Exercise 1

In under 30 minutes, with no distractions, improvise in prose on the topics below. The word count should be at least 500.
A Voyage Round Your Bedroom

Through the oversize portal they came. Across galaxies and stellar arms of green and blue and grey they came. Through the oversize portal, of mindboggling size, a thousand times the size of the ship, bounded by organic matter, with transparent matter fixed. At regular, almost pre-ordained intervals, the portal would open, and great gaseous clouds would emanate. For a long time now, the high priests of space flight had been determined to map this most enigmatic of phenomena. Was it a signal, a form of crude language? Many had debated that in fact the deep, booming noises that centred vibrated from the portals, the dual portals in fact, although one never opened, simply its colour changed from year to year, the booming noises and colour changes were some crude language: or some base form of an incredibly complicated language.

Through the oversize portal they came, timing it so the eruptions of gas had ended, and before the window of opportunity was lost, into the darker interior of the portal, beyond where any Moo or Mar had gone before.

Landing on the nearest elavated plane, they found the surface soft underfoot, vast lines of interwoven cabling stretching as far as their eyes could see. Soft, damp, almost tropical feeling. One of the explorers look at his instrumentation and took a deep breath inside his helmet. Posterity would tell as he unclipped the safety bolts around his neck and popped his own lid, a tiny gasp of air escaping as the pressures equalised. His colleagues looked around in horror, but after all, he was the chief Mar, ahead of all the Moos in their carefully defined social strata.

After a pause and a tentative sniff of the air, he took a deep breath.

“Almost fetid. There's no sign of anything alive here, and yet it smells bestial.”

The underling nearest him nodded and said “you'll forgive us then, if we don't take our helmets off? We're here to map, not to sniff strange stenches that we may never know the effect of.”

The leader's shoulders shook slightly as he silently laughed. “That's fine. And I won't mention it when we get back, that you were too afraid. No matter, you'll know.”

The underling turned away, cheeks reddening, neck flushing with shame and anger and disdain. He could take his helmet off if he wanted. In fact. His helmet. That was the answer. He stepped smartly forward towards his superior, who half turned in surprise.

“What are you,” he began, but was cut short by the crunch of his underling's helmet faceplate impacting into his nose. He recoiled in pain and anger, and began to reach for the bush knife on his belt, but the underling, shorter but faster and stronger, grabbed him and butted him again, the blood smearing and distorting his vision, and again, and again and again. The superior went limp in his hands and he pushed him back, throwing the rag doll corpse away.

“Clean me,” he said, staring into the bloody dark caused by the matter slowly sliding down his faceplate. He felt the rush as two of the others who had been standing by in mute horror moved to grab something, anything, he didn't see what, to clean the face plate. Still smeared, but with their wide eyed faces visible, he looked at them.

“This is a dangerous place, with dangerous air, and animals. Let's get back to the ship and take some readings, and scout from the air. It's the only way to be sure. Once we're on the way back to the portal, we can mourn the loss of our great Mar chief, may his name never be forgotten, but never spoken.”

With the invocation at the end of his speech he looked at his colleagues threateningly. They looked between each other and returned the invocation. “May his name never be spoken but never be forgotten.”

He nodded approvingly, and stared over the precipice a small distance away from them, sheer and geometrically straight.

“We'll dispose of the body over there, from the ship.”

The two looked again, and shrugged. The social order had been upset, but was reestablishing itself. They picked up the body, one to the legs and one to the arms, and trudged aboard the ship. In a short while, they came through the oversize portal, one lighter, one free.

With a suddenness that almost cracked in the silent wasteland, she strode towards me, the snow crunching and ice crackling underfoot. Close enough that I could see the pores on her face, the individual eyelashes, memories of them clumped together, us laying on the couch, collapsing in a fit of giggles, laughing at something from earlier in the night, watching the sun come up. That conversation that you have, all night and into the morning, till the sky pinkens and cracks the shield of safe night, bringing you into another day, the excitement in the pit of your stomach. Sometimes it doesn't stop.

