Liam Chimba
I was 6 months clean, and the sky was stuck in a permanent golden hour. Clean, as in, clean from what? Just clean. That is, spiritually barren, normal; light in weight and soul and being. White as the basin that Pontius Pilate washed his hands. Just so white that I’d lost my accent, that I would fit in.
And my language, too, came from the outside inwards. I walked along the east coast, alongside sandstone cliffs eaten away by the waves, alongside hospitals with their facades eaten off, then alongside pillboxes placed there only to screw with me. I was waiting for a messianic gesture. The next person I came across that recognised me must be an angel. I saw only more pillboxes. That machine gun nests were named the same as medical boxes was something divine, the word with a capital ‘W’, a cosmic irony; that the telephone wires floated directly upwards was something the same as puppet strings.
I mean, pillboxes.
And vertical telephone wires– the delicate lines that hung above each person. A dozen marionette dolls, twirling and pirouetting past me, dogs attached to their leads, leads attached from above. When smiled at, I could see the strings that forced the gesture. “Morning.” As if any of us could tell the hour anymore. My girlfriend ate cream cheese with scones– related somehow, no really, how? Thought more on it and this was how: I looked back at those puppets to see them exchange their dogs. Sullen whimpers and tears, it was easier to tell the children where their dinner came from that way.
I prided myself on being used to this feeling: the vacuum-sealed diaphragm, or cheeks flapping from being bitten out. Figured I was better than everyone else for it. As I walked, I heard behind me the pillboxes light up for a moment, firing, and a silence. Just the spent cases and the sounds of the ocean, calming as it was. Wondered, though not too hard, what cream tea tasted like. Just saw a permanent white in my vision, tabula rasa, a blank slate on which all was marble. Paul, whathaveyou.
Saw a cliff of stone or some old building, now calcified. Looked at it for longer to look for signs if it was man-made, though I really wasn’t qualified for that kind of analysis. Anything could be graffitied after all. Didn’t want to stand still for too long. Pillboxes were eyes that looked for people maybe a bit too much like me. They rapped and wept and shot out at the waves, which, you know how it is. Weeping. Or praying. Not sure. I struggled saying stuff in my head, all rent, all second-hand. But when they lit up, all was blinding. Light had that quality maybe: to erase any feature or depth. Blood comes the same tinge as water. Again, you know how it is. There was a certain sound you come to associate with turning holy, to holes, that is; the blood coming out to the staccato rhythm of the pillboxes.
Months. Saw some crows, still able to fly, still surviving off of something. That was good. Wanted to cry but it all felt a bit like bleach, connected back round to cream tea waybackwhen. Touched my stomach whilst I hid in a nature reserve. Thought I might’ve seen a dog even, though there wasn’t much in the way of proof and neither of us felt much like confronting one another. Bludgeoning required a certain amount of energy. And energy requirements were inversely proportional to the return of investment. Thought that maybe it just had sentimental owners, unable to bring themselves to sacrifice. Or the kind that still had enough to eat, though, such a thought didn’t change my wandering.
A sign I guess. An augur. By that I mean, a kind of hope, the birds were still around. More walking and the pillboxes had cataracts these days: they looked either everywhere or nowhere. But produced the same response within me regardless. That I’d be like the holes of the bodies lapping in red-white whirlpools off beneath the nests, slowly bobbing like death was unsure of itself. I walked and spent the time waiting on something, the sun to give way, our stomachs to run out of ammunition. Not sure. But the birds weren’t enough.
I wanted a sign that meant something I guess.
By ten months clean, again clean from what, by what, in what sense—I’m not sure. But ten months clean and I was starting to put it into words. This is that: the world was faster than me, louder too. The acceleration of its prose outpaced my ability to think about its quickening destruction. After the pet dogs had been cannibalised, well, there’s a certain logical progression that someone only thinks about if they stay up to date. If they live in it. I saw another faceless hospital repurposed into an entrepôt, a hub for bartering, decaying willows fashioned into a makeshift platform in the biggest room. I stuck between the tide and cliff to avoid being caught. IV drips were easily transformed to cells, the pillboxes lay just outside, white, pristine; a blinding light that enraptured my bones as, presumably, someone tried to escape. They were sparse with gunfire. Maybe more economical for the guns. Maybe just easier for whatever surgery followed. I heard the sounds of guttural coughing. And scalpels entering the body without anaesthesia.
They say that one of the steps in recovery is accepting a divine power. Some great eye in the sky with a sight for the road ahead, a telos-narrative to humanities collective history; this is good for suffering. It puts it all into a neat and tidy line. It also does not work when I am moving in circles, when the days won’t end, and when humanity has started to eat its own tail. And so, I walked without direction, along the perimeter of a growing marsh. Across the raised embankment of what used to be a jetty. Was looking for some more birds, as proof to there being more than this, found only bodies.
Looking out at the kiln of existence. Couldn’t help but despair at the hands that made it, that pulled the puppet strings. That humanity was once global, then divided to states, then households, then bodies, then the flow of incisions made by surgeons; rusted saw blades and garrote wire, gradually split more and more. The increasing balkanisation of life pointed my head increasingly upwards, waiting on the birds. But I saw only the furrows of grey fields lit up by barbed wire, crisscrossing fences and a network of lattices, interconnecting as they wrapped and locked the earth into something more and more split.
The world still generated signs. Maybe a side effect of detoxing. Old sewage works. A scarecrow a little too bloodied. An atom split in two, two to four, and so on, and further. And so on until the atoms made up a bird, an iron bird, silently gliding, its white gleam outstripping the sun with bleach, its payload a dull replica of a repetition. Until that happened, and we were all waiting on it, the world’s largest signs shook us with their banality.
A year clean and I was stuck in a celebration. My girlfriend ate that scone next to me, plucked out the candle, blew it out because I was “taking too long.” A year clean and my family, which I must’ve lived with, felt obliged to use the words “pure”, “prodigal”, I couldn’t quite remember–the world was a newspaper headline whether I was in it or not.
I heard bubbles of people taking off to my side: sin, further cleansings, that sort of thing. It seemed like a terrible distraction, to be honest. I read in silence. Waiting on a sign. The birds were stuck in an iron sky, still the colour of jaundiced skin. The smoke from the candle wafted, pulled in a line as if by someone. Then nothing. Dispersed. A person sat opposite me buttered a scone. Another asked for a slice of some vanilla cake. I must’ve had the knife in my hand from the way that I cut it. I thought of that pulled string-smoke, and wished for a bird.
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Liam Chimba is a graduate of Creative Writing and Philosophy from the University of Chichester and University of Essex. He lives on the east coast of England. His work has been published in Fugitives & Futurists, Peatsmoke Journal, and Maudlin House.