This story was apparently found stuck to a wall in a school library in Glossop, Derbyshire sometime in the fifties or sixties. It's marked simply "Geoffrey. April. 1954.", though we have no way of corroborating whether this is a pseudonym, a student in the school or something else. It's short, but quite striking. Written in ink, on a yellowed paper. Some words seem to have been blurred out with ink by the author (intentionally or not, we don't know). The handwriting is beautiful - I wish I could've scanned a picture of it.
The sight of the green apple made him cringe. The edges of the skin where a chunk had been bitten off had folded slightly inwards and turned a malicious brown-green colour. The flesh was white, in cell-like configurations and the teeth marks created an illusion of an abyss in the otherwise rugged, but plain, surface. It was something that he had seen so many times that he felt he needed to create some sort of common ground for analysing all the times he had witnessed this emotional atrocity. Who left it there? Was someone forced to leave it? His heart twisted where it hung, he snapped his fingers instinctively, silently, so as to rid himself of the situation, the feeling. He felt a tremendous pang of angst come bearing down on him where he stood. "So this is where it comes to?", he asked himself sporadically over the course of a few seconds. He shook his head. His hands were as cold as ice. He didn't move. His glances to the past brought him to a bench, to a mirror, to a stove, to a forest and to a bush. They took him to the church, to the fence, to the father, to the one following him and to the burnt down building. It took him to the yellow-painted slabs of wood. He traversed the creek and followed it west-ward to a birth. He kicked a stone and swallowed a piece of spaghetti. He crossed a puddle of blood, a dancefloor and a [blurred word]. He played in the snow and kissed under a tree. He lit a cigarette and went to hospital for the first time. He fell in love, hated his neighbour and sat down for tea. He drank coffee, kicked a ball, fell and grazed his knees and didn't [blurred word, possibly "look"]. He knew everything. Everything was silent and green. The skin was dry and crumbled and covered in snow. A child cried. A swing losing momentum.
Geoffrey. April. 1954.
Thursday, 12 March 2009
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