Figments

By Mel O’dea

Exploring the theme of the outsider the book concerns an unusual and imaginative girl, Caty, who escapes from her dysfunctional family and her sense of not fitting in through the murky world of addiction. The book is written in an experimental, poetic style and has a strong philosophic content. The book aims to be challenging but ultimately hopeful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496975829

Mel O’dea

Mel is based in Mallow, Co. Cork, Ireland. A relatively new writer, Mel has been published in several magazines as a poet, (as well as having given a performance as a guest poet at the O Bheal Open Mike session in Cork City), and as a novelist ('The Ghost Whisperers' published by Raider Publishing International). Mel has had an eclectic education in both the Arts and the Sciences and her initial career was in Microelectronics. Mel currently works as an artist, having had numerous solo and joint exhibitions in both London and Ireland and also as a human rights campaigner/advocate both freelance and in conjunction with a number of human rights, animal rights and environmental organizations. Mel is 44 years old and shares accommodation in Mallow with a Yellow Labrador called Poseidon

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AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

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© 2014 Mel O’dea. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/19/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7581-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7582-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

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1

I remember… the sun glistening on the window and the flight of birds… . I catch each shard of light in my hands and finger it gently, and then watch it escape… I escape with it, floating through the air like a thousand dreams that are borne out of the nothingness, the bright twirl of being that flows through each moment…

I am 10 years old

Mother Eat your food! What are you doing staring out the window . . . Father silent in the form of his resentment… I move between them, their silence cloying, sticky, like some kind of Victorian smog that clings to one, stifles one’s breath… Mother and Father looking at each other, father reaches for the wine. Mother chops up her food into tiny pieces, examining each one before she eats it, like some form of scientific experiment searching for… a reality, the reality that steals under the door and creeps into the room, the sparkles of light upon the dew wet spiders’ web on the outside of the window, moving and shimmering in the casting of its light upon the… moment through which I seek and see… something, something that echoes through the corridors of our awareness like a thousand ghosts of who we are, what we were… defining identity like the form of its own realistation, painting pictures of light and dark and blending them in the swirls of meanings that rise above the table like sacrifices to a meaning lost, I remember…

Mother scraping the food off the plates into thew bucket where the scraps for the ducks are placed. She doesn’t speak. She moves like some form of automaton, each gesture mechanical, each gesture repeated a thousand times, over and over, creating a hymn of repetitiveness to some God that hides in the cupboards where the drinking glasses are kept, each one with some etched spider’s web that the dishwasher cannot remove, each movement creating some form of symphony to routine, an echoing song that drifts under the table in order to hide itself, Mother, the plates, her movements defining her life:this is who I am. I make my identity through a universe of dirty dishes that has at each beginning and ending an elegy to its own senselessness. I ask if I can leave the table. Request refused. We must all leave the table together. The directives of etiquette, each moment of life defined according to its own particular formulated phrase: you eat the starter with this knife, this fork, then you eat the main course with this knife and this fork… definitions of meaning that seek to shatter the senselessness and establish a… meaning, in order to justify… we are important. These rituals are important. Each process of life forming of its own ritual; we exhibit our value through a set of habits and forms, a set of habits and forms that define who we are… the monotony clanks like the spoon against the bowl… do not slurp your soup like that. It’s bad manners. we define… . Father picks up the newspaper, reading silently. He hasn’t finished his food yet, so I still can’t get up and go play. I feel impatient. I feel caught by the routines of others… I play with the couple of peas that remain on my plate: don’t play with your food like that. But playing with the food offers some form of relief against the boredom. Father: YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD NOT TO PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD LIKE THAT. I drop the knife and fork. Father picks up a stick. always the incipient threat. I push the plate away. Eat your food! But there is only a pea left. I don’t care! You were told to eat your food, so eat your bloody food! I stare out the window again. there is a small bird. I wonder what it would be like to hold the bird and then let it go. I wonder what it would be like to be the bird. to be able to fly away. from all this… I remember looking at the bird, the bird and I creating some fusion of freedom and captivity. I remember Mother scraping the remnants of out food into the duck bucket. Father had not finished his food. But that doesn’t matter. He is allowed. He is an adult. and I am a child. I remember wanting to escape my childishness, to have the freedom to be myself without the threat of the stick that hovered above me, manifest of Father’s mood. The bird began to sing-I was just able to hear it through the window. I thought of that song as being me, an expression, a flight into the soft clouds of freedom where no one would be able to find me. A description of a secret hiding place where I could dream my dreams and… escape, escape from the world of knives and forks and the driving of routines… escape from the formulated phrases that define us through the wills of others, that are imposed on us through a procedure that is unaccountable… I imagine running through the woods, running and running so that no one would be able to catch me, running so fast that my feet lift from the ground and I find myself soaring with the birds, moving my arms to direct my flight as the morning mists freshen my face, moving through the sunlight of our dreamtime, catching each breath like it was some form of ancient song that gave birth to us, that I was not Mother or Father’s child, that I was the song’s child, that I belonged to no one but myself and the shimmer of my freedom, that no one could ever catch me, that I floated through the Universe and became the Universe, the supernovae of mind exploding through the dance of an ultimate creativity that began through its ending and ending through its beginning… I remember, as the sun glistens through the dew-scape of each being, that desire, the sense of floating away from them, from all that they represented, that I raise my voice upwards and float through the Milky Way, touching Neptune and Venus with my hands, molding each image as if I was the creator, being and not being, each sense moving, like a train through stations, the passing of life and the birth of new life, an infinite flow that knows not past or future but instead just is, without needing to form of an excuse for that existence. I become that existence and I drift through the stratosphere of or remembering… I remember the sense of being abstract, like I had become some Rothko painting of light, moving through my interchange through the sweet smell of imagination that caught my nostrils like the morn-scent of roses… . Moving through each moment, a dance through the forms through which we relinquish predictability and form of a… quantum awareness that oscillates through the forms of its definition, is and is not… to be or not to be…

