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plantfeed · 5 years ago

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ok turns out i am 100% that dumbass bitch who still aint posted my intro on main....... so for reference..... hello! im nora ( she / her ). im a 24 year old creative writing graduate currently residing in sheffield, south yorkshire. when i’m not hunched over a keyboard writing, i enjoy independent cinema, chinese food, and big nights out that i’ll remember only in fleeting snapshots. i currently work as a barmaid and a tutor for a filmmaking project.

without further ado, here is my interpretation on the skeleton ‘ophelia’, a development of a character who’s been brewing at the back of my mind for absolutely AGES now so thank u for giving me the push to actually flesh her out.

ive included a full biography, but please feel free 2 skip to bullet points if TLDR because it is LOOONG..... and im so happy 2 be here.... new home.... chefs kiss.... yes lov u all

IN CHARACTER.

skeleton: ophelia name: theresa rigby. (goes by diminutives tess, tessa, tea or thea. the only time she’s theresa is when she’s in trouble.) age: 21, born july 10 (cancer) faceclaim: diana silvers. gender: cis-female. pronouns: she/her degree: comparative literature & ancient history (joint honours)

INTRO.

trigger warnings.

loss of a parent. missing person / disappearance. drugs and alcohol reliance. death.

BIOGRAPHY.

i. narragansett, rhode island.

1999, an Austrian sunrise, it is the year of the Water Monkey. A water baby, first screams under the surface, the catch of it gargled in your throat. A birth mark the size and shape of a door handle pressed into your pelvis like a lover’s badge. Born like a clenched fist. Annie always wished you’d be more like an open palm. You still carry that tension with you, an unreadable kind of silence when you slink around the edge of a room or perch on an arm rest like a bird about to startle and fly off. Nobody knows a thing about you and you like it that way. Conceived in the winter, some of that coldness still lingers in you.

The only perfect girl is a dead girl. That’s what you learned, last-born runt of the litter growing up in the bedroom of a girl who would be forever cold, young and pretty. In the beginning, they thought you were a blessing — Bet’s soul reincarnate, the same pale face they’d seen as they’d signed her into the pick ‘n’ mix family. You were given her clothes, her room, even her middle name, stripped and rebranded like a toy doll bought after the last one’s head was chewed off by the dog. Four boys, a dead sister, and you who — with your birdlike features and unrelenting eyes — was merely a walking ghost. Tennis skirts, nail varnish, a shag rug, a rotten corsage; these were the staple reminders that you were living in a shrine, the room never quite your own lest you disturb the lingering presence of Bet. Soon, you began to see it as not a room but rather a prison cell caging you in the imprint of a sister you never met.

Your mothers met at an undergraduate socialist meeting when the fall semester fell into winter, Kath in a mustard coloured beret, Annie in a blood-orange duffle coat, a philosophy major and an art historian respectively. Your childhood was a montage of potato printing eels onto the walls of a Rhode Island boarding house next to the sea. Five children — some adopted, some surrogate — a permanent rotation of rooms and always a handful of lodgers to foot the bill. Travelling salesmen, students on gap years and tinkers in search of odd-jobs became a flipbook of faces etched into your memories like fleeting figures in the wings of a theatre; you sketch them into the body of your work. They become the characters to haunt the pages of your notebooks, stashed beneath floorboards lest they fall into too-hungry flour-caked fingers, scones baking in the oven two floors below. A house that seemed to physically inhale every time a new body entered it, tall and thin, too small to house all that weight. The gaps beneath the floorboards are the only spaces that feel like your own, untouched by a girl who’s shadow you were born in. In your diary, you scribble her name until it tears through the pages thinking that if you wish hard enough, you’ll make yourself her. It’s never enough.

At twelve, you lose Annie to a boating accident. You lose a piece of yourself with her and stop wearing yellow. Grief makes a better writer out of you though it sounds selfish to admit it. Kath remarries the following spring, a man named Peter. He is ordinary in all the ways Annie was magical and when he sits in your mother’s chair you feel yourself slip out of your skin and into the body of a raven cawing in the woods, scratching at the dustmites. You try to teach yourself how to be a girl, though you’ve always felt more like a wild thing crouched in the attic window of the lighthouse, screaming at the crash of the waves. You wanted to love the sea as closely as it owned you. In the sea you were rewritten into a tide, into a shell, into the swell of a rockpool around the body of a crab. You wanted to be like the ocean —a tangible, changeling thing —making paper boats and setting them out to sea, wishing you could shrink yourself into one, sail away. For a while, you toy with the idea of starving yourself into something the size and shape of an eel; of growing gills in the night and darting into the ebbing current. They’d think you crazy if you told them.

ii. concord, massachusetts.

You butt heads with Kath on a daily basis. She tells you you resent her for moving on with her life when you seem unable to move on with yours. That maybe a clean break would be best for all the family. A fresh start. A change of scene. You lock yourself in the bathroom and cry for an hour until your mouth feels raw, like running a cheesegrater down the inside of your throat. The following September, they send you to boarding school, two suitcases and an armful of Annie’s jumpers. Kath has decided they don’t compliment her skin tone, and she’s not twenty-five or studying philosophy any more. New England becomes the best decision for you that your family have ever made. You thrive on the independence of living in a dormitory on a corridor of Alison’s and Margaret’s and Ruth’s. From the names on their doors, you paint them into people in your head, red-haired Ruth who collects birth stones and can count to twenty in Mandarin. They turn out to be nothing like the versions of them you’ve spun. You love them anyway, their rough-softness, the scuffed knee thrill of growing up half-wild. There’s a brightness in their girlhood that you try to capture in your words.

