Archive for the ‘Sean Monaghan’ Category

AKIO DRAWS MANGA: By Sean Monaghan

Monday, December 6th, 2010

Akio scratched the name off the badge they’d glued to his vest. George Bright was not his name, even if that was what they called him. Then he scratched in the four letters of his chosen name. His nails became chipped and cracked.

Alistair brought him lunch and smiled. “Whassup, George …” he said. “Akio.”

“I need pens and paper.”

“Now you know I can’t do that.”

Dinner was bread with corn slop, in a pressed potato fibre bowl with a pressed potato fibre spoon.

“Better eat that fast,” Alistair said. “The bowl will dissolve pretty quick.”

“I won’t hurt anyone.”

“I know that.” Alistair bent close. “But since you put your brother in hospital with your drawing kit, the people in charge here say ‘no pens’.”

“I’m going crazy without being able to draw.” Akio reached up slowly and pulled a pen from Alistair’s shirt pocket.

“You should talk to Dr Patterson about that tomorrow. Three o’clock, I think.” Alistair checked his clipboard. “Three fifteen. I’ll be sitting in on your session too.”

Akio drew on the back of his own hand. Kana the cyborg frog-leopard, in manacles, spinning and slicing the terrified Dr Patterson.

Then he grabbed the intern’s hand and drew quickly. Kana helping Alistair’s sister out of a car wreck.

Alistair jumped, but Akio was as fast as time and the drawing was done.

“What the hell?” Alistair said. He clutched his hand.

Akio capped the pen and laid it on the floor, stepping away. “Guess I should eat my soup and bread.”

Alistair picked up the pen. “What is this? This drawing?”

“Your sister should take care.”

“My sister? How would you-”

“Probably tonight, or maybe in the morning. Bad accident.”

Alistair frowned, glanced at the door. “Geor … Akio? How do you know I have a sister?”

“Some of those Colorado roads are really slicked-up with ice. Easy to lose control.”
Alistair’s face paled. “She’s on holiday there. Skiing.”

“First time,” Akio said. He sat back on the bed. “Jasmine doesn’t drive so well.”

“Just got her licence.”

“Maybe give her a call. Don’t let her drive in a blizzard.” Akio crouched and picked up the bowl and spoon.
Alistair didn’t say anything as he closed the door behind him.

While Akio ate his soup he looked at the drawing on his own hand. He stroked it carefully and the image changed. A bisected Dr Patterson flipped back, his torso falling separately from his legs.

Akio knew that Alistair would be confused now, but would he talk to Dr Patterson, or would he call his sister? Akio just wanted to help, wanted to help the good people. Dr Patterson had brought him here, locked him away. Akio didn’t like that.

He finished his soup, then snapped and crumbled the parts of the bowl that were still friable. He used the fragments to build some new pictures across the floor in the corner of the cell. Kana triumphant over Dr

Patterson’s body. Kana fleeing to another galaxy.

Akio scraped the handle of the soft spoon to a point. He tested it against his arm, but it was too brittle.

Not even strong enough to scratch a picture on his soft skin.

He kept changing the pictures on the floor. Dr Patterson reanimated himself and had to be vanquished again. It took all of Kana’s ingenuity.

Later he heard the key in the lock and Alistair came in. “I’m not even supposed to be here,” he said. “But I called her.”

Akio sat on the bed watching. Alistair didn’t have the pen in his pocket anymore.

“She let her friends go down from the chalet in the car, she didn’t need anything anyway, so she stayed on the phone to talk with me.”

Akio smiled a little. Kana was victorious. The sister was saved.

“She just called me back,” Alistair said. “Their car … you were right. How could you know?” Alistair looked at the picture still on his hand.

“Kana knows,” Akio said. He fingered the tip of the sharpened spoon. In Kana’s hands, anything was a weapon.

“Anyway,” Alistair said. “I’m going to put in a good word for you with Dr Patterson. He won’t believe the story, but I’ll just let him know you’ve shown improvement and maybe he’ll let you go home sooner.”

Akio nodded. It was a simple thing really. And if this did not work, Kana would destroy Dr Patterson and

Akio could go home when he pleased.
 

_______________________

Copyright 2010 Sean Monaghan
 
Sean Monaghan’s stories have appeared before in Flashes in the Dark, and also in Bewildering Stories and Static Movement, amongst others.  More information at his website www.venusvulture.com

DON’T SLEEP DOWNSTAIRS: By Sean Monaghan

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Katie slept at a Motel 6 a hundred miles from the house.  She rose with the Arizona dawn, stood on the motel’s balcony watching stray beams from the sun ricochet through gaps in low fast-moving clouds, imagined painting the scene.

Quickly packing her overnight bag, she dropped the key through the slot to the night clerk, and drove.  The freeway grumbled under the Jeep’s tires.  Soon she was on side roads, then off blacktop entirely, running up into the hills on sandy graded farm tracks.  With the GPS she found the house.