I remember… . Father folds his paper and heads to the TV room. At last, I can leave the table and go play. Father gets his bottle of whiskey and a glass and turns on the cricket. I never understood the attraction of that game… I remember having to play it at school, and standing around in a field for hours waiting for a small hard ball that never came. He opens the bottle and pours himself a shot, He sips mechanically until he has drunk it all, and them pours another shot. Mother starts washing up in the kitchen. Her ams move mechanically; she doesn’t speak. I leave the table and go outside. I remember… . the sun smiles on my face and I pick up a stick and throw it into the river. I watch the stick disappear. I imagine my life disappearing, like the stick, floating down the river of dreams to its destination, a thousand journeys moving with the water as the fish flicker in and out of their own existences… I remember… Feet in water, the cool refreshment. I move my feet up and down and make splashes… . I laugh within myself, the shimmer-glass of each droplet dancing with my toes before rejoining the river… I giggle, and splash my feet once more… . A heron stands a little while away, trying to catch a fish. Its body, motionless against thew water, motionless against the sky… I am amazed that it can keep still like that; I would quickly become impatient…

I remember… I take out a packet of cigarettes I stole from one of Mother and Father’s guests a week ago, and a box of matches. One of the great things about going out to play is that I can sneak off… forbidden fruit… I light the cigarette and breath in deeply. The smoke fills my lungs. When I first started smoking I used to cough horribly, but my lungs are used to it now., I imbibe the sense of rebellion,. breathing it in deep and holding it for a while before exhaling. The sun glistens on the water, celebrations of freedom. Celebrations of freedom that they can’t take away, motions and movements…

I

move

through

the

elementals

of

existences

born

and

reborn

I

exist

through

the

collisions of my dreams . . . .

2

I remember… . the teacher standing at the blackboard. Irish grammar. I never understood Irish grammar. There is a child of four who is less advanced than some of us. If you want to go to the toilet, you would have to raise your hand and ask the teacher for permission in Irish. But the child cannot speak Irish. so, she is not allowed to go to the toilet… this is why she always brings three changes of clothes with her to school… .

I remember bringing some maths work for the teacher to correct. We are a small school and there are all ages, from 4 to about 13. The teacher looks at my work and says that I have got it wrong. I explain that I don’t think that I did. She says ‘but pi is the radius of a circle. I ask her how that can be, as radii are different sizes, but pi is a constant. Her face freezes, and turns a kind of bright pink color. She gets her ruler out and smacks me hard on the hand. I wince, but I do not cry. Never cry. Never let them know that they have got to you… . my mind drifts