And if it doesn't, then you should grab it and hold it as though your life, your very existence in the universe depends on it, because it does, in a way that I couldn't even begin to comprehend then. It goes to the heart of everything, and you run for it and grab it and hold it, and hope, with all the pitiful self-interest in the shallow cesspool of your heart that the other thinks the same. Because then, just then, you have a chance. Sometimes though, the conversation stops. And I knew then, just then that I had none.

Smash. Glass tumbles. Spinning through the air, end on end, the shards arc away, glittering and flitting and flying through the early spring light coming through the main windows. The tinkle and patter as it lands is a contrast to the brutal sound of the pane smashing and breaking, en route to violation.

Deep breath. Push down. Pull the arms back. The wave of nausea rising up like a tree growing through me in fast forward, a hundred years of growth in a few seconds. The french doors rattle backwards against the frame as I lean back and instinctively try and extricate myself. I fight the natural urge and try and force myself to relax. I can feel the blood in my temple. Glass tumbles through the air. The house is quiet, one of those rare occasions I'm left to my own devices. Probably for the best if I'm honest.

Force myself to relax and push down again. I should have used the floor bolts to stop the doors moving about. Well, maybe next time. The ridiculousness of the thought made me laugh, even now. Around my feet, the blood pooled, seeping into the carpet, warm and slippery. It sluiced down the partial pane and onto the frame, dripped and flowed unevenly from there, some of it finding its way back onto the frames below, coating them as well. It's surprisingly sunny today, a rare piece of azure in the sky instead of the usual slate grey. Doesn't help my finality any though. [here I could exert myself, my final power, a final act.]

My head lolled forward as I saw the first of the black patches cross my vision. Had to stay upright, till I went properly. I knew that when I fell while my hands were still grasping for the world on the other side of the glass that the wood and glass would shatter more, ripping and tearing at what was left of my arms. Tendons would shread, muscle would divorce from bone, ligaments shorn. The more thoroughly I blacked out the less likely that the final coup de grace as I went forward through the rest of the glass would wake me up. The benefits of forward planning; and bitter experience.


It's
not
likeillrem

with a jerk I came back from the semi conscious tilt. My breath inhaled sharply and chillingly through lips as the glass in my forearm bit in unexpectedly.

“Elizabeth? What are you...”

An inrush of wind and dust and leaves as my mother rushes in, dropping the shopping bags. I her the eggs crack as they land. She'll be mad at me for that later, ifI


My eyes open again I feel hands, arms under mine, supporting the weight, trying to lift me off the glass that's jutting into my arm like an iceberg, the rest of the doorframe under the water, it certainly looks that way nowflooringfloodingandflyinginblackandwhiteand

“Oh my god, please, please hurry. My baby girl, my Elizabeth, my...”

My eyes open again. The ceiling rose is dirty. I wince at the fabric biting into my arms below the elbow. My eyes close.

My eyes open again. And again and again. And now it's the height of summer, the day before my 18th, and I lay here in the pristine hospital bed, the nurses fussing brusquely around me. They know why I was here. The severed tendons and brutalised muscles in my arms are, truly, honestly the least of that girls problems, I don't know why she did it, poor thing, I mean look at her, I wish I looked like her, as if that was the only thing that mattered, that they could never understand, my inability, my failure, my fucking bitter, bile spitting failure, to bring something, anything, that burned with the fire of the new, that would scorch the sky and tame the earth because it was fresh in a way that made people's heads spin and minds reel. I sighed again and slept.