Though you never quite find yourself settling into a group, Dr. Franklin becomes the anchor to which you tether yourself to, a little girl leeching onto her Literature professor for a sense of stability in a tempestuous world. The others might think it sad, but she sees something in you — an inner restlessness, a need to analyse and observe and contain everything within poetry and prose — that reminds her of herself at your age. You begin one-to-one sessions after the school day has closed, whisper about Proust and O’Hara over frothed lattes in a campus-run coffee shop, ink blots on the pages of dog-eared copies she’s gifted to you on an indefinite loan. Sometimes, you think you love her. You run your fingers over the buttons of her typewriter, close your eyes, and imagine yourself pulling on her skin like a new coat.

The woods become your saviour. In Narragansett you never knew woods, only harboursides, seafood restaurants, the smell of the ocean breeze and a lighthouse calling you home. You learn to love the smell of the earth after rain. The feeling of soil between your toes. The sense of belonging you feel trailing through the woods in stark white nightgown, twigs catching on the mud-stained hem. Massachusetts becomes a place of revision. You remake yourself as a fawn, elegance in your limbs and hunger in your heart. You learn how to write yourself into being. There’s a violence in your grace — simultaneously glass and the hammer that shatters it — and despite the ethereal way you move it’s the leonine stature of a tigress, claws bared, teeth sharpened into fangs, but a smile like butter wouldn’t melt. Lady Macbeth was always your favourite of Shakespeare’s heroines. There’s something dark in her that resonates with you, the way when a pimple appears you have to squeeze it until it bleeds. You tell yourself that everybody has a morbid fascination.

Each night you take a torch, a book and a bottle of Merlot, and you wile away the hours reading in the woods. At home, sleep never came easy to you. You’d pace the floorboards counting sheep and wake having barely slept a blink. This, on the other hand, seems useful, though when you’re never asleep, you’re never quite awake, floating through the school day like a ghost, part removed, the dark circles pulling your eyes to a close. It’s a tiredness you carry in every aspect of your life, limbs heavier than usual, pen slower when it grazes the page. Soon you start taking tablets each night. Two white ones, no bigger than a baby’s fingernail. For the first time, you begin to dream.

When February rolls around you take your exams. Pass with the grace of a swan in everything except AP Calculus. You say you’ll try again next semester, but you don’t. You apply for Yale, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, Ashcroft. You wait. And wait. And wait until it feels like your skin has shed itself since the letters left your hands, before an envelope comes marked Theresa. No one ever calls you that name. Right from the start it’s been Tea, Tess, Thea, common names in your house as fickle as the tide that swallows it. Billy’s never been a William, and Sebastian sounds all wrong. You can scarcely remember what Brodie’s short for. Rejection after rejection until Ashcroft answers the call, a cawing in the dark of a wasteland you’ve not yet walked. You’ll read literature, follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg who you clumsily try to quote as you bid the girls goodbye, a bonfire and the smell of cinnamon whiskey.

iii. ashcroft university, edinburgh.

You’d read of a boy who went missing there. It happened in the woods. Seventy years and all they’d found was an emptied bottle of wine and one shoe. Newspapers claimed involvement in an elite society, perhaps a hazing gone wrong, and you imagine them burrowed in underground tunnels wearing wellington boots and tweed. This is what draws you to Ashcroft ; to Imperium. It’s not so much the mystery of it —you’ve never seen yourself as a Nancy Drew — but more the idea of living in a place where people can disappear. That’s always been an idle fantasy of yours. One day, you wonder if you’ll write yourself out of the world and into the pages of a book, nestled between a title and contents page.

From Concord to Boston, then a ten-hour flight ; for the first time in months, you sleep through the night. A line break cancels your train and you have to take a replacement bus service instead. By the time you reach the school, the open day is almost over. You feel it at the gates, like a tingle on the back of your neck, something crawling down your spine. It only grows as you close in on it. It feels like it knows your own heartbeat. You’ve never known a building to have so much soul. You imagine yourself walking the cobblestones on the quad each day, climbing the steps to a dormitory, sprawled on a library table, scribbling frantically, willing the clock hands backwards. It’s a life you want to lead.

In a matter of months, Ashcroft has become not only your home but your life. You are utterly consumed by it. You meet Lysander at a poetry reading. You recite Shelley. He recites Keats. He compliments you on the steadiness of your voice, clear as a bell. A voice for the stage. You tell him your father had a powerful voice. It’s a lie. You’ve never had a father, but it’s fun to imagine one slouched on the couch, wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose. He invites you to dinner the following week. Grilled sea bass and risotto. You don’t have the heart to tell him you’ve become a vegetarian, swallow each mouthful with your pride. You try out for the orchestra, though your hands shake a little too much and you hear more from the inside of your own head than the keys. You leave without waiting on an answer. It’s too contained for you, anyway. You need something more chaotic, like jazz. You wish for chaos, so Imperium opens it jaws and swallows you whole. They like you because of your voice, a voice that speaks scarcely more than a low whisper in life, but when written wins you a Bysshe-Shelley Prize. In poetry, you give that voice to the voiceless ; bring dead girls buried in the woods out of the ground and into being, like soil in your hands. A voice like that is a powerful thing to have in your ranks. It becomes every page in your diary, every catch of your skirt on a tree branch, every rap of your fingertips against the desktop, imperium, imperium, imperium.

