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free fiction issue #1...
YOROPPA
"Yôroppa is a lovely place..." so it says on the leaflets and flyers that decorate the streets.
Right beside the sea so black and inviting. I spend hours on my crude-oil-engraved favourite rock, sitting and waiting. Waiting, you ask impertinently? You idiot, who do you think you are? I am waiting for her, the shapeshifter. The black thing protected by the sea. Waiting for her transformative prowess to spill its grease all over my burning cock, what else is worth waiting for?
I am waiting for the one significant twitch in the black shapes of its unreal surface tossing and flowing into and out of existence. The way it moves in mesmerising circles of violence reminds me of the strokes of the blade through staring eyeballs; an ice pick torn from a shoulder blade. The blackness of guilt buried in the loins of all those virgins nobody will ever miss - they will never miss them. It's that simple. The black mass of the sea moves like oil on skin pre-ignition - the black charcoal corpses of redemption a light-up royalty of desire.
But always the elusive sign, that one black sigil, that one hieroglyph of insane ignition.
I have kept my mostly nocturnal activity a secret from my family. They will never really be able to understand the blackness in me, so what's the point in burdening them with my story?
You think I am the only twisted bastard insane bitter night-raping evil executable maniac around here, yes? You should listen to the things I have had to sit and listen to in my confessional role as the padre of Yôroppa. The horror stories from the blasted black life of waves. Then you would easily understand my fascination with the ever-stormy sea and the promise it threatens to share. It has bored me to within an inch of sanity; yet my term is not yet ended and this is a life sentence in oh, so many ways. Don't stay near me, it whispers and hisses. The sea is a real black, angry, ugly place to be - a correct and proper statement of intent for a serial killer of a nutjob like me.
The clouds, those ancient forbearers of malevolence shallows shades of emasculated grey, pale in comparison to the creative fury of such a mass of death and anger. They are beyond mentioning other than to say, "one day the sky will run red with the blood of all narrative consequence."
Let me take you on quick tour of my favourite haunts in this soon to be God-forsaken hole. God bless my successor.
My Christian name is Geoffrey.
You will not hear the locals use that name though, certainly not until I make them say it with teeth broken and vision affected by a broken eye socket, blood tearing down their foreheads. I will then see them smile when they say my real name. Geoffrey. A fighting name. A tagging name. A territorial name. A moniker of fact and misfortune. I have this book of witness. It is a thick book and its pages are mostly stuck together with age and abuse. It is a black book, of course, in line with my clichéd role in this tight-knit community of fate. I am a talentless scribe but I do my best, trying to document the blackness above and beyond the call of chronicling duty. In it's rank pages that smell of cockcheese and cuntjuice are the limits of my insipid nostalgia for the way things might be run, my domain, if you will. And, yes, your name is in it. There, on one of the pages. But more of you later, you worthless fucker.
For now, come on, follow me up off this bastard black sandy shore, I gotta get this volcanic poison off of my walking boots before I wanna kill again. Even that angers me - it's so easy. Follow me, come on, keep up. Up the gravel path that leads up the quayside into the town itself. I say town, it's nothing more than a small pile of houses that have fallen down the steep hills that form a natural barrier to the outside world.
At the first set of lights that cross the coast road, you can hear the choir of angels. Every set of lights in Yôroppa, has a pedestrian crossing and every pedestrian crossing has its own angelic refrain. It's for the blind, you know. A song to lead the blind safely across the treacherous tarmac into the promised land. What a perfect image of our Lord, the generous Deceiver, the helpful Charlatan.
On the right, as you enter the town, you will see the once proud church now a snivelling old fart masturbating into its benediction and shooting a weak grey load onto the pages of Vatican propaganda - I have such shame in me when I think of the way God has treated his exiles. His fallen angels. I see sheathes of black-winged dinosaur monsters rising into a sky of grease - those who escape now are so much more fortunate than those of us left in Purgatory to rot to a slug slime of no-life. A home I abandoned a long while back, many moons, some would say. There's a nice view of the beckoning black sea from the observation window perched high upon its bell tower like a murder of crows.
Up there, just behind the church is the town hall.
The pub stands adjacent to the house of our Lord. See how the place of the godless and the place of the drunken are one and the same aspect. It comes with the territory. Drunken on the Lord, don't they say that? Well. Enough. Let's move on. I tire of these thoughts.
To our right as we pass the pub (never go in before dusk, that's the golden rule of Decadance) you will see the cottages of the aged and infirmed. Watch the windows glowing with the twitching curtains of blood-red eyes, ever scouring the glass for reasons, victims, gossip. Watch the black slug of gossip crawl across their ripped dry lips. Disgust you just to remark upon it.
Down the other way along Boyle Street is the primary school and the local infirmary; more a cottage hospital, a privately run poor-house in dire need of refurbishment. Right near the Art College. And down the other way is the train station, ironically the newest and shiniest chunk of architecture in Yôroppa - it radiantly beams as it spills its daily load of holiday makers onto our shore in the summer months; in winter it is a sour-faced mausoleum with no place to get warm.
In the centre of town there is another road crossing with its angelic melody. The only set of lights this side of the tunnel that leads under the mountain to the headland, a cancer belly of dusty hell. This place is in many ways an oasis in that desert that lies beyond, that light-bending place of soul scorching that disgorges so much filth into our perfect society here. By the sea. At nights, as I wander drunkenly around this town, I think of my parishioners coming and going along this long straight covered road through the mountain. I think of their passage and I remember the time when the fishing boats would bring bounty back from the sea. A dead black wretch of a woman she now is. All life fucked from her dry pelvis in the name of commerce. All Gods forsaken.
Let us break the daily bread. Baker's here to the right. We gotta cross the road to get to the fishmonger's there, by the café spilling single mothers all over the road like zombies spilling from a sepia-toned screen. Then you got the hair dresser's. This side, headed out into the olde towne you got the best, no, the only decent restaurant. It is a good restaurant. Good wine. Good beef. Good turnips. I likes my beef and turnips and the restaurant is the only place to get good beef and turnips this side of the black mountain. Bread, let's get the bread sorted before all the shop is emptied.
My fob watch peels midday, God how the world feels so steeped in blackness even at this hour, only bread will alter my perception so that I can contain my real hunger until the midnight hour.
(c) 2007 Mike Philbin (first chapter of the brand new novel)
publisher to be announced
