The Master of Changes: Chapter 2

Continued from Chapter 1

It was the second day of Harry's stay in Nag Nog Creek; he already hated the place, but since he was there for good, he decided to make the best of it. He woke up early, before many of the other villagers had woken up, and he made his way to the market square. The village was veiled in blue as the sun peeked over the horizon. By the time he reached the market place, street vendors were already beginning to set up their stalls, as the birds began to chirp.

There was a bucket in the middle of the street; Harry had seen it before, but he couldn't remember where. Just as he began to walk over to investigate, he felt a hand clamp his shoulder. 'Sorry sir, employees only.' said a voice; Harry spun around to see that it belonged to a elderly man in a police uniform. His gaze met the intent stare of the man who now held him in place with the weight of his arm.
Harry stuttered, 'I-I-I was just interested in the bucket.'
'Nobody, but nobody, gets to look at the bucket, sir.' boomed the policeman who after years, half a century perhaps, of maintaining the law, seemed to have a certain calmness along with his authority.
Harry smiled at the officer, and walked slowly back to his cottage where he absent-mindedly removed his jacket and threw it in the dustbin on the way in. He dropped himself into a sofa, his eyes lost to the ceiling, and drew a finger up to his chin in contemplative thought.

Harry was one of those guys who could see potential in people, not because he knew potential, but because he could read other people who saw potential. Most unfortunately, in this case, Harry was terribly mistaken, for the people he read, were not the usual run-of-the-mill human, but like a piece of dough that has been kneaded and turned on itself many times, and wine spilled on it; these villagers had been messed up by generations of inbreeding. Harry believed that he could take Cranberry, and sell this creature back to the very people that created it, in the form of popular entertainment; Yes, television.

Cranberry Richards made for a very interesting case study. Each person is unique, that is what makes them an individual, like the ingredients and cooking times that go into baking a cake, a person like Cranberry could only be made by pure accident. He was brought up by the family dogs; his parents often neglected him because they were usually too busy having sex in the garden. It's lucky that he didn't die because the dogs themselves had been also neglected and left to fend for themselves, and they did that by hunting the local stray cats, although sometimes they happened to be domestic; Cranberry Richards never lost his penchant for cat meat, an acquired taste he would often say at the dinner table to himself.

The problem with Cranberry Richards, and everyone kind of knew it at the back of their minds, was that he was totally useless. If it were not for his daily performance, every morning, at the village market: he would not have money to go to the pet store and buy cat meat for his dinner. Aside from knowing how to prepare cat meat like no other chef in the world, mister Cranberry Richards A.K.A Jon Pickstick, had absolutely no talent.

Let me carry on this rant about Cranberry Richards, who I am starting to hate more and more as I write this. He is also someone who hates mainstream things, he likes underground stuff like outsider art and music, refusing to listen to anything else. He even finds underground a little too mainstream for his tastes, so he looks towards the outsider scene for his music collection. For this reason, and it is a very somewhat retarded reason, he carries a tape recorder in his pocket, incase he can catch someone singing in the shower or humming while doing the dishes. His last recording, and his most recent favourite, was the sound of a four year old girl singing 'London Bridge', albeit badly and messing up the lyrics. Thus, this horrid, disgusting, and little man will hate all forms of popular music, dismissing it as no good, or sometimes saying 'It sounds like the artist has no talent and is just doing it for the money.' And thus, that is why Cranberry has no skills unto himself.

The next morning, Harry sprang out of bed, not groggy eyed as usual, but with a smile so full of delight that it would have split the corners of his mouth. He hobbled down the stairs to his study and plopped himself into the leather chair which hissed as he sank into it. He grabbed the telephone handset and made several calls that morning, one of them to the mayor; he sang and whistled the rest of the day, and finally fell asleep on the sofa. That night, while the villagers slept, technicians from out of town were busy setting up cables in the street. At dawn, a box was delivered to each house in the village with a note, which read 'Please find inside this box, completely free of charge, a plasma widescreen television unit. A technician will call later to install it for you.'

