MrTickle
November 28th, 2016, 04:55 PM
This is a short story I wrote. Thank you for reading!
“Alright, fuck the international sales, forget that. We sold strong in this region, who cares if some blogger from London didn’t think it was his ‘cup of tea’.” said Burke, who was addressing the band in his garage.
Hank, who was sitting on top of an upturned crate and leaning on his guitar said, “We are going around in circles here, Burke.”
“Wait. Think about it, we’ve got a niche. A niche who like the darker parts of our album. But imagine if soon they didn’t just like our darker songs, they loved them.”
“You want to be some kind of sadist band?”
“Call us whatever you want, we need to go where our audience wants us.”
Hank, who was sitting on top of an empty beer barrel listening to this conversation from his phone most of the time, looked up, “So, what? You want to start writing a new album now?”
Ingrid, the other band mate who was tapping the drums against the hood of the bands rusted Sedan sighed.
See, that was the only problem for Burke. There weren’t enough dark undertones in Maidleton. This town was white picket fences, friendly gas stations and town halls. Burke always says, “All this town does is look back at you. One after another of reflected glass buildings. I don’t want to see my moody figure. Show me something maudlin.”
The Haunted Sphere, what a pretentious name for a debut album. It was inspired by driven by teen angst and ritualistic killings that the band made up. They played live at local venues like their old school and town hall. One local journalist said, “What a blast! A debut album to remember. I could imagine this to be the soundtrack to a Stephen King film.” That guy can’t even write films, thought Burke. And worse, Burke didn’t want mainstream horror. He wanted his album to enter your subconscious like smog, slowly dampening your positive outlook on life.
Yeah, that’s right. Darkness comes from the world you inhabit, thought Burke.
Burke made an announcement to the band.
The next Thursday they flew over to Berlin, and moved into a cabin surrounded by pine trees. Burke rented a little wooden cabin from an Italian painter called Enzo Santan in Berlin. Enzo claimed in an interview with Hearts & Arts magazine that his influences came from the dark undertones of this cabin where a snuff film director once murdered his director of photography for shooting a scene so close to the director’s image he had in his head that he smashed the DoP over the head with an iron and ate his insides. That’s the art life.
Enzo’s last words to Burke when he handed him the keys were, “Don’t be afraid to experiment a little.”
But for the first day, did they experiment? No, they sat around talking about what kind of demons could be out there in the woods. Fuck, this ain’t a found footage movie. “No more fables guys.”
“What do you want to do Burke? There’s not much going on here. There’s no heating, no hot water. What did this painter find here? And why is there an old torture rack in the corner?”
“That’s why we need to experiment! Talking about demons with pitch forks and pointy fucking ears ain’t gunna hit our niche is it?”
Ingrid starred daggers at Burke, “Then how are we going to huh? Put one of us on the rack and write lyrics about it?”
Burke shook his head and sat back in his chair, and retreated into his thoughts.
His band ignored him and started jamming. Burke closed his eyes. Then at one point during his bands singing:
The devil grows some angel wings
But he brings with them
A thousand stings!
From these deep dark woods.
Burke stormed out into the woods.
His band spent all evening shouting his name from the cabin, but they confided it was too dark out there and too late to go looking for him. The best thing to do was head to a nearby hotel and wait until morning. After all, he had a habit of running off into isolation when there were band squabbles and would often come back very tired and bruised, but having written a lot of lyrics.
His band headed out the next morning to find a hotel after a not so successful hunt for Burke. They did all wonder though how they were going to find the cabin again once they got out of the woods. There wasn’t even a road or dirt track, and the map the Italian painter used to guide them when they arrived had been given to Burke. And Burke still had it.
However, that same evening Burke wondered back inside the cabin. His hair now slicked back. His clothes speckled with mud, but having written nothing. He immediately ordered a pizza. He could finally get ideas for lyrics without the interruption of anyone else. Burke always liked the freedom of having control.
He never was in control of anything as a kid. He grew up in the pressure cooker of a controlling father in a small hut in the Mojave. Burke wasn’t allowed to make friends, wasn’t allowed toys, “use your imagination.” His father used to say. He wasn’t even allowed to go into his Dad’s room. Apparently it was off limits because there were things in there a young kid might get nightmares about, which, incidentally gave him nightmares because of that. But Burke did find a bit of control when his Dad wouldn’t wake some mornings due to long nights writing another of his dark thrillers.
Burke would run out of his hut and head to the formation of rocks a mile away and feed the coyote he’d made friends with since 8. He fed and met him all the way until he was 13.
However, one day he visited coyote. And he saw coyote lying still in the middle of an opening in the rocks. Red ink with bits of what looked like red spinach to Burke lay out in front of the lifeless coyote. His Dad was standing with his back to both of them, drawing something on a canvas like a painter. He had a portable radio playing Mozart’s requiem. But his Dad caught sight of him when he turned around to paint more of coyote’s dead body. He sighed, and said, “Believe it or not son, this pays the bills.”
At the time he thought his Dad was insane, but now Burke realised - after spending two nights in the Berlin woods - maybe his Dad really knew how to write dark stuff because he knew how to access it. Yeah, he thought, darkness comes from experience.
