Aikanen mato linnun nappaa. Eiku... Huomenet kaikille! Myö kohta männään to the tikkamäki.
nti nukkunu rauhallisemmin yöt. Ei oo ollu niin levotonta.
Itekkin nukkunu pari yötä hyvin!Nousen aamulla, peseydyn, syön aamiaista, syön lounasta, otan nokoset, syön päivällistä, menen nukkumaan. Joka päivä sama.
mi weekendScenarioTonttukirkko
This entry was posted on August 3, 2012 by Kieran McGrath, in Short Stories and tagged Gary Budden, short story, Tonttukirkko, writer. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments
The Troll Church crouches on its island off the coast of Helsinki, a quiet shaded place in the vast archipelago that swarms round the western Baltic Sea coast. Vartiosaari, the island crawls with life in the brief summer months. Blueberry bushes carpet the forest floor, lush and endless. Raspberry bushes, angry red punctuation marks amongst them. Chanterelle mushrooms sprout with abandon from the damp earth with little care for their status as delicacies. London bohemians pay near ten pounds for the luxury of consuming one hundred and fifty grams of such fungi. The facts seem pathetic, unreal here. Clouds of mosquitoes, vicious horseflies, midges, gnats, gadfly, all form a united front of insect aggression, harassing visitors as they marvel at the pure unblemished white lichen, signals of health and clean air unknown in the cities.
Adrianna thinks of this place, the place she visited three years ago, a trip abroad to see the homeland of her Finnish friends. It stays with her in searing detail, too real, too defined. She wishes to revisit, to escape the crumbling reality of the English capital, where she sees defaced monuments to fallen cyclists, ghost bikes stolen by thieves so morally bankrupt it took all her strength and composure to keep it together. A swelling desire to recapture that other reality, the emotions she felt when she stood in Tonttukirkko, with warm damp and fungal rot, only insects and preternatural forces for company. Exiting Vartiosaari meant a short swim back to their rented dwellings on another, smaller, part of the archipelago, through the warm Baltic Sea where arctic terns floated overhead and great crested grebes bobbed on brackish water.
Here in warm amniotic brine, she could feel the shades, see memories of ondines in the lower depths, the rumblings of an extinct kraken miles below the surface, the water a mirror reflecting all that her life was not. The terns wheeled above her, grebes regarding her with avian curiosity. The insect life created a continual throbbing hum even as the birds feasted on them. They would always win. Strength in numbers.
There was no reality. There was nothing for her to get back to, and the future seemed to stretch on without promise She had forgotten her orders long ago, lost the reason she was out in the world, alive, breathing. Undercover police call this ‘mission drift’: forgetting who you are, why you are doing what you are doing, becoming something that you, at first, merely imitated.
‘Always move forward’ as her progressive, socialist, friends would say. She was yearning for something that occurred in an unrecoverable past. Nostalgia was poison, she knew that. The feelings were there regardless.
It’s the alcohol, the drugs she took last night at that party, the ephemeral sexual encounter, this is what’s making her drift off into comedown reveries of The Troll Church, of Jatulintarha, the stone maze, the Ice Age boulders, the Viking lookout points at the summit of the island where she and her friends had stopped, sweaty and humid after filling buckets of raspberries, blueberries, chanterelles, until they realised they were taking more than they required and had stopped to sit on the stones overlooking the archipelago, looking out to Helsinki itself, smoking rolling tobacco, sipping from plastic water bottles, swatting insects from their skin.
They walked The Chinese Path, an overgrown road crossing the island built long ago by Chinese prisoners of the Tsar, fortification workers aiding the elaborate defence of St Petersburg during the First World War. All but forgotten, slipped down a crack in history.
What struck her was the peace. She had had no contact with the digital world in over a week and her mind had adjusted to a different way of being. Sitting under swaying trees, looking out over the rippling water at night with her friends, voyeurs to the march of the seasons, animal rituals older than her entire species, the red wine and marijuana, the devouring of her book of feminist science fiction. Things inside her settled, calmed. ‘I feel fucking Zen!’ she would exclaim with a laugh.
On Vartiosaari she had stayed at The Troll Church whilst her companions had climbed higher up the rocky cliff, now twenty metres above sea level where before it had been touched by the lapping waves some four thousand years ago. She stood there, savouring the experience. She lies on her sofa, nauseous, and allows herself to be back in the moment.
