Depthless (Original Verse - Common People)
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fictionDepthless
1800 words
prompt: the characters live in a two-dimensional world.
pg, no warnings apply.
a/n: common people is an original fiction verse set in contemporary australia. at the moment it's nothing much more than a series of character sketches, some of which come out mildly interesting...
.
Beloved woke up to discover herself inexplicably thin.
She minded the morning realization not at all. It was only mornings when she could almost connect with her body, without her malicious eyes scoring everything against an imaginary card. The errors and mistakes of the day’s meal choosings were yet to come. In the mornings her trousers would fit loosely; her breasts would be hollow, the skin wrinkled, yet to awaken to their unwanted fullness by the shower’s caressing heat. She paid no mind to her insubstantial self, thinking it only a byproduct of an especially good sleep, and a day behind her with a balance of fibre and water, until she slipped between a crack in the floorboards.
Beloved sprawled in the dirt beneath the creaking house, where it was cool and dark, and limestone foundations made of the space a dusty sunstriped boulevard.
Regaining the house proper irritated her. She had to sidle against the wall that the neighbours could not look over the fence and see her nakedness, and only narrowly did she avoid slipping again between the cracks, where weathered wood shrunk away from the wall. Step on a crack, break your father’s back, came old doggerel into her head (and again, the familiar guilt; did she not break her father’s spine, as she would of every man that came into the path of a self that would not bow? Well, irony now, as every fickle breeze brisk with eucalypt and cut grass sought to bend her double, or plaster her like lurid wallpaper on this self-bought prison!)
She avoided the cracks along with thought of her father, only to gain the door and discover it locked. It was irrelevant, as were many small details of life; she folded herself double and slipped beneath the doorframe, where the weatherseal had decayed, and where a stuffed straw snake with red felt eyes and a matching forked tongue did little to keep out the drafts, or her.
Beloved confronted herself in the bedroom mirror.
She discovered herself as flat as that plane of glass. Three hundred and sixty degrees could she turn, yet, as though trapped in an early version of a three dimensional gamer’s world, she turned and turned and saw ever and always only her face. She had no sides, no curves but for the hourglass shape that defined her, pinned, like a butterfly to the world’s board; she had nothing behind her. She had no depth.
Had Spearman seen this, rising early as his day’s labour demanded, into the darkness before dawn? He often told her he would find her with the sheets discarded, on her side with one hand outflung; her other hand invariable curled between her legs, not for release or irritation but simply because that was where her sleeping hand would lie. Did she do it to defend? He never asked her, but he wondered. Her hand would draw Spearman’s eyes to that region, where cropped curls dusted broadly but sparsely, fingers that covered the dip, the hint of more. If she did it to protect, it was a double-edged action, for he would not have looked had her hand not been there; groggy with his hours Spearman would stir against his uniform’s constraints, and wish he could do nothing more than roll atop her and claim the morning’s dreams. Yet he had obligations: a creaking house, sighing with wind and strain, a promise to himself that he could be more than the triggered reactions that defined his upbringing.
One finger he would run along Beloved’s wrinkled bare foot, from heel along arch and to calloused big toe; a touch so regular she no longer even kicked, nor moaned acknowledgement but simply slept on, and accepted this ritual as part of life.
Beloved grasped for the sleeping memory of that finger on her heel; yes, Spearman would have seen this, her reduced state. He did not wake her. Had he even cared?
Beloved leaked tears, completely purposelessly.
Why did she cry to lose what she had never loved? She mouthed a curse and a want in her mind, fuck, fuck, her automatic resort in any situation of stress or complexity; simply, fuck. Water fell onto the floor, edgeless coins merging with the horizontal plane abutting Beloved’s verticality.
In the absence of another, Beloved consoled herself. Her body had never been her home. It was a strange three dimensional thing that her forward-facing hunter’s eyes could never see from every side in any case; in two dimensions she had exactly what she had known before, her hourglass self, this view that confronted her in the mirror, her YZ Cartesian coordinates. Why did she mourn what she had never encompassed knowing? Her body had been a horrible, strange, solid, three dimensional thing; she had never loved the fore and back protrusions of her breasts and stomach and buttocks, the side to side thighs that became so much larger when she would sit, the environmental threat that her body, too, would follow her mother’s and expand out into the infinite, impossible hugeness of XY coordinates.
