"I Count Twelve" by Robert Aleisha

[ShortStoryContest]

The following story has been selected as a featured runner-up in our 2015 short story contest (Contest Theme - "The Self-Destructiveness of Vengeance and Hate")

"I Count Twelve" by Robert Aleisha

My dear sister came to me for advice.

How do you write a story?

I regret answering. I regret ever somehow, slightly encouraging her with my talent. I told her the simple truth: you can’t.

She did not take my advice and went a separate way, putting questions into the search bar of Google. I had always envisioned her lack of imagination as a springboard towards my own success. Unfortunately with every idea in the world already concocted and regurgitated in all the movies, books and trash of today’s society, no concrete ideas resulted in me waiting for the right moment to begin my own manuscript.

I find that writer’s block disables me from writing any more than a few sentences; then doubting my own work I seem to put it on a stack or save into a folder onto my computer without another minutes thought of deliberation. In honest truth, I would love to be one of those writers that could write a story on the spot. I nearly could. I would stand back, relax and come up with ideas that would flourish under my fingers.

Unfortunately, writer’s block is a widespread disease that I have been suffering from. Many writers throughout history have had it, I am in no doubt in my mind, I‘m no celebrated literary influence, but time will tell whether my prose is concrete or mere drabble. I’ve found that in writer’s block, usually it’s not that you don’t have any good ideas, it’s that you don’t know how to apply your good idea into a good, concise story.

Then there’s the hesitant thought that plugs your creative juices like a plugged sewage pipe.

Ah!

That hesitance over whether a story is good enough, whether it is really worthwhile to read by such a scrutinizing, dull assemblage of individuals. My answer is simple; people are picky and they are never content.

I find that children whom like reading, delights in rather dull, seemingly monotonous kinds of prattle. Whether you put some sort of message into a slot here and there, it’s always considered uninterested or useless in the eyes of those usually uncultured and unfocused. In the eyes of a more mature audience as am I, it could be a fabulous body of work that many would pass as a joke without another moment’s read or others would comb through it with a fine toothed comb and ridicule the slightest comma out of place.

No. I have not been the victim of ridiculed critics or mass media.

In fact, I am not a writer at all.

No, I don’t write my words down on a page and check to see if the grammar is acceptable for to be made into a paper back to be rummaged and tossed away at a charity shop.

Believe me, if you are the type as I have to get down on yours hand and knees and peer through boxes and shelves then you’d understand. If you are the type to stand in a first class book store slash coffee shop that wouldn’t even bend their knees to look at the shelf a little below their direct line of vision then I suggest you finish reading this very moment.

It’s not that this story may not interest you or may insult you.

Actually it will insult you by my reason.

I don’t want you reading it because I hate you.

Ahem.

Anyway, through my travels, I’d scrutinized stories and the blurb that truly summarises the book I’m about to read. Honestly, some are so dull that there’s no wonder it’ out of print and in a SVDP. I find it is insulting towards those who had sat down to write the book. Imagine you, fifty years’ time, twenty novels down the drain because a blurb was written dully and the font cover was merely a slightly askew photograph of a shrub and a bit of playful, twinkling sunlight.

How would that make you feel?

Rejected?

Cheated?

Out done by?

I’m sure reading this at this moment, you may have come to the presumption that there really is no story here and this is merely an opinion piece by someone in the winter years of their life, sore and regretful of all the opportunities gone amiss. The fact of the matter is; I am no sour recluse from a country cottage trying to fix mistakes of their life. Nor am I a writing deity that writers with writers block pray towards.

I am merely someone like you. Someone who would exist out of chance, another salt grain in the package that someone sprinkles on eggs or soup and the odd grain who’d fall out of the package altogether.

I don’t want to fall out of the package to the cold, hard ground, no way.

Focus me as platypus, now as Superman.

What?

I cannot be Superman?

You don’t understand the reasoning behind writing and not exactly knowing who the writer is.

Superman exists, I’ll tell you why.

But first I’ll begin with my so called writing.

I’m not a writer, yes correct, your mother must be proud, but I am a thinker.

As we all are.

You could have picked this up by chance and be slightly amused or slightly irked by my rambling. You may not be a reader at all and picked a rather dull choice.

A hobby-good for you! Isn’t your mother proud?

You may not be a writer though so you may be completely ignorant to my problem. All that I know other “writers” may also feel the same, for all I know.

You don’t exactly know whether or not someone has the same state of mind as you until they say it outright.

“I’m a sociopath.”

“No, your grammar is beautiful. I don’t think so.”

I wouldn’t exactly be proud to be completely of another state of mind, but at the same time I would completely and totally indulge in the idea. I believe, it’s because, well let’s say, I’m a teenage girl, if you put me in this instance, you’d generalize me as a hopeless romantic, someone struggling to come to terms with their life, and, well, let’s be honest, a complete psychopath when it comes to personal appearance and relationships.

