The Real
The Imagination
The woman sits in a chair in the centre of the room, her body distorted away from the figure beside her. Her arm rests in her mouth, teeth biting into the flesh. Now, she pulls the arm away, with her teeth remaining clamped over the skin, gently tearing a small segment away from the frail forearm. The sinewy skin rests upon her lip, a small stream of blood trickling down her jaw and onto her neck, following the contours of her veins. Her lips are wide with pleasure, whilst her jaw remains firmly shut; trapping the flesh against the shards of bone in the mouth.
The woman stands; the mirrors lining the walls reflecting the image of the pale woman infinitely. The man drops his briefcase to the floor and he stares out at the room, his eyes staring back at him from the metallic walls. His vision slides over to the woman standing perfectly still.
His smile imitates hers.
His breathing, now ragged and torn imitates hers.
His skin, destroyed and ripped imitates hers.
The mirrors imitate the imitations.
The woman now allows the mess to spill to the floor, as she touches her lips together and allows the flesh to fall. The blood has become dried around her mouth. Her tongue flicks out and moistens the lips.
Man and woman watch as the congealed mess forms a small pool of black red blood. The man suddenly moves and dances forwards and around the woman, as she opens her mouth wide and howls with contented laughter. She caresses his hand; previously occupied with clutching the briefcase, and begins to slowly draw his light, dancing form closer to her body. Together, they fall to the floor and sit upon their knees, gazing down at the decaying flesh sitting heavily on the linoleum. The wound on the arm remains open, skin tissue and blood exposed. The body of the woman is soon painted crimson; pain appears only to be an abstract emotion.
Silence sits heavily in the air, the laughing has stopped as suddenly as it began. Oppression acts as a weight in the surroundings. The man slowly opens his mouth and runs his tongue over his lips, feeling and sensing as if for the first time.
Which way is out?
The silence is broken now. The woman smiles knowingly and points to the frayed rope hanging in a noose from the ceiling. Man and woman smile happily.
*
If the imagination is strong enough to captivate any image, then the strongest and most creative of imaginations will behold the power to live and believe in a world that does not exist outside of the mind. When the boundary between the imagination and reality is explored, the danger of creativity becomes exposed, as the distinction between the two worlds is no longer a pure divide. When given the chance to distort the mind and live on the edge of reality, the surreal becomes The Real, the unimaginable; the imaginable.
The Real
The thin metal hand edges its way slowly around the face of the clock, jerking oddly at sporadic intervals. At 9:41 the hand flutters as though deciding whether to move forwards or descent backwards and begin all over again. At 14:09 the hand pushes but moves nowhere, as though trying to tear out of the spiral of time, finally escaping the fit and jumping to 14:11 At 23:59, the hand stops moving altogether.
Facing this clock in the centre of the room a wooden chair sits with ropes tied to the arms. The room is blank like a canvas waiting for an artists impression; walls which were once white are now a dirty grey as the deposits of time drip down the solid mass of concrete, the bare wooden furniture piled into one dark corner of the room. Until 22 seconds ago, the slow count down of tick-tock; tick-tock occupied the room, but now the only sound is emitted from the lungs of the woman as she takes in the damp air from the room, releasing the breath in muted noises.
The ropes tied to the chair were once tied around the arms of the woman sat within the confines of the deathly throne, watching the movement of the hands of time. Although she is no longer bound to the seat, her body seems to have twisted to mould into the stiff mass of wood. She makes no effort to move from this seat, although she has clearly been tormented within the confines of this room, having nothing to engage with aside from the movement of the clock. And now that has stopped. The room is dead but for the flutter of eyelids and the dull shine from the eyes that belong to them.
Congealed blood sits around the cuticles of the woman’s fingertips as she has ripped at her nails in despair, and the torn remains of hair and flesh surround the seat as though pulled frantically during a scene of torture.
A door opens suddenly behind the woman and she begins to cower and moan as though she sees a fear before her, but the noise presents itself as nothing more than a tall, slightly gaunt looking man who walks quickly round to stand before her.
The child is weeping.
They are only tears. You look at those which fall upon my face everyday and bear me no sympathy.
You are a lost soul. The child is helpless.
The man reaches forward with long delicate fingers as if to stroke the face of his acquaintance, but stops inches from the broken skin to draw his hand sharply away then twist it forward harshly against the woman. As she recoils to look away the man moves through to another door where the hushed cries are immediately silenced; and another door slams shut in the house which was once a home.
The woman slumps her head forward, forcing her eyelids to close tightly as if trying to make the world around her disappear. Light has been lost to the room. The windows are barricaded. The doors are locked. The clock begins to tick once more. The time is still 23:59.
The Imagination
The woman sits in the chair in the centre of the room and in her arms lies a newborn baby swathed in a blanket. The baby is smiling and the woman places her thumb in the vice like grip of the small child. The room is decorated in the traditional style of an infant’s bedroom, with pale yellow walls and a border running through the centre of each wall; detailing a pattern of bounding bunny rabbits and fluffy kittens. The mother takes little notice of her surroundings as she rocks backwards and forwards in the chair.
The male figure paces around the room in circles as if chasing a route that has already been etched onto the floor. He begins to grope at the walls trying to escape, frantically pulling at the wallpaper and the borders until a trail of dismounted bunny rabbits and kittens lies strewn across the floor.
Let me leave you bitch. Open your eyes.
You wanted me to care for the child. I am caring for it.
The man walks to the woman and shakes her continuously until she slumps forward and the baby falls to the floor, lying splayed for a second before disappearing.
The woman points slowly towards the noose.
Leave
The Real
The woman opens her eyes and slowly stops shaking. She tries to move her hands but finds that they have once again been bound to the arms of the stark chair. In front of her the man stands again, the small bundle of the child held carelessly in one hand.