You’ve never been able to do things by halves — you always let them consume you. One glass becomes a bottle. One paragraph becomes scrawling until sunrise. Obsession takes its form in Hamlet, strong in all the ways you appear weak. You like the smell of his breath when he tells you to stub out your cigarette. That’ll kill you one day, he says. I know, you reply, and your pretty lips curl upwards. One drunken night, you fall into his bed and imagine stitching yourself into his sheets so you can sleep with him every night. Tongues on your thighs like a voice in your throat. Touch me, touch me, touch me. Never been held like this before. Like you’re not glass, but something material and robust. You like the way his hands feel under your skin. Perhaps you’ll keep him there like a splinter. Tall for your age but thin as a rail, he makes you feel like more than an eel of a girl. You like the way he catches on your spindly elbows where others have snagged leaving trails of cotton. At first, it’s only physical, but you get greedy and want more. You’re not sure when a love of beauty became something more than skin deep. You’re not sure if you even loved him until he’d stopped loving you. In October, you find the body. The day all the clocks stop ticking. The day something inside of you snaps like the branch of an elm.

You become a cocoon, velvet ribbons in your hair and rope around your throat. Or maybe it’s lace, and you’re only imagining it that way. You drink wine, stumble blind-drunk through the woods, lose textbooks to nature and curse when you can’t find them the following morning. Most nights, you appear like a ghost in the wood, a linen nightdress with mud clinging to it’s hem and feet laden in soil. You’re not sure if it’s conscious at this point, or mindless sleepwalking. Everything you do feels like sleepwalking these days. Shadows move in the corners of your eyes at night and you turn to the tarot cards for answers. They tell you only of that which you already know. Death. The Hanged Man. High Priestess. You think of Octavia, of Lysander, and of you pulled like a ragdoll between them, with the intuition that comes from living by the sea but without the evidence to execute it. The pills have stopped working. You wake in sweats, guilt swelling in the pit of your stomach. In a therapist’s waiting room, you watch as a girl scratches the skin off her own arm.

Soon news of your occultist proclivities becomes gossip on everyone’s tongue. Witch becomes a synonym for your name, and one you’ll happily wear like a noose until you’ve stolen Lysander from the drop. Finding the truth becomes the only thing keeping you sane, runes scrawled on the walls of a dormitory where pages of novels are tacked up like wallpaper. And still, you can’t shake the fact that she hasn’t come to you when the others who scarcely believe in such phantomed are rattled by her ghost on a nightly basis. Competing and girlhood go hand in hand, but the longer it gets, the more it feels like she knows your desperation to absolve Lysander isn’t entirely selfless. Perhaps she saw you lingering in doorways, waiting in the wings for him to change his mind and tell you it was you all along. Or maybe the sight of her corpse is making you search for answers in places they don’t exist. You’re hanging on my a single thread, one glimpse away from fleeing to the woods to plant yourself into the earth.

The snow is crisp on the November ground when you learn to love melancholy like a dance you were taught as a child. You think it adds depth to being a writer. How can a person write about pain if they live in a state of blissful oblivion? You tell yourself that all of the best writers were depressed; Plath, Fitzgerald, Dickinson, Rice. If you say their names each morning, followed by your own, perhaps you’ll become one of them.

BULLET POINT SUMMARY.

here is a bullet point summary of theresa, as i understand my writing can get a little dense.

Mother always said that people who grow up near water are different to other people. That there’s something more primal in their bones. A kind of knowing.

In Theresa, the knowing is a kind of silence. She’s always struggled with verbal communication, and it’s rare that she can ever let herself go in a conversation. She’s the one on the outskirts of the group, only speaking up to deliver a poignant metaphor, before fading off again. On a good day she’ll ramble, perhaps, on morbid longings and fascinations, but it’s like she’s always skipping around words she can’t quite pinpoint.

Writing’s different. When she’s writing, she feels like all the dead souls of Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are all rising up from their graves to possess her. It is, perhaps, a rather egotistical thought -- but it makes her feel less alone. Like writing isn’t so much a solitary pursuit as it is a reigniting of what’s been lost, a way of listening to the dead. She’s militant in the way she writes, has been for as long as she can remember -- every night when the clock strikes twelve. Even if she’s rolling on mandy in an abandoned warehouse or dropping acid in a shipyard with her toes in the sand, she’ll start scribbling at twilight, for as long as she can. Back home, there weren’t too many bars that allowed underage kids, and the ones that did would nail your phone to the wall like you’re living in the eighties, so they made their own fun getting high in places long since infested with rats on baggies bought cheap in the back of the dry-cleaners shop.

