Circles/Sleep/Jam
A trilogy of short fiction pieces linked by themes of anxiety, identity and dream spaces
Circles
It has been a few minutes since her mother dropped Alice off at the station.
She is walking around (and around (and around (and around))) in circles, around a bench (and around the bench again (and again)).
Even when a lady stood near the bench, about a minute or so ago, Alice just adjusted her cycle ever so slightly, like a bat using sonar to avoid an obstacle, and continued to walk around in a (slightly) larger circle.
Around (and around (and around)) like a bored armadillo in a cage in a pet shop.
Alice is the same every weekday when she waits for her train. During the slow rise of dawn, she circles (and circles) clockwise. Always clockwise.
Until the engine pulls into the station with its ten carriages. This is when the pattern ceases and she swaps her circular rails for the linear rails of the train. One switch is swapped for another. On/off.
When Alice (the armadillo) circles she also becomes lion-like through repetition — her constant circular motion becoming a physical act (of passing time? (controlling time? (escaping anxiety?))) which seems to grow more threatening with every rotation.
It is as if the lioness is circling her cage, marking her territory, while simultaneously being contained within it.
Is Alice aware of this? Is there a sense of power drawn from every completed circle around the (her) bench, from around another person?
Does she know in a spatial fashion she is surrounding them like a lioness circling the gazelle?
Or is the lady (in today’s case) to Alice — in these moments — simply not there?
Does the motion of orbiting the bench become a form of transcendental behaviour, maybe?
Alice becomes the moon moving around the sun, maybe?
A personal mediation circle, maybe?
Sleep
After reading the first three chapters, Alice thought sleep would never come. Her mind heavy with whirls of worries.
But sleep is often like that (hiding in the dark (deciding when to pounce and take you)). Sleep decides for itself.
Sometimes it comes just when it is needed (quite often though it comes a lot later after many calls for it).
Some might say the mind seems to take a pleasure in taunting the body with its lcok on sleep.
Closing her eyes once more (counting the circles of colours (inside her eyelids)) still pays no mind to the lack of shuteye.
Neither does playing the deconstructing a song game (Blinded By The Lights (All Too Well (Therefore I Am))).
And her little friend isn’t around either. Alice saw him sneak out the cat flap while she was finishing up her warm milk.
She has even taken some advice Abe had told her: get out of bed (change the pattern (alter the environment (trick the brain))).
Looking out the window, Alice sees an (almost) full moon and their lawn (almost) looks like a pool of shimmering water.
She gazes into this (almost) pool through the window pane but cannot see her own eyes reflecting back at her.
Ripples emerge across the water as the moon passes through cloud.
Suddenly her eyes (re)appear but as sunken cigarette stubs: black ash voids, where hazel browns used to lie.
The rippling effect spreads. Trees begin to sprout (and rise) high up towards the moon. Shrubs shake and stir. Undergrowth thickens.
Alice can feel her eyes start to sink.
And then a flash of amber through the brushwood. It slows. Stills.
A pair of lemon orbs stare at Alice. They look both bitter and enticing. The urge to reach out to touch them is only countered by Alice’s growing flight wish to retreat.
The rippling is rapidly travelling towards Alice at the window.
The garden seems crinkled, as if it is beginning to fold in on itself, eating space, time and light — including the moon — as it does so.
Jam
With fragments of the daydream lingering, Pessoa leaves the park and decides to head home.
After getting back out on the road, he is soon forced to a stop after being sucked into a stasis born from the leviathan of traffic jams.
The news reports an articulated lorry had become wedged endeavouring to pass through the city’s connecting tunnel.
Pessoa curses the big sky black, as all wheels come to a standstill for two long sticky hours.
He would berate himself if he didn’t feel so foolish. Still preoccupied by a river of reverie, he missed a detour over the train tracks to loop around the eastern part of Halo. Regret is a gift that can’t easily be returned.
*
The stillness of home eventually greets him close to 10pm. The stairs are almost beyond him.
Famished, Pessoa makes himself a mug of tea and while the kettle sings a by now regular dream drifts into play.
Cautionary bird tones echo out of the filament of flashing light bulbs surrounding him. They grow into a cacophonous reinterpretation of Ligeti’s Étude №13, The Devil’s Staircase.
Their song intensifies and amplifies and moves beyond any known sound, forcing Pessoa to guard his ears.
Glass shatters. The ground quakes.
A small silver object falls from the sky and upon it hitting ground the birds complete their composition.
Pessoa is back at the wheel, somewhere in a dense forest. He is having to almost drive sideways to navigate between twisting trees and shadowy undergrowth.
The birds are quiet. Scott Walker is playing on the car radio. It appears to be a piece unfamiliar to his ears, something the DJ introduced as the Threnody for Broken Wings.
Pessoa let’s the forest guide him forwards, driving on autopilot with Walker’s haunting avian melody reverberating.
He reaches a clearing with a giant oak tree in its centre — completely hollow. Suddenly he feel tiny; a trapped canary in a cage.
Pessoa puts his foot down and drives straight into the void of the tree and disappears.
You can find out more about these characters from the wider Joy Void multiverse in And I Followed, a 76-page fiction collection available to purchase from Heavy Cloud Bandcamp.
