Nicely Strange Stories Home

allergy This was the essence of pain, the cutting sensation that could not be alleviated by chemicals, slowly building towards some unimaginable climax, and yet never reaching it... I could scream out in impotent rage, he thought, but my throat hurts too much. And besides, the people in the car next to me would think i'm strange. Well, stranger than usual. The merely routine torture of negotiating St. Kilda road and Swanston Street during the morning peak hour was, this morning, accented by an acute attack of pharyngitis. Genesis had often joked about it, but today it really did seem as if he was having knitting needles slowly driven up through the roof of his mouth. Eyes watering, he squinted through the tears, at the rear of the car in front. This triggered a tickling feeling at the back of his throat, which he knew from bitter experience would soon migrate up to a spot just behind his eyes, and then explode out of the front of his face as a sneeze. He tried all of the tricks he'd developed in the past 48 hours; the sequence of short sniffs, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth, rubbing alternate sides of his nose; but his rebellious nervous system wasn't going to be side-tracked this time. With a mounting sense of panic, he glanced about looking for somewhere to stop the car; mercifully, the lights ahead changed to red and he didn't have to risk sneezing while the car was still in motion. He had his handkerchief out, and of course, the feeling faded. He was about to resume driving when the sneeze (which had been hiding just behind his adenoids) leapt out and attacked him. The usual passage by which air left his nose was blocked, but the sneeze managed to emerge somehow. after the shock had faded and his vision had returned to normal, he thought this is something like what a fish might feel, as it is reeled from the water, with a hook up its nose. Waves of pain radiated from the centre of his face, like ripples in a pond that someone had just thrown a rusted oven full of bricks into. He somehow made it to the office, and collapsed behind his desk, knocking over a stack of 3-1/2 inch disks. "Oh gods below," he moaned softly, "it's going to be one of those days." Just to make things worse, Hanrahan, the office wit approached. "Gen, how was your weekend, mine was -Jesus Christ on a rubber crutch!" He had spotted Genesis' ravaged face. "Glad to hear it, Hanrahan." he croaked, trying to hide under a manilla folder. "You are going home Right Now," Hanrahan said, taking a few steps back. "You know how Martele feels about people spreading the 'flu around the office... UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!" he cried out. Genesis threw an empty styrofoam cup at him as he retreated. He was sitting with his head against the desk, the manilla folder over his head, trying to work up the strength to check last night's batch runs (or at least to see which ones had failed or were still running), when someone grasped his hair and lifted his head. The light seared his optic nerves. "You're right, Hanrahan," Miss Martele said, examining Genesis' red eyes. "No way in hell are you going to stay here today, my dear. You had better get the train home, you don't look well enough to drive ... I'll have one of the work experience students run your car home." Genesis drew some strength from this: "No-one touches `Eva'. 'specially not some dipstick year eleven kid who just got his p-plates. Or her P-plates, it doesn't matter, I'll-" Martele put her hands up in resignation. "Okay, you can leave it in the underground car park for today. Do you think you'll be well enough to make it tomorrow?" Genesis got to his feet unsteadily, feeling about on his desk for a pair of sunglasses to shut out the light. "I'll be here tomorrow, dead or alive." "Dead, more likely." he heard Hanrahan mutter as they dispersed. Walking to Museum station from the office, he had to walk against a stream of healthy, normal people, into the sun. It wasn't enough that his sinuses felt as if they were trying to escape, but the brilliant morning sunshine (under other circumstances, it would be quite a nice day) glittered off the blue mirrored glass office windows around him, each shard of light another needle of pain between his eyes, stabbing through the sunglasses as if they weren't there. The train-ride home took place in a timeless haze, with a few lucid moments appearing like fragments of debris bobbing to the surface after a shipping accident. He remembered seeing some incredibly ornate graffiti at a railway station - he couldn't remember which station it was - which looked like an old-fashioned stone well, with a pair of legs poking out of it. Abruptly, he remembered the fish pond in his back yard. This fish pond had been built by the previous tenants, who had taken the fish with them, leaving an unusually deep hole filled with slightly green water. He had, occasionally, idly fantasised about performing sacrifices to the Elder Gods in it. He was suddenly struck with the idea that it would be cool and calm at the bottom of that pond. He was so taken with the idea that he almost missed his station. Walking to his house from the station, he could almost ignore the morning sun's assault on his eyes (walking into the east again). He stumbled past the letterbox filled with tattered pulp flyers advertising pet-grooming services and home-delivery sushi, unlocked the front door and went straight out into the back yard. The pond was made out of grey-green fibreglass, but in his mind's eye it was a sacrificial cenote edged in slabs of obsidian, with a host of hooded figures surrounding it, chanting Enochian mysteries as he slowly approached. He stripped off his jacket, levered off his shoes and sat down at the edge of the pond. The morning sun cast a diagonal beam of light green, flecked with particles of algae, against the darker green that characterised the deep recesses of the pond. He took his wallet out of his pocket, dropped it in. It sank, swaying, into the depths, trailing silvery bubbles. a faint cloud of muck appeared a few moments later as the wallet settled in the slime at the bottom. He smiled, and waited for the cloud to settle before he turned around, sitting with legs outstretched and his back to the pond. Then he slowly fell in backwards. The water closed over his eyes in a confusion of silver bubbles and refracted light, which settled as he drifted down, his feet trailing, a stream of air-bubbles breaking against his feet and diverging as he exhaled. The pressure in his sinus suddenly vanished with a 'pop'; it felt like someone had removed the clamp that had been pressing into his temples for the past two days. He stretched out his arms, his fingertips brushing the smooth walls of the pond as he sank deeper. He exhaled as far as he could, and then cautiously inhaled some water. the mixture of air and water tickled his lungs, and he coughed until the last remnants had been expelled to drift up, glittering, past the mismatched socks he had put on this morning, through the diagonal beam of sunlight to make ripples in the silvered surface which had already settled from the disturbance he had made with his entry. It was deeper than he had thought ... the roughly circular mouth, far above, was growing smaller as he drifted down into the recesses of the pond. As he finally approached the bottom, his descent began to slow, and the faint stream of sunlight above grew even less well defined, obscured by clouds of algae and mud that his arrival had disturbed. The back of his neck and his shoulders settled into the slime, and as he settled into a reclining position at the bottom of the pond, he opened his mouth and emitted a final bubble of air. As it wobbled its way up into the distance, a sense of ineffable tranquillity settled over him and he drifted off to sleep.

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