Theresa’s always felt more able to relate to dead people than to living ones. That might sound depressing, but she doesn’t think so. Death has never been far from her. She grew up in the room of a foster sister who had died the previous winter. She lost her mother to a boating accident at twelve years old. She lost Octavia last year, found her body in the woods, and was thankful that she -- and not someone else -- had seen her crumpled like a fawn. Because even though it clings to her and burrows under her skin, she knows how to drown it out now. In words. In wine. In pills crushed against the veneer of a sink and snorted through a twenty-dollar bill. She’s getting good at losing herself completely. Theresa herself feels like a girl half-dead, like something ghostly, trapped between two planes. Which is why it hurts so much that she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost. She’s supposed to be the special one. The one who’s vision isn’t clouded by idle dogmatism. The one who believes in all that fate, juju, third eye stuff that the others seem to scoff at. It feels like a personal attack. Like somehow, in keeping hidden, she’s blaming Theresa for her death.

Theresa is the month of November. There’s something mysterious about it, something cold. It’s on the cusp of the end of the year, but it doesn’t quite reach it. I feel like that’s what Theresa’s like. Always reaching for the apples that are just out of her grasp, or perhaps, reaching for apples which aren’t even there.

She knows grief like an old friend, but somehow, she still doesn’t trust it. When she was twelve years old she lost one of her mothers. Annie was always the brighter of her parents, and Tessa never really believed that someone so full of life could just disappear. Her soul had to be somewhere. When Kath remarried, Theresa never forgave her. Between grief and anger, their relationship became fractious, and Kath decided to send her to boarding school. She went to a New England college where she learned art, history, literature, english, athletics, the sciences and the classics. Boarding school was probably the best decision for Theresa that Kath had ever made. She became fascinated with the girls around her, so feral and wild in their girlhood. She fell in love with another girl more than once. She fell in love with the freedom of New England, of being in the woods, of a gaggle of girls with bottles of wine sat around a campfire, scared half to death that the matron would find them.

But death’s never far from her. She’s been searching for Annie in the linebreaks between poems, in the chaos of clutter under her bed, under lace and linen in her underwear drawer, but somehow she can never quite find her and never give up. Finding Annie was perhaps the reason she came to Ashcroft at all. She intended to go to Columbia, read Literature, and clumsily follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg. But Annie had spoken of Edinburgh with such a childlike awe.

Lysander was the first of the society she met, at a poetry reading in the autumn of her first semester. He brought her into the club because he saw something in her, an otherworldliness, a still but powerful voice. Her eyes saw more than they let on, always glinting at something more. She thinks her closeness with Lysander is the reason she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost, and now Hamlet’s out of the picture she’s starting to think she might love Lysander. Or maybe she just needs to be loved by someone, and absolving him of blame is the key.

She was never really sure how she felt about Octavia. One moment they were friends, the next they were rivals. It was something like love and hate combined, but perhaps that’s just the curse of being a woman. A fierce sense of competition in everything you do, even if it’s just competing for air.

She likes old French music, European cinema, art that doesn’t come in her mother tongue. She’s always thought English pointless. The French say things so much better.

Her favourite TV show is Twin Peaks. She likes the absurdist truth in it, the style, the colour, the oddness. She likes the mystery of it all. She loved the woods in New England and it reminds her of that. A kind of home away from home. Tea brings a pocked dictaphone out with her, for she’s so often absent-minded that she misses half the day. That way, she can replay conversations, the sound of a bird in flight, the particular inflection in the voice of someone she loves. She’s obsessive when it comes to lovers. She doesn’t want to be loved -- she wants to be respected, understood, devoured. She thinks love is a kind of mutual lying.

She finds truth in the unusual. In tarot cards and horoscopes, in the position of the planets through a thrifted telescope. She’s a night owl, never in bed before 3 or 4 in the morning. She visits the woods each night to write until her fingers ache. Sometimes with wine, sometimes with mushrooms, sometimes with a tab against the flat of her tongue, imagining herself to be Alice in Wonderland. She feels like she’s getting close to the truth, but maybe she’s just closer to losing her mind.

LETTER TO OCTAVIA.

My dearest O,

I wish I could find an adequate way to write you an epitaph. You saw a poet where everyone else saw a foolish dreamer and yet you’re the only one I can’t put into words. But in truth, there is no word large enough to contain you. You were the ellipsis I was always looking to conclude, and it’s so like you to steal even that from me. Some days, I think I could love you.

Please know that death cannot touch girls like us. That you’re more than just skin, teeth and bone. Death itself has you only on a short-term loan. As Thomas puts so eloquently, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thank you for filling me with life. I’ll see you in the next one.

Tea.

anything else?

mock blog.

wanted plots.

someone who theresa knows purely from seeing them at the library. recently, she hasn’t been visiting as often. she’s less in the world and more in her head. her schoolwork is suffering. someone who feels this absence like a missing tooth.

unlikely bc ashcroft is in scotland but if they’re from rhode island maybe distant relatives.... ophelia / theresa is adopted so could work regardless of heritage. her family lived in narragansett, but she went to boarding school in vermont. could have met if ur character is new england based??? maybe

give me fellow wanky pretentious art-lovers and poets and historians who will go to museums and galleries with her and listen to the velvet underground on vinyl

people she gets mortally fucked off her tits with at parties bcos this baby is not alright. she drinks at least one glass of wine every night. sometimes a bottle. she’s always a little bit high or a little bit weary with a comedown. she can’t seem to keep her feet on the ground.