That makes me chuckle.

To put it simply; I am not a teenaged girl.

I can.

And I don’t have to be.

It’s simply beautiful.

I can be whoever I want to be; I can everyone and I can be no one, I can be everything and I can be anything.

The thought, I find, delicious as I don’t have to be generalized by something I don’t want to be.

No, I wouldn’t exactly call myself gender fluid or perhaps desiring to be male. I’m not looking for a sex change or anything other thing you may spring to mind.

I’m looking to be myself-in this case happens to be a genderless robot.

Don’t laugh!

You’d want it too, deep down inside of you, not to categorize in one fixed position and not being able to escape from the eyes of others. It’s not that I’m emotionless- I get angry, I get sad, I get happy. I guess in a way, I am a teenager, being hormonal.

But, I’m obsolete.

I’m my own world.

And that’s how everything else is inside my head.

No, I’m not a writer, I’m a thinker.

And I think my stories. I make a beginning, middle, an end and then I mush them altogether into an orchestra of my own concoction of senses and ideologies.

Ha, no.

This isn’t about how you should write your own life, something you’re not happy with and you’re wishing to change.

I’m not that optimistic.

Heh!

The fact of the matter is, this story finally begins with me, lying on my bed, depressed and feeling homicidal.

How did you think of my prologue? Lengthy? I come to think of it as the person who pauses a movie to give a synopsis of a story before it even begins.

I hate you, whoever you are.

Enjoy.

Sorry, I’m not using separate little indications as to where a story begins; the story has begun already, as a matter of fact. I’m in lying in bed, thinking this all up in my head. Pretty nifty, eh? Yeah, I write it down in my thoughts. It’s like an imprint, it’s always there and I may not be able to return to it, but it’s still there.

You wouldn’t be reading now otherwise, wouldn’t you?

My life up to this point; is to say boring and uneventful, however as a victim to first world problems I am extremely depressed about school work, health and relationships.

Also, I hate everybody.

No, that’s something everybody thinks, really. I sound so insignificant.

I have this special disorder where I hate myself but still think I’m better than everyone else.

Cry me a river.

I think there’s something wrong with me. Yesterday, I was fine, my walls were colourful and now they are empty.

I’m serious there’s actually something extremely worrying about my walls they’re too bare, I wish I could transport my vision onto paper in order to be believed to be seen. I’m so worried; they never seemed this bare before. Colour that’s there is now completely devoid. I just can’t feel anything anymore. The whole world feels blank.

I need sleep. Sleep….sleep…sleep…sleep…







Float-floating—sky-grey-pastel smears of aqua-blue-mmm-happy ah-





AH





My mother is waking me. I dislike when she does that, when she shakes me awake. The one thing I like about writing in my head is the fact that I can say all of this when she is still on her first shake. Literally, the mind goes a mile a minute, a million thoughts pass an she’s barely on the second shape and she shakes like SHAKE-SHAKE-SHAKE-like you’d snap your fingers.

I understand. As it is my older sister’s birthday and celebration over her result from her first published novel. Everyone is celebrating the publishing of a mediocre chick-flick. I was meant to get dressed up for this so called festivity. My sister, praised for being something I should be. Maybe with my despair I should have written, but instead I had collapsed onto my bed.

Depressed

I hate people, I want to continue thinking but I’m already brushing my teeth.

I seemed to have black out for a long time, in conversations devoid of emotion my whole entire head seems to have completely disappeared onto itself an I forget what I am doing and where I am going. I liken this to experiences as a zombie, or probably in a more scientific relatable term, amnesia, where one would forget what they were doing for a very long time.

It’s hard breaking from an opinion piece into a near present narrative. It’s interesting how I could reflect on life and my thoughts and believes while I spit blood from my gums. It’s an interesting image, I grant you that. If, let’s say, I suddenly started bleeding from my eyes then that would be a whole different matter. Instead I grin from ear to ear in the mirror and see teeth like yellow puss and a distinct red rim along my gums. My tongue is a light pink, nearly white. It’s as if my mouth is reflecting the complete degradation of mind as I comb and brush through my thoughts and pick out little pieces of blood. A little pieces of rot.

Maybe I should be brought to the dentist-maybe I should be brought to a psychiatrist-maybe there is nothing wrong with me. But who knows? What am I to think, to say about this matter? You as an individual either agree or disagree with them. Put it bluntly. I cannot travel myself into someone else’s mind, nor can I truly understand what fiction is and what fact is. I understand that I do suffer from complete insanity whether it comes to the knowledge if I am or not insane, but I know someone else would know for definite.

Maybe they would agree with me?

Treat this like a kids show. One nod for yes, one head shake for no.

I’ll take your word for it.

I’ll continue removing the scum from my head in my delving in towards my mind.

God forbid that I may drown in it.