When Cranberry woke up, as usual lying naked on the kitchen floor surrounded by cat bones, he lay there for a while and thought about quitting his day job. Later, he found a note in his letterbox; it was addressed to him, but the name was spelt wrongly, 'Crumbly Rickards'. He opened the note, and read it out loud and slowly to himself, stumbling on letters and sometimes rereading when he mispronounced, smiling whenever he had uncoded the word. The note read:

'Dear Mr. Rickards,

your extraordinary performance at the daily market has been brought to my attention. Perhaps, we could meet sometime to discuss whether you would be interested in appearing in your own television show.

Yours sincerely,

Harry MacMann.'

The sender had scribbled his contact details beneath the message. Cranberry tucked the note inbetween his buttcheeks for safe keeping. He then opened the front door and walked straight into a large box which he tripped over, falling onto his face, and shouting 'FUCKING BITCH!' at the top of his voice.


To Be Continued...

Bed Time Story

It was never easy growing up for me, and it’s even harder to describe the childhood I suffered. Perhaps it’s true that madness runs in our family; my father who jumped from the top floor of an office tower, and my mother whom was later committed to a mental asylum for reasons that I shall explain later.

I was no more than seven years old when my father decided to commit suicide. My mother, who was in her early thirties at the time, was two months pregnant. I have little memory of the period, apart from the funeral, where I saw my father for the last time; the mortician had done a good job in reconstructing his body. My mother, distraught with grief; her belly bulging with the dead man’s child, my future brother, beneath her dark funeral gown.

Only a ragtag assembly of my father’s friends and work colleagues showed up for his service; the only relative being his mother, my grandma. I had always assumed that since he came to the country as a migrant worker, most of his family remained overseas, perhaps knowing little of his circumstances, hence my mother received little monetary assistance in bringing us up, relying heavily on the welfare system to support us.

Fortunately, grandma decided to stay with us soon after the funeral to help mother. She was a quiet lady who kept to herself most of the time, staying in her room with the door locked. I’d often hear her sobbing and wailing; a mother dealing with the death of her only son. After several months had passed since my grandma moved in, it became apparently obvious that my mother and her did not get along.

I would often hear grandma’s screaming and shouting coming from the downstairs kitchen, in a tongue that I did not understand, and promptly afterwards as I watched from the landing, my grandma would stomp up the stairs, her face contorted and red with anger, her eyebrows furrowed so deeply that they would hide her dark beady eyes. She would walk past me, pushing me out of her path, enter her room, and slam the door loudly behind her. Then almost immediately, my mother would run up the stairs and slap me on the back of the head, taking her distress out on me.

It wasn’t long before my baby brother was born. For the first time, in a long while, my mother began to look happier. The baby slept in a cot beside my bed. Sometimes the baby would wake up during the night, and hurriedly, my mother would run into the room and take my brother downstairs to the kitchen to feed him. Soon afterwards, the screaming could be heard to settle down to intermittent cries until they eventually became quiet.

It was around this period, that my grandma would also come into the room to check on me while my mother was busy. I took the opportunity to ask her about my father; I wanted to know why he killed himself. She leant in to my face as I felt her breath against my neck and ear, her voice was raspy, uttering one word that seemed to forcefully shake my body, ‘madnessss’.

About a week later, about the same time as usual, my baby brother began crying during the night. I had gotten used to the routine, so I stayed still, but awake in my bed as I anticipated the door to open and my mother to shuffle in. Strangely, the door did not open as soon as I had expected. Strangely, the baby had stopped crying, and laying in bed I turned my head towards the cot. It was dark; the moonlit glow from the thin curtains unveiled the outlines of the cot; I saw nothing. Suddenly, a shadow which I had assumed to be a play of light, darted across the room and melded into the blackest corner.

A light bulb lit up on the landing outside my bedroom. I could make out the edges of the doorframe as light leaked into the room, the silhouette of the door swung open; the lights of my room came on. My mother screamed and then collapsed. I saw my brother’s limbs littered on the floor which was covered in blood; my mother laying in a puddle of redness. Arms and legs appeared to have been torn from the body. The torso was on the end of my bed, belly ripped open and blood still gushed from the gaping hole. His head was still attached, although it looked like his face had been savagely bitten off.

