Untitled ( Part 11 ) Wasted Words

WHEN WE WENT into the red room and it was busier than I had ever seen it in my life.


It took me a while to realise why but then I remembered all the capsules were in the process of being rebuilt and everybody also had a ghoul attached now. So for everybody else it probably didn't look that busy.


'Dunstt!'


I turned around at the sound of my name. A little startled. We didn't really do the whole name thing, partly because we didn't need to and we didn't want to waste our words on trivialities.

It was Coin. She wears grey and I spend time with her on Exposure Day. I wanted to say Hi but I also wanted to keep my twelve words to use all at once. But she and some of the other girls never did. They were careless and spat them out a tiny piece at a time.

'Hi.'

Two words wasted. Foolish girl. I nodded and sat down next to her. The red room is only tiny but it's where we all like to hang out when we all want to be together. It's a round room and we all sit along the edge in a circle.


'Can't go to our rooms.'


She only had five words left now. I shook my head. Sometimes I think that's all we do. We nod and shake our heads like sheep. Stupid stupid girl. And then I started to worry about what would happen if Coin had the gift of mindspeak and she could hear what I was thinking about her. But then I stopped thinking like that because mindspeak is something I've made up so why would anybody have it in the first place?

Everybody had a ghoul and most of them seemed to be sleeping except for one which did something I wasn't expecting. It slipped off somebody's back and stood in the middle of the circle. And then it looked at me. Eyeball to eyeball. And it was like we were both in our own party that nobody else had been invited to.

It looked uncertain, as if it was waiting for my permission to make the next move.


'You can see me.'


Four words. I froze. I wanted to answer him back but I wasn't going to waste my words on a ghoul, I was saving them for my friends. I nodded.

He was agitated. I think he was more nervous than me at this sudden turn of events.


'Nobody.'


I still refused to return my words.


'Nobody should be able to see us. How can you do it?'


And then they fell out. Like spittle. They fell out before I could grab hold of them to put them back.


'A crackle gave it to me. It's a gift I don't want.'


Twelve words. All gone in one go. I could have cried.




A few seconds later she was dead. The girl that he came from. She was dead because he killed her.

Untitled (Part 10) Temporary Blocks

When I woke up it was Moon Day and somebody had taken all the walls down and replaced them with temporary blocks. They do that occasionally and by the time you get back again everything is back where it should be.


I don't know why they do it and I wished they would at least put thing back a little differently so we can all have a change. Nothing ever changes and that's why you have to make the most of the small things, like holding hands and words and yolk. For some reason I find it easier to tick when the walls are down and I managed to manifest everything that I wanted. Layla Juice and puff berries and slat bread. I was pretty stuffed and it was a nice change to walk along the colourdoors full to bursting.

Moon Day's are my favourite days because you can pretty much do what you want as long as you practice your ticking. And you even get twelve words as long as you don't talk while you are ticking or tick while you are eating. I usually spend the day visiting Ink and Roth and both of them come to mine later on in the day. But today we had no capsules to go to so we had to go elsewhere until they put everything back where it should be.


Even some of the colourdoors had been taken down so we spent most of sunfest trying to get from one place to another without crossing into any of the forbidden zones. And that's the last thing we wanted to do because we didn't want to lose any of our words when we had twelve to ourselves and we wanted to use them.

Untitled (Part 8 ) Dreams

When I'm in my capsule it's just me and the world is locked out.


Just me and the hum. It drives Ink crazy. She told me once. I think she received a gift from a crackle that makes everything louder but I'm just guessing. Because it's not that bad, you get used to it. It's the walls talking.

I don't know how she can enjoy helmet so much and get so wound up over the hum. If anything it helps me to sleep. It's there all the time but is sounds louder at night when there's nobody else to take your mind off it.


Sometimes I cup my hands to the wall and listen to it to see if it speaks. But it doesn't. It's just a hum and they don't really talk. That's just something we say.


At night I like to talk to myself. There are no rules about that or if there are, nobody has bothered to tell me. Most nights I talk myself to sleep or give up when I run out of words to tell myself. We are not used to talking so it's not easy even holding a conversation with yourself.

And then there are dreams. I think I have more dreams than everyone else does. Once I dreamed that we all had unlimited words and we all ended up speaking so much it became unbearable and nobody could hear themselves speaking. It was a total waste of time in the end and because we all could talk as much as we wanted to our words lost their power. We didn't enjoy them or appreciate them anymore and in the end we stopped talking and decided to limit ourselves again.

And then there's Noah. I dream about him all the time. Noah and ship and the flood. It's because of helmet. It put's all these things into our heads. Some of the things stick and we just know them but other things stay in the background like the hum. And then they turn up in our dreams. Weird things like Noah and the two by two animals and Hitler and pockypines, the little creatures made of pins.

Untitled ( Part 7 ) Ghouls

I have decided to call them Ghouls.



I can't think of a better way to describe how they look and how they make me feel but they make me feel like somebody is tying a knot in my stomach the way you would tie up a pair of shoe laces.


I have never spoken my Wombday words in front of anybody else before but I had to. She was there and her ghoul was there at the same time and I had no choice but to let him become part of our secret conversation. Of course it was all deeply forbidden. Nobody is allowed to speak their words to more than one other person. And on Wombday it's Mentha. It's always Mentha because she holds my hand and doesn't let go of it.


' You feel anything?'


I felt guilty straight away for asking a question. You never ask a question because then they are forced to waste their three words on answering your question instead of thinking up their own words. I could feel myself going red and I tried to apologise inside my head, in the hope that she would hear me. In the hope that a Crackle really had given her the gift of mindspeak.


