Category: Short Story

Assail

Leo Diarmuid GreyLeave a comment

,so I cradled my broken arm and ran as fast as I could using my shoulders. I could hear those dreadful footsteps slobbering behind me, tripping in hunger and desperation. The sound brought cold tears to my eyes. The insides of my cheeks famished and swelled from the constant, burning hyper-breathing.

I could not decipher which way to go, how to get away. So I just carried on, jarring myself against the thick parallel concrete walls that surrounded me. I prayed for relief.

I suddenly snagged on a creeping root and my entire body weight landed on my arm. With a terrible snack, and a pain that felt like someone had placed my arm on kerb and then jumped on it, came a horrifying, wet moan from just behind me. I scrambled to my feet and continued my agonising run. Every step I took stabbed me, and I could feel a juggle inside as my completely shattered bones shook from movement. I could hear those awful steps plummeting…

Closing in… Hot breath on my neck… I took the next left sprinting so hard that I sprung into the adjacent wall. This time my arm let out a falling-tree creak, but I didn’t have time to notice the blood that then started spitting. The impact surprised the thing and it hurtled forwards, being slapped by that long enclosure that kept us both trapped here. It gave me seconds.

But then it got faster.

I heaved everywhere, my life was just ache, my arm bleeding heavily through my white fleece. My legs fidgeted on each step I took. I was giving in. The thing had me. I was hopeless, my pace slowing, each turn and each shoulder against the wall knocking more from me than the last..

With pride, I snapped around, ready for a defeated dog fight. I was already dead.

But then it all glistened away in grey fog. The stone walls burning softly, their new state of matter drifting up slowly, in circles and bending lines. I watched, gently holding my broken arm as the sky formed into grey, and the walls came loose, and I could nearly see the shape of the maze I had bashed through now broke in suspension. Light as air it left me. With my broken arm I stretched, painfully, stained with blood on my clothes and my beaten hand that poked from the darkened sleeve, and felt the mist that rose from the wall beside me. It felt…slender on my damaged body. Healing almost, like deer tears roaming along the pain.

I turned to meet my chaser and found it lying in a massy mass. It was limp and fallen, just letting itself cloud. Its thick blackness eroded into grey too, it lightened as it flew.

The effervescence felt like home.

And then I realised, my devastated hand was dissipating too

‘An Envelope Popped Through The Door’ Prompt

Leo Diarmuid GreyLeave a comment

She hand-closed the door softly behind her, to keep it from falling to pieces. She let her strict ponytail loose. She took a well earned deep breath and her insides were treated with the taste of fresh-on-old mildew. “Home”, she whispered. She waltzed then through the dainty hallway, allowing her finger to trace along the many semi-circular hanging tears of wallpaper, like child-drawn waves. There remained only few doors in this framed rubble of a building, and none that separated the hallway from the kitchen. She descended from the pale beige glow of the hall into the skeleton light.

Everything in this home was devastated, but she kept it neat. Closed drawers, levelled and stacked books.. She was an organised woman, now that she had the freedom to be. What satisfied her about this place was her feeling of control. She would leave for weeks to come back and find everything as only a dustier form of its previous self. She felt powerful, finally safe in her own clay-stained hands. It was a rather new feeling of assurance, something she had not been familiar with most of her life. With no mother, she was hastily forced to be wed when she was still a girl.. to a man much stronger than her. And older, too.

But that was past her now. She gazed through the window above the sink, into an abyss of ash. For miles, there was nothing salvageable, and the rest was swept from an orange drift of wind, seemingly like a sandstorm, that hid the rest of the world. She was grateful for whichever bomb that had hit this place, leaving a piles of embers, and erratic poles dotted around. But she most loved that she could feel the mush of compressed ash as she walked.

On the sill. A dead spider. She gasped. It’s legs crooked in agony. She examined closer. It’s face was smushed, as if from weight. It reminded her of him, how he would kill everything in his house, break objects, leave things open and messy but never allow her to clean. Or to leave. She was to rot, as he trumped all over, just to see her squirm.