theresa was pretty numb after finding the body, as you would be. she stayed in her room listening to enya for three days straight and just eating cereal straight out the box. then thalia broke up with her and that fuckin shook her too, and now she just thinks she’s unlovable. she’s always been pretty bad at sleeping but now she just wanders about in her white nightdress looking for a door with light spilling beneath it so that maybe she can find someone who’ll hold her for the night and make her feel like she’s still alive

she’s currently hooking up with a lot of people. a lot of very detached sex, so if she has any sort of close connection with your character this might not work. could be good for angst or awkwardness though, or she cld get like.... super attached after a one night stand and complicate the shit out of everything. theresa’s kind of obsessive when it comes to her affections, she loves with her whole heart or not at all

people she used to date or unrequitedly likes, but to them it’s just a physical thing, give me all the thirsty angst plots, and maybe some softness too, i need some religion in this girls life jesus

honestly everything just give me all the plots

#stands on the rooftop and screams like a banshee as i fling this into the woods #spectreintro #very late and personally i think that's incredibly sexy of me x

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oswald-privileges · 6 years ago

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Loudmouth

(I wrote some statement fic. It’s been a heck of a while since I wrote anything for fandom.)

Statement of Ulla Ness, regarding, um... a peculiar transformation. Original statement given March 14th, 1999. Audio recording by Christopher Peake, in an… unprofessional capacity. Statement begins.

I still don’t see why I had to come to you. I know you have an email address, so wouldn’t it have been easier to just scan the form and send it to me? Hell, I would have taken a physical copy sent to me in the post. It would have been slower, but it would have meant I could have stayed at home. But no. I asked, and you just gave me a lot of waffle about how you have ‘strict acquisition policies’, alongside directions that had been copied from google maps. Which I know, because I checked.

It’s not that I’m lazy, you understand, far from it. I used to have what I regarded as quite the active social life. But recently that’s become impossible for me to maintain, for a number of reasons. Which are also the reasons that I’ve come to talk to you.

I used to be quite a religious person. Still am, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure. I was a member of the congregation of Saint Mary’s, a small anglican church in a small, anglican village up in Lincolnshire. Not everybody there was particularly devout, but it wasn’t one of those places where it especially mattered. It was more about the sense of community we had. Catching up with each other after communion on Thursdays, singing in the choir, arranging cake sales or coffee mornings as fundraisers for whatever bit of the building had fallen off now. I’ve been attending since I was little, and more or less grew up with the congregation.

I miss it quite badly, if I’m being honest. I’ve always been the sort to need other people, but I didn’t realise quite how much losing them would affect me. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and all that, I suppose.

It started with another fundraiser, a jumble sale this time. I had volunteered to help manage the event, so I was in charge of sorting through the items that people had brought in for us to sell. Like I said, not everyone there was strictly devout, and didn’t always take care with what they decided to donate. Some people seemed to use it as more of an excuse to toss legitimate junk in our direction and call it a good deed.

This was definitely the case with Mister Ashley. He attended purely because his mother was too old to walk by herself, and I rather think that she insisted that he stay with her throughout the service. It was definitely at her behest that he took part in any communal activities. She would always announce that he would be happy to run stalls or make tea or some other menial duty, while he sat by her side, stony-faced, and saying nothing at all.

The only time I remember him giving any sort of reaction was when when his mother announced that her Jamie would be happy to donate some of his shop’s excess stock for the jumble sale. I remember, he turned to her with the strangest look on his face. At the time, I thought it was one of badly suppressed outrage. I assumed that she had simply gone a bit too far in volunteering his services; Mister Ashley was a second hand book seller, and owned the Jabberwock Bookshop just off from Memorial Square. It can’t have been all that easy to turn a profit. Thinking back on it now, though, and I wonder if his expression was something sharper than just anger. If it could have been alarmed, almost panicked. But I believe that is likely be nothing more than hindsight colouring my memories. If he had had some way of knowing, had been frightened of something like that which came to pass, then… well. I cannot honestly say I ever truly liked James Ashley, but neither can I believe that he would be as cruel or as cowardly as to not have said or done anything.

As it was, he brought the books to the side room the next day, where I was going through the donations and sorting the sellable items from those things too broken, torn, stained, or just plain unusable. I had just set aside yet another jigsaw- this one with almost two thirds of the pieces obviously missing- when he knocked on the outer door. In spite of the heavy rain, he wasn’t wearing a coat, hat, or boots. He didn’t say a word to me when I opened it, just shouldered his way in, dropped a heavy cardboard box on the floor by the unsorted donations, and walked out again. He did this three more times, leaving the door swinging behind him, letting in strong gusts of wind and rain, and reinscribing a damp trail of rainwater on the carpeted floor. Then he was gone as abruptly as he had arrived.

Ashley had taken better care to protect the books from the rain than himself. The cardboard was soaked through, but the books inside had been wrapped in several layers of plastic sheeting. They were stacked upright, and had been fitted in without any attempt to force too many into a single space. They were all, without exception, worn, faded, and almost completely without interest. Paperback romances long since out of print, old text books, children’s encyclopedias. It was rather a relief, if I’m honest. I could just reach into the boxes, grab a book, give it a flick through, and place it on the “for sale” pile.

