The Earlham Road Project

Fiction, collaboration, disgust

Thursday, February 16, 2006

The Profusely Bleeding Hand of W.H., Whom Astute Readers May Recognise as Being Himself the Author of this Sorry Tale, But Then May Be Not Quite So

Astute As Their Teacheres Have Led Them To Believe In Matters Of Stories And Fables

W.H. picked up his pencil and his cigarette using the same hand, because he was using the other to open the window. Outside, it was spring on the Earlham Road. This was in 1935 when the secret gardens had just opened. It was nicely raining. He began to write. When he had completed the following passage-
Wonderland and Looking-Glass land are fun to visit but no places to live in. Even when she is there, Alice can ask herself with some nostalgia “if anything would ever happen in a natural way again,” and by “natural” she means the opposite of what Rousseau would mean. She means peaceful, civilised society
- the sash fell on his hand. “Cunts”, yelled W.H., never the kind of man to offer a platitude when a profanity was available (“to hand”, he initially thought, but that was just a bad pun). With one eye he inspected the crushed and bleeding appendage, and with the other glanced at what he had written. W.H. looked like a crosseyed dog.

First he said (out loud) “why did I write that?”

Then he said (out loud) “I haven’t written that yet.”

W.H. didn’t know what Rousseau would mean by “natural” but he didn’t know what he meant by it either. He suspected it didn’t mean bleeding profusely out of an open window. How had his hand got back there? A crocodile of schoolchildren, who were just leaving the secret garden, began to scream en masse at the sight of the limp digits that were splayed across the sill. Their teacher was yelling something up at him, but could not make himself understood as a result of a cleft palate.

“Fuck off!” shouted W.H. “Nobody sounds as stupid as you do!”

The schoolchildren began to throw small pebbles and coins at the window. W.H. picked up a heavy paperweight and threw it through the window at the teacher. As the glass from the shattered pane embedded itself in the already-broken hand of the solipsistic author, the teacher slumped to the ground.

“Good fucking riddance!” shouted W.H., who had never really liked his left hand anyway. Admittedly, he was regretting having positioned his desk so close to the window when the room had a plethora of cavities in which one could work in peace.

Because it was 1937, the police were too busy giving directions to strangers and helping old ladies across the street to investigate the strange death of the schoolteacher on Earlham Road. The children went back to school and raised a skull & crossbones on the flagpole.

(From the Papers of M. Joe Kennedy, lateley much of these partes)