I really was pulling at straws though and by the look on her ghouls face he knew what I was thinking.


'I feel nothing.'



I felt bad all the way back down the colourdoors so I gripped her hand tighter than I have ever done before in the hope that it would be a kind of apology. I felt terrible and I would have to wait another week so that she could say her next three words to me.


Words are precious. We don't have much else. Except on Exposure Day but I would feel bad all week for what I said.


I'm sorry 


I screamed in my head.


I'm sorry.


If  only she had the gift. If only she could hear me and we would be ok the two of us until next week. But he could hear me. I was sure of it. Her ghoul. I could see it in his eyes, his dark eyes. Eyes that looked through me as if he was looking at somebody behind me and not me.


But maybe he was. Maybe I had my own on my back and I just couldn't see it or wasn't supposed to.

Untitled ( Part 6 ) MindSpeak

I was still holding hands with Mentha as we walked around the birthing Zone.


It's amazing how important touch is when you can't talk. It almost becomes a second kind of speech. We have done this so many times I am beginning to think that we can read each others minds. I tell her things all the time in our own mindspeak but she never gives me an inclination that she has heard me.

I told her about my dream and how Noah was building a ship so that we could all escape, two by two and how we were collecting adjectives instead of wood or whatever ships are made out of. I wonder how many times she has been visited by a crackle and whether she gets triangles or circles or squares. Sometimes I think she can hear me when I talk to her and that maybe that's the gift she has been given. The gift to hear what other people are thinking. When I consider this possibility I try to shout louder inside my head until I end up giving myself a headache and needing to manifest another Yoogle.


We are poked an prodded. We have things removed and taken from us. Blood, skin, urine and anything else they can think of. It's not good. But it is slightly less annoying than Triple Helmet. At least we are not forced to sit in the same position for hours. At least we can walk and think for ourselves without the constant beeping and screeching from the head sets. I still saw the monsters but I tried my best to filter them out and the constant prodding and poking helped with that. But they were getting clearer. More like us. People like us. Not monsters but people that shouldn't have been there. People attached to people.

But of course I couldn't tell anybody about them. It was forbidden. You couldn't talk about the Crackles and their night time visits and about the gifts they bring. Or else something more terrible than words would happen. Everybody knew that. I don't know how we know it but we just do. Maybe we are born with that knowledge or maybe we learn it in helmet or perhaps the crackles whisper it into our heads when they visit without us knowing it.


I spotted Ink looking gloomy. She didn't like the berthing zone at all. But she was older than me and they did more things to her because her body was getting closer to the age they take more of an interest in. They take her into special rooms and they open her legs. She told me that once on exposure day. They open her legs and do other things that I'm not looking forward to.

Untitled (Part 5) Monsters

YELLOW YELLOW RED RED PIRKLE BROWN BROWN



Wombday's always mean a trip to the birthing zone. As we wear white we go straight after Sun Fest. My stomach was making all kinds of noises as I moved along the colourdoors because my zolk was pathetic. I can never tick very well when I am nervous and I hate going to the birthing zone. So most Wombday's I go empty and hungry.


But something was different. I was seeing them for the first time. At first they looked just like shadows but then they started to take shape. I saw one attached to Mentha at first. She always sticks to me when we go to the birthing zone because she is as nervous as me and we hold hands and share our three words. Then I noticed that everybody had one. Some were bigger than others and some were still and others were restless.


I wanted to say

                        can't you see them too?

but of course we only had three words and I also didn't want to waste all of mine before Noonfest. The lively one's weren't too bad, the ones that moved their arms and their heads, but the stiff ones were terrifying. They just hung like dolls.


I didn't have one or at least I could see it unless it was hiding behind my back.


Now at least I knew why the Crackle had visited be during the night. He had giving me the gift. The gift to see these monstrosities that nobody else could see. There's always a gift when they come but most of them are small gifts, like the gift to hold my breath underwater that I received when I was 9 or the gift of patience that I was given on my twelfth. But this was something entirely different. I could now see something that nobody else could see. Something that had been there all along, but hidden.


Not nice things. Monsters.

Untitled (Part 4)

I RECEIVED MY crackle in the middle of the night. It woke me up when I was dreaming about building a ship that was made of adjectives. Adjectives are the way we add colours to our words. I learned that from Helmet. We learn everything from helmet. I was building the ship with Noah and now he will be upset that I have left him to do it all by himself. I wonder if he is still there and whether he has sent out a search party. Dreams are stupid.



I don't know if there is any method or madness to receiving our crackles. I can go through phases where I get one every night and then I sometimes have to wait another fourweek to get one.

It landed on top of me and nudged me awake. They don't have any manners do crackles. They are ultimately selfish. They barge into your life and out again without as much as a sorry or a thank you.



I held out my bed hands and he gave it to me and then popped. They always pop quietly so that nobody in a surrounding capsule can hear them. I don't know if they live to fight another day or whether it is the end of their life cycle. Every crackle that visits me is a different colour and this one was green so maybe it has died in my capsule.


It's a triangle and it's the first time I have been given a triangle. I usually get round gifts but there is sometimes a square one. I am still half asleep and part of me is still collecting adjectives. So I am thinking about the word handsome when I hold the triangle to my head to let it start working. This one feels different. Stronger than the others I have been given. I feel like I need to lay down even though I am already lying down. This is a big one, I think. A very big one.








(C) Ally Atherton