That threat was gone!
But had she ever hated her body? The threat of excessive three dimensionality defined her! Beloved had always felt such pride and shame for her body. She could never simply accept that it was: she imagined most people did not think beyond inhabiting what they had. She imagined most people felt neither pride nor shame for their bodies, any more than they could feel proud or ashamed of bearing lungs, or lips, or a nose, yet for Beloved she had always survived the discordance between self and body via martial courage. She must be proud of her body, and display it, and acknowledge the double-edged sword that it was, or she would automatically default to the shame of bearing a body so clearly designed for the appreciation of someone other than herself.
Spearman’s hours of work passed mostly in the dark, and the silence of awaiting caffeine’s kiss to work its magic; then the hard labour that followed, crates and pallets shifted and heaved, packed and unpacked, stacked and sorted and resorted all in a coolroom smaller than his bedroom, in which he and his workmates would climb like monkeys and risk limbs, torn ligaments, to good working conditions that could not be met; done seemingly the faster for the caffeine, frantically, yet never completed any earlier. Did he discover his own two dimensionality there, or was he too busy, too tired? Did his notice his workmates’ lack of substance? As he did every day, Servant spoke longingly of home in a distant Somalia; he had lived and slaved here for two years, not knowing the words for excuse me and please and thank you because no one had told him; he had been thought rude, unemployable, recalcitrant. Daily he recognized only that he would not find a dream here, no riches to bring back home, no family pride to reward his daring, he laboured simply for enough to survive where everything cost so much more and he owned not a cent of social capital. Daily he woke flattened under the terror that he would not be able to afford to get back, and what would happen to him then? As for Praise, whose country’s name he would not rephrase in an English tongue, who had lived here longer and refused to use the words for excuse me and please and thank you: he would not thank nor beg a country that built what he saw as a slave labour force of immigrants. Why had he come here, he and Servant, alone, if not to flee slavery, to only find it by another name; ignorance, lack of experience, high cost of living and low wages, accusations of his inability to understand like concrete and unbreakable; the monotonous sameness of boxes, stacking boxes, unsafe and cold and sluggish.
Were they, too, all two dimensional people, and Spearman simply did not notice, thinking of Beloved curving in his bed, her hand between her legs, not as reward or right but simply circumstance that occurred, miraculous though it seemed that he had something to look forward to, someone who enjoyed him. Working without needing speech, was Spearman aware he stood upright simply because he refused to fold?
Spearman returned home from his labour ready to sleep. He would rise by the afternoon and find Beloved gone; but when he came home he found her there. She demanded:
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Tell you what?’
‘Can’t you see what’s happened to us?’ Beloved’s hands knotted; she used her fists too often, Spearman knew, but not as often as his father had, or his brothers, and only because she used her fists could he trust her to use them when she needed them. Such a relief, to know she would not ever depend on him.
‘What’s happened?’
‘We’re flat!’ She said it without emphasis: flat as the word. ‘We’re two dimensional. We’re – nothing. We have no substance! We have no depth!’
Was this another attempt to rouse him to become more? Another argument started because Beloved could not fit into this menial life any more than Spearman could? She had no endurance, all explosion and firework, she couldn’t see past the day and he admired that. Beloved found miracles in every second of the day, miracles or epic failures; she demanded that every experience be trauma or wildness; from a life behind an Australian equivalent of whitewashed plantation walls, she made of every small thing a risk and threat, simply for the sake of excitement. How could he dislike that? He did not! If she needed to fight to feel stirred, well, then he would fight! Every instinct told him to cower, to deflect, to avoid argument for the hurt that would follow, but he was more than his instincts.
So he said, with callousness (and that everpresent fear, that he spoke not to hurt but only to air a truth that he did not want to acknowledge,) which only Beloved was brave enough to rise to challenge:
‘Is that all? We’re exactly what we always are. What we’ll always be. Like you really think we have hidden depths? You’re as shallow as I am, to stay here with me.’
To which Beloved howled a despair: was Spearman right? Was this all they had ever been, two dimensional shallow things, deprived of any complex motivation by a world as careless as he, flat, and without substance, images clinging to the surface of their lives, these bare weathered walls of a house never home?
