In a recent meeting I had with a person who is interested in the web… I realised something. This project is a fairly unique proposition. So I had better start paying more attention to it. I have some plans but alas not time to fulfill them. I will start posting more regularly and today I am planning out the next phase of this project.
So if you do check back every now and again… I haven’t forgotten… I am merely overwhelmed in my trade as a wage slave.
The experience she just had gave her a nauseous feeling, because she was not the type of person who could enjoy hallucinations as some kind of fun happy time. She had been having them for years and no matter how many times she had them or how many drugs she took, nothing ever prepared her for the onslaught on visual and auditory hallucinations. That would mean losing control, which to her was one of the most important things in the entire world.
Control is everything.
‘This can’t happen to me; I can’t go schizo, not now … I have to go work dammit!’
We’re watching you dear, and waiting for you to come …
One of the most interesting things about living in the ghetto-like Eastern suburbs was the constant danger that real crime was around the corner, and you just never knew if a predator was waiting in the bushes or a flasher was around the next street or maybe even a rapist. It was a real roll of the dice.
Paradoxically, the place where Kimberly lived was filled with trees and a massive park was next door. It was developing and property from around the corner was selling at prices that were eight times was the average person could afford. A very strange place indeed: on the one hand the worse crime area in her fair city and on the other it had made many yuppies and rich people ever richer. Moving around was like walking through a part of Heaven that Satan owned. It was a good thing it was this way because previous to living here, Kimberly had been in a place with ‘white padded walls’.
Inside her mind, which was a place that scared most of her therapists, was a world of her own creation. In this world, she created the day or what the day would be like if she wasn’t incapacitated by her medication. She saw herself, stroking her long red hair without thinking that it was going to fall out, she saw a great smile on her face as she sat playfully in her boyfriends (or husbands or whatever) lap and flirted with him. Often, she dreamed that she could go out in public for extended periods of time without worrying about what other people might be thinking. As her mother always said to her, ‘they can take your freedom away but they can’t stop your imagination. As long as you have that, you can achieve anything.’ Mum was full of crap though, because they can take your imagination, especially when you must take these drugs.
Kimberly looked at the wall with fierce concentration again to see if it had more moving parts that she could amuse herself with, and it appeared as if the shadow had stayed put. Suddenly she began to feel very light headed, yet another effect of the drugs, as she stared at the wall. What was worse, she was now feeling disoriented. Kimberly looked back at the wall, and again that damned shadow appeared to move from one side of the picture to the other. On the wall a homeboy was pictured with a big smile on his face carrying a couple of guns and a thick gold chain around his neck.
How typical…
The shadow began moving again but not like the last time. It began to extend itself off the wall taking on a third dimension. Kimberly didn’t like the feeling of losing control, she blinked and then it was gone. Not believing what she had just seen Kimberly looked again and the shadow had been where it was originally drawn – at least according to the way the sun was positioned in the sky.
‘What the hell was that,’ she said uneasily, ‘shadows can’t move like that … I have to stop drinking so much coffee.’
Isolation does funny things to the mind you know—funny things it does, like what happens when you hurt people—you hurt them and they die.
Good morning.
The site is under going a revamp under the next few days… I will keep posting to let you know what I am going to do. Work is making me HELL busy at the moment so I have to do this on the side. That’s cool because writing is a passion that never goes away. Even if you take lots of drugs and get involved in various problems (society-wise).
Blam.
I am planning to add a PDF version of the current draft for download and a link to buy the actual book as soon as I can.
Give my regards to the queen.
*Salutes*
Last week she went downstairs into her garage to see what was wrong with her hot-water system and she noticed someone had stolen the copper rings from it and had dismantled the entire thing. It was definitely a bad area, but it was affordable—so she lived there … at least until she could find a way out of it. Besides, it was close to the city where she worked with others like herself, it was almost a certainty that she would move on sooner or later. The developers had already rendered one block of flats because they caught ‘city glimpses.’ What they failed to tell the tenants who were dumb enough to buy these apartments was that the people who lived across the road were drug addicts, prostitutes and just about homeless, like Kimberly. This used to be the kind of area where all the worst of the worst head cases would wind up. Now, it had become the centre for Latte sipping social climbers, who were ever too conscious of self to notice the decaying nature of the societal structure around them.
Don’t squash my spirit.
I have been doing so much lately that I have not had a chance to look at this project. But as ol’ blue eyes said, ‘I thought about cuttin’ out… but my heart just ain’t gonna buy it.’ So here I am talking to nobody about this project. I am about to re-launch this site again on my main blog so it’s time to refocus and re-start my energies into something creative.
Such is life.
