Flare and Falter

By Michael Conley

How many ways can the world fall apart? A smug superhero belittles the very people he’s supposed to save. An Aztec god escapes the sacking of his city to take refuge in modern-day Manchester. Rebels topple a despotic regime, much to the disappointment of the dictator’s body double, and even the penguins decide to rise up against thei

• Language: English
• Publisher: Splice
• Release date: Jul 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781999974138

Michael Conley

Michael Conley is a writer from Manchester. His poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and has been Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. He has published two pamphlets: Aquarium (2014), with Flarestack Poets, and More Weight (2017), with Eyewear. His prose work has taken third place in the Bridport Prize and has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize.

Book preview

FLARE AND FALTER

Michael Conley

ThisIsSplice.co.uk

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Michael Conley is a writer from Manchester. His poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and has been Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. He has published two pamphlets: Aquarium (2014), with Flarestack Poets, and More Weight (2017), with Eyewear. His prose work has taken third place in the Bridport Prize and has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize.

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Contents

About the Author

Anatidaephobia

Marked

When It Starts

Krill Rations

The God Quetzalcoatl Has Retired and Now Runs a Pub in South Manchester

To Armour a Vehicle

Body Double #3

Toddler Ninety-Six

Lifelike

Internal Memo: The Ministry for Bees

Dispatches From the Last Great War of Good vs. Evil

Gentleman of the Bedchamber

Silence Is Golden

Amok

The People

The Superhero Your Rotten City Deserved

The President’s Penis

Here’s Why You’re Such a Shit Department Store Santa Claus

Vertigo

Happiness

Security Detail

Pinniped

Red Velvet

Rory’s Difficult Year

All the Little Yous Just Find Each Other

Some Final Thoughts From Your Soon-to-be-Ex-Lover, the First-and-Last-Time Skydiver

Speed Dating

Coda

As for the War

Personal Chef

Kraken

Who Are International Moon Team?

A Rock to Wind a Piece of String Around

Questions, Some of Which Are About Cats

The Wasp Man’s Greatest Fear

Acknowledgements

Copyright

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Anatidaephobia

"The fear that somewhere, somehow,

a duck is watching you."

Gary Larson

He wakes to an echoing quack.

In the bathroom mirror, behind his shoulder, a duck roosts on the shower rail. When he turns around, it’s not there.

On the way to work he notices the same duck waiting at a bus stop. Something in its expression reminds him of his father.

The duck isn’t in any reference books. The closest specimen is a Swedish Blue, but his duck is yellow. He wonders when he started to think of it as his duck.

When he gets home, his laptop is on and his internet browsing history is open. A trail of moist flipperprints leads to the kitchen. The breadbin is crumbless.

He turns on the television. He spots the duck in the audience on Question Time, wing raised politely above its head, staring into the camera. Dimbleby ignores it.

Sleepless weeks pass. He keeps finding feathers on his pillow.

One morning, in the mirror, the duck seems closer than usual. Without looking directly at it, he shoots an arm out behind him, grabbing it by the neck. He raises it to eye level, studies its empty black pupils.

Quack, it says.

He howls. The neck snaps like a broccoli stalk. He stands in the bathroom for ten minutes, cradling the lifeless body. He decides to bury it in the garden.

When he returns, panting, his fingernails packed with soil, he doesn’t notice the full bath, the two large yellow shapes bobbing serenely, watching him dress for work.

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Marked

One night, Alphabet fell from the sky. It began with uppercase Y’s spinning earthwards past our bedroom windows like giant maple seeds. We heard them burst as they hit the pavement, spilling out millions of tiny lowercase versions of themselves, which caught on the wind and settled on footpaths and driveways and on tiled roofs. By the time we got to our door, the air was already a ransom note: supersonic streamlined V’s shot by with their white-hot tips, while seabird W’s and M’s wheeled on the currents and fat watermelon O’s bounced off car bonnets.

It wasn’t just our letters either: afterwards, some swore they’d seen hieroglyphics tearing nimbus clouds to cirrus, or Hebrew characters entwining with Cyrillic and tumbling together, backlit by moonlight. When the debris landed on our skin, it was cold, but not at all unpleasant. At dawn, the first punctuation appeared. Children ran around, catching exclamation marks on their tongues.

By seven in the morning, it was over. We were all out in the streets in our pyjamas, looking up open-mouthed as the last few commas fluttered about our heads. The panic only began when we realised that the ink covering us from head to foot was indelible. Rumours circulated about similar scenes in Paris and New York.

The press, at a loss to explain the origins of the attack, instead focused on the human interest. Some newspapers were certain that people had been given the messages they deserved, citing the iron-fisted drug lord who’d been laughed off the estate by his subjects when they discovered TURNIPS planted in a circle on his bald patch. Others lamented the random cruelty of it all and wheeled out the grandmother who now refused to leave the house because of the way F, C, and K had been arranged around a U-shaped birthmark on her chin. The Archbishop of Canterbury called it irrefutable evidence of a divine presence but nobody listened, since we were watching a dozen altar boys slopping soapy water over the ten-foot high NULLUS DEUS scrawled across Westminster Abbey.

A well-known right-wing demagogue, who blamed terrorists for the new Arabic tattoos on his forearms, had some success by scrubbing the letters pink with wire wool, but his wild-eyed triumphalism was short lived when they returned in the scar tissue.

Post-mortems found traces of ink in bone marrow. Scientists declared that it had turned our DNA to Blackpool Rock.

