1.11
One minute, Sylvie’s lying, peacefully in bed, sound asleep. The next, the curse slams into her, like a giant hammer. Its sheer magnitude, the reflexive impact on her systems, is immense. Its intrusion is all-consuming. Its influence, irresistible. Sylvie hasn’t seen this coming. Not this time! She is momentarily stunned, stupefied. Her head lolls to one side. Her eyes inflame with sudden fear, incomprehension. The first round of convulsions sends shockwaves, pain, washing through her in a relentless tsunami. Then the curse tears her, limb-by-limb, joint-by-joint, with burning intensity. Briefly, the beast subsides. She draws breath, dreading its inevitable climax.
Before she knows it, Sylvie is jerking about like a marionette. Tiny beads of perspiration form on her brow, congealing into thick, slimy sweat which streams down her face in torrents. She lies squirming on the saturated bedsheet in her sodden jasmine-flower silk camisole top and matching briefs, her body’s salt drying-out in white shock-rings, sodium chloride circle-stains, roasting in the body-heat that radiates, like personal fall-out from her fantastic dream exertions.
Sylvie goes into spasm immediately. Her irises roll revealing perfectly-opaque, white-marble eyeballs. One-by-one, she feels her joints start to crack. First the vertebrae in her neck and spinal cord crack. Then her joints crack; hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, elbows, wrists. As they crack, the bones bend, warping out of shape. Her muscles unfurl, unfold, giving her the outward appearance of a misshapen crone. Sylvie’s heart has big palpitations, her lungs heave with the incredible effort, her brain engulfs a sensory sea of excruciating pain. She’s crying freely when her heart gives out. Her heart actually stops beating! For a minute or so she dies, lies, inert, staring blank, up, into, sheet-white light, sensing her sacred spirit rising up, and speculating on her shattered body. Before she abruptly coughs, convulses again, body jerking back to life, a frog’s leg hanging, twitching, electrified, by her nervous system’s red-hot wires.
Exhausted, miserable, wretched, she lies back, a tearful, tarnished doll, a weeping mistress to the unimaginable force of the seizures. Painfully, slowly, her right elbow cracks. An arm unfolds, backwards, the wrong way around, twisted with torque, reaching out, greedily, past her shoulder blades, for her neck. Sylvie start to bleat: the little lamb, struggling, as she strangles on her mother’s tangled umbilical cord. Her right-hand twists, three hundred and sixty degrees, turns on its palm, and creeps up inside her silk camisole top as far as the nape of her neck, where it pauses for a while to stroke her fine, damp, brown, down. Then, waving a fond farewell to her twisted spine, the hand promptly disappears into the bush of her wispy, wavy, chestnut hair and squats there scratching flecks of dandruff from her scalp. She cries out to Alexa, who’s busy watching her, for help.
Alexa looks down dispassionately at the ghostly, grimacing, luminous-green figure through her night vision lense. A black angel, an angel of death, patiently watching, noting, assessing, recording her subject’s behaviour, its mannerisms, quirks, tics. Scrupulously documenting each spasm in the cause of science. Relishing in its subject’s responses to the invasive reflexes. She always looks down on Sylvie, belonging to a vastly superior, more intellectual race. Once she’s recorded every move, she will onwards-transmit the sylph’s cracking performance, for further analysis. Alexa is no help to the woman whatsoever.
Inevitably Sylvie succumbs to the mind-numbing pain: arches her back, relaxes her bladder, cherishes the relief, latently supplied by warm jets of urine, trickles amber fluid down her legs.
‘Now look what you’ve gone and made me do, Alexa!’ she complains.
The left hand reacts, to escape her flow, casually wandering up her spine like a spider in a wet bath tub, determined to find dry skin. Can’t take any more: is Sylvie’s last thought before she passes out.
4.44
Sylvie comes to in pitch black darkness. Driverless freight train rumbles over a nearby railway bridge. Pilotless A9000 airbus prepares for its final descent, bound for Stansted. Real fox barks, fruitlessly foraging through her eco-bin for food. The pain’s gone. She doesn’t hurt anymore. Sylvie’s stiff, bent, fourteen different ways, shattered and broken. But at least she doesn’t hurt. Above all else, her pride is still intact:
‘Because I’m a woman, did you think I was going to crack under the pressure? Go on, be honest. Admit it, I had you all fooled there, didn’t I?’
She tries to move her head, it won’t move. Her neck and spine are stiff, set, solid. She tries sitting up in bed, can’t. Tries moving her arms and legs, they won’t move either. Her joints are set, rigid. It dawns on her: she might be paralysed from the head down. Alexa either can’t, or won’t, help. Bitch! Sylvie’s alone, unable to move, trying to stem her growing sense of panic. She has to defeat this curse. Deciding to be very brave, she takes a deep breath and fights back, for the first time in her short life. With an enormous effort of will she snaps, crackles and pops each joint back into place, assembled bone-cereal, starting with her neck, followed by her spine, shoulder blades, elbows, wrists, hip joint, knees, ankles.
