Exercice du jour : la folie meutrière d'un chewing gum à la menthe.

Nanoyo m'a donné cet "exercice du jour" : écrire un texte sur la folie, quelle qu'elle soit.

Puis il a changé d'avis en me disant "Non, mieux : la vie et la mort d'un chewing gum à la menthe".

Je me suis dit, pourquoi pas les deux?

Imagine, t'es né pour mourir. Born To Die. Je sais plus qui l'a dit, mais ça a l'air plus cool en anglais. Imagine, t'es même pas né, mais créé par une machine, à partir d'élastomères, d'aspartame et d'arômes artificiels. Créé pour servir l'humanité, cette espèce toute puissante, ce parasite de la Terre, qui arrache ce qu'elle veut à Mère Nature et en fait des immondices telles que moi.

Heureusement que les chewing gums à la menthe n'ont aucune conscience. Forcément, si un jour un de nos ingrédients était vivant, ça fait longtemps qu'il est mort. Mais imaginons que tu es un chewing gum à la menthe, doté, par je ne sais quel miracle d'un dieu farceur, d'une intelligence, d'une conscience de soi, peut-être même d'une âme.

Déjà, quelle vie pourrie. Tu viens au monde au milieu du bruit des machines, et on te ménage pas. Tu te fais trimballer dans tous les sens pour enfin finir dans une petite boîte en carton, entouré de camarades identiques, au destin identique. Pendant le transport, t'es seul dans une boîte de chewing gums inertes. Alors pour éviter de craquer complètement, tu leur donnes des noms, des caractères. Ca devient ta famille. Le temps que tu sois transporté, mis en rayon et vendu, t'as créé ta propre société à toi tout seul.

La vente : 2€ si t'as de la chance. Toi et tes neuf petits camarades, vous valez 2€, tous ensemble. Et les clients trouvent le moyen de se plaindre de l'inflation.

On va dire que c'est un homme qui t'achète. La trentaine, un métier stressant, cette manie d'avoir toujours un chewing gum dans la bouche. Aujourd'hui il a oublié son paquet de cent à la maison, alors il se contente de toi et tes compères pour la journée.

Il secoue la boîte, parce qu'il aime le bruit que vous faites tous ensemble contre le carton. Il l'ouvre. La gravité vous tire tous vers le bas, mais ce n'est pas toi qui tombe. C'en est un autre, un frère que t'aimais bien en plus. C'est pas comme si vous serez réunis dans l'estomac - un chewing gum, c'est pas digeste. On le crache après. Tu n'as même pas cette utilité là.

Un par un, il sort tes camarades, les machouille tout en pestant contre la circulation et la radio. Un par un, il les crache, dans un mouchoir, un morceau de papier, par la fenêtre pour se faire écraser sous les roues des voitures. Noircis, ceux-là finissent par faire partie du bitume.

Tu es le dernier. Tu es seul, il t'a tout pris. Tu attends que vienne ton tour, mais au lieu de ça il gare la voiture, en sort. Tu entends des cris d'enfants, une voix de femme, un claquement de porte, le silence. La nuit tombe. Tu es seul. Tu ne peux même plus t'inventer des amis. Tu ne peux pas sortir de la boîte pour en trouver d'autres. Tu es paralysé. Tout ce qu'il te reste, ce sont des pensées.

Alors tu penses à cet homme, à son espèce et à leur place sur cette Terre. Tu n'en trouves pas, et tu prends une décision. Tu sais que ça ne fera pas une grande différence, à l'échelle du monde, mais au moins tu auras participé à le rendre meilleur.

Le lendemain, il ouvre la voiture avant que le soleil ne soit levé. Tu t'attends à ce qu'il ouvre la boîte, mais il en est encore au café, qu'il pose à coté de toi. Quelques gouttes tombent sur le carton, mais ne t'atteignent pas. Il termine son café. Tu sens la voiture qui accélère, vous êtes sur l'autoroute, dépassant les camions qui t'avaient emmené au marchand de journaux pour être vendu. Tu frémis d'impatience.

