Jane Nash: Horror story ‘Safe’

‘You’ll be safe in my hands.’

She wasn’t so sure and even with no other option on offer, shook her head, no.

He glanced over his shoulder and spread his hands, palms up. The trusting Truth Plane.

‘I promise.’

His hands looked odd held waist height while he was sitting in his van, leaning towards the open passenger window. She didn’t like his balding head. A patch of his old skin shone like the side of Aladdin’s lamp. She could see his collar darkening from the beads of sweat running down his neck beneath a crescent of salt and pepper hair. She sensed him to be untrustworthy but what experience did she have at 17?

‘I promise.’

She hesitated until she heard footsteps running down a side street towards the plaza. She wanted to escape her stalker. She nodded and went to climb onto the passenger seat of his small white van.

‘Get in the back. They won’t see you there.’

Her stomach lurched. It was one thing to be a passenger but in the back of the truck?

‘Get. In. The. Back.’

She scrambled into the cave of the back of the van, toppling forward as it moved slightly and took off. Gravity and the lurching of her stomach held her to the metal floor. The scrape of her raw throat from bile’s acid took more of her attention than the chains beside her. She swallowed hard as her mouth filled with saliva. She vomited.

The van sped up. There was nothing to hold on to and her long hair was now threaded with pieces of sick around her face.

Her eyes adjusted to the lack of light in the back. She became aware of a shackled foot. She followed the leg up to the face of a boy, whom she estimated to be possibly 8 years old.

His eyes were wide open exposing the sclera all around his black pupils. Don’t worry, she whispered loudly to him, wiping stray vomit from her chin. The boy reached across to her and she held out her hand in return. His fingernails were encrusted with dirt, his skin smeared in patches, black.

His nails like talons ripped into her from the inside of her elbow cutting through the flesh like a hot knife to butter, all the way down to her wrist. Blood sprayed out over his face and began to sop the grimy metal floor.

She screamed as he sprang towards her, affixing himself to her wrist, blood covering his pallid, ecstatic face. She tried to shake him off but was frozen, her mind screaming to move but nothing in her body responded. She found her voice and screamed out to the driver

‘You said, I’d be safe in your hands.’

‘You’re not in my hands.’

The leech child drained her. She lay in her own vomit, looking at the ceiling of the van. He made busy with her arteries and veins. I don’t want to become a vampire she thought until she realised that was a silly childhood myth.

Jane Nash

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Jane Nash: Poem ‘Snow geese’

The snow geese scratch on the iced pond
Specks amongst the brown reeds
The white landscape reminiscent
Snowmen on the lawn
Carrots for noses
Shiny dirty obsidian for eyes
Who has coal anymore?

This adult scene of geese, of ice, of snow
Has replaced childish games
Without the young there is no impetus
But barren wombs can still take comfort
In barren landscapes
The birds bringing hope
From their overseas adventures

As the earth greens so do the snow geese fly
Spectacular in their wing span
Connected in flight
It takes only a little imagination
To see them go
Waiting for their return
When fingers hide in wool and fur.

Jane Nash

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Jane Nash: ‘Perfection’ – basead on a true story

It was never recommended by anything she’s heard of. He decides not to tell her.

“I’ve done hundreds’ he lies. In his office you can see the many success stories he purports to have been instrumental in creating.

He considers sculpture- the creating something beautiful. He sees himself an artist.  He assures her he is part of a few in the world who can make such sculptures.

She is searching for perfection but she has a poor pocket for pennies. She looks at pictures in magazines on a daily basis. Glossy photographs that show each curve and shape she covets, She dreams deeply in her sleep of having, of being. She meets with someone with a reputation near to her home. The price is too high and her heart is discouraged not to be able to live a perfect life. She is convinced through TV and social media that she has less than she desires, perhaps it’s less than she deserves. It’s difficult not to feel entitled to whatever strikes you when everyone in sight seems to live a perfect life. That’s her word. Perfect. She wants to feel perfection about most things. She saves for the perfect shoes. She saves for the perfect kitchen. She spends her money on perfection in any way she can.

