BONUS STORIES

 

 

Do you smell a rat?

 

Once I was a party to fresh caught rats roasting- rural louts, used to treading in the aborted fetuses of cows and laughing at the squelch, had a Hessian sack full of them, they threw it alive with writhing life on a purpose built bonfire.

The smell was the smell of Sunday dinner- sausages on a barbie or beef Wellington, according to your pocket. The high pitch screaming memorable.

A similar smell clung to the jungle in Vietnam, the dirt roads in the Congo and the broken homes of Bulgaria.

If you possess immensely sensitive noses you can pick up the sizzle of historic human bacon from even modern carvings made from ancient wood from Germany’s Black Forest.

Smell that just the once and seldom a day goes by without you smelling a sad rat.

I smell sad rats, flattened cats as road-kill, dead or diseased minds and their poisonous outpourings, waste of trees books and rooks whose only genius is to be omnivorous- to penetrate the cunts of offal with their black beaks.

 

Dark bird, absurdly braving the Chelsea tractors, sticks dogged to the verge, giving great head to a busted badger. It should be comic. But nature has no human sense of humor and all categories of tragedy have their uses.

The slightly lame and crooked rook, bill in the trough of death, trips me into remembering someone. I am not being unkind, I am merely giving vent to the multiple and constant outpourings of my awake mind. If you don’t notice things like this then you are missing so much, all the several other worlds. What a great shame.

My name is Tamsin Breath- and you have obviously only ever had a few brushes with genius; maybe none whatsoever. 

Fuck!

That makes you of no interest to an average girl like me.

 

The garish roadside pornography of demise and survival cued me into thinking about Mitch Davis- an old unsatisfactory fuck of mine who had finally and inevitably fucked up phenomenally and caused me to move my life on and along, way above and beyond his fetid little pond where literary leeches constantly sucked up to his rag and bone heels like love-struck puppies captivated by his unwashed smell of play-school revolution.

Hell, although its very existence having been retracted by the Catholics, never far from this thin man’s heels; a patsy’s hell and damnation of being in constant thrall to the ubiquitous lipstick feminine, a born stalker, schizoid and always on the look-out to avoid the truth or rejection, an obsessive constantly in danger of believing his own twisted version of events, his own vanity press.

His was a miserly meager erection that spat black worm gism- synthetic pearls.

He had the look of a rook and dwelt in a tower- the last remnants of a Welsh castle; a second floor council flat in Merthyr Tydfill: the ugly town a common venue for location filming, especially of movies requiring an Eastern Block back-drop, something awash with spies, lies and profound hypocrisy.

 

One night, after he had spent hours polishing my boots with his own saliva, I ended it.

You do what you have to do. Nobody owns you.

I was far too long not happy with having my various holistic bits caressed by the forked tongue of this pathetic excuse of a man, a bloke’s bloke who could not ever differentiate between a lie and the unobliging truth. Besides, encouraged by his excessive drinking, his confusion had recently become pathological.

This worshiper of all the goddess principles was verging upon becoming a real danger to real women. Fuck. The countless femmes who could attest to that!

And he was clearly and suspiciously homophobic, [Every bit as much as I was vehemently feminist]- an unhealthy and duplicitous trait in a man that I always find intolerable: my brother could easily have been hurt by him [There’s a premonition] and his delusional revolt against all things that rejected him [Gay-life]; land-based publishers of merit, ladies he superficially fancied, the weak ideas he floated like Pooh-sticks.

In dire need of therapy he sought out dire things he believed were therapeutic. And then, as if in some mirror reflection of his own damaged ego, he elected to gain gainful employ as a support worker for the local mental health trust. Nature would not have tolerated such a perverse thing but mankind has long been divorced from the rightness of nature.

Naturally, he was shot to shit by recreational drugs and a career of quirky circumstances and miserable relationships

He was never my ‘boyfriend’, merely the least talented of all my consensual rapists.

 

Encouraged by the exhausting experiences of a female lecturer in English at Manchester University I had set out to use him- him always being such a sucker for cunt and all.

The sap.