Peut-être qu'il le sent. En tout cas, il allume la radio et ouvre la boîte. Il sait qu'il ne reste que toi, alors il te verse directement dans sa bouche. Une odeur de café et de clope t'enveloppe. Sa langue, cet énorme morceau de chair, te conduit vers les molaires, mais tu as un plan, et la colère t'a donné des forces. Mû par ta seule volonté, tu te projettes en arrière, vers la gorge, tu esquives l'épiglotte, et par miracle tu te retrouves exactement là où tu veux : en travers de la trachée, où tu te loges fermement.

Un spasme, une tentative de toux, mais tu t'accroches. Tu n'auras qu'une seule opportunité, il ne faut pas la gaspiller. Par chance, tu l'étouffes à un moment critique : doublant un camion, il perd le contrôle de la voiture, qui fonce à 140 km l'heure, accrochant d'autres voitures, qui quittent la Terre-Mère pour la retrouver en état de fertilisant. Le camion fait une tête à queue, c'est le carambolage, le nombre de victimes grimpe à la vitesse de la lumière, jusqu'à la grande finale, où la voiture s'écrase contre un muret, l'homme, qui avait oublié sa ceinture, est projeté à dix mètres à travers la vitre. Lorsqu'il attérit, le choc te projette hors de sa bouche, couvert de salive, ta coque en sucre à moitié fondue, et tu es bientôt écrasé sous le pied des pompiers venus lui porter un secours inutile.

Ton âme quitte ce corps minable, et tu surveilles de haut ton oeuvre. Vingt-sept victimes, dont une douzaine de morts. Tout autant d'humains qui ne pollueront plus, qui n'arracheront plus à notre Mère ses ressources, pour en faire des immondices telles que moi.

Poppies

Boom!

The Earth explodes.

And I’m nowhere near my body, I’m up in the air, I’m flying, and maybe what they say is true and you do remain conscious for a few seconds after they cut your head off. Not sure if the theory still holds when it’s blown off your body though.

Shrapnel sings through the air. I’m too surprised to feel it. Too dead maybe. You know you might die. As they start dying next to you, you realize fast that you might be next. Just another number. You know you might die. But you never think you will.

“De la chair à canon,” said Deroux this morning, before the daily slaughter began and they shot him to pieces. Cannon flesh. French is a colourful language.

That’s Deroux there, a few feet away from me (well, some parts of me), still leaking into the ground. I seem to have rained on him. The mud isn’t grey any more. The sky is grey, all the way to the horizon. Our uniforms are as grey as our corpses. Our battleground is close to a dried up riverbed, which we crossed to get here - four dead there, Perrot, Thompson, and two I don’t know - and the mud was grey to begin with - lifeless, grass churned out of it, the earth all up-and-down lumpy from being blown up.

My life doesn’t flash before my eyes. That bit they were wrong about. Only I find myself thinking about certain bits of it as I observe the infinite fall of my shattered flesh. Some of it surprises me - things I had thought forgotten. My mother’s face - dead too young for me to know her, but I remember her now, a dark, seductive woman whose carmine smile reminds me eerily of my own. That time my cold, stern brother, who I swear has never smiled at me in his life, bought me my first atomic firebombs and walked round town with me on his shoulders, not minding when I clung to his hair with sticky hands. I laugh - if Emma knew why I love firebombs so much, she wouldn’t scold me for eating them. She always did find it a shame about us not being friendly, like she is with her own brother.

Emma. A jump forward in time, and the brother in question is my bunk mate at school. We would fight so much, but we were the best of friends. Charlie he was called, and one day he dared me to climb the theatre curtains on the stage, and I brought them both - and the railing - tumbling down on his head.

I remember the embers of the bonfire in front of which I met Emma. It was the fifth of November - the sixth really - and everyone had gone home except for me, her and Charlie. I was staring into the dying flames in a rare contemplative mood most probably brought on by drink, and she asked what I could possibly be thinking about. I said I was wondering what I would do if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, in a war, say, and she said “Of course, the answer is ‘love’”.

