A Crumpled Thing

I come to the village wishing to disappear. The need to reset is something I’ve felt in my life before, but now it’s forced on me by grief, rubble and fire. My departure from London comes as an act of hibernation – or, at least, the closest I can get to it. A benign act of suicide, without the permanence, fuss, or complications.

             The final leg of my several train rides from Paris is long, hot, and delayed. I’m dropped off at an empty platform, shielding my eyes from dust and sun, where a single white car waits for me. The driver leans against the bonnet as I approach, lighting a cigarette. I wave, say a clumsy introduction in basic French. He nods, and says back to me, in English, “One moment.” I lean against my suitcase. Watch him. He doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t really look at anything. Just smokes.

            After a while, I ask, “Are we waiting for anyone else?” He shakes his head. I sit on my suitcase and fold my hands into my lap. Try to ignore how loudly my stomach starts rumbling.

            He finishes his cigarette, flicks it away, and pushes himself off the side of the car with a deep sigh. He gestures for my suitcase, still managing to not look me in the eye. I hand it over and we set off in a car that’s been cooking in exposed sunlight this whole time, that mingled taste of hot petrol, rubber, and smoke heavy on my tongue, in my nostrils.

            The village feels like it was eroded into the side of the mountain by time, insects, and wind. Nothing about it feels manmade – the buildings are the same mix of faded white, yellow and brown as their sandstone surroundings. Then there’s the emptiness, too. People can’t have built this place; they’ve clearly never lived here. Corner shops with stock that never depletes. A café with chairs that never need moving. A church whose bells must surely ring themselves.

            We stop at the cusp of a long gravel path that separates a field from a moss-eaten, barely standing wall that seems to serve no visible purpose. The driver pops the boot of the car. Turns to look at me.

            “Down there,” he says, pointing.

            I look down the path.

            “Can we go a bit further?” I ask, then feel the need to add, “Suitcase.”

            “Tyres,” he counters simply. I can see the conversation ends there.

            The sun is starting to set when I do finally reach the house, sticky, stiff, and with slightly grazed shins from knocking them against my suitcase. I take a moment to stop, watch the valley glow beneath me. I can’t place how I feel. Detached, maybe. Numb. Like the world around me, however vibrant, isn’t something I can touch – and so has no impact.

I turn my back on the sun and find the key under the pot, as instructed. I let myself in, and the house is mercifully cool. I leave my suitcase in the hall and slowly wander through, opening up all the shutters as I go. It’s undeniably gorgeous – deliberately unrenovated in a chic kind of way, unattended but never rundown, its age adding only to its character. Three bedrooms, far more space than I need for myself, and as close to complete isolation as I could ask for. I flop down on the biggest bed and stare at the ceiling, suddenly very aware of the silence, of my presence here, of the time stretching out before me, and the imagination it demands to fill it.

I start with a shower, which turns into masturbation, which turns into a doze that I manage to snap myself out of before I sleep through the evening. A search through the kitchen reveals some basic essentials, and I have a coffee at a table outside which gives me the resolve to search for the bike I find surprisingly functional and ready to ride in the adjoining shed.

I head into town uncertain of what to expect, hoping simply enough for food. The streets twist and narrow the further I get, and by the time I reach what looks to be the centre, I’m still yet to see my first person. A fountain that no longer spouts water stands at the foot of a church with a single dark, circular window punched into the stone. The only sign of life is a café opposite, its light conspicuous and somewhat magnetising amongst the stone and brick that recede into darkness around it. I approach, wondering where to chain my bike before realising I don’t have a lock, nor a reason to need to anyway. I rest it against a wall and step into the café’s light.

Empty metal tables with ashtrays that are still somehow full. Vintage framed beer posters on the wall. The whole place feels like it’s slanted, on a slight angle somehow. For a moment, I feel strangely dizzy.

The only person inside is the bartender, polishing glasses in a way that would imply the existence of customers, whether departed or yet to arrive. My presence doesn’t seem to illicit any obvious change in him – nothing in the way of satisfaction, surprise, or annoyance at the appearance of a lone patron. His arms are thick, his moustache thicker, and his fingers surprisingly slim. I come to face him and try to strike up a conversation, although it soon becomes apparent that not only is my French not strong enough to sustain us, but neither is his enthusiasm, and he passes me a beer in the way you might hand a toy to a toddler, just to give them something to occupy themself.

I take a seat at a table facing the square as he goes to prepare a sandwich for me, and watch clouds start to cluster overhead. Dark, heavy clouds that almost seem to hide some kind of inner light of their own, fighting to get out, glimpsed only in fleeting, white-flashing seconds. Like gashes in skin, reflective with blood.

I think of flames huddled by smoke. Crackling. A mouth too burned to speak, a tongue burst and melted.

I never looked at the body.

I am glad I never looked at the body.

I return to the café daily. Nothing advances in my interactions with the bartender – we tell each other no further details about ourselves, exchange no particular pleasantries, but there’s a routine and familiarity that I at least start to take comfort from. Other people appear in the village too, and the longer I stay, the more they emerge, like they hid from me on arrival and now, after observing that I’m no threat to them, have the courage to reveal themselves. An old man who seems to materialise from bench to bench feeding the pigeons, never once seen on his feet. Some teenagers smoking in an alley against a small building that shakes with adolescent yells. A few fellow lonely regulars at the café, who seem entirely happy to drink and stare their days away. Not that I can judge, as I seem to be doing the exact same thing.

            My days are long, but seem to go unfilled. I walk, I read, I cook, I doze, but I make no connections with anyone, and my notebook sits untouched, closed and empty. Opening it now would be to unleash the accusations and disappointment festering in its blank pages, rotting deeper into its spine than ink could ever reach. It’s a reckoning I have no strength to face, and so it remains shut, resentful and whispering. I don’t even know why I brought it – I have nothing to design for. The fire took everything – not just my home, but my studio. My career. My present and my future.

            And, of course, the person I was going to share it all with.

            Before I came here, I had developed a habit in the months that followed. I would routinely and compulsively buy and take pregnancy tests, maybe once every few days and always three or so at a time. Just to be sure. Convinced that there might be some trace of what we had, what I lost, left inside me. Like it was real, and not something that could be so easily, so totally, so instantly wiped out. We hadn’t been seriously trying, but we’d had the conversations. We knew where things might go. I wasn’t on birth control, and he stopped wearing condoms. If something happened – it happened.

            And so the thought that maybe something had happened – whether I really wanted it to or not – was something to hold onto. It was more fear than hope (I wasn’t delusional enough to think this would be anything other than a disaster) but either way, it was a certainty. A belief in the reality of us. A denial of its cruel, suffocating replacement.

In the town, the sky refuses to brighten. Those tendrilled clouds snarl and shift and mutate but do nothing to dissipate. One night, I dare to ask the bartender if the weather’s usually like this. He says he doesn’t pay it much attention. I ask him why, and he points to the ceiling. Says he doesn’t need to.  

Eventually, the storm that’s been threatened this whole time decides to arrive. It’s pulverising stuff – rain that feels like it could break your skin, wind that could flay you. I get drunk sitting outside, letting my bones turn to water, liquidising my body. The world as I can see it is cut into shredded streaks of water, like a canvas slashed with a thousand tiny knives.

By the time the rain eases I’m pretty wasted, nothing but plain baguette and red wine in my belly. When I go looking for another bottle, I find my notebook waiting for me on the counter, somewhere I could have sworn I didn’t leave it, and the sight of it ignites a rage in me that propels me back out into the yard, where I draw up a metal bin and fill it with newspaper and lighter-fluid. I toss in the notebook, light a match, watch the maiming unfurl. Dramatic, maybe, but it fills me with a warmth that contradicts the way my soaked body is shivering. I feel destructive. Vengeful. I head back inside with a slight stagger, find the bottle I was looking for, and pass out on the sofa.

The sleep that finds me feels grey and muddy, like crawling through a swamp. Equal parts loose and tight in all the wrong ways, letting me slip out only to yank me back in harder, squeeze me fiercer. As always, I dream of heat. Choking. Doors that glow, and refuse to open.

The crash that wakes me echoes around my head like it was something internal. I lie there for a moment, half-conscious, considering the urge to vomit, when I hear something else – a scraping. A rattling. I sit up. The rain has started again, but only softly. Darkness outside.

I find my footing, manage not to lose my balance as I walk to the backdoor. I pull it open. It’s stiff, takes a few wrenches. The rain now feels playful rather than brutal, ebbing and easing with fickle imprecision. As my eyes adjust, I take in a shape on the floor. At first I think it’s an animal, and I tense instinctively, only to realise it’s the bin from last night’s notebook pyre, overturned on its side. I’m about to turn away, when another noise sounds. Rustling. Then, what I can only describe as a croaking. Weak and broken, but unmistakeably living. I stare at the bin. From where it’s fallen, I can’t see into it, but I can tell from the tinny echo of what I’m hearing that the noises are coming from inside.

I approach. The rainfall buzzes. Hisses. Lightning peels the sky open in the distance. Shows me its innards. Fog and water.

I crouch down in front of the bin, shine my phone torch inside. Something moves at the back, hidden beneath ash and coiled flakes of paper. I get a stick, gently brush the pile down.

Catching the light, I see the raised tip of a beak. Blackened. Gleaming. Opening and closing. Thin virgin wings clutched to a frail, featherless body.

I manage to hook the stick behind the creature and pull it down the bin towards me. A bird, new-born, as fresh as if it had only just hatched, yet I can see no traces of a shell. For a moment I think it’s bleeding, but as l look closer I see that it seems to be oozing some kind of black oil, not from any visible wound or orifice, but from all over its skin. Black, or maybe a very dark blue. Running it between my fingers creates a smudged effect, like wet mascara. The bird whimpers. Tries to turn its head. Mystified, I take it in my hands and carry it inside.

            I stuff a towel into a box and place it under a lamp with the bulb tilted low. I nurse the bird with honeyed water, and fall asleep alongside it on the counter as the sun brings quiet death to the rain outside.

            I spend the next morning Googling how to care for it and, after some failed time trying to catch insects outside, I head into town for a supply run. That night, carefully feeding the bird seeds with a set of tweezers, I notice some small, prickly feathers running along the length of its spine.

            The next morning, these feathers have spread across its back. By the evening, its smooth skin is completely eclipsed. It’s not just baby fuzz, either – these are long and angular, sleek and fully-formed. Its bedding towel is stained black with that same secreted plasm. I swap it out, but by the end of the next day that towel too is ruined. By that point the bird is also standing on its own, stretching out its wings, examining the room around it with an eerily considered level of curiosity that I can only describe as patient.

            By the end of the week, it’s the size of an adult crow, its body shimmeringly, radiantly dark. Despite its size, however, it seems in no hurry to leave the box. Though it stands, though it stretches, it makes no effort to hop out, nor any attempts to take flight.

            With each passing day, it continues to grow. Frantic research into species of birds reveals nothing. Ten days into its life and it’s the size of a small cat. Still though, it seems content to sit and watch, never trying anything more strenuous than rearranging its position in its bed. I swap out its box for a tub, fill it with sheets because I’ve run out of clean towels. I start to see something in its eyes. An awareness. The way it watches me changes – its gaze becomes something more curious, almost interrogative. Its eyes don’t just follow me – they question me, like it isn’t enough to know what I’m doing, but why.

            At the size of a puppy, its appetite is voracious. Whole punnets of berries are gulped down in seconds, and the only thing I can find that remotely satiates it is beef or steak. At this point my wonder has subsided into fear, and I keep the creature locked away in a room of its own, venturing in only to feed it and keeping the lights low when I do. Soon, a winged beast the size of a large dog lurks in the shadows of this secret cell, refusing to eat anything that isn’t raw, that isn’t meat.  

            I don’t dare leave the house for too long. It’s become my project, my obsession, and, for whatever reason, my shame. When I finally return to the café it’s in a daze, and it’s not until he’s right in front of me that I realise the bartender has changed. I stare into this set of unfamiliar eyes, this clean-shaven face, squatter build, wider-set eyes.

            “Who are you?” I demand.

            The man wrinkles his nose. “Et pour toi, la même question,” he replies, looking me up and down.

            “The other man,” I say. “L’autre homme – he’s been here every day, where is he?”

            “C’est moi,” he says, then, “It’s only me.”

            “Is he coming back?”

            “Qui?”

            “The other man that works here!”

            “This is my bar. I have been en vacances. Holiday.”

            “He’s been here this whole time—”

            “Are you going to order something?”

            I look to the few patrons around me, appealing for help, but they all seem unfamiliar, no faces I recognise, and on the spot like this I realise I can’t conjure any from memory either. In tears, I run from the place.

            When the creature reaches the size of a horse, I decide to stop feeding it. Panic overwhelms me. It fills the room now, in a way that makes it look grotesque and misshapen, hunched and crammed in a corner it’s now outgrown. It has started pacing. I can hear its feet thudding through the house from below. It sounds heavy. This thing could crush me if it wanted to. I block the door to its room with furniture and try to ignore the way the walls quake as it moves, the way I can feel its every step in my feet, in my soul.

            I decide I can neither fix nor understand this. The only thing left for me to do is leave. I pack my bags and flee into a mild, unassuming early evening.

            I drag my suitcase down the gravel path, along the winding road into town. When I get there, flushed and panting, I decide to head to the café one final time. Something about my urgency convinces me that he’ll be there. It’s not even that there’s anything between us, but there’s comfort in the prospect of familiarity and I need that right now, I need something to ground me.

            As I move through the town, though, it’s clear that something’s wrong. Not only is it now as deserted as the day I arrived, but everything’s visibly shuttered and bordered up. The effect isn’t one of abandonment, but fortification. There are people here, but they are barricaded.

            Every shutter is pulled down. Every curtain drawn. Every shop locked up and sealed, every window closed and barred.

            My breathing echoes off the stone around me. My footsteps could deafen.

            I reach the square knowing what I’ll find. Sure enough, the café is as lifeless and vacant as everything else. I approach it anyway, at a loss, and soon I’m hammering on the shutters, cursing, pleading, letting myself break.

            And then the sky above me darkens, and a rush of wind chases its way across my body. The sound of wings ripples from wall to wall. Huge, cold drops of black liquid land on my head, my arms, flecking the ground around me. I watch them run down my skin, the way they’re stretching, blotching, how densely they come to hang off the tips of my fingers. The creature circles overhead. There’s no hiding from it here, and yet I feel no compulsion to run. There’s a vindication to seeing it out here exposed like this – if it’s freed of being my captive, then I am freed of being its captor. When the creature lands, it’s with grace, strangely delicate. It settles across the square from me, a spiralled trail of black puddles on the ground between us. Its size has doubled. It’s now something immense. Awe-inspiring. Metallic eyes that are bigger than my head. Two bottomless wells that if you stare into for too long, you’ll surely fall. 

            I don’t move. I don’t look away. When it approaches me, I hold my ground. When it takes me in its talons, I don’t fight or squirm. When it lifts us both up into the air, I think nothing of what I’m leaving, and know nothing of where we’re going.

And then I feel something. Spreading through me like mist. It’s a lightness. A mercy. The closest thing to relief I’ve felt in so long.

I let myself go limp. Let the wind take my hair.

I want to be removed. I want to be sheltered. I want to be hidden, nurtured, buried or eaten.

Take me somewhere I don’t have to think, where my heart has no use and my brain can’t remember. Take me somewhere that doesn’t speak. Where there are no faces. Take me somewhere that forgets. 

Destroy me. Keep me. Care for me or crush me.

Me, a crumpled thing to be carried, that came here wishing to disappear.   

Will Pinhey is a London-based writer across film, theatre, and prose fiction. His debut feature film 'Mother Maker Lover Taker' premiered at Unrestricted View Film Festival in May 2024, winning the Festival Director’s Choice Award, and is now streaming on Apple TV+ in select European territories and Fawesome TV in the UK. He has previously won the National Theatre's New Views playwriting competition, and had theatrical work performed at Theatre503, The Bread & Roses Theatre, and the Edinburgh Fringe. His short stories can be found published with Idle Ink, Crow & Cross Keys, The Horizon, Literally Stories, and Bristol Noir.