I spent the next few years of my childhood in and out of institutions, spending up to months at a time in therapy. My mother never recovered from the shock. The most curious thing was that the police were never able to solve the crime, although the incident was published in the papers and shown on television, nobody claimed to have witnessed anything suspicious leading up to the moment where the attacker broke into the house.

It wasn’t until I was in my late thirties that I decided to confront my mother about that incident. There was one small detail that constantly kept rolling around in my head and nagging me. My mother and I hadn’t discussed the incident since it happened. I went to visit her at the institution where the doctor told me that she spent her days weeping and blaming herself for having not responded to my brother’s crying sooner. The day I visited her, she appeared to be peaceful and rested, albeit a little dazed from the drugs. ‘Mother,’ I asked her, ‘there is one thing that I need to ask you.’ she gazed at me and smiled, her eyes distant. I continued, ‘What ever happened to my father’s mother, my grandma?’

Her eyeballs swung wildly towards me and she laughed with a fixed grin, ‘Silly boy, your father was an orphan, on his side, you have no grandma!’

The Master of Changes: Chapter 1

Harry MacMann, a heavily built, angry man who had a habit of smashing his clenched fist down on any nearby horizontal surface, such as a table. 'Get it fucking done!', he'd shout, his face shifting colour, almost instantaneously, to a fuschia red. He was the CEO of a medium sized television broadcasting company, and breaking desks with his fists was how things got done; well, that's how Harry initiated change; he was good at what he did and he knew it.

Having devoted several minor strokes to Eutopian Televisual Broadcasting Corporation, Harry decided that it was time to retire. He summoned his secretary into the office; he didn't use the buzzer system, instead, he chose to call her at the top of his voice, 'IRENE!!', he shouted as he looked out to the street below. Nothing, he waited, no sign of the old woman whose birthname (if she hadn't lied) was Irene. It was a large office, his desk on oneside of the room beside the tall glass window, and a span of thirty feet to the door where outside his secretary sat.

He pace up and down the room, clenching and unclenching his large puffy hands. 'IRENEEEEEEE!!', he shouted once again, this time prolonging the call until his face turned purplish red and his voice turned hoarse like a wailing donkey. He comtemplated pressing the buzzer which was right next to him, the old lady was fucking deaf, he knew that, but it wasn't good enough excuse for Harry MacMann. There was a politely quiet knock on the door, Harry took a deep breath to calm himself down, 'Come in...' he said while shaking his head, the door creaked open slowly and some trembling eyebrows peaked around it, '...it's about fucking time... bitch' he spat.

The old secretary shuffled across towards the brighter side of the room, her back arched humbly in the presence of Harry who appeared even more sinister with his shape silhouetted against the window. She sat down shakily and readied a pencil to her notepad. Harry snorted, he pulled a damp hankerchief from his pocket and rubbed it across his brows; the room was cool from the airconditioning yet he was hot from the stress of waiting for this decrepid, crumbling sack of bones to cross the room. He hated Irene because she was so old, he hated the way she was so subservient, he hated the way she dressed, he hated her with all his hatred yet he only kept her in employment because she was so obedient and also she functioned as a focus for his hate.

He stared at the old woman who looked at him, ready for dictation; she caught his eye to acknowledge her preparedness for his words, and then when he returned her gaze with an intense stare, she lowered her head as if bowing to him; he loved that, and he smiled to himself. 'Dear Diary,' he began, Irene hastily scribbled into her notepad; she wasn't the ideal secretary because dictation often made her nervous, she awaited his next word as the tip of her pencil hovered nervously over the paper. Harry turned towards the window and looked to the street which was forty-two stories below, and continued, 'I have decided to quit this fucking job, do something else. I have built this empire from scratch, working my way up from a mere coffee boy, and turning this once small company into a formidably sized profit machine.' he scratched his belly. 'I will now...', he stopped, 'delete that last part Irene!' He scratched his bottom, 'I will take my leave now, to greener pastures. Go to the countryside or something; live in a small town, or village, or something; and live off vegetables that I shall grow in my backyard or...' he coughed, '...something.'