.
1800 words
prompt: the characters live in a two-dimensional world.
pg, no warnings apply.
a/n: common people is an original fiction verse set in contemporary australia. at the moment it's nothing much more than a series of character sketches, some of which come out mildly interesting...
.
Beloved woke up to discover herself inexplicably thin.
She minded the morning realization not at all. It was only mornings when she could almost connect with her body, without her malicious eyes scoring everything against an imaginary card. The errors and mistakes of the day’s meal choosings were yet to come. In the mornings her trousers would fit loosely; her breasts would be hollow, the skin wrinkled, yet to awaken to their unwanted fullness by the shower’s caressing heat. She paid no mind to her insubstantial self, thinking it only a byproduct of an especially good sleep, and a day behind her with a balance of fibre and water, until she slipped between a crack in the floorboards.
Beloved sprawled in the dirt beneath the creaking house, where it was cool and dark, and limestone foundations made of the space a dusty sunstriped boulevard.
Regaining the house proper irritated her. She had to sidle against the wall that the neighbours could not look over the fence and see her nakedness, and only narrowly did she avoid slipping again between the cracks, where weathered wood shrunk away from the wall. Step on a crack, break your father’s back, came old doggerel into her head (and again, the familiar guilt; did she not break her father’s spine, as she would of every man that came into the path of a self that would not bow? Well, irony now, as every fickle breeze brisk with eucalypt and cut grass sought to bend her double, or plaster her like lurid wallpaper on this self-bought prison!)
She avoided the cracks along with thought of her father, only to gain the door and discover it locked. It was irrelevant, as were many small details of life; she folded herself double and slipped beneath the doorframe, where the weatherseal had decayed, and where a stuffed straw snake with red felt eyes and a matching forked tongue did little to keep out the drafts, or her.
Beloved confronted herself in the bedroom mirror.
She discovered herself as flat as that plane of glass. Three hundred and sixty degrees could she turn, yet, as though trapped in an early version of a three dimensional gamer’s world, she turned and turned and saw ever and always only her face. She had no sides, no curves but for the hourglass shape that defined her, pinned, like a butterfly to the world’s board; she had nothing behind her. She had no depth.
Had Spearman seen this, rising early as his day’s labour demanded, into the darkness before dawn? He often told her he would find her with the sheets discarded, on her side with one hand outflung; her other hand invariable curled between her legs, not for release or irritation but simply because that was where her sleeping hand would lie. Did she do it to defend? He never asked her, but he wondered. Her hand would draw Spearman’s eyes to that region, where cropped curls dusted broadly but sparsely, fingers that covered the dip, the hint of more. If she did it to protect, it was a double-edged action, for he would not have looked had her hand not been there; groggy with his hours Spearman would stir against his uniform’s constraints, and wish he could do nothing more than roll atop her and claim the morning’s dreams. Yet he had obligations: a creaking house, sighing with wind and strain, a promise to himself that he could be more than the triggered reactions that defined his upbringing.
One finger he would run along Beloved’s wrinkled bare foot, from heel along arch and to calloused big toe; a touch so regular she no longer even kicked, nor moaned acknowledgement but simply slept on, and accepted this ritual as part of life.
Beloved grasped for the sleeping memory of that finger on her heel; yes, Spearman would have seen this, her reduced state. He did not wake her. Had he even cared?
Beloved leaked tears, completely purposelessly.
Why did she cry to lose what she had never loved? She mouthed a curse and a want in her mind, fuck, fuck, her automatic resort in any situation of stress or complexity; simply, fuck. Water fell onto the floor, edgeless coins merging with the horizontal plane abutting Beloved’s verticality.
In the absence of another, Beloved consoled herself. Her body had never been her home. It was a strange three dimensional thing that her forward-facing hunter’s eyes could never see from every side in any case; in two dimensions she had exactly what she had known before, her hourglass self, this view that confronted her in the mirror, her YZ Cartesian coordinates. Why did she mourn what she had never encompassed knowing? Her body had been a horrible, strange, solid, three dimensional thing; she had never loved the fore and back protrusions of her breasts and stomach and buttocks, the side to side thighs that became so much larger when she would sit, the environmental threat that her body, too, would follow her mother’s and expand out into the infinite, impossible hugeness of XY coordinates.
