I Come Bearing Gifts

Yes!

Gifts!

Two of them!

Y'see, I entered two competitions this week and I won NEITHER OF THEM, so you get them instead. Aren't I lovely?

1) "Rise"

It used to bustle.

It doesn't any more.

Paper stacked in in-trays and out-trays, dust blurring the words. Computers, too, the keyboards bent and broken. Staplers sit, jaws wide, on the desks – looking for fingers and papers to bite. Chairs with their legs torn and tangled. Windows cracked and glass scattered. The bins hold nuclear ooze, wax paper rising with colours all matted and dirtied. Unidentified green crawls up the walls in specks, the scent of it heavy in the air. The carpet bubbles and the floor bounces on woodworm weakened joints.

There's a tie, purple spotted silk, that hangs over a chair. The body long since gone, every tired bone bagged up and zipped away, out of sight, out of mind. Some things never change. He died of over-work, says the report. In neat-and-tidy diction, neat-and-tidy cuts. Neat-and-tidy stitches. Neat-and-tidy death.

He's not the only one.

Red-faced blue-faced, strangled by their independent ties. They lie on metal slabs in their hundreds, their thousands, gray-faced, blue-suited, without their independent ties (of purple spotted silk).

Time stands.

Trips over its own feet.

The tracks are worn, the lines are read. The papers are signed and the company dead. Hush hush. Hush hush. Spiders spin, white wire on the window sill. Rats shouldn't be up so high. Shouldn't run a sunken ship. But what else makes a life where all is gone? Jumping from desk to desk in dark brown dashes, spelling a lament in Morse?

S-O-S
S-O-S

Why would you save a sunken ship? The air and the weight and the waste have battered down the brick. It won't stand for long. It won't. It's too late for that, it's gone, it's dead, nothing left but the silence and the creak. There's nothing for it, now. The bodies have gone and the building is rotting from the inside out and the outside in (it was rotting long before the signs were seen).

Is that it, the lament of a long dead ship? Whose bones and brain still function but whose soul has fled to the supply closet in the sky? Is that it? Will they come? Can you hear them if you listen in close, if you put your ear to the slatted blinds and concentrate? The wrecking balls and the cranes, running on their rolling feet. The dynamite and hard-hatted men.

There's only one thing left to do.

You know what it is, you know the myths. You can see the ashes around you even now.

There's only one thing left to do.

Rise.


#2 is in the next post, because it's longer. See you in a minute!

~Alice