UNDER Zacherly UNDER: Episode One
short fiction by bonnet nils (one of my favourites!)
I’m excited to share a piece of writing from bonnet nils today, in part because it is my birthday and nils’ writing feels like a wonderful birthday gift to me! I hope you all enjoy this gift as much as I do. You can find some of bonnet nils’ work in the MULCH zine we published last Autumn, and find out more about nils’ work at bonnetnils.com
CONTENT NOTES:
Horror movie references (Hellraiser and Alien), discussion of sickness and pain inc. blindness and bladder, sex toy mentioning, uncare commentary, various voices of sick and unsick/ pre-sick, urban legend - intruding tongues, bed proximities, familiar and far away, blood+piss, hot dog arms, conceptual dog death.
UNDER Zacherly UNDER: Episode One
IT IS NOT HANDS THAT BROUGHT US HERE BUT DESIRE
You should read this in bed.
Zacherly is in bed.
He is trying to slide his hand, aching-slow, across the growing expanse of bed it is trying to travail.
With the eyes of his face he can see his hand lying on the bed unmoving, but with the eyes of his body he sees tightening lassos of hurt encircling his forearm, wrist, hand, fingers.
His knuckles too tight, rubbed too close together, his fingers stiffened, the longer elbowknuckle of his arm a static tube or casing. Sometimes, when it doesn’t hurt, he can hardly feel anything at all.
It feels more natural to imagine his arm moving only from external motion or momentum. Being spun around on its bone axis; rolling, a slow turning hot dog at the cinema in a large metal heating device. Sweaty.
He just wants it to fall,
over the edge.
Away.
He can’t sleep because of the pain, and the pain has become enough of a penetrating, consuming, rumble-drone coring through him, that the idea of anything else happening to his body, even if it is ‘bad’, even if it is ‘worse’, is one of bliss.
Zacherly can’t be here anymore. He closes his eyes and starts to play his favourite films in his head, it helps him leave. Re-insert. He sees the film and feels his bed, feels his bed sheet become the projector screen; he can move or unmoving be shadowed against it.
He reframes. He is so nestled between viewing lens and screen that he feels finally held, supported.
To start the movie he performs a careful internal ritual- visualising the pressing of buttons (depress, click) on a jukebox to make a selection, a record held by an arm moving across the semi circle window, tilting, slotting into place, needle falling (a momentary static). Sound. A familiar song. An orchestra score. A lament.
The needle a pin.
Zacherly’s eyes are closed, he listens, and he thinks that if he had the box, if he held the puzzle box under the covers like a clandestine text read by torchlight, and had the momentary necessary manual dexterity to slide the pieces around and solve the lament configuration, he would welcome a cenobite appearing. They would have a lot to hurt about.
‘Welcome to the worst nightmare of all… reality’, they both smile. There is something like a wink that passes between them, though their eyes do not move. Zacherly thinks about how their appearance is normally heralded by hooks first, before body - sliding into flesh and pulling back, revealing form. But for him, there is time, a pause before action. There is space. A settled peace against a backdrop of dread because there is recognition. He has always known a body's ability to tear open, to transform. He is a sight and has seen himself. And they want to know, how it feels, hear him say it. They want to delight in it together. Doesn’t it feel bad. Doesn’t it feel good. Doesn’t it feel.
He tries again, to move.
Scuttles his legs weakly against the screen, against the tangled bed sheets that rope him as he bodily repositions, and moves his arm closer towards the edge. He blinks his eyes for a second (a flicker between frames), picturing someone muscular, sleeping heavily. In their heaviness of muscles, and of sleep, under the orders of some strange dream, they roll over their great corded form and without intention their arm just lollops off of the edge of the bed with abandon.
This space, that the arm hangs in, out blanketed, beyond the borders of bed, it’s, it’s.
INTERMISSION
A neighbouring audience member leans towards you and whispers:
This hand hanging over the bed is referencing the urban legend where someone has a dog and they put their hand over the bed in the night and the dog licks their hand and they are half asleep and it is a comfort to them, they fall back into dream. Bed can be a scary place and night can be a scary place and if there is a conceptual dog that is a story version of a dog form (and we probably summon it to be the idea of the feeling of a golden retriever) that is less a being and more an embodied idea of normative and familiar comfort, reassurance and reliability, it is understandable to want that to lick you.
And then in the story the dog that is comfort is killed, and the person who has been licked by the ‘dog’ realises this. But they realise it after there has been further licking of their hand, and at the time their hand was licked it was a comfort. I heard something dripping and the dog told me it was fine but it was never fine and it was never a dog.