I was about halfway through the last box when my fingers brushed something that did not feel at all like paper. It was dense and yielding, and ever so slightly damp. I recoiled, shock and disgust crawling their prickling way up my arm. My fingers looked clean, but the ghost feeling of something sticky still clung to them.

My first thought that it was some nasty practical joke. That Ashley, stung by his mother’s willingness to give away his stock, had put something disgusting in there by way of relieving his feelings. But that would have been ridiculous- he was a grown man, for goodness sakes, not a slighted child. It was more likely that the plastic keeping the books wrapped up had slipped, and allowed the rain to seep in through the sides. That was the more likely explanation.

It seemed as though I was right when I looked into the box properly, and saw nothing there but more books. But when I reached in again, all I felt was rough, dry paper. Confused, I went through the contents more slowly, looking where I placed my hand and at the books I chose.

I didn’t feel it again until the fifth book I picked up, that same almost-damp feeling. It was broad and set in landscape, almost like a sketchbook. It was dense with pages all jammed together- dense and heavy. It flopped bonelessly in my hand, and I needed to support it from underneath before I could read the title.

Hymnal, it read. The gold letters gleamed wetly on the slick cover.

It appeared to be full of sheet music. No titles or lyrics, just scratched staves and notes that meandered up and down the lines as though drunk. The smell that rose from the pages as I turned them was odd and unpleasant. I wondered if the leather binding them hadn’t been properly cured. Those areas of page that weren’t covered in music were full of sketches, but so dense and overlapping that I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. And, I realised with an unpleasant start, the cover beneath my hands was warm, as though I was touching a live thing.

Suddenly, I’d had enough. I was sitting here, working myself up over an old, graffitied book for no good reason. I shut the thing hurriedly, and it snapped closed with a heavy slithering of pages. I caught the soft part of my forefinger on one of them, and a tiny bead of scarlet began to well from the wound. The stinging was welcome- it gave me something to focus on, mundane annoyance drowning out the confusion that had been threatening to become fear.

I dropped the book onto the discard pile. I couldn’t sell something like that, that much was obvious. Then I picked it up again, and dashed through the rain to the rubbish bins outside. I tossed it in, and followed it up with as much of the discard pile as I could bag up in one go, burying the thing underneath threadbare scarves, broken plastic dolls, and half used art supplies.

I felt a little better when it was done, but not much. Whatever those hymns were praising, I don’t think it was Our Lord.

The cut on my finger didn’t heal like it should. It stopped bleeding without any trouble, but the edges became raised, reddened and sensitive to the touch. I dabbed at it with antiseptic and did my best to put it out of my mind. I succeeded at first. I had plenty to keep me busy, both at church and at my workplace, and for a day or two, I completely forgot about it.

At least until it opened up again.

I don’t remember what caused it, or if anything caused it at all. Just that I was reaching for something, and there was the feeling of… unpeeling, almost, the cold feeling of fresh air on wet skin. I checked to see if the cut was bleeding again.

Instead of a cut, I found myself looking at a tiny, fully formed mouth.

The raised, reddened edges I had thought were a sign of infection had become minute lips. They were slightly parted, and behind them I could see the tiniest slivers of white. And behind that, a dark space where something wet shifted.

I didn’t look at it for long. Already I was reaching for the first aid kit, hastily covering the cut- the mouth- with a plaster. I was already convincing myself that what I’d just seen was some kind of infection I was too squeamish to look at, and that since I couldn’t feel any pain, I should probably go to the doctors, in case it was nerve damage or something. The impression of having seen a mouth rather than a cut was an unpleasant trick my mind had played on me, and one I didn’t feel like closely examining. I told myself I had imagined it.

I hadn’t, though. I could taste the soft fabric patch on the plaster.

I really did mean to go to the doctors. Mouth or no mouth, whatever was happening to the cut on my finger worried me. I even got as far as making an appointment. But the next day I went into work, and there was an accident involving a slippery patch of floor and a very, very sharp knife that I was carrying at the time. I ended up with a nasty slice parallel with the underside of my ribcage.

This time, it was obvious how quickly it stopped bleeding, how it was practically dry before I even changed the gauze once. How the scabs began to flake before I even touched them, leaving nothing but those raised, reddening edges around the cut itself.

I didn’t go to that doctor’s appointment. I don’t think it would have helped me if I had.

It took longer for the second cut to open, but when it did, I could stand in front of the mirror to properly see the flat, white, human teeth, and the tongue that moved behind them.

It didn’t feel alien. That’s what surprised me most. I was scared, of course I was scared, I was growing new bits, opening up in places that I shouldn’t- but that was just it. It was my body doing this, not some… weird infection or surgery. Whatever was happening, it felt like an extension of myself.

I could move them, I found. Not as consciously as I could my original mouth, the one in its proper position on my face, but sort of like moving a limb after it’s fallen asleep. It took concentration, like I was working through partial numbness. Like I needed to focus to wake them up.

I didn’t spend very long doing that, though. I would realise with a start that what I was doing wasn’t normal, it wasn’t sane. I would pull my shirt back down or re-plaster my finger with a feeling almost like shame. I wasn’t as scared as I should have been, and that in itself was somehow a lot more frightening.