So I did. I loved her - still love her, with the bright, firey passion of first love, that night and every one after it. I didn’t care what people thought. She did, and I regret that now, because without me there to protect her, who will?

Charlie died last week, in the hospital tent. He made me promise to take care of her, the bastard. He knew I couldn’t promise, but he made me do it anyway. I’m a traitor now. I made the others promise to kill me before I got to making them promise things. At least they won’t have to do that.

I’m floating in the air above a carnage. Watching it happen. Being dead does odd things to your nerves. I know why we were fighting. I signed up - Emma made me, mostly, I didn’t want to leave her on her own, white feather or no - but I did understand why we had to win the war. Still, it seems unimportant now. I should have stayed home. I should have kept her safe. Sadness as grey as the landscape fills what’s left of me as the last of the soldiers dies or flees the battleground. I can’t tell who has won. I don’t care.

That’s when I see it, right in the middle of the field: a single poppy. Poppy. The name on the last letter Emma sent me. I should have known I’d die before I got to see her. Should have known it was too good to be true. A little girl. A daughter. Poppy.

The sun dips under the blanket of clouds, and suddenly the sky is awash with flame. Colour seeps into the land, animating the corpses for a second. Blood shines as the earth drinks it in, turning death into life.

I wanted to win the war for Poppy. My baby, my little girl who I’ve never seen, but I love her.

I love her.

I love her.

Therapy

I can ignore the knot in my stomach if I want to. In fact, ignoring it is the easiest thing to do, as any psychologist will tell you. Even writing about it is the emotional equivalent of poking at a beehive: do it too much, and they will all spill out in an angry swarm and overwealm you. Running away is not an option. It will be painful. It may even be fatal.

And you can't just spray the whole thing with pesticide. As any ecologist will tell you, that's bad for the entire ecosystem: the world needs its bees. No, the best way to untangle the knot is to coax these bees out one by one with their own honey.

"What are you afraid of?"

A dozen of them buzz out of the knot. A couple sting, but the hurt is bearable. The knot is smaller, a little lighter.

"Why are you afraid of that?"

A couple more. Or several hundred, depending on what your reasons are. You don't have to say it all at once. You can start with a sentence, and then another, and when it gets too painful you stop and throw up your walls again while you heal.

You work through the pain, one sting at a time. Your pain tolerance builds up, and you can let out a couple, then a few more, a dozen.

And little by little, she gives you an entirely different world view, one that makes even the bees stop in their tracks. They stare at you, scratch their tiny heads, and say in their tiny buzzy voices, "Why the hell didn't we think of that?"

And you feel amazed and relieved and a little bit stupid. 

Of course, that's not the end of it. You still need to get rid of that reflex you have of hitting all the buzzy insects that cross your path. The road is long, and it takes work. But once you're there, you realize it's worth it. The bees buzz about their business, making the world more colourful, and once you're part of the hive, they won't sting you any more.

Ninth of August, seven o' clock

We are sitting on a stone slab, him behind with his arms around me, and me with my back to him, leaning against his chest. We are probably interlacing fingers - I can't remember exactly, our hands are in lazy but near-constant motion in their desire to be everywhere at once. We are talking about smells, and he is trying to figure out what mine is. His breath tickles my neck.

In the background of my head, thoughts form their usual filter to the outside world. They're not too thick at the moment, but their grey chatter is so much a part of me that I tend to forget it exists. There's the warm fuzz of being in love, residual elation at having gotten over my fear of it, reflexive worry at being seen, frustration with that worry, the stern reminder (in my mother's voice) that we're not doing anything wrong. There's the mental post-it note saying we're supposed to do the shopping, a vague irritation at the presence of mosquitoes. Not wanting to leave on Saturday, wondering when I can come back. Like headlines running across the bottom of the TV screen.

"That's it!" he says, "Hay. Hay and... chestnuts. You smell like autumn."