‘This is what happens when you drink putrefied brown tap-water,’ she convinced herself again, ‘plenty of things go into that water supply that I have no knowledge of.’
Water? Who cares about water? You are going to die …
Perhaps the sheer boredom of doing the dishes was leading to this hallucination? Kimberly wondered if the years of living with a disfigured face were beginning to manifest itself in some kind of schizophrenic episode. Perhaps. Then again, it could be that the shadow was actually moving, or did move via some kind of ingrained wall effect or special paint that she hadn’t heard of. Surely after staring at it for the last two years she might have noticed that. The sun outside was shining, the world looked good for a moment; it had even made her place in the ‘rat’s nest’ seem inviting. Sort of. The ‘rat’s nest’ being that part of the inner city she lived in, so named as it really was a haven for all kinds of vermin—especially the rat. Although, inner city had become chic in
She opened the brown wooden door to grab her prescription medication off the shelf, hesitating as she did so. Kimberly carefully studied the bottle and then conspicuously opened the container.
‘I hate poppin’ these bloody pills.’
Down the hatch they went, although it just might be a little too late for her. Once they started no matter how much medication she took, it was rare for them to stop quickly. Kimberly, looked out the window again at the painted shadow on the stained besser brick wall, it was back where it was supposed to be, not moving at all.
‘Shadows don’t move by themselves,’ she said to herself, feeling rather uneasy after suffering an optical illusion of some sort.
This positive affirmation technique they had her using was one of her mothers fruity new age ideas. One of those, speak-it-and-it-is-so deals, where the therapist tells you to breathe a lot then prescribes you drugs that could sedate a mammoth.
Kimberly was daydreaming while she ran her white and green chequered cloth over the last dish in the pile, reaching for a nearby towel to start drying them. Poor water quality, due to the continuing drought (or so the media has said), meant that the water supply for Brisbane had gone to a dark brownish colour, and this was very disconcerting when that’s the water you drink and bathe with. The view from the one-bedroom apartment where she lived was not necessarily fantastic, mesmerizing, or at all glorious; it was completely mundane, yet somehow transfixing.
What immediately caught her attention in the middle of the wall was a picture of a homeboy character, with two large guns and an almost sadistic smile behind his face, as if something was behind him or inside him. The picture was so well made that a painted shadow almost appeared to move. Kimberly looked at it and it did move for a moment, so she shut her eyes and opened them again. Kimberly, stopped the dishes and opened a nearby cupboard door with a label on it:
DO NOT ENTER!
‘Mum,’ Kimberly said with a soft voice, ‘I’m sorry for what happened. I trust you if you, I … I …’
‘Yes, Kimmy …’
‘I want to stay here with you for a while if that’s OK.’
Kimberly opened the shower door and poked her head out to look at her mother and to give her a repentant smile, but was stopped by something she couldn’t really believe. Her mother was holding an extremely sharp meat cleaver, with a line of fresh blood on it which dripped from the blade onto the floor. Kim was utterly speechless. What was worse, the symbol she had seen earlier was there again, lit very brightly. The look on her mother’s face was not one she had ever seen before; it was one that conveyed a lost element, or a lost cause. It was somewhat blank, as if in deep shock, yet formed well enough in intent that she seemed to know exactly what she was doing.
‘Kimmy, won’t you come out of the shower dear, I have something to give you,’ she said, ‘I think you will like it honey; it’s something that your father should have given you when you were a little girl.’
This was not the same woman she had known her entire life, not the recipient of the University of Queensland best ‘Academic of the Decade’ award. Surely not. There was no time to analyse the situation, as her mother appeared to be closing in on her. In one hand she had a meat cleaver drenched in blood, presumably her boyfriends, and in the other she had what appeared to be brain and skull fragments stuck to the back of her hand. Across Eunice’s face was a thin wispy spray of arterial blood that speckled her wrinkled cheeks, giving away the fact that she had just ended her boyfriend’s life. Almost immediately Kimberly thought she was having another hallucination, but it couldn’t possibly be, this seemed so real. The look in her mother’s eyes was one that sent a shiver up her spine. Dark rings had formed around her eyes and the skin that was visible on her arms was bubbling slowly. It was as if some thing inside her was trying to break itself free of her mother’s body but couldn’t.
‘Oh dear Kimmy,’ Death said through Eunice, ‘Time for you to get the chop.’
Without warning Eunice walked briskly over to her daughter in the shower and made a quick grab for her through the door that Kimberly had shut, smashing it to pieces. Eunice was cut in the process, squirting blood around the white tiled bathroom. Kimberly, in a state of panic, tried to push her mother out of the space she had so aggressively invaded, but she was far too strong for her. Eunice somehow had her pinned to the shower wall with one arm and was now raising the meat cleaver above her head.