and very slow frustration.

6) There were ships of shapes and sizes scattered across the surface, some of them were too old to fly but others looked like they had not yet taken off from the factory and yet they all sat there in disarray.

7) The band played and played and played and the cloths on their back morphed and changed as did the hair on their heads, they did not care, they had found their groove and were settled within.

8) The leaves were such fragile things reaching out to the sun that seemed too far away in the sky.

9) Tufty black hair and staring brown eyes seemed to be the baby’s main features.

10) Looking like little glass pepper pots with LEDs in the robots danced around, syncing with the music and pulsing on and off.

1) The galaxies clustered on the map, it was a projection straight into the navigators mind.

2) The building was made of sand stone with a metal stair case that ran as a gentle balcony, up and up and up, leaving a huge empty space in the middle. Stone arches load off of the balcony into palm tree decorated rooms with earthen colours for their walls.

3) The games had been set up for hours, dice and discs neatly in little bowls, awaiting their turns upon the tiles but the men had ended up in deep talk whilst they ate and now the talk for flowing freer than the the wine.

4) There was nothing quiet like an early morning swim in the acid waters of a volcanic lake.

5) The whole was perfect, a circular blackness that was crisp and certain, around it a haze of snaking lightening and twisting flares making the darkness a neon rainbow.

6) They sat there, the yellow beads so uninteresting that you would have been forgiven for throwing them away.

7) It had seemed like such a good idea, something to bond them together – taking daft pictures by the little wooden jetty up in the mountains, she’d agreed and driven him and his chair the 20 minutes or so.

8) Looking at the tricloured tattoos he knew this was it, he now belonged to the ad company.

9) Pick leaves, chuck leaves, pick leaves chuck leaves, the basket would not even be a quarter full yet but it already chaffed rubbing the skin from her back.

10) The skull had stupidly sized teeth, large blade life chopping, cutting, slicing teeth, the rest of the skull was pointy and not shaped much like any of the creatures they should have been finding. Perhaps it had happened – he’d found a new species!

1) The yellow flowers cascaded across the garden clogging all the flower beds and encroaching onto the path.

2) The furry buildings where a new thing to her, they had not existed in the city when she had been a student but now they green growths were everywhere.

3) The little bird had a yellow chest and a white ring around it’s dark little eye, it was almost invisible on the river smoothed pebbles, where it sat.

4) Opening his mouth to speak to the assembly, he felt the pressure in his head once more, he needed to go to the Drs but not mid campaign, never mid campaign.

5) The girl held two shopping bags, one was full of fresh veg and fruit only they weren’t that fresh, the other contained icing covered and custard stuffed doughnuts, they were stale.

6) Everyone was proud, everyone had a flag and waved it even if they felt a little bit silly for doing so, there was a future once more and it was one they wanted.

7) The factories arced into the sky, covering the horizon in a bland blanket of brick and mortar and steel and wire.

8) The young solider was no longer young but unlike the photographs his memories where not in sepia and they were not as faded as he could have hoped.

9) The child was filthy but well loved, which is why it’s parents had bought it to the clinic, they hoped for medicine to keep the plague at bay. The nurse flicked the vaccine packet and then twisted the capsule open.

10) The green dress did not suit her, it made her look even more frumpy and 1950’s Mumsy than normal but she did not realise this and beamed with a new found confidence.

The moment that shattered me was violent and sudden and ripped half of me away, melting the stubs of bones that jutted from blackened flesh. It was an oblivion. It swept away the city in which I lived and scored patterns into stone and flesh and the survivors rotted in their skins, some painfully over decades.

It was not the first time something so fearsome had descended to wipe out a nation but this time was different. This was no petty war over natural resources or ideologies, it was not even a conscious action. It was no declaration of war, though that is of course how it was taken.

I was 17 and had been on way home from ballet class, I had changed into comfy track bottoms and baggy tee. It was a summer day but I recall the sudden chill before obliteration. The world grew dark and then too bright, I know there were pressure waves and booming sound but I recall none of that.

I was dead, and mash for rodents but I was not allowed to remain that way. My remains where the most intact within the blast zone and so they tried to correct their mistake. They began to fix me, I floated in vats, gelatinous oozes of various colours that crept down a throat only half there. My head had remained mostly there bar my lower jaw which was smashed and had driven wedges of itself into my grey matter.