It’s hard to imagine someone drowning in their own thoughts but it’s rather easy when you think about it.

Depression-Guilt-Anxiety-Murder-

It reminds me of poetry.

I’m not alone when it comes to poetry; depicting complete lack of confidence and dark, mysterious premonitions to their being.

However they’re always left ambiguous; there’s no knowing exactly how dark these thoughts may be. This could be a hidden desire, pushed at the hardest at times.

Or it could be like me, a first world problem, where boredom makes you think.

Oh yes, I think.

I’m a firm believer of creating stories through the whole thought process itself.

As in when I want somebody to die, for example.

Whether they actually die in real life I’m not completely certain of but it makes me happy that at least in one alternate reality it was true.

As you know, ever alternate reality is true.

---WELL DONE WE’RE SO PROUD OF YOU YOU WORKED SO HARD FOR THIS AND YOUD DESERVED THIS NOW LET ME KISS YOUR ASS A LITTLE MORE AND SLIP YOU A FIFTY JUST TO HIGHLIGHT HOW BRILLIANT YOU ARE---

I sit at a table with my forehead pressed to it, completely devoid of normal understanding of what I am and what I am doing here.

My sister is horrible person. She is perfect. A lovely summer rose, God’s tear drop, angels sh*t…

I want to kill her.

She looks at me with understanding eyes and I hate that. The eyes are like, you’re perfect the way you are, but you have to change to not be in a perfect bubble of perfectness.

You know this bubble, this void bubble. I choke at it; a microscopic, one cell thick bubble. Dull and weak. So easy to break but when you do the balance is over and you’ve left this circle and there’s nothing you can do to make it again.

In my own little world I got a butcher’s knife. You know where these lead to; that pulpy story where I describe the sensation of tearing skin like butter. No, I’d rather not. Instead my description is better expressed with the aftermath of the lifeless lump on the ground with 12 stab wounds.

In my head I snap back slightly to reality. My hearing is gone, everything seems to gone somehow. I am completely devoid of anything that the colour.

Ah yes red, my favourite colour.

My hearing returns one decibel at time per my random thoughts of glee and admiration at the amount of blood that comes so quickly.

My dream wasn’t completely a subconscious desire and I realize I had picked up a fork and placed it square into the back of my sister’s perfect hand. Her face writhed in pain.

Why are you screaming? Surely, there’s worse pain than this?

My sight flicked once to a carving knife, placed innocently beside a smoked ham. A perfect representation of materialistic values of something like smoked meat.

I count 12.

They don’t seem to notice me now. Poor perfection is leaking and must be plugged.

I’m wandering outside wiping my hands on my dress. I like to hum. I like Kill Bill and I sing the tune of Twisted Nerve from it. I’ve seen the original film with Halley Mills and I like that one too.

I stop, feeling a little melodramatic and over the top.

As I made towards the water I notice that the red is gone.

It flickered again.

I’m not sure what I made true and what I have written in my head. The scream could be laughter.

I don’t know.

It’s flickering.

There’s one way to end the story.

I’m lowering myself into the water and I’m going to drift away into a better being, yet I’m sinking slowly, but it’s warm and I don’t need breath.

I could be dying and I don’t know.

My sister’s hand is there in front of me still, flexing as it tried to remove it again. I think I stabbed it twice more. 12, again.

I’m not entirely sure what’s happening, but I like it.

It’s a cacophony of inner desire. Mine? Murder and a higher plane of existence. It doesn’t seem likely and even though I still see her hand writhing I’m sinking, still sinking. Sinking in depression, sinking in water or sinking into my bed, I desire something else mere existence cannot give me.

So how do you write a story? Be the story. Make it come true.

But you can’t always make the best of it.

So take it as you will. I am. I seem to existence drifting as I do. My thoughts cannot stick and collect to an available surface but they seem to connect to page. The universe collects my thoughts in a single matter of time and I can feel every single once inside of my head.

Now I’m not a teenage girl. I’m a platypus. I’m Superman now.

I can be whoever I want to be.

Because I don’t exist.

I’ll be honest, whoever wrote this story exists, or may they do not. I don’t exist in your world but I exist in a parallel and it excites me that this writer has written me down for you to read. As soon as this writer said the word God and my thoughts popped into their thoughts-

I exist.

Superman doesn’t exist?

Wrong

Superman does exist.

But you can’t see him.

Everything and nothing exists and I’m in bliss with it.

My life is in the palm of my hands because I don’t exist, I’m guardian of my own world. My sister, in a way exists as does my mother’s shaking hand.

But I control their faith.

I am their God.

My sister thinks I am dead. She feels safe. She shouldn’t. The second she turns around.

I will unplug 12.

The second you believe that I don’t exist, the second I creep up behind you and look at you. You won’t see me. I won’t existence.

But you know.

That I’m in a parallel universe and I am God.

I will find you.

Very soon, you will worship me.