SITCOM / DENSITY

PART ONE - SITCOM

When the people who had come upon this land started cutting back the overgrowth - a mess of brambles that tangled and thunderstormed across the ground like a rolling black mood, scratchy and bad-tempered - they discovered, buried under the brambles, gravestones.  When uncovered they were found to be not only monuments to life but descriptive accounts of death.

#

NOT A WELL MAN.  BELLY AND LUNGS.  DIFFICULTY BREATHING.  

NOT A BAD MAN.  QUIET OR EFFICIENT.  LIVED ALONE.  

FED THE BIRDS.  AS IF THAT WOULD SAVE HIM.  

DROWNED IN A BOWL OF SOUP.

#

The days were dark, more like nights.  Sunrise was painfully slow, eked out inch by inch, immediately after which sunset followed,  slamming the day shut.  All year round the same - long, dark days hacking the brambles back.  We used machetes, wielding-and-hitting, wielding-and-hitting, wielding-and-hitting - it didn’t matter where we struck, everything had to be cleared.  We protected our hands with gloves, double- or triple-layers so our skin didn’t get clawed to shreds.

When we finished work for the day, we repaired to the bar in the factory basement, to sit at iron tables and drink.  Above, the factory kept on clanking and grinding, slamming its entire bodyweight down over and over again to pound into shape whatever it was that was being processed above us, until we began to feel like it was we who were being beaten into the ground.  The fixtures rattled and steam poured through vents in the wall.

No one could hear what anyone else was saying.

“***** ***, ** ****.”

“* ***** **,” someone replied.

The bar tender chipped in: “******* ******** ** *** *** **.”

They all looked at me.  I shrugged and told them:

“**** ****** ******.”

#

YOUNG AND LOST.  GOT LOST.  LOST HIMSELF.  

STARTED FOUND, THEN DRIFTED.  TOOK HIS EYE OFF THE BALL.

DISTRACTED BY MOONLIGHT, DISAPPEARED AT MIDNIGHT.

OUT OF BED.  STARING OUT.  SWALLOWED BY CURTAINS.

#

Our clothes were like hangovers, rusted mornings.  They stood tough against the brambles’ attempts to pick them apart.  The material refused to yield to barbs, but it was coloured by the smoke from the burning brambles, by all the smoke pouring out of the factory and by the incessant darkness that made colours meaningless anyway.  The same clothes every day as we wielded-and-hit, wielded-and-hit.

On occasion, the brambles would rally, rearing up to reclaim an area we had cleared.  As if to re-erase the freshly re-discovered deaths from history, though this re-erasion did not bring anyone back from the dead.  We would return the next day and find it covered again with tangled nonsense and so, once more we would set to hacking it away.

At the edges of the bramble ocean, fencing had been erected, an attempt to keep it all in, the way you might cordon off a house fire or a car crash.  The brambles had no respect for boundaries and made their way over, under, through and round, but the fences succeeded in stopping us from leaving.  

Day after day, hacking away at brambles, uncovering gravestones we had recovered once, twice, three times before.

#

SUSTAINED INJURIES IN INNOCUOUS INCIDENT.  THINGS WENT AWRY.

INSIDE, BLOOD CREEPING WHERE IT SHOULDN’T.  SLOW SEEPING.

THE INITIAL ACCIDENT - STOOD ON A PUDDING, SLIPPED, FELL.

TOO EMBARRASSED TO TELL ANYONE.

#

The factory kept on stomping itself into oblivion as if it would never get tired or old.  All we had to do was think.  The presence of the factory felt somehow linked to the presence of the gravestones and the proliferation of the brambles.  It was producing one or the other?  Was in league with?  We couldn’t make the connection.  

The beer served in the factory bar was thick and treaclish - it worked its way down our throats, as if attempting a coup.

I longed and yearned - had long longed and had long yearned - to see something funny, to think something funny.  In the bar, choking down that thick and difficult beer, we tried and failed to tell each other jokes.

“*** *** *** ******* ***** *** ****?”

“* **** ****.”

“** *** ** *** ***** ****.”

We acted out laughing, doing our best impressions of having succeeded in amusing one another.

#

HOUSE SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTED AND HE WAS IN IT.

HOUSE FELL OFF A LADDER, FELL FROM A GREAT HEIGHT (AND HE WAS IN IT).

HOUSE WENT FOR A SWIM, FORGOT HOW TO SWIM (AND HE WAS IN IT).

#

Other times we might attempt an argument, a big blow up full and frank exchange of views with no punches pulled.  It was never clear what we were arguing about.

“*** ******* *****, *** *** ** ******* *****!”  Hypothesis.

“**** **** ******* ****, ********!”  Counterpoint.

Someone interjecting, trying to calm things:  “*** *** ******, ****.”

We would lower our voices, rein in our body language, settle back down completely un-sated.

#

WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM HAD NEVER HAPPENED TO ANYONE ELSE BEFORE.

NOBODY KNEW WHAT TO DO.  THEY DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START.

STOOD AND SHRUGGED.  STARTED SENTENCES BUT DIDN’T FINISH.

BEFORE ANYONE COULD DECIDE WHAT ACTION TO TAKE, HE DIED.

