Flannel: Worlds Apart

By Aden Rossinni

Flannel is a story about a man - hardly a man - who has grown up in a country that is not his own. It has been twenty years since world war three, and his family has relocated from England to Colombia. They are called the white ones by the locals although they have been become Colombian in almost every way. Flann and his brother along with their ne

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aden Rossinni Books
• Release date: Jul 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994389701

Book preview

Flannel

Worlds Apart

Aden Rossinni

Flannel

Worlds Apart

Aden Rossinni

The Future of Books

Flannel

Issue 1, Volume 1

Copyright © Aden Rossinni, 2015

Cover design: Roberto Calabrese

First published 2015

Aden Rossinni

Australia

Email: [e-mail]

Editor: Roberto Calabrese

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a database and retrieval system or transmitted in any form or any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the owner of copyright and the above publishers.

Flannel

Worlds Apart

Rossinni, Aden

Dedicated to my childhood,

To my dreams,

To the distant fellows,

The persistent bellows

Of

Inner struggles and

Fortune

That bubbles.

To my wife, to whom

Nothing is possible without,

Her love knows no limit.

Least of all,

This story is like the lid of

My imagination.

It has unlocked

Emotions.

With love always,

Aden Rossinni

A Matter of time

This story is fictional, and yet…is it?

Time doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter what you’ve been told or even how you think you see it. The fact of the matter is that time is but an illusion of reality used by humans to avail themselves of some semblance of challenge. This forces one to act according to the beat of the majority rather than oneself, and any constraints you may impose on yourself.

Anything organic has as its PRIMARY root thought. The being or thought are actually the only reason that we believe that the physical universe is our master and creator. Of course, some still believe that a creator – external to themselves – is responsible, and yet, this is false at the same time that it is true.

A Memory is always there and depends on not the body or its devices but only on the being’s willingness to retrieve the information that it has cast into the ether like an undulating wave. A memory exists in actuality as an idea, a bolt of light – thought – life.

The Year is 2042.

I only state this fact whilst you still consider to, stubbornly, accept the world within the confines of the weak and somewhat tortured human intellect.

Of the millions of universes and galaxies that have been conceived of yours is but one, and although it is important to you and your nearest and dearest friends and family; it is only a figment of your creation and who am I to tell you what to do with yourself?

What is that? I feel like I’m moving. Am I awake?

Where am I?

Flann? Flann, it’s time to get up?

Mum had been shaking me.

Hey mum, feel like I was hit by a bus.

‘You’ve had quite a trip.’ she said, but I wasn’t sure what she meant.

There’s something I am always trying to remember...it’s a memory, I think. Actually I’m not sure what it is because there are people and…it feels like it’s still happening to me, but really, I can’t tell. As though I don’t know where I’ve been, what I’m doing and, in what direction I’m headed, but then there are other things…

I sat upright, fixing the pillows behind the small of my back. It’s the little things that show me something isn’t quite right. Am I explaining myself? I mean, can you get the gist of what I’m saying because sometimes when I say it out loud like this, it sounds confusing, even to me.

Sure, I guess everyone has those times in their life that makes them feel lost and they meet a person that triggers a memory because that person does something that reminds them of something or someone else.

Yes, but it’s more than that.

What do you mean?

I can’t explain it. It’s sort of like a dream. You know when you dream about something and it can seem so real and then you wake up and a little bit later on in the day you can’t even recall what the dream was about or who was in it?

Yeah, I guess so, but my dreams are vivid and I remember all the details, most of the time, but yes, I know what you mean.

Anyway, so in this dream that I’m having, as usual I don’t remember much, and I don’t think it’s even a dream. Maybe you’ll be able to tell, it starts off at my father’s funeral.

I was crying, listening to the priest talk about how everyone loved my dad. I looked up and through my clouded, teary eyes I saw this girl. She was standing with what looked like her parents, and for a moment I recall thinking: ‘who is that girl?’, and I couldn’t place her or her parents.

Doesn’t mean that you knew everyone that your father knew! Could have been colleagues of your father that you hadn’t met, don’t you think?

No, couldn’t have been. If it was England or Australia I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but here in Colombia, it’s different.

She was crying, more than me. I just didn’t understand it and the funny thing is that I can’t remember what they looked like, but somehow it seemed as though there was some connection there, something in that dream, but I...

Yeah well, dreams and memories can be weird and who knows what it all means really! Who knows!

Guess so. But there’s something else. Do you want to hear it, I mean, should I tell you?