I’m not clumsy. I can’t be, considering the sharp tools I have to handle at work. But I started to accumulate injuries. Innocuous things at first. Paper cuts from the prayer books during mass, scrapes from the edges of the metal benches at work. And then other things. Pushing down a door-handle would lay my palm open as though I’d been struck with a metal ruler. The pressure of my jacket across my shoulders would tear the skin. I woke in bed one morning to discover that the folded sheets around me had left cuts going from my hip to my collar bone.

Every single one of them bled, reddened, and opened.

The mouths started to become restless as their number grew. They tried to chew on the clothes I wore to cover them, and if I didn’t focus, they would let out soft, but audible moans or sighs. I tried to quiet them. I even tried feeding them, though I only did that once. It seemed to help, but the mangled sensation of swallowing with a throat that seemed to be lodged under my right kidney was so disorienting I couldn’t bring myself to do it again.

I hadn’t stopped going out altogether. I left the house less, certainly, but as uncertain and uncomfortable as my changing existence was, I didn’t want to give up the company of other people altogether. I get lonely easily.

So, one Friday, when when there was so little skin left under my clothes and gloves that no new mouths could easily form, I patched my face and neck with gauze, and went to take my place in the choir again.

Nobody really seemed to notice anything different about me. I had all the right stories lined up for when I was asked about what had happened to my face, but almost nobody did. A few condolences, a few jokes, and that was it. People apparently preferred to gossip about the death of Mrs Ashley, and how her James had stopped coming to church now, and how they had known his heart wasn’t in it all along.

It felt awful. There I was, standing in the middle of them, skin to skin almost, with the most fragile disguise imaginable hiding a secret that would ruin their perception of the world for good- and they were too wrapped up in their own smug assurance of their own piety to notice. I offered up a brief prayer for patience, but like all my prayers lately, I don’t think I was offering it to the God whose praises we’d all gathered to sing.

And when we raised our voices together for All Things Bright And Beautiful, and I opened my mouth to join in, and then opened my mouth again, and opened my mouth again, and opened my mouth again- I wasn’t singing praises to that God either.

I didn’t realise that the others had stopped at first. It wasn’t until I glanced to one side, and saw Julie Wright staring at me with her powerless mouth open and unmoving, that I realised I was singing in harmony with myself.

I broke off, suddenly embarrassed and frightened by the way that they were all looking at me. There was something like awe in their expressions, but there was something else there too. Something that shuddered and recoiled. I desperately tried to remember the words I’d been singing, if I had gotten them right. I had the horrible sense that I might have subverted something holy.

Adam Bromley was the one to break the silence.

“Well now. You never told us you were getting private training!”

And just like that, the spell was broken. The unexpressed disgust sank back beneath their faces, and the others took up the idea almost with relief. A beautiful voice, they told me, what trick did they teach me to make it resonate like that? I forced a smile and said something non-committal and when we took up the tune again, I was careful to sing only the words that were on the page in front of me.

My own relief was short-lived. When I got home, I found the skin I had left was being pulled apart by the restless movements of the mouths. Blood stained the underside of my shirt, and I couldn’t stop the moans and hissings any more than I could have controlled a spasm or a muscular tic.

I didn’t sleep that night, and called in sick to work the next day. I lay on the bed, and stared up at the ceiling, trying very hard not to move.

It wasn’t any use. My skin had become so fragile that even getting up and walking to the kitchen caused it to split, the blood barely having time to dry before the wound began to twitch and whisper. All my fascination was gone now, as were all my attempts to ignore what was happening. All I did was lie on the bed, and let myself slowly drown in my own body. I lived like that for a week.

When next Friday evening came, my entire body burst into song.

I writhed and moaned and hummed without will, without choice, throwing out snatches of hymn before discarding them as not what I wanted, not right. And for the first time, the indistinct murmurs and whispers grew louder, began to form words. Prayers that had been chewed out of shape, pleas for more, more mouths, more brothers and sisters, to come out of hiding and join the great curdling of flesh.

This went on for the entire night.

That was when I decided that I needed to do something. I’d let… whatever this was go on for too long, long beyond the point of saving myself. But I wanted to tell someone first. So I dragged myself to my computer, and searched as best I could. It’s difficult to type with only a confusion of tongues.

And that’s where you came in. You aren’t special. You were just the closest place that didn’t either ignore my emails, or reply with not so gentle suggestions that I see a psychologist.

I don’t think I’ll be leaving my home again, once I get back. I doubt I’ll even bother uncovering, although there’s no-one there to see me. For all that I wanted to let someone know, I don’t want to be seen.

The cupboard below the stairs locks from the inside. I can push the key out from underneath the crack in the door.

Whatever is happening to me, I won’t allow it come to fruition.

Post-statement follow-up: There wasn’t anyone under the stairs when I went to check. The lock on cupboard door was broken, and so was the one on the back door. Either Ms Ness was, um… successful in her attempts to… halt her transformation, and a housebreaker with some seriously questionable motives took what was- what was left of her. Or she wasn’t. And her resolve either waned or the situation was, um. Taken out of her hands. Or. Whatever she had instead of hands.

I wasn’t… going to record this. It’s not my job, strictly speaking, but I was reading some of the old statements, and this one just… sort of caught my eye. And I’ve seen the Archivist and some of the others do recordings, and it just looked so… I wanted to try it out. I’ll be taking the tape with me, though. None of the others need to know about this.

