come in come in please come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in come in !!! wrapped shell around itself, wrapped dark around himself, herself, punctuated by stars. There were stars on the inside of the shell: the dark between them writhed with fractal growth and sprouted detail as one looked closer like lichen or soot-dark coal glittering shamelessly. Creature looked closer, because she had rage to diffuse. It was inside her like the sea was outside the cliff (in which was embedded the shell, in which was embedded ShellCreature). It was a heavy ocean pressing, pressing. The act of her looking was the act of poking holes and watching small rivulets trickle from this greater rage into ridges of shell where they glistened as they split and split and split fractally going down and down and down as creature clung to one shameless glint becoming smaller until it got lost in the almost-dark. ShellCreature felt that her rage could rupture the world, should it ever be released. She imagined a great lightning-struck flood of the kind that created life on a dead world once, that would make this world dead, and leave this world and all that was precious and awful in it dead for cold eons. That is why she curled inside the shell - at least so she told herself - out of care for the world that she could and wanted to tear apart. Yet she was also afraid of being something so uncompromising. She was afraid it would destroy her, yes, but she was more afraid that it wouldn’t, and she would be left standing there at the cold end of it, a l o n e C r e a t u r e S h e l l S h e l l C r e a t u r e S h e l l C r e a t u r e S h e l l C r e a t u r e S hellCreature Shell CreatureShellcreatu re shellcreature shell *Anne Conway, 17th Century philosopher, early Quaker, reader of Lurianic Kabbalah, and migraine sufferer, describing God. Both, also, are forces of love. Think about the love of looking. The kind that dwells in detail, cherishes the detail and the aching beauty of it, yet the looking makes more detail and pulls it apart and dissolves it... Looking, really looking, at the one or the thing you love pulls it apart, don’t you think? Not just in your mind. In reality. Actual little pieces. That is what nobody understands yet.” She doesn’t wait for an answer, “Then the other force is the kind of love that is Spirit, Light, and Life*. It is eros and ecstasy. And yet it burns and explodes itself. It burns things and people up, consumes them or makes them consume themselves.” Lou’s quite-annoying date twists the empty sugar packet in her hands, big rings clacking. Lou stirs the last bit of coffee in the bottom of her cup, tracing the detail in the grounds which leave a swirling trail and wondering whether that is really what love is like. Annoying she might be, thinks Lou, but this person is earnest. Where did she pull the story from? Outside, a blackbird starts to sing its dusk-song. Lou’s quite-annoying date has short blonde hair, spiky, with just the tips of it dyed a darker brown. She has jewelry that looks too new, and she isn’t used to wearing it. This, in itself, is not a reason to find her annoying, Lou knows. Only she acts as though she is so at home in her new jewelry and in this bar and everywhere, and yet she seems to know no-one and she’s so young and she has the kind of confidence that you only get when nothing bad has happened to you. L ou’s quite-annoying date is recounting an origin myth. She sips her turmeric latte, “So there are two forces right? Two... impulses, doing things in the world. There is the force that expands - the force of rage, waves breaking, the bull leaping over the curve of the shell, then there is the force that curls inward - detail-making, disintegrating, the kind of decay that makes intricacy, beauty, lace-thin leaf skeletons. Both forces are life; both are death. There is the infurling and there is the outfurling, and there is fire, which is between them. Fire unfurls its heat and its power and its brightness, and/yet it disintegrates and consumes. from Lou's quite-annoying date A lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson i a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson in mythology a lesson i ShellCreature didn’t want to kill him. Lou wasn’t the kind of person who killed people. They all said later that she had dealt with it admirably, Lou rests her well-defined chin on her hands and watches the cars go past and tries to locate the blackbird that has now reached its final trill. She scans the opposite pavement, but then there is someone walking out of a shop whose haircut is like his and she flinches back into her seat. on her own. ************************************* S hellcreature hears the sea heave and wheeze on the other side of the cliff. She imagines watching its surface as it breaks its own ribs to pull in air. Vast masses of fluid smash against each other under the skin. Listening, she is reduced only to now. She waits for the next crash and swill and gurgle and it feels like something she herself is surviving, such that any thought of ‘after’ is useless in the all- consuming task of endurance. But she is only listening, she tells herself. She is within the cliff, in which is embedded the shell, in which is embedded Shellcreature, and she is listening. You’re in the land, she tells herself. You’re not in the sea. The sea is only outside. It is alright. And yet she is on the very border of this safe solidness that is the land. “Blueurgshh h hh”, says the sea. “Leave me alone”, says Shellcreature. Shellcreature was a red fist of spittle in the mouth of a dog. Shellcreature was the first hair to stand up, slowly and gently and