She cupped the spider, and dropped him into the sink and ran the tap. Brown water came and washed the spider down. Gone. Forever. She wiped the sill clean. Her brief moment of fear had been cleared. She was alone here, in control here, and safe here.

She began her ritual of cleaning. She had brought a purse full of Wypall wipes and a multitude of business-marketed cleaning sprays. She wiped the damaged counters of the kitchen, the frames with no doors, the old mahogany counter-piece in the hall, all along the bannister, up the stairs…

A noise. Right as she ascended the final step. As of a knock. On the door. Behind her. But there was nobody there. She could see through the frosted glass in the middle of the door. Nothing. She gave a plain smile. All but the sound of a footstep.

And so she carried on her cleaning upstairs, and she made everything in every room glean. Her last mission, was to batter the dust of the duvet in the only bedroom. And so she grabbed two corners of it, and slid it off the bed. And screamed.

On the bed. A stain. An ink stain. A lidless pen lay leaked. Permanent black. Her first thought was not to question its presence but to get rid of it. She went to rub at it with her wipe but the ink licked it. And stuck. She dropped it then, and backed away in horror. She had now realised. Someone had been here. Recently. They had stained the bed and killed a spider.

She ran. Down the stairs. Not safe anymore. But there. The frosted glass was no longer clear. 

A shadow. Something. With a top hat. Mad hair underneath. At the door.

“It’s not real…” Perhaps just a gathering of dark dust. It was quite probable. The wind could’ve placed it. She stood frozen on the second bottom stair for minutes, her heart rate slowly averaging as the something showed no form of life. It wasn’t real. She was not in danger, or in the presence of something else. She gave another plain smile. Just a trick of nature. She slumped down the last step.

An envelope popped through the door.

Dillon #2

Leo Diarmuid GreyLeave a comment

His skin is cold to touch. Colder than The Grey. His teeth are icicles. His tongue is vanilla ice-cream. His favourite colours are white and blue but he pretends they are red and black. When kissing his lips it feels like eating snow. His breath is always foggy. His blood has frozen, so he moves with stiff legs and turns slowly. He gleams with brilliance and cleanliness. He is immaculate and pure and those of wicked and wretched sin, those like me, are hurt to look upon his white statue. The light cuts the black of our eyes like a needle.

Nothing penetrates his glacier exterior. The pools of emotions inside him are never rippled. They are steady and lonely and never overflow and they are a young blue atop and embowled by a flawless white.

He deflects weapons and blocks punches. He is a white barrier. He is physically unbreakable. He doesn’t crack. He glows – a strict, skinny, skeleton glow that radiates from his skin. He is intimate with his surroundings and can surge them with confidence to withstand the wildest of winds and strongest of storms.

When he walks through empty corridors he glides his finger along the wall emitting little flakes from the contact that melt to a tear of water before they reach the ground.

I think he lives like he’s made of glass. Perhaps porcelain. A cold porcelain vase that doesn’t home flowers and acts as just an eye pleaser, a decoration on a marble mantlepiece. And so, he feels cold and worthless and looked at but not looked in, not studied, just passed, his existence fragile and unmendable once it shatters into fragments; picked up with delicate hands and let fall again. And again. And again. 

We could combine, little Dillon. You and I, the frost and the fog could attach and produce a new world. An illusionist and a shapeshifter. Who’s who?

Galaxy Goo

Leo Diarmuid GreyLeave a comment

I could crack you open and galaxy goo would slime through the fissures, thick and dark purple and full of little stars.

You don’t even know that.

You have no idea what’s inside of you. What you’re made of. I guess that’s because you can’t see your eyes. Unless you look through mirror. But you and I both know, mirrors only reflect colours. Cosmic magic gets lost in translation.

