The Story of the Backwards Girl; Celine’s Adventures in Ceylon

The sun – smaller than the inconceivably large object just outside the boundaries of our solar system which was approaching with an exponentially increasing rapidity – rose over the doomed planet.

Holly, a young girl with an interest in Ernest Hemingway’s shorter work, took a dusty old tome from the shelf where it had been leaning against Thomas More’s Utopia. The embossed gold print on the burgundy leather spine indicated the name of the book: Erehwon.

It told the story of Jack Vincennes – a smalltime book dealer who never had a chance – and his dealings with a couple of femme fatales: one chick who talked funny and was kind of indescribable, and the other, who was French and a hottie.

Her name was Celine and she was from the Dordogne but spent a lot of time in Ceylon trying to taste tea for a succession of unsuccessful suitors; they were mostly timorous thieves. She was mixed up with a bad lot, is what I’m saying. They were darkly diffident too, and at the worst times, so that Celine was often saddled with the bill at swanky eateries – when her consort slipped away – sans recompense.

Soon broke, she swiftly set sail from Ceylon, saying ‘adieu’ to no one but her trusted maid, who – the years of servitude suddenly lifted from her shoulders – sensed a liberation previously suppressed during her years sewing socks for Celine, and constructed a scale model of a viaduct from matchsticks alone in her Ceylonese cellar.

Celine, on returning to the Paris of her childhood, went into the booktrade and soon became a scion of the scene. However, the siren who spoke in words and sentences of polarity reversed had other plans; plans which didn’t include that slut Celine and her budding business.

Kenny Stetson (a.k.a. Jack Vincennes) a Texan millionaire of infinite wealth, unhealthy girth and unlimited libido, was having it off with both Celine and the backwards girl.

Attending a race, Celine shockingly fell beneath the wheels of a car at Monte Carlo and, dumbfoundingly, died devastatingly.

Many years later, the backwards girl was to give birth to her own mother, who would develop a discreetly discriminating tendency towards Hemingway’s short stories, which she would clandestinely consume in the study of the huge house, beginning at the end and reading each line from right to left until she finally found how each story began.

It's Soo Big by Kenny Stetson

`It's soo big.'

`And so far away, many thousand times larger than our own sun.'

I marvelled as I spoke, what could be so big? The books had names like `The Holy Bible', Kamasutra' and `David's Coppers Filed'. Anybody walking past the book case or bumping into it would no doubt be impressed with the fantastic parade of canon literature. Even if nobody ever saw the books, they still made really nice decorative objects. And one day in the future, they will surely find a reader: a guest or a neighbour, or the cleaning lady's son, who has to hang around for a few minutes waiting for his mother and uses the time to rummage around in the book cases. Or perhaps the landlord's budding daughter, who has just been reading the Travels or a Hemingway story at school.

* * *

Now beginning to feel weary, I removed my gaze from the cat and fish of the `ejaculation on canvas' painting on the far wall. The sun shone in through the green branches of the elm outside the window.

`Gnippohs og ot deen I', the backwards girl chirped.

What did she mean and how did she get here so fast? I wondered while admiring delightful lips and golden hair. They flickered for an instant and subsided. Where are they now? The face of it I failed to understand.

`Could you talk like most other people for a change, just for ten minutes, say?'

She watched me and smiled. The hollow place behind her pupils contained nothing but sorrow. Perhaps a little resignation.

`Difficult - only if I try real hard. It gives me headaches.'

Gastric distress, I thought between farts. `Okay, you don't have to talk.'

All set for a hard time, I rolled off the bed and tied up my gown in a burst of activity.

An attractive woman in her mid twenties with a round face. No egg-sized purple birthmarks, no cellulite, no surgery.

`What we must do now is eat at once, you go and see what you can find in the kitchen, I need to go and call Gerard.'

The guy who ran the drugstore downstairs knocked. `You just got another call - this one from France - a girl called Celine. What are you running here? An international whorehouse?

`Skoob eht era erehw?' she said, pocking me.

`Honeythighs, let me explain—'

`Who are you sleeping with!'

`I bustled past her towards the door. The drugstore man was gone.

`Where do you think you are going?'

High-pitched footsteps echoed across the digital corridor. She emerged from room 108 running, spilling nearly all the spaghetti over the orb ball. Did loving really mean dying?