Despite the presence of the crude wooden cross attached to the ancient rock, this is a pagan place, it exists in a world different to the one that Adrianna knows and battles with in her day-to-day life. The vegetation becomes lush and the birdsong disappears, the stink of humus and fungus, of fresh new growths bursting from leaf litter all stronger now, and she sees, really sees Tonttukirkko, a gathering place at equinox and solstice, tusked masculine bipeds, polyamorous fauns, iridescent plant-men shimmering in shades of emerald, opal and malachite, shambling furry things of giant size that she may once have called trolls, impossibly lithe, woody females indulging in an orgiastic bacchanalia who whisper invitations to her in archaic tongues. Things not of her mythology. Primal creatures, Earth things, that dance and revel, drink and fornicate. A Troupe of Fools, scarred harlequins and grimacing jesters, she sees the Narwhal pod out to sea, breaking the surface as they laugh at the name ‘sea unicorn’. The trees shudder and sway, their motives and intentions opaque, the ground is a fluid nest of worms, shifting, buckling. A chance of falling, of being swallowed, crushed underfoot by the revellers. Tonttukirkko is alive and it’s real.
The shouts of her companions from the cliff-top brought her back. It was gone, evaporated. She’d shaken her head, blinking hard like a freshly woken coma victim. She rejoined her companions, who gave her odd looks, though this was soon forgotten as Adrianna regained her composure, seeming now even more invigorated by the place, by the island, and as she sat with them on the Viking lookout, staring out across the waters and the dotted islands, she thought of what she had seen, and she smiled, though she mentioned it to no one. Thought of the Vikings looking out, sentries on The Guardian Island, igniting their giant bonfires at the sight of unfamiliar ships, alerting the mainlanders against danger. She thought about who these people were, what they were like, what they hoped for and dreamed of.
Her future is opaque, her skin is becoming translucent, and the past is bottoming out.
Adrianna lies on her sofa, nauseous from the after-effects of chemicals and alcohol, her throat sore from coughing, from too many fags the night before. Her body still retains the feeling of an ill-advised sexual encounter. Re-runs of poorly executed American sitcoms flicker on the television, the volume down low. Traffic rumbles outside. A mother shouts at her children somewhere out on the street.
She sips her tea,
mi weekendScenarioTonttukirkko
This entry was posted on August 3, 2012 by Kieran McGrath, in Short Stories and tagged Gary Budden, short story, Tonttukirkko, writer. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments
The Troll Church crouches on its island off the coast of Helsinki, a quiet shaded place in the vast archipelago that swarms round the western Baltic Sea coast. Vartiosaari, the island crawls with life in the brief summer months. Blueberry bushes carpet the forest floor, lush and endless. Raspberry bushes, angry red punctuation marks amongst them. Chanterelle mushrooms sprout with abandon from the damp earth with little care for their status as delicacies. London bohemians pay near ten pounds for the luxury of consuming one hundred and fifty grams of such fungi. The facts seem pathetic, unreal here. Clouds of mosquitoes, vicious horseflies, midges, gnats, gadfly, all form a united front of insect aggression, harassing visitors as they marvel at the pure unblemished white lichen, signals of health and clean air unknown in the cities.
Adrianna thinks of this place, the place she visited three years ago, a trip abroad to see the homeland of her Finnish friends. It stays with her in searing detail, too real, too defined. She wishes to revisit, to escape the crumbling reality of the English capital, where she sees defaced monuments to fallen cyclists, ghost bikes stolen by thieves so morally bankrupt it took all her strength and composure to keep it together. A swelling desire to recapture that other reality, the emotions she felt when she stood in Tonttukirkko, with warm damp and fungal rot, only insects and preternatural forces for company. Exiting Vartiosaari meant a short swim back to their rented dwellings on another, smaller, part of the archipelago, through the warm Baltic Sea where arctic terns floated overhead and great crested grebes bobbed on brackish water.
Here in warm amniotic brine, she could feel the shades, see memories of ondines in the lower depths, the rumblings of an extinct kraken miles below the surface, the water a mirror reflecting all that her life was not. The terns wheeled above her, grebes regarding her with avian curiosity. The insect life created a continual throbbing hum even as the birds feasted on them. They would always win. Strength in numbers.