There is a village, a strange one no doubt because its inhabitants look like each other, talk like each other, and smell like each other. Why they do, nobody knows. Although, it has been speculated by sociologists, who happened to be stranded in the village when their bus broke down on the way to a sociology convention, that the people of Nag Nog Creek (for that is the name of this quaint little village) are the product of generations of inbreeding. This village, where the people are the same, and do evil and nasty things to each other as soon as the sun has hidden itself from view, is where Harry decided to spend his retirement.

It wasn't the ideal place for Harry, he only chose Nag Nog Creek because he liked the name. He had never heard of nor seen the place until a friend of the family, a sociologist, recommended it to him as a 'great place to die'. Harry's first impression of the village was that it was too small, it reminded him of the Smurf's village, he despised the fact that he knew that, and he only knew that because his murdered pet dog used to watch that stupid show.

He had bought a cottage, not far from the village centre. The village centre was marked by a well, near the well was a blacksmiths, near the blacksmiths was a tree, on one of the branches of the tree hung a plank of wood from a pair of ropes; it was a swing; the swing was the only reason why anyone would want to go to the village centre. There was a marketplace to the east of this swing, this was where the daily life of the village was actually centred; nobody needed a well, all the buildings were fitted with running water. The only reason why anyone would go to the well would be for matters of excretion when they were caught short, or too lazy to return home to use their toilet.

It was Harry's first morning in the village. He had arrived during the night to his newly furnished dwellings, slept well, woke up with a smile, showered with a song, and then he ventured out to explore the new place. His first stop was the well, he stood next to it and looked down it's shaft into it's shadowy depths; the foul stench of faeces soared upwards and surprised his scent organs like a punch to the head, and he staggered backwards, snorting the flies that had shot up with the smell into his throat cavity. He choked, then fell down on his knees to give birth to a pile of vomit on a nearby flowerbed. After expelling the entirety of his breakfast (cereal, toast, bacon, sausages, cheese and boiled eggs), he raised himself from the ground and brushed the dirt from his trousers. He wobbled over back towards the well, this time holding his breath; pale and sweaty still, he drew a digital camera from his pocket and took a picture of himself standing next to the well.

The next stop was the market square. Harry was amused by the stalls of fruit, vegetables and other items for sale that he considered useless. Amid the stalls, was a street performance. A jester stood within the circle of a crowd; Harry shoved some small children and their grannies aside to get a better view. The jester's name was Cranberry Richards; a sixteen year old who was a highly respected entertainer within the close community. His act consisted of waving his arms crazily and screaming, 'FIRE! FIRE!' while standing perfectly still on the same spot, this would last about five minutes (unless it rained, then it would be about one minute), and then he would pull a ham sandwich from his shoulder bag and begin eating it; at this, everyone would break out in raucuos laughter. Most strangers would not understand why this was so funny, but really it was an in joke between the villagers. Since most newcomers would watch the show from the front, that is while facing Cranberry, the funny stuff happened behind him.

Harry stood, slightly crushed within the crowd, a slightly bemused look on his face as he watched this young man in his traditional jester costume proceed to eat a ham sandwich, while the crowd laughed their merry heads off. He witnessed an elderly man laugh so hard that he started coughing up blood, but nobody cared, they were too busy laughing. Young kids stood on the opposite side, behind the performer, they giggled until tears streamed down their eyes and their cheeks cramped till their little faces spasmed into unreadable, deformed expressions. If Harry had watched the spectacle from where the children were standing, they would have seen that the jester had a round hole cut into the back of his costume that revealed his buttocks. As he nonchalantly ate his ham sandwich, he would excrete into the tin bucket that he stood over making bimp, bimp, bimp sounds.

Harry thought to himself, these people are crazy! They obviously hadn't discovered television. It was true, nobody in Nag Nog Creek watched television; they never even considered it, watching young Cranberry shit into a bucket while eating a ham sandwich had always been enough in way of entertainment. Harry decided that he would introduce the people of Nag Nog Creek to the device that had made him rich, the box of dreams: television.


To be continued...