She stopped by a dry wash, looking up the slope towards the place.  A two storey house with steep gables and narrow attic windows.  Some of the dull clapboards, which were peeling and sanded in places, had warped away from the house’s frame and pointed at the scrubby desert.

The Jeep chugged over the pitted dry streambed and spurted up the long driveway.  She parked in front and stood looking over the plains.  Wind-scoured bushes, long stretches of yellow-brown earth, tall desert cactus and little, hardy spring flowers.  The sky was a kind of heavy cyan she never saw back east.  This would be perfect.

Katie glanced at her watch.  Only 8am.  She walked through the hundred-year-old house.  The kitchen was functional, the bowl in the downstairs bathroom was probably original.  A triple-bolted room in the back corner with the owner’s possessions.  They’d told her, in the emails, that they came out annually to do maintenance and walk in the desert.  They rented the house furnished, even if the furnishings were just as old; overstuffed armchairs, oak table and mis-matched chairs in the kitchen, undersprung beds with kapok mattresses.  Katie picked where she would paint and where she would sleep.  In under a half an hour she’d set herself up on the first floor, her studio in the corner room where desert vistas were all she would se.

She put her easel up near the window, layed out her brushes on a drop cloth on the chest of drawers.  Opening up the paints, she grinned.  No browns, no black, no grey.  That period was over, excised.  She hadn’t allowed herself any darker colors.  Even the blue was lighter than the lowest points in the sky.  With this limited palette she would have to paint differently, no more paintings of the dead, of the eviscerated and maimed, no more blank and black-eyed people pressed up against dirty windows.  Here her paintings would have to be sun, sun, sun.

Dragging a stool up from the kitchen, she sat by the easel, staring into Arizona.  Such contrasts, the distant dim rugged hills hugging the horizon, misty and blurred, the spiky nearby cactus and dead-looking bushes.  She imagined strolling along trails after dark with a flashlight looking for lizards and snakes.

Katie blinked and stood, knocking the stool down.  Not the thoughts to have, she reminded herself.  Calm and peace, stay away from the darkness.  Stay in light and paint only light.
Something moved across the desert.  A dust plume following a vehicle.  Katie stood the stool back up, took a pencil and drew a horizontal line a third of the way up the canvas, side to side.  That’s my horizon, she thought, above, only sky.

The truck crossed the wash and she walked out and down the stairs.  When she came to the front steps, the car was already parked, someone getting out.  A man, cowboy hat, button shirt, jeans.  Cowboy boots.

“Hey there,” he called up.

“Hey yourself.”

He grinned, his smile pulled a little to the right, his chin clean-shaven, his eyes bright blue.  Like ice, she thought.  She had all the colors to paint him.  If he was blond.  He walked around the front of his truck. 

“So, what’re you doing here?”

Katie glanced back at the house.  “Needed to get away to do some painting.”

“Painting,” he said.  He took off his hat.  Blond.  “Sure could use a dab,” he said, nodding at the building.

Katie smiled.  “I guess.  Not that kind though.”  She held up the pencil, thinking of her single dividing line.

“Oh,” he said, walking towards her.  “Art?”

“Yeah.”

“Still, just wondering why you’re on the property.”

Katie frowned.  “Rented it.  On the Internet, they sent me directions and the keys.”

“I’m sure they did.”  The cowboy smiled.  “So don’t sleep downstairs.”

“What’s that?”

“I…” he trailed off, stopping by her.  “I’m Earle,” he said.

“Yes you are.”

He grinned.

“Katie.”

“Katie, hey.  You saw the locked door?”

She nodded.

“Probably thought it was their stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“You better come look.”  He held her gaze for a moment, then walked by and on up the steps.

Katie followed him.  Earle pulled out a big bunch of keys and flicked through, opening each of the three locks.

“Are you the caretaker?” she said.  “I know you’re not the owner.”

“I’m the guy who locked it up.”  Earle pulled the door open and stepped into darkness, reaching out.  After a moment he found a cord and a light came on.

Katie stepped back.

The walls were covered in paintings.  Dark oils of heavy towers and abandoned industry.  The pictures were nestled one against the other, almost forming a continuous flow of gloom.

“Mrs Finnsch went crazy,” Earle said.  “She disappeared.  Mr Finnsch and half the county searched for her.”  Earle turned from the paintings and looked at Katie again.  “They found her back in here, years later, after Mr Finnsch had died.  She was painting the walls.  Institution came to get her, but she died on the doorstep.  Still haunts the place, so don’t sleep downstairs.”

Katie stared into the pictures, realizing that it wasn’t to paint the sun and sky that she’d come here.  Forget redemption.  She’d brought her demons with her.

Confrontation, then.  She would need more art supplies.

“So I guess you won’t be staying?” Earle said.

“Are you kidding?” Katie said.  “I’m going to sleep in here.”

________________________

©2010 Sean Monaghan

Sean Monaghan’s paintings of Arizona are singularly bleak.  His stories have appeared before in Flashes in the Dark, as well as in Bewildering Stories, The New Flesh and MicroHorror, amongst others.  More information at his website, www.venusvulture.com