Short fiction

10/6

Do you ever feel like you're just watching your life happen? Like, you're a character in a book and there's someone else deciding what will happen next? You feel like the story is rushing forward but you're watching, not living it.

Like sometimes when I use pen and ink for an illustration and the water seeps through the paper so that when I try to draw a line the ink bleeds and I can't control it.

11/6

My name is Caroline and this is what Dr Jameson calls my RECOVERY BOOK. I know, that makes me sound like I'm some terrible teenage delinquent, tip-toeing along the knife-edge that glints between reality and insanity, quivering beneath the groaning pressure that modern society imposes upon its youth... BUT I'm not. Like, realllly not. And if you don't believe me then you can put this journal down RIGHT NOW because it probably means you're some shrivelled up, furrow-browed psychotherapist or similar adult-being and you probably have a pair of those irritating half-moon glasses perched on the end of your nose that you wear just to make you feel important. Trust me, I would know.

Millie thinks I should 'tell Dr Jameson and her merry men at doolally's (that's 'Delillo's Rehabilitation Centre' if you're not quite acquainted with all things Millie) to stick this journal idea up their sugar-coated arses'. Subtlety was never her forte. Millie thinks a lot of things. Millie probably thinks a lot of things rather wrongly, but she's probably the best friend a

sixteen-year-old could ask for. She's the sort of person you know will stand up and throw her trainers at the PE teacher for you when they tell you off for wearing a long sleeved PE top. Which -obviously- is the best sort of person.

12/6

Isn't it strange how we all might be seeing the world completely differently? Like, what I call blue and what you call blue might not be the same thing? What I call blue might be the same colour that you call red but we'd never know. They say people are attracted to people whose face reminds them of their own face or the face of someone close to them, like a family member. Makes us all sound pretty incestuous if you ask me. I like interesting faces. Faces that use lots of different lines and cross-hatching to draw. I especially like really old people because it's like there are hundreds of stories and memories etched into their skin. When I sketch their veins and wrinkles it feels like I'm drawing out all their pain and disappointment and happiness and scratching them onto the paper. Like a way of processing all the feelings they've ever felt.

13/6

I don't know who I'm supposed to be writing to, Dr Jameson never said. She just tilted her head (the way people do when they're trying to work you out, or when your cat dies), placed the journal in my hands, said 'this is a place to put your thoughts. About anything you like, but especially when you have your DANGER THOUGHTS. Maybe you could start with a THOUGHT about the first time?' then pursed her perfect fuchsia lips and smiled. Not a happy smile. A smile that said 'another lost little girl'. She forgot that spending much of the time drawing faces kind of makes you an expert in reading emotion, even when it's hidden behind a mask of perfectly precise make-up, and I'm not keen on pity, so I rolled my eyes and refused to speak for the rest of the session (which somewhat satisfyingly made the veins on her eyeballs stretch right to her iris like tiny threads). It feels like I'm writing for someone though, and I guess if you're reading this, I must be writing this for you.

14/6

There was an Australian scientist who found that temporarily disabling the left side of the brain made people better at drawing. It stopped the left side of the brain suppressing the detail-hoarding right side so that people focused properly on the details of the images they were presented with instead of trying to process the whole picture at once. Maybe that's why people think artists are all terribly dramatic and sensitive and self-important. Because they can't help but be affected by all the little details of what's going on around them more than the average person?

15/6

I'm going shopping on Oxford Street today, but Millie seems to be FREAKING OUT because Tom's changed his status from 'single' to 'it's complicated' on facebook which is obviously a MAJOR catastrophe. Given the volume of Millie's voice on an average day, it's highly likely that the entirety of Topshop changing rooms are also going to find themselves suspecting who Tom might be 'complicating' with and finding some totally rational reason as to how he's clearly just still in love with Millie.

16/6

He hadn't been there. He hadn't even been mine to look for anymore. I rolled up my sleeve and stared for a second at the translucent-ness of my tissue paper skin. I used my finger to trace my veins. Furiously blue. And I needed to draw. I needed to sketch out the pain on the icy white canvas. I took a compass and dragged it hard across the soft paleness of my skin. Realllly hard. Aren't we all just searching for something to make us feel real? My eyes pricked as the lines crossed, and I felt safe. Safe from remembering that he didn't want me anymore and away from the way he used to make the nape of my neck tingle just by whispering in my ear. Just the deadening calm and the sound of my breathing as swollen bulbs of scarlet painted down my arm. I had watched the dainty doodles get redder and redder. And I was alive. I felt. I wasn't trying to die. I wasn't trying bleed. I was not insane. I just needed to scrawl out the pain tangled in my head. A doodle.

And that was the first time. That was how it began.