"Really?" Surprised. Pleased. "Wow..."

I look up at the leaves, find one backlit by a ray of sunlight and transformed, like a dancer in the spotlight.

And suddenly, I'm there.

The filter is gone, and my senses blink awake. I can feel him behind me, his chest warm through his shirt, and smell him - like hot bread dough - mixed with the cut grass smell of the park. My skin prickles against the breeze on my arms and legs, and his words hum against my back. Our hands are warm, and the air is fresh, and the leaves are green as gold.

The Thrumli

The Unseelie Court is widely known to be the least noble of the two fairy Courts of Prettania. Aristocracy belongs to the houses with the strongest fairies, those who excel in glamour and magic, and minor houses are born and die every month. The oldest houses still exist because they are powerful; they know that in order to maintain their line, each generation must marry the most powerful scion possible in order to produce strong heirs, and to that end, any means is fair game. Assassinations and maiming, secret duels and plots are common currency in the Unseelie Court.

Even the plebians fight among themselves, so that only the strongest, cleverest, and most powerful survive.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Thrumli's presence went unnoticed for so long. Had it turned up in the Seelie Court, where every death was either King's order or punishable by the same fate; where nobles disliked to get their hands dirty and commoners didn't dare; where there were laws - had the Thrumli acted there, it would have been discovered at once, and some means found to destroy it.

There were no laws in the Unseelie Court.

In the Inkestwood, the deepest, darkest corner of the Unseelie lands where not even the moonlight reached, the fae had long since lost their eyes for more useful senses, and the hapless few who wandered in with a torch had a short glimpse of something white and blind and ethereal, like those fish of the deepest oceans, before both light and life were abruptly extinguished. There, three moons before Arwyn's return, the mutated descendants of a nixie turned on their mother and ate her alive, before turning on each other.

Further south, if south you could call it, deep under the Silver Mountains, the last peace treaty between goblins and dwarves was torn to shreds along with the goblin tribe massacred by one young dwarf - a mute and a simpleton, who before then had never been known to hurt a fay.

In the Capital, an entire household was found dead, one member in each room of their home. One had banged his head against the wall until he cracked it, another had eaten his own arm, and third had stuck iron pins in his eyes - the question as to where and why he'd gotten such Catspawn objects ran across the grapevine like lightning from cloud to cloud, landing nowhere.

Even in Sundown, a swarm of fey gathered as if to dance and mate, but instead began attacking every other thing in sight, until a boggart swallowed them all and died of it - but the story was eclipsed by Arwyn's return.

It wasn't until a group of exiled Seelie rebels, brothers all of them, like fingers on a glove, turned on each other the moment they were through the barrier into Unseelie lands, to the bewilderment and fear of their Escort, that the matter was brought to the attention of Oberon, and the Seelie King, knowing what it was and knowing it could not pass the barrier into his realm, decided not to inform his rival Queen, but instead let the Thrumli do his dirty work for him.

Which was her plan, of course.

The Storm

It's one of those days when the sun is hot lead and the air presses onto your skin like a damp flannel. There are no clouds, but the sky isn't even blue any more, pollution has hazed it to a dirty white. All around you, the few who are still here pretend they're not slowly cooking in this mountain-rimmed oven that is Grenoble, student city, deserted for the holidays. The wiser permanent residents have also fled to gentler climes, leaving you and these strangers to roast in your own sweat.

Sometimes there's a breath of wind, and even though it only sends the hot air into your face again, you think it's cooling you down, and that's what matters. You don't get used to this sort of heat: rather, you learn to think of other things, to add lemon juice to the tap water you keep bottled in the fridge, to sleep after lunch. Children splash in fountains, and you take your shoes off and paddle with them. You find the shops with air conditioning and there you spend far more time than shopping demands, and nobody needs an excuse for ice cream. And once you've finished, you have no money left and can't put off the walk home any longer, you take the more shaded route back, and cross the street to avoid the sun.

Sometimes, a miracle happens.