I have seen your eyes. The first time I met with them, my lonely mind took their picture and replayed them to me – over and over. It connected us in that infinite land of dream and magic and imagination, where we will breathe and fly and implode even after this world has let us go.

You’re heavy. You carry yourself around and you tire yourself out.

Gravity despises you. You’re too hard to hold down. Gravity told Love to break you, so you chained canon balls around your ankles and kept yourself grounded.

That was bad.

You see, dreaming is flying, flying is rising above,out of reach from Shadow, the snappy-stick wetness that moves at night. We sleep to escape it. That’s why we sleep at night.

But you don’t sleep. Do you?

No. You shiver and stare at the stars and wonder.

Oh. Galaxy Goo! That’s us up there! Far from the ground claimed by malice!

I feared for your safety.

But you were safe.

When I turned and found myself deep within Grey depth and not alone, I found you! Oh, wicked truth! Beyond imagination! You are of Grey as I am, as she is! And I pondered just HOW A being of the Grey could survive the darkness without dreaming! Without sleep!

And so I realised,

At night as we leapt to Earths beloved universe and hid in a galaxy, you turned into your galaxy. The darkness couldn’t collect you because you collected yourself.

And so, you could survive the night. And, the night became your dream. And, you lived amongst devils and demons and were immune to their wickedness.

And then came the Grey…

Pyrophoric

Leo Diarmuid GreyLeave a comment

Pyrophoric: The ability to ignite spontaneously in air. That’s the word I’d use to describe you. One minute, we’d be running and chasing, jumping over logs and turning swiftly around the twisted necks of trees, the next, you would accelerate beyond all human capability and throw me to the soft earth – pin my hands and kiss me hard, like you were trying to crush my lips between yours or trying to suck every spit of taste from them, like squeezing a sponge. You could become so passionate so quickly. I admired that about you.

And I still remember that blissful night. The stars had fled; the sky was a black wall to match the colour of the bags under my eyes. We walked – though I cannot remember where we planned on going or why we were going there. All I knew was it was us.

I was alight. The lux of the moon enchanted my pale skin, I was glowing. Yet, although I was burning, you were the only light. I studied you as we moved; your golden-brown skin so delicate that the Egyptians would have bowed to it, your eyes so azure to match a mid-summer sky with more depth and identity than the ocean, and your lips as ripe as strawberries, but as exquisite and as soft as the petals of a young rose.

Suddenly, you halted. You stole my arm and dragged my body, twisting it to face you. The circumstance in your action rendered me speechless. I could see you say it before you did. Your upper lip twitched, and the birds caged in my chest fluttered. The fire in my stomach raged. My bones, it seemed, were loosening in their sockets. My heart beat so ferociously that my hands went to either side of my ribs to keep them from unhinging.

“I love you.”

“I love you too”, I whispered.

You tumbled onto my rickety body and threw your arms around my neck. I could feel the warmth of your body ensnare the coldness of mine. And then, in my ear, I heard the words; “Never let me go”. I cried, you cried, and we glided through the night.

That’s what I think about now.

I wore the suit you told me I resembled dark sunshine in. I can’t tell if there is music playing, because I can’t hear it. I don’t know if there are people around me because I can’t see them. Churches always made me anxious, but this is different. I wrote a hundred songs, a thousand stories and a million poems about you. I recall them all, and I sing them, as I walk down the aisle.

Finally, I see you.

Your skin has been stolen of its colour. Before, you reminded me of the hot tumbling fire of a dragon’s breath – now I am reminded of a hollow white lantern, eerie and lonely. I stuff the bundle of pages neatly by your corpse, so you may read them if you’re ever bored. You did always say boredom was your idea of hell. I hope to prevent that, in the only way I can. I try not to look at your lifeless face. You will forever be a human of electric vitality to me. Forever.

As I rush out, I recall one last memory. It was a warm spring. You and I were bathing in sunlight beneath a cloudless sky in a meadow so golden that I was sure Midas himself was somewhere lurking in the tall lines of hay. We had been observing the sky for hours in peace and isolation. All of a sudden, you turned to me and you asked me; “Why do you always wear long sleeves?”