The pizza Burke ordered was a bit too greasy for Burke’s liking, and the filing in the crust more like glue, but Burke wasn’t one to complain. He couldn’t anyway. He was dragging the dead delivery girl he beat to death with an amplifier towards the rack in the cabin.
Burke pulled the handle of the ratchet mechanism until her limbs were as far as he thought they could go without tearing off, and then he got a garden rake and raked her skin hoping that some kind of dark epiphany would be set off in his brain. But no lyrics were forthcoming in this act.
Later on, he used her teeth as pens dipped in an ink well to write replies to his fans thanking them for their fan letters. He also told them he was in a good place creatively and hoped they would be ‘violently’ surprised by his next record. But no lyrics were forthcoming in this act.
But later in the evening he did try to write some lyrics:
I used to love ya
but you pushed me too far
so I’ll stretch ya
so you’re tall enough to see
the things you did to me.
No. Fuck, no. Burke snapped his pen in half. He looked at the girl’s dead body, resembling a mound of skin sent through a grill. This hasn’t even affected me, he thought.
Burke lay on the floor starring up at the wooden beams, the cobwebs and the flies trapped in the webs. He watched as a spider edged its way into the middle of one of the webs and devoured a fly, and with a spring in its crawl, vanished. Maybe darkness doesn’t come from experiencing things. Maybe it comes from inside, he thought.
Burke went outside and found a snake. He grabbed it by the mouth and with his right foot clamped it to the floor so he could tape its mouth with duck tape.
He carried it back inside and bent over the table. It slid up his ass with surprising enthusiasm, but he kept the tail hanging out so it would be easy to yank out when he was finished. Burke kept reassuring himself that it was simply a scaly tampon. Nothing else to it.
The strain it put on him. The pressure inside, he felt something coming, a distant lyric maybe? But suddenly the snake stopped squirming. Did it just die inside of me? He thought.
Fuck, even the snake can’t find anything of worth inside of me.
Burke pulled the snake out and threw it back into the cold outside. Burke then slung the body of the delivery girl behind a tree. He moved the rack out back and cleaned the brown muck off the floor.
He sat down at the table for another four hours waiting to see if another song would come. Nothing. He tried to remember how he wrote all his other albums, but really, they all sucked.
It took him another two hours to buck up the courage to ring Shaun, who answered sounding tired yet relaxed, “Hey, do ya, you know, wanna come back?”
“Maybe... huh? Where are you?”
“Back in the cabin, listen, I-I want to collaborate.”
“...That’s a first.”
“Alright, fuck the international sales, forget that. We sold strong in this region, who cares if some blogger from London didn’t think it was his ‘cup of tea’.” said Burke, who was addressing the band in his garage.
Hank, who was sitting on top of an upturned crate and leaning on his guitar said, “We are going around in circles here, Burke.”
“Wait. Think about it, we’ve got a niche. A niche who like the darker parts of our album. But imagine if soon they didn’t just like our darker songs, they loved them.”
“You want to be some kind of sadist band?”
“Call us whatever you want, we need to go where our audience wants us.”
Hank, who was sitting on top of an empty beer barrel listening to this conversation from his phone most of the time, looked up, “So, what? You want to start writing a new album now?”
Ingrid, the other band mate who was tapping the drums against the hood of the bands rusted Sedan sighed.
See, that was the only problem for Burke. There weren’t enough dark undertones in Maidleton. This town was white picket fences, friendly gas stations and town halls. Burke always says, “All this town does is look back at you. One after another of reflected glass buildings. I don’t want to see my moody figure. Show me something maudlin.”
The Haunted Sphere, what a pretentious name for a debut album. It was inspired by driven by teen angst and ritualistic killings that the band made up. They played live at local venues like their old school and town hall. One local journalist said, “What a blast! A debut album to remember. I could imagine this to be the soundtrack to a Stephen King film.” That guy can’t even write films, thought Burke. And worse, Burke didn’t want mainstream horror. He wanted his album to enter your subconscious like smog, slowly dampening your positive outlook on life.
Yeah, that’s right. Darkness comes from the world you inhabit, thought Burke.
Burke made an announcement to the band.
The next Thursday they flew over to Berlin, and moved into a cabin surrounded by pine trees. Burke rented a little wooden cabin from an Italian painter called Enzo Santan in Berlin. Enzo claimed in an interview with Hearts & Arts magazine that his influences came from the dark undertones of this cabin where a snuff film director once murdered his director of photography for shooting a scene so close to the director’s image he had in his head that he smashed the DoP over the head with an iron and ate his insides. That’s the art life.
Enzo’s last words to Burke when he handed him the keys were, “Don’t be afraid to experiment a little.”
But for the first day, did they experiment? No, they sat around talking about what kind of demons could be out there in the woods. Fuck, this ain’t a found footage movie. “No more fables guys.”
“What do you want to do Burke? There’s not much going on here. There’s no heating, no hot water. What did this painter find here? And why is there an old torture rack in the corner?”