My eyes open again. It's the feel of the last big weekend before the weather turns and our clothes turn longer and warmer and hide our bare flesh away from prying, inquisitive eyes. Three weeks out of that bad, and my legs are still unsteady, far unsteadier than my mind is now. They betray me and wobble and wave, and they're not helped by this deck that holds prying, inquisitive eyes. Eyes who stand on the other side of the bar on the boat on the river and don't even look abashed as they stare at my arms, for once not hidden by sleeves or some other tailor's trick of gauze, and linen and artfully, and doesn't she look so elegant? Clumsily covered with makeup, concealer misnamed, my exposed upper limbs are a call to abuse, none of it original, none of it new, and none of it knew, not really, what you go through to get there, unless I'd been in some terrible vehicular accident, and even at that it was rude to make assumptions and ruder to point and look and everything else, and even ruder to, oh fuck it. I threw the drink, glass and all over the rail, it splashing gently, can't even tell if it smashed, probably from this height above the water. Looking, I couldn't see the glass, but I could see, just about dispersed the bloodstain it had left in the water, before the holy baptismal of the river washed it away, diluted and eventually draining away into the ocean. A snigger from the eyes on the other side of the bar. I put my weight on the ball of my foot and let the world rotate around me, and walk off the boat, stupid boat on the river. I sigh. I'll sleep later.

My eyes open, and even from my bed, I can see the blink, blink, blink and flicker of the lights in the city from our house, this creaking pile atop the hill north of the city. We're safe here now. Safer now there's less glass. And don't think I don't see that the kitchen drawer locks, mother. As if I'd resort to that depth of cliché. You don't understand it, you never have. It must be late in the night, or very early in the morning. I don't quite get when it switches from being one to the other, they flow uncomfortably into each other in a way that makes me easy. Delineate, deter from ambiguity, much preferred. Outside though, there's a bird who's singing, something cheerful about the need to feed his family. Ambiguity is probably better considered when you don't need to worry quite so fucking much about where your next meal is coming from. The glow over the back of the horizon tells me that the sun will be coming up soon, and I will face another day.

Consequence, follows action, regardless of intention, and by any intentions and rhyme or reason I should not have been here. I should not have been able to lift, and drink from, and caress the cold stem of, my breath condensing against the side of, that glass that ended up in the river, spilled any unhappy, and empty, no longer half full or half empty just a thing, an empty vessel.
`
Ever since I was born, or at least since I stopped being a solpisist, I started to corrode. I might start retreating back into that, maybe I already have. How would I even know? But I suspect, strongly suspect, and it burns, and hurts a little every time I think it, that no-one else feels like this. No-one, in the history of the world, in hundreds and thousands of millions of people, has ever felt this way. How vain.

Every day I decay a little, and with each passing minute and second and hour, another slice, slice, slice of my life, my existence, my whole is lopped off. We call this living, and we do it because we must. There is more than intent, more than just being, and more than just living. That's what the others could never understand, that's why we fought bitterly, tears and hoarse throats, drained and empty, hollowing inside out. The road to hell is, as they say, paved with good intentions, and that's why well meaning actions that result in nothing – well it's nothing short of death. Bad intent, the worst intent that you have in your darkest, bitterest moments, that results in beauty is far beyond death, because the dissonance is too great for us to handle, to comprehend. Now I realise, as the seconds and minutes and hours are shaved away that they lack a something the others call life, experience, living.

Through the window, I should have shut the curtains before retreating to bed last night, every night, I do it and every morning I wake before dawn, even in the grey wasteland we call weather, before dawn and wonder why I didn't do it. But through the window, and through the haze, the sun is audaciously starting to creep over the horizon off to the side of the city. Soon light will stream into windows, and people all over the place will blink, and yawn, and throw off their comforters and comforts and push themselves out into the world for another harsh day. Protecting themselves by insulating themselves from feeling, coating the wire. Inert glassware to carry the vicious acids.

If it has to be, then our – my – entire purpose has to be, as we corrode and crumble into nothingness every day, that we make something new. All of my intentions must be devoted to that end or we are all for nought, regardless of what the others, the faceless, and the leader may do to us. Even under the heaviest burden of oppression and influence we can still create that something new, something special, the original from which all others are derived. That, and only that can give the hours and seconds and minutes value, and meaning, and purpose.

I sigh. For now, I sleep.