There was no reality. There was nothing for her to get back to, and the future seemed to stretch on without promise She had forgotten her orders long ago, lost the reason she was out in the world, alive, breathing. Undercover police call this ‘mission drift’: forgetting who you are, why you are doing what you are doing, becoming something that you, at first, merely imitated.
‘Always move forward’ as her progressive, socialist, friends would say. She was yearning for something that occurred in an unrecoverable past. Nostalgia was poison, she knew that. The feelings were there regardless.
It’s the alcohol, the drugs she took last night at that party, the ephemeral sexual encounter, this is what’s making her drift off into comedown reveries of The Troll Church, of Jatulintarha, the stone maze, the Ice Age boulders, the Viking lookout points at the summit of the island where she and her friends had stopped, sweaty and humid after filling buckets of raspberries, blueberries, chanterelles, until they realised they were taking more than they required and had stopped to sit on the stones overlooking the archipelago, looking out to Helsinki itself, smoking rolling tobacco, sipping from plastic water bottles, swatting insects from their skin.
They walked The Chinese Path, an overgrown road crossing the island built long ago by Chinese prisoners of the Tsar, fortification workers aiding the elaborate defence of St Petersburg during the First World War. All but forgotten, slipped down a crack in history.
What struck her was the peace. She had had no contact with the digital world in over a week and her mind had adjusted to a different way of being. Sitting under swaying trees, looking out over the rippling water at night with her friends, voyeurs to the march of the seasons, animal rituals older than her entire species, the red wine and marijuana, the devouring of her book of feminist science fiction. Things inside her settled, calmed. ‘I feel fucking Zen!’ she would exclaim with a laugh.
On Vartiosaari she had stayed at The Troll Church whilst her companions had climbed higher up the rocky cliff, now twenty metres above sea level where before it had been touched by the lapping waves some four thousand years ago. She stood there, savouring the experience. She lies on her sofa, nauseous, and allows herself to be back in the moment.
Despite the presence of the crude wooden cross attached to the ancient rock, this is a pagan place, it exists in a world different to the one that Adrianna knows and battles with in her day-to-day life. The vegetation becomes lush and the birdsong disappears, the stink of humus and fungus, of fresh new growths bursting from leaf litter all stronger now, and she sees, really sees Tonttukirkko, a gathering place at equinox and solstice, tusked masculine bipeds, polyamorous fauns, iridescent plant-men shimmering in shades of emerald, opal and malachite, shambling furry things of giant size that she may once have called trolls, impossibly lithe, woody females indulging in an orgiastic bacchanalia who whisper invitations to her in archaic tongues. Things not of her mythology. Primal creatures, Earth things, that dance and revel, drink and fornicate. A Troupe of Fools, scarred harlequins and grimacing jesters, she sees the Narwhal pod out to sea, breaking the surface as they laugh at the name ‘sea unicorn’. The trees shudder and sway, their motives and intentions opaque, the ground is a fluid nest of worms, shifting, buckling. A chance of falling, of being swallowed, crushed underfoot by the revellers. Tonttukirkko is alive and it’s real.
The shouts of her companions from the cliff-top brought her back. It was gone, evaporated. She’d shaken her head, blinking hard like a freshly woken coma victim. She rejoined her companions, who gave her odd looks, though this was soon forgotten as Adrianna regained her composure, seeming now even more invigorated by the place, by the island, and as she sat with them on the Viking lookout, staring out across the waters and the dotted islands, she thought of what she had seen, and she smiled, though she mentioned it to no one. Thought of the Vikings looking out, sentries on The Guardian Island, igniting their giant bonfires at the sight of unfamiliar ships, alerting the mainlanders against danger. She thought about who these people were, what they were like, what they hoped for and dreamed of.
Her future is opaque, her skin is becoming translucent, and the past is bottoming out.
Adrianna lies on her sofa, nauseous from the after-effects of chemicals and alcohol, her throat sore from coughing, from too many fags the night before. Her body still retains the feeling of an ill-advised sexual encounter. Re-runs of poorly executed American sitcoms flicker on the television, the volume down low. Traffic rumbles outside. A mother shouts at her children somewhere out on the street.
She sips her tea,
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