This has to stop. You belong in this world; where you can think and feel, where your son cries and you can recognise pain. Your imagination is only an escape and you cannot keep running forever. Close your eyes, block out the noise, turn your back on this life; it is all a lie.
The woman closes her eyes and feels a sharp smack across her face. The door slams and the baby screams.
The Imagination
The woman lies on the floor. She cries silently.
*
The Imagination
I show you nothing. You see no fear in my eyes. You see no anger, no hatred. All you see are the tears. Here, this is where I show and this is where I can see. I can create and destroy, I decide the future that is to come and I decide the past that has gone before. You cannot touch me and I will not dare to let you try.
Let….please….please….. just let me leave.
But we can be happy here. Everything we need is here. I am here. You are here. We need nothing but each other to survive.
But the child. The child is screaming, screaming for it’s mother. Open your eyes and speak to your child. Show it how you care even if you will not show me. This can all change. This here, this is not real.
It is real enough.
The Real
The baby screams and the man screams too. Both are screams of anguish, one of pain and one of frustration.
The woman slowly smiles, opens her mouth wide and throws her head back to the seat as she laughs.
Her cracked lips begin to bleed. She does not care now.
The Imagination
The woman remembers a time before when her thoughts were nothing more than thoughts; her memories just flashbacks to a time when she could smile without fearing. Now her thoughts are her life, and her memories are the battle she must face every day. The memories that taunt her now show her no happiness, but they replicate the black years. They are the memories of the deep oppression that settled in her mind; suffocating and strangling sanity until insanity was born. The birth of this evil gave way to the woman who is now bound to the chair. To an outsider it would seem like the work of a sadist, but to the woman she knows it is restraint for her own safety. She knows that she has been tied down to force her to stay; to stop her from leaving the place where she is safe. But she knows that she can escape. She has escaped now. She is thinking.
The Real
There is nothing more we can do for her now. I have tried to calm her, I have tried to restrain her but nothing seems to stop her. She knows she can escape to this world in her imagination and I can’t stop her anymore. I can’t live with this now, she needs to be taken somewhere safe.
Where else can she go? There is no hospital, institution or remedy for this behaviour. I have never seen anything like it. Nowhere would take her, she’s too much of a danger to herself and others.
But she’s too much of a danger to me and our child. She is slowly draining this house of life.
I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do for you now.
You’re a doctor, there must be something. Please. She’s stealing me. She’s stealing my soul. I can’t overpower her anymore.
The doctor sighs and slowly opens the door that leads into the outside garden; a small scrap of land with discarded garden furniture and quirky ornaments; signs of the family that once lived in the small home. He glances quickly behind him, smiles apologetically and closes the door. It is impossible for anyone to understand of the trauma that the house has seen; in this house the closed doors remain closed.
The man is left standing in the small hall pacing in circles. He places his hand on the handle to the room which once served as a study, and takes a deep breath as he enters the cold lair. He looks at the woman and knows that she has heard. She has been listening. He closes the door.
The Real
The man and woman cower together in one corner of the room. Their faces are blank and they show no sign of movement aside from the occasional blink of an eye. The child’s screams can be heard from upstairs but they go unnoticed by the couple.
The Imagination
The couple scream at each other from opposite corners of the room. The man wants to leave but the woman is controlling him. He is powerless and she knows that he must obey her.
The woman speaks of a time when she was happy, when they were happy together. She speaks fondly of memories of sunny afternoons or strolls by the beach. She snaps, and suddenly speaks of how everything changed. She screams of how he stopped loving her, how he abused her, how he wanted nothing but to use her.
At first, the man screams back, shouting and hitting at the walls. The mirrors smash and the images become cracked. Eventually the man calms; and he falls to the floor, sobbing into his chest.
The Real
The man suddenly awakens and stands as though to leave. He charges to the door and has almost closed it behind him before the woman has grabbed at his arm and pulls him back to her world. She claws at his body with nail-less fingers and bites at him as though deranged. He knows that there is no longer anything he can do. So he closes his eyes once again, and falls back into her imagination.
The Real
The baby is still screaming. There is no-one to hear his cries. Eventually they cease. Silence pursues.
The Imagination
The man and woman no longer have enough ammunition for fight. They sit together with arms around each other. The woman is jerking as she screams and cries intermittently.
I have only ever needed to be loved. The day that you stopped loving is the day that I started to escape. The day that I gave birth to that child, your precious son; that is when you stopped needing me. But I still need you. I will force you to love me.
Just let me leave. I cannot make you happy now.
Happiness is subjective.
The Real
The child cries one last cry. It is feeble. He too has given up.
The Imagination
How are you doing this? Why am I in your mind, I do not belong here.
I can control you with my thoughts. I have learnt that now.
The man suddenly looks up in fear. He knows that death is near. But he does not know who death has come to reap.
Get off me. Let me leave. I will not make you happy here. I cannot do that.
Then I cannot let you leave. I told you which way was out.
The woman looks to the man, and forces herself to smile. At the same time, a smile appears on the face of the man. She forces him to laugh, she forces him to dance. But he cries as he dances. The woman starts to maim her flesh. She is already broken on the inside, but she continues to break and tear at her skin on the outside. Blood drips to the floor.
The man looks to the woman.
Which way is out?
She points to the noose hanging from the ceiling.
The Real
The woman opens her eyes. She is shaking. Beside her lies the body of the man. She has killed him. She suddenly starts to cry as though she has realised what she has done. Her mind has re-awakened and she recognises reality. She stumbles to the door and through to the room where her child lies. He no longer breathes.
The woman screams. She has murdered love. She has murdered her life. She slowly walks to the kitchen and picks up a knife from the counter with a steady hand. What is Real now?
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