They fixed that but could not know how the connections within worked. Many things happened whilst they rebuilt me. The nations of the Earth united and fort the foe from the skies. They ripped us to shreds, not with crude nukes, but with their real weapons. In our arrogance we sealed our fate, it was not an attack, we were not worth that! What had taken my city had been nothing more than a deep sea oil spill to them.

Then as they tried to fix what they had done we attacked. And as they wiped my people out, they continued to rebuild me. I was pre-war, so I and not the children, the billions of children on Earth, was considered innocent.

It took them a long time. I had to learn to walk and to talk, I floated and the light was so dim, and they moved. Slithering over things and whispering to me. They told me how they ripped the grass to shreds with nano beetles, how millions starved or died of old injuries.

I watched my planet die through the microcosm of their stories, hissing and echoing in my newly forming mind and the anger boiled and burned but was quenched with a dream cycle and numb disbelief, until I could not know fiction from reality.

Somewhere at the back of my mind I still think maybe it isn’t so, please God let it not be so! I am mad and all those people where never harmed and are living still in the throngs of their hive cities. Manhattan and London and Nairobi, those three burn brightest in my memories but I can not tell you why, they could not grow memories back, I am sure that this is a blessing.

They set me down, back on the broken and charred world and I have been searching for someone, anyone but definitely a someone. It seems like years but I do not think it has been a complete set of seasons yet. Snow is falling and I hid within the skeleton of an office block, all bright glass and chrome, I have a fire but am numb within. I have walked the wastelands and they are dreadful, vast plans of grit swirls as the soil rips into the wind, soon there will be just stone. The whole world just stone, for they boiled our seas dry.

I am a wonderer now with nano-tech bones, I am not sure if I can die. They used to say hell was other people, I would swap that circle for this. I write this letter in hope that someone may find it and know of my existence, maybe find me. I will be heading north, there are caves there and it was sparsely populated so may have been over looked.

Until I find another living soul I am nothing but darkly awake, my heart is shut and I function through necessity. Please find me.

1) The hand was just an accident of nature, just a nothing, a blip on existence. It wasn’t a hand at all, just some malformed bit of tree but that didn’t stop it’s effect…

2) I’ve always loved the moon, it shines sometimes just for me, with extra sliver moon dust glittering down onto the grass of my lawn.

3) The colours in the sky where not what was thought by generations of people nor by the scientists who had spent the last 200 years studying them.

4) The water could be used as fuel but once that was done there would be nothing to drink and it would depend on what resources the destination actually had to offer.

5) There simply was not enough room in the boot for all the equipment but he couldn’t just leave it behind.

6) The cave painting was ancient and yet he was sure that it showed the galatic flow channels, he was even more certain that the fearsome slashes of red and black showed plague microbes.

7) It was a daft thing to do but it was done now and the car was stuck in the desert with sand clogging the engine.

8) The water was soothing, splashing up her thighs and tugging at her as the wave pulled back out to sea, it was quiet here and she could lay on the beach and dream that it had all some how been different.

9) The crane was a monster, the cab far far above the ground, the amount of metal used int it’s construction was frightening and Zack had to drive it, he was also already bored.

10) It looked like the clouds were eating the sun.

I age, it is an eternal deep age, down deep within me, I know I do not belong here. They smile at me and feed me and move my limbs, one at a time. Sometimes they stick me with with needles so thin I mistook them for hairs initially. What ever it delivers burns with shock and cramps the soft muscles.

They show me images and play me sounds, I watch and learn and now have words where the blankness was. I think they want something from me but I can not work out what it is. I scream in the night with the cramps, iron locked pulses that threaten to shred me from within.

A concept has been growing, from the images, so many, shining people, glowing like those who come to me with bright lights haloed around their heads. Those who come with the needles and the pain. They smile and sing songs that echo around this place. Singing and praising and laying hands on me but I don’t know what they want.

I think they are the creatures they have shown me, eternal soft creatures made of glass and crystal and energy. I wish they would go. I am not like them for all they wrap me in a white shroud. I can not see their wings but the way there fabric drips from the stiff form of their hats I think the artists miss drew them and the wings where always material flowing in the breeze.