That threat was gone!
But had she ever hated her body? The threat of excessive three dimensionality defined her! Beloved had always felt such pride and shame for her body. She could never simply accept that it was: she imagined most people did not think beyond inhabiting what they had. She imagined most people felt neither pride nor shame for their bodies, any more than they could feel proud or ashamed of bearing lungs, or lips, or a nose, yet for Beloved she had always survived the discordance between self and body via martial courage. She must be proud of her body, and display it, and acknowledge the double-edged sword that it was, or she would automatically default to the shame of bearing a body so clearly designed for the appreciation of someone other than herself.
Spearman’s hours of work passed mostly in the dark, and the silence of awaiting caffeine’s kiss to work its magic; then the hard labour that followed, crates and pallets shifted and heaved, packed and unpacked, stacked and sorted and resorted all in a coolroom smaller than his bedroom, in which he and his workmates would climb like monkeys and risk limbs, torn ligaments, to good working conditions that could not be met; done seemingly the faster for the caffeine, frantically, yet never completed any earlier. Did he discover his own two dimensionality there, or was he too busy, too tired? Did his notice his workmates’ lack of substance? As he did every day, Servant spoke longingly of home in a distant Somalia; he had lived and slaved here for two years, not knowing the words for excuse me and please and thank you because no one had told him; he had been thought rude, unemployable, recalcitrant. Daily he recognized only that he would not find a dream here, no riches to bring back home, no family pride to reward his daring, he laboured simply for enough to survive where everything cost so much more and he owned not a cent of social capital. Daily he woke flattened under the terror that he would not be able to afford to get back, and what would happen to him then? As for Praise, whose country’s name he would not rephrase in an English tongue, who had lived here longer and refused to use the words for excuse me and please and thank you: he would not thank nor beg a country that built what he saw as a slave labour force of immigrants. Why had he come here, he and Servant, alone, if not to flee slavery, to only find it by another name; ignorance, lack of experience, high cost of living and low wages, accusations of his inability to understand like concrete and unbreakable; the monotonous sameness of boxes, stacking boxes, unsafe and cold and sluggish.
Were they, too, all two dimensional people, and Spearman simply did not notice, thinking of Beloved curving in his bed, her hand between her legs, not as reward or right but simply circumstance that occurred, miraculous though it seemed that he had something to look forward to, someone who enjoyed him. Working without needing speech, was Spearman aware he stood upright simply because he refused to fold?
Spearman returned home from his labour ready to sleep. He would rise by the afternoon and find Beloved gone; but when he came home he found her there. She demanded:
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Tell you what?’
‘Can’t you see what’s happened to us?’ Beloved’s hands knotted; she used her fists too often, Spearman knew, but not as often as his father had, or his brothers, and only because she used her fists could he trust her to use them when she needed them. Such a relief, to know she would not ever depend on him.
‘What’s happened?’
‘We’re flat!’ She said it without emphasis: flat as the word. ‘We’re two dimensional. We’re – nothing. We have no substance! We have no depth!’
Was this another attempt to rouse him to become more? Another argument started because Beloved could not fit into this menial life any more than Spearman could? She had no endurance, all explosion and firework, she couldn’t see past the day and he admired that. Beloved found miracles in every second of the day, miracles or epic failures; she demanded that every experience be trauma or wildness; from a life behind an Australian equivalent of whitewashed plantation walls, she made of every small thing a risk and threat, simply for the sake of excitement. How could he dislike that? He did not! If she needed to fight to feel stirred, well, then he would fight! Every instinct told him to cower, to deflect, to avoid argument for the hurt that would follow, but he was more than his instincts.
So he said, with callousness (and that everpresent fear, that he spoke not to hurt but only to air a truth that he did not want to acknowledge,) which only Beloved was brave enough to rise to challenge:
‘Is that all? We’re exactly what we always are. What we’ll always be. Like you really think we have hidden depths? You’re as shallow as I am, to stay here with me.’
To which Beloved howled a despair: was Spearman right? Was this all they had ever been, two dimensional shallow things, deprived of any complex motivation by a world as careless as he, flat, and without substance, images clinging to the surface of their lives, these bare weathered walls of a house never home?
.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-28 12:34 am (UTC)Samara