Micro-fiction 032 - Two Faces (Gothic series)

Was family lunchtime ever like this? The family gathered, dressed on their fine white clothes, but Patsy bears a frustrated frown…

“Can’t you see what’s happening around you?” Patsy yells, inside her head.

It is Sunday. While not being a religious family, they do observe a long tradition of polite lunchtime gathering. Patsy’s father, his bloated body dressed in an immaculate, white three-piece suit, sits at the head of the table, his dead eyes wide, staring at everyone, checking their perfect white dresses and pontificating about the latest political events. At the other end Patsy, separated by three siblings, her step-mother, grandmother and her friend, gazes down, milk-eyed. It is a table of women dominated by a righteous man.

Patsy allows her eyes to fall to the watery soup between the carefully arranged cutlery, and a napkin in its requisite, slightly tarnished ring. Her hands rest on her lap, stilled, as she awaits instructions to eat. Always hungry, she used to grab the spoon as soon as she sat at the table, but now she grants a pyrrhic victory to her father, knowing there to be bigger battles to be endured.

Her fallen eyes disguise a deeper truth, for she dwells in two places. Her father’s house of norms and petty etiquette is the one in which she must abide, but the other place, a mind palace as she likes to think of it, is both more consuming and more terrifying.

In this other place a landscape of crimson skies, desolate buildings and heaving, smoking land, she looks out, her body encased in rock. Her face is exposed and lacerated by the sulphurous air, the leathery flesh hangs in strips and knots. She screams with a voice that never tires.

Her father reaches for the jug of water, and nods for it to be passed along the table. With almost exaggerated care, in case of accident or noise each person pours themselves a measure of the blameless liquid before passing along to the next. She observes the winsome smiles of her family, the quiet murmur of camaraderie. The conspiracy against her father is now subtle. He thinks he has beaten everyone into submission over the years. It was always an unequal warfare between a self-confident patriarch, a man unused to opposition, or questions, someone willing to prosecute to utter victory, against a group of well-meaning people who remain puzzled about the need for subjugation but fear the consequences of not allowing it.

Patsy coughs. In the other place, she bellows. A swarm of large insects has risen across the wasteland that stretches to the nearest tower block, bringing with it a huge muddle of sound, a dull buzzing that echoes between the towers. The insects amass, then spiral into the sky, momentarily blocking out the reds and oranges of the broken sun. And then they dive, from such a long way off they appear small but they gather pace, breaking through the flames and smoke of the land, roaring towards a site nearby, but Patsy knows she will be in their way so she presses against the rock that holds her, and failing, she roars her defiance, her mouth wide with fury and fear as the massive wave of dark forms floods across her, and the rocks around, their wings and spikey torsos, their endless spindly, slippery legs, clattering across her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks and into her open mouth, gagging and choking her, wriggling and agitated.

“Will you please pass the water to your mother!” The voice at the other end of the table rises a little, its passive aggression familiar and effective.

“Of course.” Patsy nods, smiles agreeably, and pauses for a moment to pour some water into her own glass.”

“I said pass it to your mother! Are you deaf as well as insolent?”

“I’m sorry father, you wish me to go without water?” She raises a smile in her cheeks, her eyes remaining neutral.”

“Are you questioning me?”

“Of course not father, just clarifying.” She knows she is in dangerous territory.

“Why would you have water, when you linger so long, eh?” He lifts his chin, “We don’t want a repeat of past behaviour, do we?”

“Of course not father.” Patsy picks up the jug and makes to pour some for her step-mother. “May I?” She looks at this nervous second wife of the tyrant, and tries to convey some quiet sympathy, knowing the attention will pass to her.

“I didn’t say pour it.” Her father now grits his teeth. That’s always a bad sign. “I said pass it.”

“Of course father, I was just trying to make amends.” She promptly places the jug near her step-mother’s glass, receiving a fragile glance in return.

“You know, I don’t think you’ll ever fit in.” Her father, exasperated, reaches for a napkin, swiftly withdrawing it from confinement, passing it across his sweaty face. Both Patsy and her step-mother try to conceal their anxiety. Among the family members at the table, only they have faced this particular accusation in the past.

In the burning landscape the insect storm has receded, only occasionally splattering into her. Exhausted and disgusted Patsy feels a little stronger, having survived the latest indignity. She vomits wings and darkness. Now, instead of just shouting, her rage manifests with bursts of dark matter that propel from her mouth, blasting at the insects, smothering them all , the fumes and the flames around her. And the rock in which she is sealed seems to have been affected too by the swarm, and she discovers some movement in her limbs, her head can shift a little, and her wide terrified eyes cast down to see that she is trapped in a fissure, not in the face of the rock itself, which she had always assumed.

“Father, don’t, let’s eat.” Her step-mother tries to ameliorate, knowing, as did they all did, that such acts could either temper his anguish, or make him even more agitated.

“Don’t!?” He wipes his forehead with greater vigour. “How dare you!”

But it was Patsy who stood up. An unforgivable gesture, probably a fatal one.

“How dare you!” her mouth was open, her face red, and twisted, her rage now turns outwards, a torrent of dark matter bursts from her gaping jaw and smothers the jug, the table, and reaches across to her father, flooding him with black feathers, wings, legs, and bile, covering his entire, choking body.

“Can’t you see what’s happening around you?” Patsy yells, aloud.

The family scatters, shrieking, but her father sits at the head of the table still. His white suit obliterated by the dark bile, and his dead white eyes rolling slowly to the back of their sockets.

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2020 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells, Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.