Frankie and Johnny (2) by Kenny Stetson

(warning: the following text contains a description of violence)

Frankie and Johnny were lovers. Frankie was the guy and Johnny was... He wasn't sure, actually. Oh I think Frankie was the girl. Anyway, they were lovers. But the happiness they shared had been tainted by the premature loss of their daughter from sudden child's death syndrome.

“You said you no longer wanted to live after she died. And now, six months after, you are still alive - why? Because of your work, because of your toys, because of me or because of nothing?” Johnny had asked.

“I just don't know what to do with myself.”

“Live or die.”

(Men have nothing to do with birth and babyhood anyway)

The life force and a fearful inability to end the own existence forces a person to keep going and to finish up alive in the face of most cruelties. Occasional bank robberies provided a welcomed diversion. The couple were bad-as-fuck bank robbers. Check this out:

They enter a high street bank and as Frankie pulls out an automatic rifle to threaten the employees, an old woman in galoshes gets in the way and starts screaming she thinks the world is ending. Frankie (now as a girl) spontaneously hits the old geezer in the back of her neck with the butt of the gun, but the woman merely stumbles, and recovers to start screaming in a more throaty and hysteric kind of way. As Frankie lifts her weapon to throw on a more effective battering, the victim drops and begins squirming on the floor. Johnny glances at Frankie who is nodding convulsively from across the counter room, then Frankie pumps two bullets into the back of the old woman's head.

“Darling!”

Her dress is sprayed with waves of brownish-red blood erupting from the back of the old lady's cranium. Finally, she has stopped squirming on the floor; but now Frankie needs to buy a new dress.

During this scene, Johnny has been looking on, it's all quite surreal to him, because before the bank raid he took a fistful of pain killers, and now he's all woozy and thinks he's seeing stuff. For example, he imagines he just saw his wife blow an old woman's head clean off.

“Who, no, who said I was dreaming?”

He has also developed one helluva twitch, easily to be interpreted as some sort of nod by someone in bad shape, for example. Johnny's a right mess, but Frankie loves him all the same. He buys her dresses when she messes them up during `jobs', but often falls asleep when they're fucking. Go figure the enigma that is woman.

They drive off after threatening the floored occupants of the bank with the same justice that was meted out to the old hag.

“...lay you down SOLID !!”

Their car is white - white and fast, it carries them to the edge of town and beyond amongst the grey ribbons of motorway and exit roads, towards the abandoned wooden house which is big but drafty. Welcome home. It is where they have been hiding for the last three weeks, since Johnny shot the highway patrolman.

Here they lived unhappily ever after.

Frankie and Johnny

Frankie and Johnny were lovers. Frankie was a guy and Johnny was … I’m not sure, actually. Oh, I think Frankie was the girl. Anyway, they were lovers. They were also bad-as-fuck bank robbers. Check this out:

They go into a bank, and this old woman gets in the way and starts screaming, like she thinks the world is ending. Frankie (a girl) hits her in the back of the neck with the butt of her gun, but the woman keeps screaming. She squirms on the floor. Johnny gives her the nod, then Frankie pumps two bullets into the back of the old woman’s head. Frankie’s white dress is now covered in the wave of brown blood that burst from the back of the woman’s skull. The woman has stopped squirming; Frankie needs to buy a new dress.

During this scene, Johnny has been looking on, but it’s all kind of surreal to him, because before the bank raid he took a fistful of painkillers, and now he’s all woozy and thinks he’s seeing stuff. For example, he thinks he just saw his wife blow an old woman’s head clean off. He has also developed a helluva twitch, which could be interpreted as some sort of nod by someone in a stressful situation, for example. Johnny’s a mess, but Frankie loves him. He buys her dresses when she messes them up during jobs, but he often falls asleep when they’re fucking. Go figure the enigma that is woman.

They drive off after threatening the occupants of the bank with the same justice that was meted out to the old woman. Their car is white and fast, and carries them to the edge of town and beyond, to the abandoned wooden house which is big but drafty, and where they’ve been hiding for the last three weeks, since Johnny shot that cop on the highway.

A collaboration, of sorts

This is the Earlham Road Project, a site set up to provide a home for collaboration between 'the legendary' Kenny Stetson and Karl Whitney on a number of fictional projects. We plan to post pieces of stories, then rejig them and post them again. Effectively we will be scribbling all over the other person's work, so this may lead to some entertaining fights. Who knows?