Eons I have lain here watching them coming and going, the void was peace – I wonder if I can slip back to that time? Know nothing, no pain.

A man comes in a white coat and stands there, his beard is long and curled and grey like those in the paintings but he is not parting clouds. Instead he always has a clip board and frowns and tuts. I think he is the one who orders the white glowing beings around. What is that they want? Why do they kneel and clasp their hands? I don’t really care I just want peace.

This world spins around me and the music is on again, I do not understand all the words, I think it is several different ways of speaking.

I don’t know the words to get them to leave me be. I think I know who I am in this place, a person who has had many faces, they show them too me, the sorrow in the eyes, ribs showing and hanging from some structure and surrounded as I am by them… the shining ones and sometimes the grey bearded man is there. I do not understand. But now they are here with the larger needle.

It snicks and snacks and slides in painfully. They’ve twisted a glove around my arm and now the red stuff begins to flow. Down and down in to the cups, the large golden cups, the grey man does a finger dance over them and then all the shining ones drink and the other cups are taken away. They look like the ones in the pictures. The world fades and I awake with wholes in my flesh.

They say I am flesh bound, I don’t know what that is but I wish to go now, eternities I have lain here and I seek oblivion.

Here are some story starters to help get other people writing 🙂

1) The sun was blue and insignificant hung high in the sky, the hills round and about where a grey colour with dead looking trees stretching leafless branches to the sky.

2) He awoke with the marks all over his body, initially he thought they were bruises but then they began to rise out of his skin, fearing some form of plague he booked a Drs appointment.

3) It was that nightmare again, the one where he was three years old but wasn’t and was a distorted adult child wearing a cowboy outfit and begging his mother for the perfectly wrapped present.

4) The hairy primate ticked off the days by scoring them into the wood of the tree, it wasn’t quiet sure what it was but it knew it was not human.

5) His wispy white hair stood up on end and his jaw had turned to soft furry paunches but he was feeling fine.

6) The lighting was strobing and casting everything in flickering monochrome, the cubic structure of the building helped him find his way though.

7) The drawing was of him, it was supposed to be a fun image but he hated it, he looked so smarmy in it and there was nothing he could do about it without harming his rep even more.

8) The pale bellies of the fleshy mushrooms had begun to curl upwards, straining to find their chubby ways to the top of the fruiting body. The vibrant red top however knew supremacy and planned on keeping it.

9) The arc of the metal wheel glinted in the summer sun, the sky was blue and no one could hear the passengers screaming in their pods.

10) The bug was an odd shape and an odd colour…

Pretty were they sitting there in slight and ill fitting linen dresses, like a garden of flowers, each was a pastel hue and the sent of the alcho pops and sticky mixers, leant them the fragrance of blooms.

Clouds of blue misted up above their heads as they sat and thought and dwelled on their own mortalities. Each sort to numb the pain and intensity of the world they found themselves within only to find the pain at the core of nothing. The blanket of smothering inability seemed to hunker down over them.

Sunk within they spoke slowly to each other.

‘You alright Tracy?’

‘Yeah Stacy, you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Wanna get some fags?’

‘yeah.’

‘Com’on then.’

And they stood in elegancy and danced away to shorten their lives with cancer sticks and the fermented juice of the apple consumed in the small hours shivering in the majesty of The Park. But for now life was ok and another day would dawn for them.

UD sat in the orphanage looking out at the stark grey city scape, the dreary half light of the dismal day was nothing compared to the splendour of the light jewelled night. Of course it was not called an orphanage, that was an old term and not allowed. It was called the childrens home and foster centre, UD and the other kids, however called it the orphanage.

Sometimes the other kids got homes but Joan who ran the centre had explained time and again why UD would not get a home. She was after all disruptive, distracted and distant but worse than those things… were her deep pits of too slanted eyes and bulbous cheeks, UD’s forehead was too wide and hair too sparse.

Joan thought it was why as a baby UD had been dumped in a bin, she had been thrown away. Bitter anger filled the child, 8 yrs at the Home was enough to turn anyone cynical. UD only had her hate, she held it close and lashed out at the other kids. After all they and the grown ups had all made it clear that she was a monster – why shouldn’t she behave like one?