‘Come on, girl. You can do this!’ she tells herself.
To her surprise, the snapping, crackling and popping of her joints doesn’t hurt at all. After an hour, Sylvie manages to unfurl, and open, like a jasmine flower, in front of Alexa. She still feels a tad nauseous, but the nightmare of her first ever full-blown curse has passed. Her supple, lithe, body returns to normal. She is shivering cold. Soaking wet. Her hair is thick, plastered. Her face is salt-streaked dry. One could be forgiven for thinking Sylvie’s life reached an all-time low. But deep down inside she’s changed. She feels better now than she’s done for years.
‘Whatever happened just then, I’m over it,’ she decides, ‘I’m fine now.’
‘Alexa, you won’t tell anyone what just happened, will you?’
No immediate reply.
‘The time is 4.44, Valentine’s Day, Sylph,’ Alexa informs her.
‘Valentine’s? Chance would be a fine thing! Never get so much as a card, let alone a lover’s champagne, her red roses, her decadent perfume, a box of skinny chocolates. Is it still raining?’
‘Yes. The weather is mild, breezy. The temperature is 6C. It is cloudy outside. Occasional rain and drizzle.’
‘What did happen?’ Sylvie tries, ‘Come on, at least say something, love. Like: how are you feeling after your terrible ordeal?
No immediate reply.
‘Thanks for asking, love. Well, I’ve had better nights, you know, feeling queasy, going to be sick, need some air, that sort of thing…’
Sylvie flicks her silk eye mask, gingerly swings her legs out of bed. Something slides down the back of her thighs as she stands up. A hand, presumably? Instinctively, she clenches her buttocks tight, fearing another reflex, then shuffles pigeon-footed to the window. The dayglow-pink drapes, flaky-framed dormer window, throw themselves open at once, steering well clear of her. She stands staring out into the murky gloom, drawing lungsful of fresh night air.
‘Lights!’ she commands.
She takes in the dishevelled bed: no way’s she sleeping in that mess. Sylvie isn’t particularly inclined to pursue the subject of the curse with Alexa. Not with her current attitudinal problem. Her beloved AI’s been acting very strange recently. She’s become distant, disrespectful, almost shifty. Alexa is due a full service. Alexa is scheduled for disassembly and replacement by the end of the tax year. Meaning the end of next month. Sylvie shakes her head, sadly, stripping off her soiled pyjamas, duvet cover, bedsheet and pillow-cases in one foul swoop, bundling them all into the auto-wash. Then she admires herself. In the full-length bedsit mirror. Noticing her hair looks a complete mess, her face is streaked with mixtures of dried tears, teak mascara, red blood. Her lipstick’s smudged.
Not good!
Sylvie sprays the entire bedsit with alpine air-freshener, resolving to have the wedding cake duvet dry-cleaned, a fresh mattress in place by Saturday; before taking a break. The teas-maid serves up instant milk peppermint tea in her favourite mug: KEEP CALM YOUR ONLY 16!
‘Why, thank you!’ she giggles, appreciating the ageist joke. Her spirits are rising, she blows cooling ripples across her tea, cautiously supping the red, mass-marketed, piping-hot mug of purest peppermint; leaving stale watermelon pink lipstick smudged on its rim. The tea tastes sweet, and milky, just as she’s expected to taste one day. When she’s finally kissed by ‘her’. If she’s kissed. If there’s ever time in her busy life to fall in love. She isn’t so sure, now, there is. Sylvie has never found love before. So why should she find her, or it, now, at forty-two. She desperately hungers for love, looks to the heavens for divine inspiration:
‘Is It Today?’ she asks God, ‘Love?’
There is never an immediate answer from God. No messaging facility, either. He’ll come back to her later, in his own Good time, one fine day, when her immortal time on Earth has finally run out. Hungry, she treads to the micro-kitchen where she chews chunks of hearted, granary cob, buttered with re-churned, low-fat steno-spread. Once gorged to repletion, a fat sylph goose destined for pâté de foie, she burps wind, farts methane, and slides back into bed.
Sylvie rolls over to the dry side, slyly slipping an effervescent bliss tablet under her tongue. Satisfied, sedated, doped, snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug, warm-to-the-collywobbles, full-to-the brim, she drifts off to sleep. Somewhere beyond the kissing gate, where the black angels never fly, and the sun always shines, like a red rubber ball, in her private, magical, la-la land.
*****
From the first of my 9 books on Amazon: Is It Today by HJ Furl: https://www.amazon.com/author/hjfurl