#

Spring, late-spring, spring-summer.  It made no difference to how long or short or non-existent the daylight was, but we sweated as we worked, starting to wish the beer in the factory bar was cool - cooler, colder, thinner, less sludgy.  

To save our hands, we used our booted feet to stamp the cut-down-dragged-out brambles into bundles, little arguments.  I had conversations with myself whilst I worked, arguments or wonderings in my head.  Asking questions like:

“What might I see from the top of the factory if I were up there at sunrise?  What beyond brambles?”  

The brambles beat us into submission, picking us apart until we started to like them, love them.  I came to treasure the pain they inflicted; began to love the darkness and the constant noise; felt glad that in the bar at the end of the day I only had to appear to be listening.  

Really, my thoughts were my own.  Which was a way of saying I was alone with my thoughts.  Which was a way of saying, my thoughts were all I had.

#

NOT SURE HOW HE DIED.  WHEN?  HOW?  NOBODY SURE HE WAS STILL ALIVE.

BEFORE HE DID DIE.  WHAT WAS HE DOING?  BETWEEN NOW AND THEN?

SO LOST IN HIS OWN THOUGHTS THAT THEY SWALLOWED HIM WHOLE.

TOOK HIM OVER, FILLED HIM UP, SUCKED HIM DRY, LEFT FOR EMPTY.

#

In truth, there are so many inconsistencies within the story, so many questions.  What did these people eat?  Where did they sleep?  How did they get there?  These challenges are put to the character.  He deflects the questions, insisting on telling the story entirely as he wants to tell it.

Now he pulls something from a pocket in his overalls.  It is a picture of someone - he won’t say who it is but insists he loves them very much.  Maybe it is their gravestone he is looking for in the brambles?  He shrugs off the question and returns to his work, hacking at brambles then dragging them away for rolling up and burning.  You have the feeling that he is hiding something, evading, obfuscating.

We’re not going to learn anything about him like that, not until he’s in real peril.  He has cut his way into the brambles, hacking wildly at them, but now the brambles put on a growth spurt and block his exit, creeping up so close he doesn’t even have room to swing his machete back and fight his way out.  The barbs stick into him.  The only way out, he reasons, is up and over.  He pulls himself up to try and get on top of the brambles, to clamber over the wave, up and out and the brambles inflict many and bloody injuries on him and his body.  As he tries to crawl over the top of the bramble mass, they suddenly give way and he plunges headfirst into the mire amidst much scrambling and a feeling of becoming impossibly stuck.

#

When the rescue comes, it is from above.  They prise open the space between the sunrise and the sunset, until they can see in.  They see the factory, the perimeter fence, the brambles, him.

“Holy shit.  Get him out of there.”

The gap widens.  Sunlight floods the world.

part two - density

He still has the tattoos from all his past lives.

Inside him is such density, all this packed-in stuff lumbering around.

Sometimes his wife wakes in the night to find him asleep but whimpering.

She buys him a new shirt which is of a much higher quality than his other shirts, and is a lot more expensive.  For a time the shirt elevates him but eventually he wears it down, bringing it down to his level.

Sometimes when he is walking along the road he closes his eyes – only gently, only briefly – and enjoys a little time out from the world.  It feels good, like floating.

In the spring, his wife goes away on business for several weeks and every day he comes home from a long day working in the forest and sits quiet and still until it is time to sleep, then up for work again.  

For meals he eats only herbs and spices.

His wife returns and he is pleased to see her.  She tells him all about her time away but when she asks him what he has been up to he doesn’t have anything to say.  He sees a tear form in her eye.

The first weekend she is back, they are both invited to a barbecue and she convinces him to go.  He wears the shirt she bought him, ignoring her suggestion that maybe he could wear something other than that old thing, something a little nicer.

The barbecue is being hosted by one of her friends or maybe one of her colleagues - he struggles to distinguish between the two and maybe they are interchangeable, one and the same, probably this is someone his wife considers both a friend and a colleague. 

He is reluctant to go.  He sits and thinks about it but he cannot imagine what they - him, his wife, the friend/colleague, whoever else will be there - will talk about.  He finds it impossible to imagine there will be enough for them all to say, though actually once they are there he finds the time passes without any effort - to him this seems like some kind of sorcery.

They chat over cans of beer and glasses of wine as they wait for sausages and burgers to cook, noting when the sun passes behind a cloud and when it comes back out again, and when the sausages and burgers are done they help themselves to sausages and burgers and bread and salad and whatever else there is to be had.

The back garden, the fold out chairs on which they all sit, the food and drinks and the smoke from the barbecue… all are just exactly as he had envisaged, only the way the time passes is different to the way he thought time would pass, when he imagined it.  

He had thought that it would need to be pushed along, that each next moment would need to be built painstakingly onto the last.  But that is not what happens - instead, time runs along, dragging them behind it.

Which would be worse, he wonders?  Which is more terrifying?

All those people, each packed full of density, being catapulted along at such speed, out of control.

by Ric Carter

Ric Carter is originally from Northern England and now lives in Guernsey. He has written hundreds of short stories, some of which he has published at https://digestivepress.wordpress.com, been shortlisted for a few prizes and has a couple of short novels more or less ready to go, should anyone wish to publish them.