He would happily lap away at my moist badger, completely oblivious to the fact that I would too soon, rapidly, find him repugnant; that I would grow to disrespect his tentative hold on reality, his transparent passion for genius. Genius, in fact, had always rendered him totally insecure, made him crawl inside out with his barely hidden envy and loathing. “Love you.” he’d say.

Yes. The toad had to go. Not only is my brother irretrievably gay but he is also a creative genius- an aberration in our family.

Despite my own lame gender politics, my bro and I remain absolutely as one on one matter- we don’t like all women per se, how very sensible, and of the remainder we persist in being very picky. I am a woman unafraid to admit she’s a genuine ingenuine bitch and yet I do like my men to be utterly genuine. Go figure.

Of course the crooked rook was bound for a black plastic bin-bag.

So happy to oblige.

Jesus! [Not that I am in the least religious. OMG! Why should I have faith in anyone but myself?] Another JESUS!

A third- Jesus, I never figured there would be divisions of the rank insufferable- much like the British football scene. If I see referees in rook black I am still liable to shudder. Mitch still is a premier cunt in Y-fronts, not a fan of Swansea or of sports in general, no, he is not exactly sporting except for when it comes to scoring piss-poor own goals. What do they put on social networks- oh yes, LOL. I am not laughing, well, not much.

 

Black beak beating into the maggoty meat of a road-kill badger, screwing, doing all that he knows to pierce the rose, his thorn of a prick forgettable.

Wank. Wank.

Thank you mam.

Love you mam.

Worship you mam.

Enslaved to you mam.

What is your bidding mistress? I will serve you faultlessly even as high as the 33rd degree. [He’s getting one of those terrible, terribly easy to get, degrees in pseudo-psychology. It is yet another track to faux professionalism. Ah bless!]

Alas. Jurassic alack.

The creep. 

Get the thieving magpie off my back. Despite all his glittery blustering- nothing but lack luster utterances fall on stoned ground. Only fools obsessed with jolly folly fall for it, fools and seriously sick people, people whose only commitment would be to being repeatedly committed into very secure guardianship. Stoned people, addicts.

Unbelievable! You better believe that these people are considered way to insane to be ever believed. [What a bugger- having to get medicated, in various ways, to survive between a rock and a hard place.]

Fuck! Get a mind of your own- saddos. Adios saddos.

 

A VR serial killer of truth is on the loose.

A very fast moving Mercedes van may yet swat him as he dithers on the road-edge. Who dares to swerve to make his bloody demise all the more swift?

 

Still alive- the rooks are eyeing his dying eyes with some relish.

Peak at beaky, sneaky beaky. Yum.

 

*

 

I am in the inadequate common room of a summer gathering of The Open University, making notes. The space is gloomy with the sweat of the necessity of burning candles at both ends, bright and scintillatingly alive with the prospect of getting as much as possible right- paying heed to genuine yardsticks, needfully eliminating the intrusion of second-bests and all the perverse rest that will never ever pass muster- not in a month of harvest moons.

Here you have to be far more brilliant to excel than in the sycophantic corridors of Oxbridge.

Here is no place to clothe yourself in self-generated delusions.

 

 

TAMSIN’S NOTEBOOK

 

“Disappointment can sit like raw untreated shit in the deeply sensitive recesses of the creative mind. You would have to be callous, witless, sociopathic, psychotic not to have noticed it.

You noticed it. Phew! I thought you might be another serial killer in the making- a tall, thin, man in black, aching to stab his penis into palpitating badger.

 

And, mediocre talents- the stuff of Facebook, as proliferate as dark matter, appear to make their own sewerage plants to filter all their deserved negative criticism and make it as palatable as spring water to them, the recidivist plonkers.

 

Plain as fucking day, delusional wannabee ‘talents’ exist because their sense of smell is disabled or has gone AWOL. Miraculously and against all laws of nature, their rose-beds are in flower through all four seasons, even when the snow is three feet deep; plus all through the hours of sub-zero darkness.