Some got away with quotations from Shakespeare, Plath, Seuss. Two or three were imprisoned for displaying state secrets. Comic Sans started their own social justice group, claiming unfair treatment from the rest of us.

That year, it was all anyone talked about, until it wasn’t. Life crept back to normal. When the first post-attack babies were born marked, it became clear that this was now a part of us, and we got on with the same old business as before: falling in and out of love, winning wars, losing wars, murdering, tweeting, marrying, going bankrupt, becoming celebrities. Strange: it never occurred to any of us to see what would happen if we were all to stop and stand side by side, and then start to read.

When It Starts

It starts in a mid-sized former mining town in Yorkshire.

No explanation for it. No marks on the bodies. No history of such things.

Outside its walls, nobody is affected.

Some consider sending aid but it’s unclear what they can do.

The town’s MPs decide to stay and fight for change in Westminster.

The news describes it as a population the size of roughly three Wembleys in an area roughly half the size of Surrey in case we cannot comprehend what a quarter of a million people in a mid-sized former mining town in Yorkshire would look like, which we never can.

In what ensues, there are no heroes. We want to help, but we are afraid. Everyone seems to disapprove of the vote to quarantine the town, but that doesn’t stop the proposal passing with a comfortable majority. Perhaps the ones who voted against it are the closest people we have to heroes, or maybe they’re actually the biggest hypocrites because they all knew they never stood a chance of winning.

There’s a special episode of Newsround to explain it all to the children.

You can tell how panicked the government is because the construction vehicles are used to make a de facto perimeter fence almost immediately, and the real fence goes up overnight. There are rumours about the migrant workers who built the fence having been tricked or forced into building themselves inside it, so as to avoid further risk. Either way, they’re in there now.

There are half-hearted protests against the government, but they only last a few days, and the slogans on the placards seem more imploring than angry: Don’t hurt them, Surely there must be another way, Please, not this, and so on and so forth.

The residents of the town, of course, upload everything live onto social media. It is unwatchable, in both senses of the word: they are so ordinary and none of them really have anything interesting to say about any of it. There are lots of messages about how important love is, how important it is to live for the moment because you don’t know when everything might be taken away. The same stuff as always.

In light of what we all know is about to happen, you might think that some of the nastier corners of the internet will give them a break, but if you actually think this then you know nothing about the nastier corners of the internet. Now there are many memes of young people quietly weeping to camera, their heads superimposed onto bodies involved in a bewildering variety of pornographic exploits.

In the night, someone damages whatever brings the signal to the town—the power lines, the fibreoptics, the satellite signals, we don’t know—and with that we hear no more from them.

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Krill Rations

Day 1

Using a series of hops, clicks, and honks, the penguins have communicated their desire to be free. We have increased their krill rations. Do not approach the enclosure.

Day 4

We are aware that the penguins’ keening has escalated. Those exposed report uncontrollable sobbing as they are reminded of all their unspoken childhood sadnesses. Earplugs and tissues will be issued to all homes within a two-mile radius.

Day 7

We have treated the bars of their cages with invisible paint. You are reminded it is a capital offence to advocate on behalf of the penguins. Remain in your homes until further notice.

Day 12

All children must be taken to the zoo to see the penguins. Demonstrate how easy it is to come and go freely. Do not be alarmed if the penguins fling themselves at your family: the invisible bars are electrified.

Day 16

The penguins have realised that the concept of freedom is more complicated than they thought and have indicated that they no longer blame us. Administration will be handed back to the surviving zookeepers. Please rinse and return your earplugs.

Day 28

The penguins are completely silent. They lounge like tuxedoed lions and are no longer approaching the place where the invisible bars had been installed. We have recently been able to remove the bars and sell them off as scrap. The revenue we have generated will be returned to you in the form of a small tax rebate.

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The God Quetzalcoatl Has Retired and Now Runs a Pub in South Manchester

He likes this new work: granting, recurrently, the single recurring prayer of the drunk; the way the sallow light drags ruby through the bottom of a pint of stout. He loves the early afternoon lull, the heavy silence punctuated only by the occasional cough or the bright jangle of the fruit machine. Even the stench of the gents’ toilets, which he has never been able to fully eliminate, is at least honest. The days are so still he’s forgetting what it was like to be a god. Lots of heat, a little light. Smug superiority. Unmanageable mood swings.

In his last clear memory of Tenochtitlan, he is weak and sick: as his people succumb to Spanish thunder, they inevitably lose the faith that sustains him. The conquistadors toast their victory in the sizzling night. His last loyal High Priest hurriedly sews together a working human body from the butchered remains on the streets and then leaps, jacketed in flames, from the sacked city’s tallest tower. He inhabits the body: not quite like putting on clothes, more like a puppeteer insinuating himself between the cells of a puppet and learning to master woodenness. Then one final choice before his omnipotence disappears forever—a time and a place, far from here.

He wakes up, naked, on the pool table of the Three Arrows, a crowd of people laughing at him. They think he’s the new owner and estimate that he’s in his late fifties, and he doesn’t contradict them. That was three months ago. He’s decided on an English name he can give in case anybody asks, but nobody has yet.

If the first adjustment to being mortal is to fear death, the second is learning to ignore that fear, reducing it to a perpetual but faraway alarm. He can’t believe how often his body reminds him of its own meatiness, its slow decay, but he quickly picks up the ways to mask or delay it: