Crumbs E-Book

Ana Tewson-Božić

• Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'This dazzling series shows that if the barriers can be vaulted there is true beauty to be had from the lesser-walked streets of literature. These works are both nourishing and inspiring, and a gift to any reader.' —Kerry Hudson Written in the winding-down stages of a severe psychotic episode filled with manic delusions, this extraordinary story chronicles Julja's relationship with drugs, family and friends. Julja's teenage games take a serious turn as she becomes inducted into a computer cult. The surge of dopamine in her brain connects her with psychic aliens and chemical conspiracies, sordid and secret. On this dark journey of discovery, she pops pills prescribed by Big Pharm and relinquishes all ties to her sanity as she attempts to reach a heaven full of voices and gods. Spotlight Books is a collaboration between Creative Future, New Writing South and Myriad Editions to discover, guide and support writers who are under-represented due to mental or physical health issues, disability, race, class, gender identity or social circumstance.

Leseprobe

Praise forCrumbs

‘What is on the other side of base reality? Ana Tewson-Božić conveys the peculiarity and disarray of psychosis in a kind of distressed, demented prose which from time lets in shafts of reality—going round friends’ houses, interacting with classmates in college, ending up in hospital. Anyone who’s ever been through the looking glass will recognise her account. Anyone who hasn’t—Wonderland awaits.’

—John O’Donoghue

For the burnt

To have faith is precisely to lose one’s mind so as to win God.

—Søren Kierkegaard

Contents

Title PageDedicationCrumbs AcknowledgementsAbout the Author About Spotlight Copyright

1

Crumbs

Tata

When my father was a young beatnik, he was visited by a light-engulfing orb of almost human proportions, small enough to make its way through the old, shuttered window of the shack in Croatia.

He took acid once, and then lost his speech for a month. He told me not to mess with that stuff.

Afterwards, the Serb would sit and smoke and watch the eye in the wood of the scabby door to the courtyard and it seemed to be the eye of Satan, or Sauron, overseeing all that we did there.

Some places hold the ancient power of a community. The neighbours chatter to me and my 2acid trip. I am transported higher. The door in the yard watches, as it watched my father, it guards the house I’m tripping in.

In this place, I see heaven. I am buoyed by the souls of the relatives in their homes around me, buoyed by the fact that they’d known and liked me. With these powers, I see fragile bodies rise through a church steeple and crumble into ash against the ceiling. I see great alien eyes and tongues of steely poison poised to greet us at our deaths. They see me back and I never felt so much terror.

Butch has seen it all before, he says on the walkie-talkie.

I wake when I’ve got too close to the reptilian all-seeing eyes. I go to the bathroom and splash water on my bovine face. I hold meat. I have breasts that are soft and pliable; Butch feels them and the acid tingles. The whole place becomes a sink-hole, a toilet bowl—we all spin down the drain with the sounds of plumbing an opera.

During my first psychotic episode, I was taken in by my parents. Tata was the devil, Mama an angel of light, a willow woman. I threw Faust at my father’s feet in a holy rage. Woodward played Dark Souls on his Xbox and I saw the world in it. My mother was 3entangled in the roots of a tree, I saw her on the screen and rushed downstairs to find her sitting.

Mama and Tata

In a tall tower by the sea dwelt a woman of the waves. At the nape of her neck her hair did curl, though the rest of it she furiously tried to straighten. As she grew older, she sat glued to her laptop, a portal into other realms. Her hair losing pigment glowed brighter than it had in years. Her eyes glazed over like a wondering child’s.

In these realms, her words flowed like pale fires and lapped at temples in a righteous rage, made quiet with only a secretary’s tapping.

She’d been a typist for years, the keyboard was her piano, the trade she plied. She wiped words clean and examined them in wonder. But in the examination room, she ripped too heartily, and when away from the device, she would continue the excavation of language and thought, to the detriment of her tower-dwelling fellows.

Among these fellows was an old Eastern European gentleman—her lover. He had been scoured away almost completely, his ego a tiny shell 4he cultivated in secret. I was merely a lodger with them; I could not know fully the secrets they kept in their birdcage.

Their bedroom, you see, had been damaged by the son, in an argument with the woman. He’d punched holes in the door, as a teenager is wont to do, but the gentleman and the woman had not the funds to fix it. The war in Yugoslavia had rendered Yugotours obsolete, and the rise of booking holidays over the internet left a travel agent jobless—now delivering curries in a car bought with the woman’s measly inheritance.

So, the woman, she’d put up chicken wire over the holes, cut into the doorframe to fix it. It was very pretty and French—or the perceived French of one who reads House & Garden—but it let loose the couple’s every sigh, and the house and I, we heard them.

In the dead time before dawn, the gentleman woke up sick. He hobbled to the bathroom like a parody of the brave father I’d known, to vomit and heave. The woman could not believe him so grievously ill, but I knew it was slow death coming—the clouds were claiming his bones, sucked so dry in the flames. These are the secrets they’ve kept from me. 5

The secrets of the bowl (a poem)

Folk barely wash in this fell mansion, instead we

Breed bats, and at our desks have luncheon.

But the bowl knows more than any of we do,

The bowl has seen and eaten our sweaty loads

and gulped them down, down, down.

When the lid closes, the cats rush in and sit

On windowsills in pretty poses, this is just before

They maul a bird or some winged insect and

Play with its imminent corpse.

All breaks in the routine.

Everything’s dirty and everything’s clean.

I must bow down to the toilet:

God’s greatest machine.

Catboy

Catboy is a Korean man. The moniker was bestowed as a way to talk secretly about him to friends. He had cats. Lots of cats. His milky torso was covered in scratches—it was sexy, but we spoke not the same tongue as tongues flashed in mouthy kisses to movies with subtitles. After the affair ended, language being a big part of both our inner worlds, unable to express pain or pleasure except in sighs, I held a torch, I obsessed. In 6my mind’s psychic eye, he was there communicating through the ether: I saw his torso pumping, I saw his mouth smiling ghostly blue eyes. He was an anomaly. I was a schizophrenic. With too many analogues and an imagination vivid and romantic, I slid into visions.

I convinced myself my phone was racist, so threw it into a facility toilet, already partly blocked with car parts and banana skins. Catboy was not impressed with the homage. Alone in his flat sat he, a cat on each shoulder, like feathered accoutrements on an invisible blazer.

I, in hospital, started a war on the patients—I called them humanzees and myself Jesus. Without confidence I was weak, yet with too much I became a bully; Catboy had bullied me, too. When we had sex, his paws kneaded my rice stomach. I don’t think he meant to ridicule, but it felt unclean.

A vagina is

A flower which opens up

Like an umbrella.