Some lonely cunts publish them or assist in the vapid disguise of their self-publishing. There is no vaccine against this very infectious diseased trend to bend the proper order of things.

Do I care? No.

No amount of aping truth will let them escape the aliens’ food chain. I believe the brains of the near brain dead make sweet eating for the Greys- on the point of maggot blow, just like well hung game-birds.

 

Speaking to my much published brother I discovered that no genius will eschew the grave irritation of puerile shit or grit- creations or decisions. They have the innate means to utilise it all for their own illuminated purposes. They are inclined to recycle it through the percolation of pure uncluttered, unbuttered thought, not sullied by the marmalade of idiots. They need no recourse to shiny shiny mechanical filtration plants, vast reed beds beloved by the log-knitting Greens or multistory gravel pans.

They are, by definition, remote, reclusive, elite and exclusive, often enjoying considerable sponsorship and patronage. It is down to them which of the many social hymns that they prefer to sing and how loudly they do so. They are rarely inclined to make an exhibition of it.

 

Try your very best but you will not ever imprison them.

The Quetzal bird with it’s magnificent call and plumage has always, and will always, croak it in any cage, however much the bars are gilded.

Yes. You cannot ever have what you crave but cannot ever have.

You should never hate it because of that. You should loathe yourself for your mind ever going there.”

 

Now. Well, soon. Today’s set lecture focuses on my gay brother’s oeuvre- all the found and lost births. I will hear the absurdity of the word ‘frenum’ and smile.

It is globally criminal that he is not alive and here to hear it with me.

 

Mitch is also sort of dead- serving life for killing him so rabidly; being daily buggered by the big daddies who run such places of no escape except for the sheer hedonism of contextual gayness. Bruised wives, keeping shtum about their ginger spam lovers, smuggle in their husbands’ anal lube, clusters of unmarked soft plastic tubes stuffed like tampons in their slack fuck buckets.

Easy peasy.

And he’s editing the dreadfully serious in-house magazine; encouraging inmates to attempt a literary jihad against the truth of the world. He tells them they will be hailed as giants of the genre. But such flattery is no defense against a determined hard-on raging beneath the belly of a former prop-forward.

 

*

 

IN THE END

 

It was an infamous knifing. What else? A hand gun is always devoid of penetrative pleasure.

Imagine the bloody worst- you will not do proper service to the truth of it, unless you are, of course, a feminine creator of gore addled fiction. Women, imprisoned by their gender, are in fact, the proper giants of that genre. Ha!

Sad though.

So very sad that Mitch had taken so early to B-movie driven cannibalism.

There is the measure of his overblown imagination- the short and the long of it, diminutive really, the wreckage created by unrequited love.

Yes, really.

They emptied his distended stomach in a military hospital- found undigested evidence of my brother’s missing genitalia.

That was a wrap.

 

*

 

The last news I got was how Mitch was now going blind- a diabetic side-effect. My, oh my.

He has always been idiosyncratically myopic- how rewardingly ironic this is; the putative God of the Welsh chapels has seemed to have rediscovered his bi-curious sense of humor. Good for you Godwin.

Soon the killer prick will have to feel his feeble away around the communal showers.

That is, for me, some tiny measure of redress.

 

I will spend endless hours of disgraceful fun imaging that and then telling my suitably censored tall tales about it at dinner parties attended by genuinely interesting people.

 

*

 

Nevertheless, I still smell sad rats, flattened cats as road-kill, dead or diseased minds and their poisonous outpourings, waste of trees books and rooks whose only genius is to be omnivorous- to penetrate the cunts of badger offal with their stiff black beaks.

 

And, nevertheless, I sometimes wake up in the small hours having heard the small voice of genius calling a spade a spade. I ache after every lost brotherly conversation.

Then I shudder at the ugliness of men who deal in broken promises and disappointments.

And then, because it is England, I often hear the onerous pre-dawn rain. It reminds me of dropped soap-on-a-rope and very butch communal showers in  Mitch’s secure facility for the insane. The memory makes me smile. I am such a normal bitch.

 

This entire fiction is part of how a normal bitch gets her kicks.