“I… I don’t know. I – I just do.”

“It’s too warm for them today.”

You went to unzip my fleece but I swatted your hand away.

“I’m comfortable like this.”

You were relentless. I struggled, and you fought back. I began to weep, and then you began to weep. You had seen before you had seen.

Eventually you ripped my fleece from my body and grappled with my folded arms. You overthrew me, as you always did. You examined the length of my bare arms. The long pink vertical scars were evidently older than the fresh thin dark ones.

The meadow was no longer golden, the sky no longer clear. Spring had ended. You found a glass bottle, and shattered it to shards on a patch on Daisy flowers, ripping their stems and decapitating them all, whom had all of a heartbeat ago been basking in our shared sunshine.

You picked up the sharpest fragment and staggered to where I knelt, sobbing like an abandoned infant. Without a word, you unzipped the perfect skin that ran from your right elbow all the way down to your palm. Blood splurged out like a volcanic eruption and the liquid formed rings of red around what remained of your arm.

Of course I knew something was wrong. For me the blood would bubble and drip, bubble and drip. Not jump.

I remember how you stared at me, confused and dazed like a drunken boy reaching oblivion. Your body fell on top of mine, and if it hadn’t been for the dark atmosphere or the oozing wet and sticky liquid that surfaced my torso, I’d have believed you were pinning me down to kiss me, that it was still Summer.

I remember how the soil, clutched, soaked and stole your blood. The plants must have thought your life was water and absorbed you to benefit themselves. But there is something… Comforting, knowing that you became part of nature.

I remember how I held you for three twisted hours until we were found.

I remember everything. All our memories, now only mine, I wrote down into a hundred songs, a thousand stories and a million poems and gave them to you. I hope you don’t forget, as I won’t.

Numbers

Leo Diarmuid GreyLeave a comment

A kingdom awaits. A kingdom stands.

The lone renegade wanders endlessly through the empty violet streets. Traffic lights flicker, neon signs buzz, as he steps slowly, with a sad beat of his feet softly pounding the ground.

There are no remnants of other life. The road is clean and wet with a rain that has fallen long ago, but never dried.

Static screeches in his eyes. He sees another, one other, a boy. Eyes a colour he hasn’t seen for ages. The boy waits for him at the long end of the road, where it meets a dumb hillside and slants smoothly.

Dead electric blue numbers develop along the boring brown building walls, in random patterns. They are cracked and illuminate at a great speed and follow the renegade.

The beautiful renegade, a cloud ready to implode wanders on, not oblivious but accustomed to the appearing numbers. He is following the boy.

He is nearly there. There is an echoing feeling of distance reverberating off the hollowness of his kingdom.

The bad renegade needs mending.

His soft hood is not threatened by wind. Wind does not blow. He does not allow it. His complexion is complete. It does not change. His head is down. He breathes steadily. His face is but a black shadow. But until..

The boy is an intruder. He does not belong. His belief is misplaced. He deserves to be punished. He was warned. ‘Beware the broken.’

The renegade lets loose his fist. His finger tips brush the polished brick pavement of the hindmost building. He feels nothing with his dented sense. The numbers shock at the close touch, pulsating harshly, but still silent as the emptiness that they act as counterpoint to.

There they bump. The two do not touch physically but bump elements. It is a bold idea. Two kings stood in front the other. Their bodies face but their heads are stooped. Neither move.

The boy awaits. The boy’s hands are cold, his body is stiff, he smells the old petrichor. The renegade does not.

Two kings bouncing power. It’s a subtle bargain, it’s a number.

“I feel numb”, breathes the renegade. The male planets are not far from each other. The boy picks up the whisper.

The scratches on the renegades waist itch beneath his clothing. Only but for a moment.

He moves closer.

The boy then glides over to the renegade, for this is no human boy. This is a shadow of a boy with no features – only an outline, and a black cesspool of undetermined body. Burning white eyes.

