Thursday, 23 February 2012

Short Story - East West

This story was also posted to my tumblr. It was written in 13 minutes, a self inflicted challenge to write a story in the 13 minutes it takes to listen to the classic "East West" by the Butterfield Blues Band. Trippy Psych Blues to write sci fi to!

My story East West is copyright Bloody Mulberry 17.02.12


 

East West

I was standing on a remote atoll, an artificial atoll in the Pacific, secretly constructed as a test facility for Americans and French to monitor the Bikini Atoll nuclear blast tests and share data, and later to carry on classified experiments using drugs on soldiers and subversives to measure how much the human brain could be moulded to another man's will.

Moulded to another man's will and short circuiting, bypassing all the restrictions of ethics and morality that normally protect us from carrying out evil acts against our wills.

Apparently, a man had murdered his own brother and his family deeply under the influence of industrial doses of sedative with STP 43-X – a hallucinogen – thrown in. He had cut open his throat and stuck his tongue directly into his larynx and blown sounds from hell while a CIA agent stood there pointing and laughing and his children lay there desperately attempting the blood screeching out of their precisely slashed wrists an oozing in zig zags on a linoleum floor.

This was all a long time ago in 1959. How I knew this I had sworn to secrecy. How I had found this place was through a CIA agent operative's son who had found out when his father had made a deathbed conversion and chanted out his multitude of sins but was so delirious no-one believed him.

So here I was on this unattractive blue sea washed block of concrete crudely modelled into lagoons and bays and a river mouth where water had once flowed to the sea but was now chocked with driftwood and huge dams of rock salt that had crystallised in the sun like sinning humans with evil eyes.

My own experiment was drug assisted, but only a bottle of vodka. Which I had only drunk a small amount of and was using the bottle to light a fire with the suns rays as evening was coming in and things were getting a trifle chilly.

I was stood astride the International Date line, looking intently at my watch. I had painted the exact line in blue paint on the false rock. As my watch hit 6pm, I jumped into the East. Then back into the west. East then West. To Day and Tomorrow, Yesterday and Today. Over and again

Over and again. East West. Today Yesterday. Tomorrow Today.

My watch began to slow.

I jumped faster hopping and a skipping across the dateline as an albatross soared by and thought I was insane as it seeked certain death at the hands of longline trawlers.

East West. Yesterday. Today. And today. And today. And today. TodayTodayToday.

My watch had stopped, and the albatross in the sky was stilled against stilled clouds and a frozen sea.

I had stopped time.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17.02.12

No comments:

Post a Comment