I’ve got nothing better to do, but are you sure you’re up for it, you’ve been out for fourteen hours?

I have?

Yep.

Okay, but I’m fine.

So let’s hear it then.

Part I

Some People shout, some people cry – others walk around dirty, rotten and wry. Ours is oft to wonder, but truly nothing can be tamed except the limits of our imagination within the bounds of other’s frustration.

1

A

breeze fluttered about touching all and nothing. The sun appeared and then disappeared at the bequest of the clouds that overhung the tatty neighborhood. Chulos circled in wide arcs their great wingspan stiff, reluctant to bend to the will of the wind. They waited for anything; an opportunity; a time – their time.

The main street was bubbling. Little tykes, still-wet hair, slicked back; skinny street dogs, rib cage pressing their dirt-ridden skin, fur shaved by societies’ lack of attention. A mother scolds her child for not eating her breakfast. Sounds pierce the poverty, bounce off and return to whence they came without effect - it took more than that to turn a head in the neighborhood – something unusual, or at least out of the ordinary.

Next door was a family. I thought they were normal. I thought the fact that only I saw them every other week was just my lack of attention-to-detail. There were three of them and they didn’t partake in the street’s mundane activities. Quart, another neighbor, sometimes hung out on the front steps – with his sister. They’d just sit there nothing doing, no intentions, and no plans as the world went by – the clouds had more drive than them. Nothing changed in the world when they sat there; they didn’t have any effect on anything as far as they could tell and that’s what normal people did. If someone went past, they’d say hello or ridicule them for being odd in some way – a different odd to them, so that was odd.

I like being at home. I also liked being away from home. It was confusing because when I was away from home I wanted to be at home and vice versa. What to do? I like staring at the wall and feeling the blankness with my mind, the white nothing leaving an imprint on some part of my cells until I couldn’t take it any more – something else would pop in. It just dropped in without an invitation, no knock; no aforementioned activity led you to believe that it was coming. Just there and then it stood still, wouldn’t budge. I knew that if it didn’t go away something would happen and I’d do something.

The girl next door, she’s the one that I never see, except with her parents at the time they leave and return some time; some time that is that we don’t see, or at least not I. The parents I don’t really care about because they look abandoned. Their faces wrought with shadows and signs of a vacuum that prevents anything in their minds from entering or leaving. They were nothing to me. The girl however, I felt - was different.

Five-foot five inches, long dark hair, sort of waves that rippled down her shoulders. Her hand clutched by her mother’s outstretched arm as if they were always crossing the street. She didn’t seem to carry the same illusion of structure; the biding of time that the humans dragging her did.

Was she a prisoner? Did they take her out every few weeks for some kind of mind-control? A way to capture her being in a box and close it forever - her eye caught mine. I mean, it actually just stole my thoughts with one direct and exact clutch. My mind had been vacant until that time. A seed was planted – her seed.

I told my mother about it and she crossed her legs, took a drag of the cigarette that had a permanent position between her first and second finger. Her tired eyes ever-so-gradually squinted – maybe because of the smoke, possibly because she thought something or perhaps because she knew. She didn’t say anything else, except that; that non-utterance. I knew what it meant really.

My little brother was a dork. He thought of everything before I could even imagine that anything even existed. His thoughts penetrated the ionosphere fleeing out into the forever gloom of a vacuum the same way the little girl’s parent’s minds had no thoughts – apparently. I sometimes questioned his ideas and spoke to him about the plants and the dirt. He said many things, mostly out of my reach. My mind needed gravity. His was without. I took it that I was different. He said something else. I asked him if he had talked with the girl next door and he replied – I always do. I didn’t understand.

The main street of our neighborhood was littered with beings like me or they appeared to be like me. A café on the corner with yellow chairs and metallic tables opened every day at ten am. The lady who put the tables out at that time was nervous looking; strands of her hair couldn’t have cared less about the rest of her hair and what it was doing. They just went in their own direction.

I went past as she placed the tables down, her eyes focused on me - blinding me from anything else. I averted my eyes annoyed that I couldn’t look at her activities anymore. The fact that I couldn’t look made me want to look. I looked. She was back inside getting another table – nothing to see.

I continued walking past the other shops – the little old man with crumpled pants, pulled too high, his belt fixed in a position that disagreed with his waist. His shop was not even a shop it was a wooden box that resembled an old writing desk, but impoverished. A piece of wood held the lid up – things hung and protruded from the box; little containers with sweets and plastic canisters with sticks of some sort wrapped in colorful papers. He didn’t say much.