“That’s why we need to experiment! Talking about demons with pitch forks and pointy fucking ears ain’t gunna hit our niche is it?”
Ingrid starred daggers at Burke, “Then how are we going to huh? Put one of us on the rack and write lyrics about it?”
Burke shook his head and sat back in his chair, and retreated into his thoughts.
His band ignored him and started jamming. Burke closed his eyes. Then at one point during his bands singing:
The devil grows some angel wings
But he brings with them
A thousand stings!
From these deep dark woods.
Burke stormed out into the woods.
His band spent all evening shouting his name from the cabin, but they confided it was too dark out there and too late to go looking for him. The best thing to do was head to a nearby hotel and wait until morning. After all, he had a habit of running off into isolation when there were band squabbles and would often come back very tired and bruised, but having written a lot of lyrics.
His band headed out the next morning to find a hotel after a not so successful hunt for Burke. They did all wonder though how they were going to find the cabin again once they got out of the woods. There wasn’t even a road or dirt track, and the map the Italian painter used to guide them when they arrived had been given to Burke. And Burke still had it.
However, that same evening Burke wondered back inside the cabin. His hair now slicked back. His clothes speckled with mud, but having written nothing. He immediately ordered a pizza. He could finally get ideas for lyrics without the interruption of anyone else. Burke always liked the freedom of having control.
He never was in control of anything as a kid. He grew up in the pressure cooker of a controlling father in a small hut in the Mojave. Burke wasn’t allowed to make friends, wasn’t allowed toys, “use your imagination.” His father used to say. He wasn’t even allowed to go into his Dad’s room. Apparently it was off limits because there were things in there a young kid might get nightmares about, which, incidentally gave him nightmares because of that. But Burke did find a bit of control when his Dad wouldn’t wake some mornings due to long nights writing another of his dark thrillers.
Burke would run out of his hut and head to the formation of rocks a mile away and feed the coyote he’d made friends with since 8. He fed and met him all the way until he was 13.
However, one day he visited coyote. And he saw coyote lying still in the middle of an opening in the rocks. Red ink with bits of what looked like red spinach to Burke lay out in front of the lifeless coyote. His Dad was standing with his back to both of them, drawing something on a canvas like a painter. He had a portable radio playing Mozart’s requiem. But his Dad caught sight of him when he turned around to paint more of coyote’s dead body. He sighed, and said, “Believe it or not son, this pays the bills.”
At the time he thought his Dad was insane, but now Burke realised - after spending two nights in the Berlin woods - maybe his Dad really knew how to write dark stuff because he knew how to access it. Yeah, he thought, darkness comes from experience.
The pizza Burke ordered was a bit too greasy for Burke’s liking, and the filing in the crust more like glue, but Burke wasn’t one to complain. He couldn’t anyway. He was dragging the dead delivery girl he beat to death with an amplifier towards the rack in the cabin.
Burke pulled the handle of the ratchet mechanism until her limbs were as far as he thought they could go without tearing off, and then he got a garden rake and raked her skin hoping that some kind of dark epiphany would be set off in his brain. But no lyrics were forthcoming in this act.
Later on, he used her teeth as pens dipped in an ink well to write replies to his fans thanking them for their fan letters. He also told them he was in a good place creatively and hoped they would be ‘violently’ surprised by his next record. But no lyrics were forthcoming in this act.
But later in the evening he did try to write some lyrics:
I used to love ya
but you pushed me too far
so I’ll stretch ya
so you’re tall enough to see
the things you did to me.
No. Fuck, no. Burke snapped his pen in half. He looked at the girl’s dead body, resembling a mound of skin sent through a grill. This hasn’t even affected me, he thought.
Burke lay on the floor starring up at the wooden beams, the cobwebs and the flies trapped in the webs. He watched as a spider edged its way into the middle of one of the webs and devoured a fly, and with a spring in its crawl, vanished. Maybe darkness doesn’t come from experiencing things. Maybe it comes from inside, he thought.
Burke went outside and found a snake. He grabbed it by the mouth and with his right foot clamped it to the floor so he could tape its mouth with duck tape.
He carried it back inside and bent over the table. It slid up his ass with surprising enthusiasm, but he kept the tail hanging out so it would be easy to yank out when he was finished. Burke kept reassuring himself that it was simply a scaly tampon. Nothing else to it.
The strain it put on him. The pressure inside, he felt something coming, a distant lyric maybe? But suddenly the snake stopped squirming. Did it just die inside of me? He thought.
Fuck, even the snake can’t find anything of worth inside of me.
Burke pulled the snake out and threw it back into the cold outside. Burke then slung the body of the delivery girl behind a tree. He moved the rack out back and cleaned the brown muck off the floor.
He sat down at the table for another four hours waiting to see if another song would come. Nothing. He tried to remember how he wrote all his other albums, but really, they all sucked.
It took him another two hours to buck up the courage to ring Shaun, who answered sounding tired yet relaxed, “Hey, do ya, you know, wanna come back?”
“Maybe... huh? Where are you?”
“Back in the cabin, listen, I-I want to collaborate.”
“...That’s a first.”