They stop directly in front of one another. The boy returns. His bare feet patter to the floor. He is blood and bone again. He is grateful but ever fearful.

Now, the renegade looks at him. Those eyes… They see the boy. They allow the boy. But they hold no promise. They betray the boy. They burn the boy. They burst the boy.

The renegade’s lips preform again. In his dull, doped voice, he speaks again.

“I feel numb.

I feel numb.

I feel numb in this kingdom.

I feel numb, make me better.”

The renegade reaches out to the boys lips. He can barely feel them but there is a touch. The renegade frowns. His eyes turn red.

“You better make me better.

You better make me better.

You better make me better.

You better make me better.

You better make me better.

You better make me better.”

The boy accepts the energy sizzling from the renegade, he breathes the sparkling snatches down into his lungs, and breathes them back out, turned from blue to white and the Renegade is thrown back. Mix-matched numbers flicker through his eyes, counting to infinity but in no order. They increase in speed and the boy can smell the friction of connection as the renegade faces the empty sky, his body agape. There comes a low murmur from the streets. The murmur picks up into a mumble, a mumble into a groan, a groan into a shout, a shout into a yell and a yell into a whistle and the whistle SCREAMS and the Renegade pushes his hands through his face as he vibrates relentlessly and then the renegade throws his hands down in an outright power burst, and the noise quits and numbers are sent slashing over the surface of everything as they redo and disintegrate and redintegrate.

Sheer Divinity

Leo Diarmuid GreyLeave a comment

Palm trees in the light. That’s all that was visible to me. The light was ghastly and divine, nefarious and exotic, inspiring and terrorizing. My ears heard only the stupendous song of nothing; I couldn’t even hear myself breathing. I wasn’t sure I was. My eyes flickered on and off under the strenuous pulse of this light. The long and healthy palm tree leaves were slightly swaying by a wind I could not feel on my skin.

The sea was so grey. Or was it the ocean? I didn’t know, though I didn’t much care-nothing, nothing could affect its beauty. Usually, people believed that for something to be pure, it must vibrate in colour, but how this sea curled its waves, and calmly poured them onto the light shore line, was the visual definition of purity. And with the white light spraying as far as the misty horizon, my fragile wrists curled, my eyes lifted, and the soothing drone of the breezy coast was swallowed.

The gleam was blinding. I’d have shielded my eyes with my palms if I had been able to feel them. Shutting my eyes was useless, the light pierced through easily. Through squinted eyelids, I observed. The snow was untouched, flat like a hardback book, and it was everywhere- It engulfed the brown of the trees, the green of grass, even the blue of sky had been banished and now reflected the marble floor. Was it cold? I couldn’t feel any cold, or warmth, or anything. I could feel the lights ominous presence, as though a single eye had been stretched across the surface of the sky, with one purpose only- to watch me silently, and transport me wherever it wanted. I was helpless, hopeless, but unsure, as to if I was victim or a champion.

These corridors are too hollow. Where are the windows? How was the light in here too, ricocheting off the immaculate walls? This is a hospital, I know, but it must have been a hospital built on a star. The lux was too heavy; I could not bear it any longer.  I tried to scream, but my lips were stitched shut. Still my legs walked, soundlessly through the shimmering endless corridor. No end, no beginning. My eyes and mind were the only parts of myself I owned. The rest of me had been stolen.

Here, in these four places, I spent my eternity.  Alone, silenced, banished, I unwillingly wandered. Before the palm trees, where I once lay on an open road, calling for death. Before an exact recreation of the very same melodic water I had once thrown my lifeless vessel into, and drowned the breathing dead. The snowy forest, in which I’d ripped my veins, letting the blood flow like a raging river from my deceased beating heart, and dyed the snow  the inside of my dead body, and lastly the hospital where I was born. And when I was born, my soul dragged itself along the endless corridor, seeking salvation.