The very next shop was a sort of cantina. It was closed – I could tell because the metal gate to the court-yard area in front was locked. Some papers grabbed onto the legs of chairs, dust made settlement and the style of the place was not of now. Was it closed-down? I looked across the road to the other side of the street and the girl appeared right in front of the butcher. Her velvety-like aura was a vast contrast to the red and white slaughter house with its guts and blood spilling onto the tiles beyond the front counter.

Vague, once animate beings hung from the ceiling, skinless muscles rippling and blood clotted. I could see her nose convulse in horror. My body shivered although it wasn’t a cold day. She turned her head toward me but I wasn’t sure if she saw me and if she did – did she know who I was? There was no guarantee that just because you noticed someone that they noticed you as much as your ego wanted to believe it so.

A bus fled down the quickly narrowing street with cars plied to the side of the road like sausages making room for themselves on a full barbecue. The bus narrowly missed my body – that was normal. Space in the neighborhood was a luxury that even Mr. and Mrs. Belgearn couldn’t afford with all their chocolate money – that is, the money they’d accumulated from peddling twenty percent cocoa bars to the unfortunate who couldn’t afford anything else. It was like crack to the depressed – something in the recipe abated their need to voluntarily flat-line it.

I looked back after the bus had gone, and - she was gone. I couldn’t remember if I saw her parents. I wandered back towards home the long way, past the supermarket and around the corner and up the hill toward the playing field with its ten-meter wire fence and dirt field.

The basketball court was empty except for a few guys lurking at one end, smoke emanating from them like a boiling pot of salted water, rolling and clutching for the pasta to be added. Some work-men pulled apart the house on one corner, closest to the field’s fence. A cord hung from the second story window – a drill lay on the ground waiting for its life-line. One of the doors to the garage was left open.

A wooden horse stood in the middle of the garage slash room, a workman dashed past like a poltergeist into another room and the sounds of a hammer echoed - vibrations streaming through the cement and causing some woodchips to dance.

Most life circumventing the field took a turn for the worse. There was an odd atmosphere about the place that was unlike anything else in the neighborhood. Mostly kids formed the community of the dirt field but now and again adults would appear but only for a short time.

The morning had the highest rate of mothers and wives as they took the opportunity while the degenerates were still in slumber. They ran around the edge of the field as the dirt kicked up – some at a snail’s pace carrying their bodies like a bag of cement heaved into the air, some raced along with dogs in tow determined to keep their eighteen-year-old bottom and yet others formed small groups – chatting about their malicious husbands or the bitches two-doors down letting the world know about their availability.

As I neared the beginning of my street – my street because that’s what you say isn’t it? As terribly ego-centric as it sounds, that’s what you say – I could see two cats running across the grass next to the field and onto the pavement near Mrs. Bloomer’s house. They didn’t fight like some cats do. They were actually playful, stopping to tumble over each other as if they didn’t have any bones. I could have sworn they didn’t have bones – I even tried proving it once in my year ten biology class. Everyone said I was a loser. I didn’t care because losers knew more things than winners.

Mrs. Bloomer’s house was immense in stature but in credibility it was likened to a ghetto slum house. The railing going up the side of the house was rusted and narrow. The entire west wall was four different colors – none of them attractive and it was difficult to discern which the proper color was. The cats like it though, and to them, a big house – old or new was just a playground.

I went home and slept.

2

Quart woke to the sounds of bells. He didn’t move; the bulging pillow clasped his form. The blanket remained at attention. His eyes rolled down to the sight of a stiffy.

‘Huh!’ he thought to himself.

‘Nothing I can do about that’- he didn’t feel like skinning the corn.

The hard-on was just a body’s way of telling the man that he was still a man – not to worry, relax! The sunlight was already revealing the spectacles of dust emanating from nowhere in particular. A blade of light cut across – through the blinds, sharply stabbing the floor boards.

It was almost seven-thirty am. Outside his window the world waited for him. All beckoned for Quart to join them and live in bliss. He closed his eyes deliberating what he should do today. He didn’t have any work. A couple walked past – dressed to go somewhere; they strode as if they had a plan. Quart noticed when people had a plan – their knees didn’t wobble and their shoulders carried them and their worries. Quart bounded along like a vulture – side to side, the head following the body, sometimes leaping. It wasn’t his fault. He had nothing to do.

