The Story of my Twin

Novella

Extract

Time moved on, but I hardly did. A lingering wound that refused to heal. Spilting and festering, then calcifying itself as scar tissue. “But when you became two, what will you do?” I was able to reposition my thoughts not as a creature with an endlessly desire for life, rather the coward in the mass suicide, the Jonestown survivor. Repulsion of my flesh became my obsession. A thin white blade, heated under coals, would pierce my arm between the muscle and the bone, as the blood retreated away from the heat. Searing the flesh to its cracky black and red as lava hardens when heat vanishes. The blade would be driven even deeper until it breached the skin fully through my arm. Cutting lengthways as the flesh perfectly scooped itself up like floppy red ice cream. This process of destruction would be repeated across my body. There would be no pain, as the ritual is perfect, a flayed corpse prepared for renewal as something else entirely. My skeleton fractured in thousands of pieces, large bones broken off then shoved into a wood chipper. The tiny pieces and the fragments all gathered into a large trough and baked in the sun. Then crushed into dust with a mallet and shattered into the wind. True obliteration.

The Search of Man

Short Story

Extract

Once there was a face; brow, eyes, nose, a mouth. Cast iron now. A prisoner’s mask, shackled to his face. The mask itself was two-piece shell that joined at the back of his skull. Assembled and locked shut with a blazing hot steel pointer. The lock melted as the prisoner screamed and began his journey through abject suffering in iron. The mask rattled like a tea cup during tremors.

The Conformist or Contrarian

Creative Writing Master’s Thesis

Extract

I come back to the point of contrarianism having no gain. I have thought long and hard about what end it serves. I don’t believe the end justifies the means, rather the means is the end. How we choose to interpret the world around us determines if you have done good, or evil done in the name of good. They will do it in your name, regardless. But it should also be noted, neither does the conformist have any gain. Both the conformist and the contrarian, despite differing views, operate towards the means to the end, as neither elements of duality support the status quo or gain from it. Perhaps in another lifetime there would have been another way in which my approach to the world could have developed. Heaven knows I wish my approach to the world was different, as any further aspiration of reaching the dreams I have set for myself slip further and further away from a tangible reality.