Her antics had gotten her a room of her own, and she had filled the walls with drawings of a home, they were all drawn in red, always in red, she hoarded the red and purple crayons. The cleaner would not clean her room, UD didn’t care.

Rain began to sheet down outside and the overcast day became a dark premature night, UD could not wait for the night when the world would glow wetly, but that was hours away. Jasmine crashed into her room, a tall girl who was almost old enough to be sent away (no one was really sure where too but if you weren’t adopted…), ‘New arrival!’ she cried and hurtled on towards the next room. UD stared at the rain a moment longer and then clambered off her bed and followed the other kids down to the hall.

There were ten of them in the Home and each of them craned to catch a glimpse of the new kid. He was slightly disappointing to behold, a pale child with paler yellow hair, so pale UD thought at first that it was white. He was dripping, bundled up in a grey padded coat that was about four sizes too big. His eyes were in shadow by UD was sure they would be that steel grey people called blue, he looked scared, new arrivals always did.

He did not look at any of them as he shrugged his coat off and hung it on his new official hook. They had known he was coming, ‘this is Bruce everyone now play nicely until lunch is served,’ said Joan as she bustled off to where ever it was she went.

‘So what did you do?’ asked a tall kid, nick named Skid due to the state of his pants. Bruce just stared at him and UD began to grin, others being picked on was always a pleasure, it meant it wasn’t her and she wouldn’t get into trouble for biting again. ‘Well? Why are you not wanted?’ Skid drooled.

Bruce shrugged and turned away, Skid grabbed him by his luminous hair, yanking his head back, ‘I said… why are you not wanted!’

The boy began to tremble, UD’s skin felt prickly as she watched the scene unfold, the pale boy suddenly went rigid and then began to thrash wildly, Skid let him drop and there was a thud of head hitting the floor. They all stood dumbly watching the froth spewing from the contorting face. Jasmine screamed and ran to the kitchen. UD wasn’t sure why she did it but she moved forward and crouched down by the boy, this wasn’t like the tears of the kids she’d thumped, this was… wrong.

‘Don’t touch him! Come away!’ hissed Joan but UD was never good at listening and she certainly was not going to start now that things were interesting. She laid her hand on the boy’s forehead and felt a tremor pass. He quietened, the froth round his mouth was red where he had bitten his tongue. He felt waxy, she stroked his hair and made a soft clicking sound with her own tongue, he opened his eyes and stared at her. Horror of what she was filled her and she rocked back on her hunches and sprung onto her feet. Joan and Michel the grown ups, the know bests, knelt by him and she fled the eyes of the other kids.

Cocooned in her room with the muted reds and purples she ignored the dinner bell and hoped it would all be a dream, a gentle tapping at her door told her it wasn’t going to work like that though. The pale kid came in, she hadn’t said he could.

He came right in and shut the door! No one ever did that incase she had the mads, perhaps he was mad? He was still coming towards her, she curled up more tightly into her corner by the window, it didn’t seem to matter to him though, he just sat on her bed.

‘I’m mouse,’ he said quietly, ‘thankyou for stopping the seizure.’

He wasn’t asking her about her eyes or pointing out she was almost bald, UD didn’t know what to say in the situation, ‘I’m UD,’ she said when the silence started to hurt her head. He smiled at her and put his hand out, she stared at it then gently shook it.

‘Why are you called UD?’ he asked eventually.

‘Short for Ugly Duckling.’ She shrugged and turned to the view from the window, it was still not night, she sighed and waited for the taunts.

‘Have you turned into a swan yet?’ he asked, she noticed he looked through his pale lashes, not quiet making eye contact with her.

‘A swan?’ she asked confused.

‘Yeah the ugly ducking wasn’t a duckling but a baby swan that had gotten lost, don’t you know the story?’ she shook her head sometimes Jasmine would read to the kids but she had never had the patience to sit still. He told her the story and she scrambled forward to listen.

‘I think I’m not a swan yet,’ she said quietly.

‘Good! That means you can be my friend – I don’t think anybody wants a quiet little mouse, grey and dull that’s me.’

She smiled at him, she’d never had a friend, ‘greys a good colour, it lets the light jewels shine,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘when it gets dark I’ll show you!’

He nodded and they went off to find some left overs from lunch.