I think when we hear this story there is an idea that we are horrified because i) the dog is killed, and it is gruesomely beheld, it’s blood writing on the wall the phrase ‘humans can lick too’, which I don’t think is actually a very scary thing to write (because we already know something is licking if the dog is dead and we know humans often can lick, unless we are saying that humans are scarier than something unknown under the bed, they probably are), although I think that is sort of the point of urban legends, to be over the top, a camp, pleasing terror; we are imagining this in a cartoonish way, which is why I’m only a bit worried about talking to you about dead dogs given my awareness of e.g. doesthedogdie.com though I did warn you about the conceptual dog dying ii) the licker is a mystery and they have already touched us, and they killed what we previously knew to be comfort.
I think that the thrill that pulls at the thread of us, really, that we don’t want to say, is that the licking was still comforting, and what does that mean.
PLEASE TAKE YOUR BED AGAIN, THE SHOW IS ABOUT TO BEGIN
His frail wrist is in the free air now, the angle of it hurting his elbow and shoulder, as unsupported as they are. He waits for a little while. He listens to the sound machine on the floor by his bed, blowing wave noise at him, the light on its back set to turquoise, which is not appropriately thematic for this film, but it’s too much effort to change it. Everything is too much too much effort.
For example, Zacherly hasn’t changed his bedsheets in 5 weeks, and at least one if not many of his conditions ring loud siren noises in response to this. Loudest of all, the sensory feel of the sheets unfresh against every bit of skin that touches them. And it’s all his skin touching, because pyjamas make him feel strangled. If you are reading this and you are not sick you might be thinking surely someone comes in to change the sheets, to help, to provide care. And it’s so sweet that you think that. It doesn’t help us that you think it, but we think it’s sweet. Maybe it’s nicer for us to imagine that you like to (wrongly) imagine us cared for, rather than that you enjoy the uncaring happening all the time around us and in us. If we were a Murphy bed you would fold us directly into the wall.
He’s been in bed for days and days on end, not nights on end, the whole expanse is just long days stretching into each other with the curtains shut. Night is an idea of rest- there is a pressure and expectation to sleep within the vessel of it, but the pain makes it impossible to do so, the volume of the pain is the volume of the vessel. It’s easier to think of it as one long unending day. Like how a werewolf movie will have repeated consecutive full moon nights. There is a time bleed that cannot be staunched.
He sort of gets ‘out’ of bed or ‘up’ of bed, sometimes, to deal with a piss situation. If you are not a sick person and you are reading this, we aren’t explaining the piss situation to you. In general, we want to educate and create less taboo- for us/our ease and for the you that will be us, but we sometimes have to find some scraps of enjoyment.
Like leaving you in a temporary story void of imagining what horrible things can happen with a body and piss and a bedroom.
Truly, it could be anything. Sometimes it is anything. You can imagine, can’t you?
At some point we will tell you (not now), and as we do we will remember when we got told, in a few hurried minutes, by a doctor, a little while after he’d come in to tell us we needed to choose between two drugs, one that might not work (important, when on the neuroscience trauma and critical care unit) and the other that might work, but might cause specific blindness as a side effect. They say, ‘oh, and you ‘piss’ like ‘this’ now. Ok?’ And close the curtain behind themselves like a simultaneously over dramatic yet somehow banal cape. And later in your own bed, that you don’t generally receive active or ongoing care in, someone does a home visit to scan your bladder repeatedly. And they wear their outdoor shoes in your room. And they rub jelly on you. And they move the wand around.
And you want it to be that maybe there is some alien creature in there, not just more piss. Or an alarming lack of piss. Or blood. Or bloodpiss.
Back to Zacherly, who wants a t-shirt now, that says bloodpiss on it. We want one too.
His hand is still over the edge. Imagine the thematic music at the start of Alien, the Nostromo floating in space - this is what we think space sounds like to people but it isn’t what it would actually sound like. But it is what people imagine it sounds like so that’s how we have to make it. For something to be recognisable, to parse, it has to have been a before and been witnessed to be a before. You can’t just introduce an unseen now and expect people to accept it.
The hand is hanging out in space and, and, though Zacherly cannot see it from where he is, we can see a long tongue start to eke its way out from amongst the under the bed dark space. You can imagine the tongue as a kind of limb. You can imagine it as a creature cocks sex toy, a lot of them are pretty tongue adjacent. You can imagine it as a tentacle belonging to one of those aliens from The Simpsons. Kang and Kodos. Canonically queer, which is nice. The tongue is obviously canonically queer because this is our story that we are writing. And it would be fine anyway to just have x years of assuming tongues sticking out from under beds are canonically queer since so much of life is assuming tongues (general) are straight. If you are reading this and you are sick or not sick, you can take a moment, if it’s possible for you, to use your finger or something that’s not your finger, like a thought, to explore that little wet under tongue pocket, if one exists.
The tongue is approaching Zacherly’s hand, and we can start to imagine that under the bed is a little wet webby pocket, even though it’s never seemed like that before. But anything could be under there, couldn’t it.
The thematic music of under the bed begins to play.