#The Magnus Archives #tma #the magnus institute #whoops its all OCs

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bitchdoeseurope · 7 years ago

Text

Concrete jungle, wet dream, tomatoeeee

(Title is a misheard Alicia keys lyric. Just in case anyone was wondering)

Day three started a bit more fabulous. I felt below average but better than the zombie like state I've been in. I got a donut and hot choc for breakfast (because I'm super healthy and everything here seems to be on the go for breakfast) and headed on to MoMa. The museum of modern art. Now I didn't have long here so I smashed it out.

The top floor was an exhibition "is fashion modern?" And surprisingly I found it really cool, the main gist of it was that everything in fashion comes from something from past fashion or another culture and is recycled to create a "new" piece. It discussed ideas like how the little black dress changed the colour black from only being about mourning to also being a sign of elegance, how a white t shirt can be casual or smart depending how you dress around it and how clothes generally are a canvas of expression for most people. It was a really cool concept.

The next level had some classic art works. I'm a bugger though because I'm not very good with stopping to read the descriptions of pieces, I tend to think that art shouldn't have to be explained - you either get it or you don't. The highlight here was van goghs starry night 👌🏻

The next two floors focused on Louise bourgeois who did a lot of sketches, print work, fabric work and sculpture work. She was apparently quite fascinated with arachnids (spiders) and compared them to her mother (in a loving way. Kind of odd). The coolest part of all this was the big ass spider and cage sculpture that sat in the middle of a room. Inside the cage was tapestries from Louise's own collection and little trinkets hung down as well. It was just a funny looking piece and I enjoyed it.

Headed down to the sculpture garden and of course my favourite piece here was the big ass fuck off rose. It was huge. 👌🏻

By this point I had really raced through the museum but I was also somehow at the exit and really could not be bothered with the mass crowd that was lining up to go upstairs again. So I went for a stroll instead. I walked past the flat iron building as well as the public library and Maddison square park. Why did you walk all this way alison ? Well fam, I was going to get another tattoo. (Soz not soz dad).

I eventually (let's not say how long it took) got to the studio and met my artist, Miko. Miko is a fucking godddddd at scriptwork and this is why I had chosen her. Now, before I reveal the tatt (is only little I promise) I need to explain its significance because if not it just looks "white girl". So, as many of you may know... I'm a philosophy major ✌🏻. In my third year of uni I did a unit on stoic and epicurean (Ancient Greek) philosophy. Basically the epicureans had this concept of "ataraxia" as the idea of what one should strive for in order to live a happy life. And by happy the didn't mean like all smiles and excitement but a sense of peace and calm within oneself. Ataraxia is freedom from physical pain and mental anxiety. This Greek word translates roughly to "tranquility". Now, I'm not saying I'm a calm or peaceful person but I think it's a pretty fucking good thing to aim for.

Post tattoo I got an uber to the American museum of natural history !! I was so excited for this and then I got real fucking pissed off. So I prepaid for my ticket. Turns out the fucking Ross geller archeologist of the year awards were on so half the Shit was closed, and entry was fucking free. Was pissed me off the most was the main entrance that you see in "night at the museum" WAS OFF FUCKING LIMITS. IM SO MAD ABOUT IT. I JUST WANTED TO SEE REXY GOD DAMN IT. needless to say I'll try to find time (god fucking knows when) to go back and abuse them into letting me in. Anyway, I had gotten a ticket to see "dark universe" in the dome thingy they have there. If you ever want to feel motion sick whilst also having an existential crisis then this is the place for you !! It's fascinating to hear about how large the *observable* universe is and that less than 5 % of shit is actual matter, then rest being dark matter and dark energy but it is equally terrifying to consider how microscopically small we are in comparison. Yay?

After this I wandered around - where I could - problem was I wasn't given a map, there was none on the walls and I couldn't connect to wifi to download their stupid fucking app. So aimlessly I went from room to room. And I'll admit there was some cool (creepy) animals and some interesting looking world culture stuff, and I did find the exhibit that Ross and Rachel boinked in!!!! But I was still a little (a lot) heart broken at the management of it all. I was starting to cough and splutter again and could feel myself burning up something terrible. So I sat down in front of a mineral display and mum called me. So for about 40 minutes I looked at rocks. If that doesn't describe my state of 0-energy I don't know what does.

Uber again to go to the theatre! By this stage my cheeks were on fire 🔥 I stopped to get some food and ordered way too fucking much - didn't realise a"side" of broccoli was going to be an entire head of the stuff!!! And then I trundled off the Anastasia.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Everyone needs to see this show. It was fucking glorious. The costumes were BEAUTIFUL. The set design and technical elements were ducking flawless. And the story itself was so magical !! The stage play is adapted from the Disney movie and another movie version and it was just so bloody wonderful I can't put it into words. It wasn't the kind of thing that makes you want to get up and dance every song but it takes you on a journey from Russia to Paris on the most gorgeous ways 😍😍 there was comic relief, there was a villain who learns to not be a dick, there was love and loss and just go see it okay ?!

So again I walked back to the hotel and made my way to bed. Deciding to spend this morning right here while I try to mend myself a little bit. Wish me luck !!

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