She arrives in Costa Rica, convinced it is here she will buy her way to perfection. The humidity hits her; she goes into the reception area where there are tropical flowers on display. She thinks of her succulents at home. There is a small marble top table with two chairs beside.  Upon the table are brochures of women and men in perfect proportion. She keeps her mask on. He comes in and shakes her hands. She sanitises them immediately.

He turns her body to view her from the side. ‘Yea, this is an easy job’ he smiles without engaging the little lines around his eyes. She wonders why she feels uncomfortable.

Back at the hotel there is that little voice nagging at her, to call it quits, to go home, to save what little money she has, to commit to going to the gym every day. It has taken her so long to save for this procedure. Even two of her cousins have given her a thousand dollars each to help her feel better about herself. She showers, sweating from the humidity. She catches sight of her body in the long bathroom mirror. She hates her shape. No man will love her with such a flat bottom. A boy’s bottom.

Surgery takes time and she wakes in the recovery room. Her buttocks are suitably enlarged but they feel lumpy. She is nauseated. ‘It will pass, it’s normal’ says the grin behind the mask with empty eyes.

She waits four days in her hotel room, lying mainly on her stomach, the pain is beyond anything she has experienced before. The pain is excruciating on the flight back to Michigan. She cries at the pain in her sleep. In quite a short time her less than perfect implants begin to dissipate into her legs causing her a deep ache and what appears to be permanent water retention. She finds it increasingly difficult to walk. The lumps never perfect, never smooth out. 

She saves her money, sure that she needs another enlargement, but concerned about the current implants she goes to her doctor and tells him of her Costa Rican adventure. It doesn’t take too long to biopsy one of the lumps.  Her idea of perfection will never be attained.

What was dissipating throughout her legs and the lumps in her buttocks, was something irreversible, now interstitial… There is no way of knowing if it will spread into her organs. Her vanity is the price of now arrested longevity. The implant? Cement.

Jane Nash

Jane Nash: Poem ‘Linguistics’

Babylon still calls the young,
while white whiskered fathers despair,
but freeing them pray for their return.
Languages of home mix in the distance,
delete a culture, remove its language.
It’s time to be linguistically challenged.

The nights reveal the other world.
White whiskered fathers remember the allure
their cynicism eschewed those complex values being tested,
while their children search
for that precise wonder
that Babylon promises.

Jane Nash

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Jane Nash: Poetic prose: ‘How to catch the moon’

Bring out the scent of a lover so embossed into your olfactory memory that satiation is the only response.

Perhaps it’s from two flowers on sale out the front of the supermarket. Cut price for wilted cut flowers. Hope for a cloudless night and then summon the memories of watching films, holding hands, catching buses together and watching a very old cat nibble at a block of South American chocolate through silver and brown paper.

Look up into the heavens. Now listen for the promises of someone who never left the building – experiment with the words they said. ‘Leaf’ they wrote on a leaf. You should wear your hair up, you have a different face when it’s up. try writing it in third person now. The moon? Mr Moon, you mean?’

Bring the sound of a dog’s panting when smiling. Dogs do smile. Cats steal dark chocolate and dogs smile and pant in happiness.

Still standing outside, facing the empty sky, full of crystalline patterns from behind where the hidden sun exists until dawn.

Within the dreams of the tiniest of children lie the clues of where to find the magical net of luminous threads.

When you track down the illusive silver penny of the sky, when you lay your magical threads upon the obscured alabaster plate, they will quickly melt into its surface, crinkling into craters and bumpy lines quite visible on a cold cloudless night. Pull hard, fear only the speed at which you will succeed and capture it with exuberance, excitement and energy.

It must be renewable energy. I’ve brought down three already. They’re locked up in the toolshed, mounted on a very large cheese board. They’re magic and I really don’t need any more.

There’s a trade in moonbeams. Even if you manage to catch the moon and bring it home, you have to keep it shining in whatever case you keep it in or it will be unable to squeeze out the djinn tears which sparkle and bathe lovers, livestock left out and every rock trodden into each desert on the globe.

Jane Nash

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Jane Nash: Short story ‘Answer’

When she heard that most of the questions were statements waiting for confirmation, she stopped asking questions. Instead, she stated her intentions so there would be no misunderstandings about what she wanted or what her position was.