As usual, not knowing what to do, in a field with no boundaries – he removed himself from the covers, tidied up the floor by piling dirty clothes and magazines together against one wall and pounding the pillow as if giving it life. His mother was up tending the kitchen affairs. His father had left for work twenty minutes beforehand and his sister was blow-drying her hair with the door open. As he walked past her door, she switched the machine off and turned. She’d seen him in the mirror.

Hey brother, what you up to? she cordially chirped.

Quart stopped just past the door, leaned back and replied.

Hey Portia, just walking – getting hungry - you?

They were close siblings because they had each other and countered on it. They had parents – both as per not-usual, especially in Colombia but it just wasn’t the same with their parents. Mother Katrice liked her friends more than anyone in her immediate family. It’s just the way she was. Her demeanor threw most people who visited the house.

You’d expect a mother to be caring and loving – to set flowers in a convenient place, to fix breakfast for her loved ones. Not Katrice. The least she could do to get by was how she lived – day by day.

Hey Mum, morning. Quart greeted his mum with unease.

Katrice leaned on the bench with one leg over the other and her hands firmly clenched to the laminate.  Her face was dry and her hair bedraggled. Next to her hand sat a coffee, the vapors filling the air.

I’m leaving now, take care of your sister won’t you. she blurted sin care.

Okay Mum, bye. his voice reached out but it had nothing to grab onto.

He sat at the table, hands on his lap. Sadness brewed and pushed through his sodden cheeks.

Quart stayed there at the table. The chair wasn’t comfortable but neither was his life, so he just sat. He didn’t even notice as he sat in a trance. Portia had skipped in and put some bread in the toaster, pulled the eggs out of the pantry and was cutting some bacon. It must have been the smell of the wafting pork and the sound of the crackling egg that broke his silence.

Hey. he whispered.

Give me a cuddle Quart, give me a broozing cuddle. Portia was the savior of them both. Her enthusiasm trusted the world and why it turned. If it wasn’t for her – Quart wouldn’t get up.

Quart clenched Portia’s arms and pulled her close. Her slight body wafted towards him and then they held each other up. Her arms wrapped around Quart’s waist – her face smothered in shirt. It was almost the same every day. It was as if - if they didn’t hug - they could not get through the day but they did, quite frankly – with ease.

Quart’s chin was perched on the top of her head and his eyes looked into the wall as if trying to discern an answer written on a white board. There were no answers. He squeezed her with greater pressure. That was the answer she required – all else was by the way.

~

I could hear the neighbors stirring on the other side. I could always hear their phone ringing, the old man snoring and that darned swing that the family had been using since I was a baby. I could never understand how the walls didn’t give in – the squawking of the ropes and the connection to the wall made me feel ill at ease. I always wanted to play on the swing but it never happened. The only time I ever got into that house was for such a short time that I could barely breathe, less lone take in the local amenities. It was before the strange couple and the mysterious girl moved in. I had just turned four. Victoria and Jason who were a few years older than me were the ones that the swing had been put up for.

Their parents had to go down the shops that day. I recall the car starting and two doors slamming. It was strange because I’d only ever heard one door close other times and they never left the children alone even though Jason was at the time seven and Victoria was about five.

I ran to the front window of mother’s bedroom and pulled the curtain back slightly and chinned up the wall to rest on the window sill. I could see both of them in the car and the back seat was empty. As soon as the car was eating the distance I opened the front door and dowsed the seven steps with my little feet. I didn’t know how long they’d be gone and the only thing I could think of was to rush. The front door was closed. Should I knock or find another way in, I thought. I was four – I knocked. The door didn’t move. My knuckles reddened on the metallic door. Just as I was about to give up, a kindred spirit motioned with her arm from the inside.

Victoria had grabbed the end of her jumper and had stretched it over her hand so she could rub the painted metal. She couldn’t reach to open the door; nevertheless she tried in vain to let me know I was welcome.

Victoria, go and get your brother! Is he there?

No answer.

Little padded footsteps faded into the distant. A few minutes later, the latch of the door was pulled and it stood open just enough for Jason to peek out. I could see his blue eyes in the darkness of the crack.

What? he said.

Hi Jason. I replied.

We were kids and there needed no further explanation. It was an unwritten law. The door opened and he grabbed my wrist and pulled me in. We all knew it was wrong and that’s probably why we did it. The three of us stood in the dark as the door closed behind me. Victoria’s sweet breathe whispered her close proximity to me. Jason looked on as if he had the eyes of a cat.

Let’s go. he said as he grabbed both of us and then dropped our forearms and turned. We followed his lead up the stairs.

He was much faster