Of course, most of the time it's just the windspray from a fountain, or someone watering their plants a little too carelessly as you walk by underneath. But sometimes, that warm, heavy drop on your arm multiplies. Clouds that weren't there five minutes ago gather and grow, and a promising rumble raises hopes - people run for cover with newfound energy, and a prudent few take out umbrellas. But you and I, and those like us, we just stop and stand there, gazing up, hoping to be the first to see a flash -

It hits us, sudden as an awakening in which we remember why we're here, on our way home from the air conditioned shopping centre, where the whole town had turned out, united in the desire to escape the summer heat. The rain soaks into our clothes, weighing them down, and into our skin, reviving us, bringing us back to the surface of our dry fatigue and into a strange wonder - for on this day, at this time, the sun is opposite the clouds, and through the meteor shower of sunlit rain, the whole spectrum glows against the sombre sky.

Children dance, adults laugh, and we celebrate the fulfilment of everyone's secret wish - that the heavens would open and drench us all in a deluge of sweet relief.

The Void

It started as a dream, the way it always does. The one where I'm running. Or trying to run. I can hear them behind me - heavy boots and harsh shouts, or leathery wings and laughter. Or silence.

The silence is the worst. I can feel it pressing in on me, like piercing eyes, a song of terrible discord not heard, but felt in my gut. If I could only hear it, it would be more bearable, but I can't hear anything - not a simple absence of sound, but like I've gone deaf. Like hearing was just a dream, the memory of which trickles out of my brain like water, leaving me in a soundless void.

The void has eyes. My skin puckers under the chill gaze, yet I'm hot, so hot, and the more I try to run, the harder it becomes, the less I can move. The blood in my veins is hot lead, my muscles drain of energy as the my fever rises.

I realize that I am in bed, and I can see my bedroom around me, through closed eyelids. For a split-second I'm relieved - it's just a dream - and then I realize I cannot move, that the Void is still staring at me, freezing my skin, it's here, in my room, in real life, and I can't escape, if only I could move - it's pressing down on me, heat and cold, and my breathing is too shallow, I'm suffocating -

I try to turn over, but I can't. I try moving my arm, but I can't. My hand. One finger. I must - if I don't, I'll die - it'll get me - I can't breathe - I concentrate, but the heat is unbearable, still rising, and the contrasting chill on my skin begins to hurt, creates a pain that becomes unbearable agony-

I'm awake, gasping like a fish out of water, trembling, I fight my way into sitting position, eyes frantically scanning the room for any sign of - of what? There's nothing there.

No, not nothing. There are lots of things here - objects with the dozy souls of the inanimate, dusty and familiar. There is wood and metal and plastic and glass and air, filling my lungs and not being less for all that - but there is no void.

And I pull the covers around me and pull me knees to my chest and cry in relief, my head in my hands, but my eyes wide open, not to let the void back in.

The Dance

Those of you who have read "Strawberries" (redubbed "The Glimmerlands") might recognize Arwyn.

If you're interested, try my FictionPress account.

The dance was there, in the middle of the hall, spinning in its centre and turning slowly towards the ends, like a galaxy.

The air felt warm and electric, like just before a summer storm, only the electricity seemed to be coming from the glowing centre of the dance, the naked bodies of sacrificial fae illuminated from the inside where it snaked and writhed in their veins and shone through eyes already lost.

She could feel it, a faint itch in her muscles that no amount of stretching would relieve. She would have to dance, she knew, or it would spread first to her stomach, then up, through her heart to her brain, filling her with a wild, terrifying joy that would pulse through her, connecting her to the others and throwing her straight through logic and reason into the throes of helpless ecstasy-

"Arwyn."

Of course, everyone knew she was weaker to it than them, out of practise from so much time in Cat's Court. But only Orren seemed to realize just how vulnerable she was.

"I'm here," she said tonelessly. She was still angry with him.

He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. "I'll make sure you are." His protectiveness annoyed her, and distracted her from the itch - she focused on it, stoking her gut into grumbling ire, refusing to wonder if that had been his aim.