By denying others the opportunity for self-discovery, she presumed to know every detail of the life that touched and moved her.

Until there was nothing left to discover, except the space left behind where new questions could be formulated.

Jane Nash

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Jane Nash: Story ‘Summer Solstice’

I wake and she lifts me as easily as if this body of mine was but 9 years old. At 52 there is the usual overhang, newly forming jowls and in my case, a certain crustiness.  The morning sun spills through the wooden Venetian blinds onto the wooden floorboards. She places me feet first on strange shimmering fabric upon the warm bedroom floor. This material has no substance to it and is the most comfortable magnet you can imagine, tenderly pulling and gathering all that I have to give at the end of the night. I sleep in the warmth of my own snow. Criss-crossed flakes containing the blueprint of streets, the building blocks, the very form of me. Sloughing. It sounds smoother than the actuality of removal. I shed for her.

I was the cause of my own discovery. Picking and stripping tiny pieces of my own skin as it flaked and cracked upon my body was bound to leave a trail like winter’s frosty remnants. But no balls of fun and hilarity are the result of such conditions. Instead, I am reduced to insect bait. I am motioned not to scratch lest I lose the finest rubbings – lacewings drop from the skin on my forehead.

I am a delicacy or at least, is my skin. Not the pink healthy, pig-like thick dermis but the sick, the weak, probably diseased part of me. You should be farmed and managed, she whispers to me as she pulls the crusts from my eyebrows. Once thick, striking, beautiful, youthful and definitive, they now resemble the torment of singeing.  

 By some form of recompense she lulls me to sleep when I take my siesta. She breathes with me.  She has taken me into her confidence. I cannot betray her. We have fallen into a strange symbiosis although I’m not entirely sure it manifests the correct or required balance.  I am also too tired and too bloody sore to fight her any more. We have become co-dependent.

During lockdown she would crawl in through the open window in the attic in the dead of night so not to be spotted. She became more real now that lockdown had stolen the space for private vanities. Shape shifter. Her length denies imagination in negotiating those only slightly open windows. Now she steals my steroids and antibiotics, replacing them with  night candy and I grow more for her. My doctors can’t fathom why I don’t heal. I’m a rarity she says. I try not to lose sight that I am her delicacy, she is not doing me a favour and this might never end. But it will. Soon there will be a thickening and that’s not her predilection. 

This morning I’m wondering, as she looks disappointed with my offering, is there a network of them? How do they communicate? Will a different one come to harvest my scar tissue? It strikes me as being more painful. Not that this is – it’s just strange. The talons at the base of her wrists scoop and drag each fragment of rice-paper thin skin which threatens to leave me. Once renewed, taut, it pulls and cracks and in that instance of striking pain comes the relief of every teenaged cutter who doesn’t understand the processes of their pre-frontal cortex, of their amygdala, of their fight and flight responses.  I’m flying now. 

When she first found me my heart stopped. The same way it stops when you find a leech on the back of your calf muscle, barely feeling it but sickening you all the same.  I was patting my skin dry on stepping out of the shower. I thought it to be my lover behind the frosted glass door but she had forgotten herself and was gathering the remnants of my DNA from my clothes left upon the bathroom floor. At 6ft 4, bent over like an aluminium tent frame, the iridescent patches, sensors, flashed and blinked like the perfect fly’s eyes. Multiplied. It has no face and I call it she because her touch is tender and considered. She has never made me bleed. That’s just the natural order of being stripped clean of loose, crusted skin every morning, every evening, every time I am alone.

At first I thought her to be a hallucination. I spoke to my shrink who gently considered which medications I needed to change. But I knew she was real when I saw the photos I took of my hands and face every week. Evidence is undeniable. I am being cultivated, harvested. Faceless, she makes me feel comfortable. I can imagine she’s some kind of exotic otherworld insect but once she’s sated, that’s when I feel afraid. That’s when I close my eyes and wait for the night to roll into my mind. She quivers, each sensor on her body assimilating each crumb of me and she emits a bismuth light and for thirty terrifying seconds, she becomes a gossamer pyramid, enclosing each fallen scrap of me like organza crystals and emits an eery sound akin to the calling of the wind through the broken milk bottles of my youth.

Jane Nash

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