inevitable and Shellcreature was a fallen stray bristle always at the point of spiraling into the drain, in the weight of downwardsness, in spinning and spinning and spinning Shellcreature was singing though she didn’t notice at first. She was sending out little phrases of song absentmindedly into the dark. When she noticed, she thought for a moment that it was the voice of someone else, or the voice of the sea. She had argued with the sea many times, but never sang to it. Then she noticed that her tongue was moving. There was a buzzing in her throat. She was shaping the air into something. Odd, thought Shellcreature. What was she singing? Was it something she remembered? T hey called her Sarah-the-birds. She called herself a different name every time she heard a new sound in the trees, and each name tasted like bitter sap in her mouth and she shivered under it like she had been touched. She had two jobs which she did assiduously. Her jobs were: delivering the mail (the job she did for money), and keeping up with the affairs of the birds (the job she did for a reason that nobody knew). One day, she delivered mail to Lou’s house. Lou’s sister ran out, socks getting soaked with the dew that was still on the grass. She snatched the envelope from the hands of Sarah-the-birds and tore it open. Rejection. Another one. ‘They’ve negotiated a truce, did you hear?’, asked Sarah-the-birds. ‘Uh huh’, said Lou’s sister. ‘You heard? I doubt it, they only announced it this morning’, Sarah surveyed Lou’s sister’s pyjamas and hair-rollers. ‘It’s the first time they’ve had negotiations like this. Truly unprecedented. The negotiators have become quite the public figures. I can hardly believe it. I had been lulled into thinking they would be fighting and negotiating forever. I guess we all had.’ She let out a breathless laugh. ‘That’s nice, Sarah-the-birds’, ‘What?’ ‘That’s nice Sarah’, ‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Did you hear the song they played over broadcast this morning?’ She sighed, ‘wow. wow. just... so beautiful and sad. There was something eternal in that song.’ ‘Uh huh’, A pause. ‘Sorry, you must be busy’, said Sarah-the-birds. ‘Uh huh’, said Lou’s sister. She was still looking at the letter she had opened. A bead of dew fell off a blade of grass and onto Sarah-the-birds’ foot. She shuffled it away. She flicked through the letters in her bag. The sun was starting to turn things pink. Eventually, Lou’s sister folded the letter (crisply, in half) and looked Sarah-the-birds right in the eyes. ‘Sorry Sarah’, she said, ‘I was really hoping that would have been the one. But it’s ok. There will be next time’, she tucked the envelope into her pyjama pocket. ‘Tell me about the truce again?’ ‘Um yes’, said Sarah-the-birds, ‘Yes don’t worry about it. Um. Sorry about the... the thing’. Lou’s sister nodded. ‘The truce was between the birds-of-the-rocks-on-the-western-shore and the birds-of-the-mud-by-the-estuary... The birds-of- the-rocks-by- the-western- shore and the birds-of-the- mud-by-the- estuary had not always been at war. The older ones among t h e m r e m e m b e r e d this, but they couldn't tell you when it was that the war started or why. The younger ones c o u l d give you hundreds of reasons. The western shore had suffered a bad storm, yet the birds of the estuary did not think to share the worms that thrived in their t h i c k e n e d mud. The estuary had s u f f e r e d a dry summer yet the birds of the shore, fat on fish, had not offered aid. The birds of the estuary looked down on the birds of the shore, or the other way a r o u n d . Whatever the reason, the war had been sung about for the past three springs, and f o u g h t brutally. And now it was o v e r S hellcreature was turning in the dark. She could feel the dark flowing over the ridges of her spine like her spine itself was a shell is my spine a shell she jolted awake in terror. No. Her breath rattled out of her. Suddenly it felt like there was too much space too much air between her face and the nearest wall. There was too much darkness without the warm sense of something to break it something that could be touched to steady oneself if one were to slip. She breathed quicker. Why had she not felt this scared since ... Why had she never felt this scared in the shell? The air was cold as she breathed it quickly and it felt like it didn’t fill her. ‘help’, thought Shellcreature for the first time since... ‘ h e l p ’ AND THE DARK SPAT OUT AN EMBEDDED - IN - SHELLCREATURE ' S - ABDOMEN WET STONE AND IT HURT L ou put off writing to Erin for a month. Then she woke up one morning and there were snails all over her window blocking the light and they were on the inside and Lou thought ok that’s it fine I’ll do it. She sat down, not even bothering to try to move the snails. She sat down right in front of them but with her chair turned to the side so she didn’t have to look at them directly, and held her notebook open and a pen over it poised. Dear Erin , She wrote at the top of the page. And stopped. I dream of her too? I dream of her, I don’t know what else to tell you. Can we have coffee or something? HELPHELPHELPHELPHELP First meeting Erin came in looking like she had walked out of a bush or a horror film, darting her eyes around bird-like. Her hair was long and sand-coloured and knotted and she had mud on the side of her neck. When her eyes found Lou it was as though she had found driftwood in a sea she was floundering in. Her face softened with relief. Erin picked her way between the tables. Lou thought that the way she glanced around furtively seemed familiar, but couldn’t figure out why. Before she had time to wonder, two ditch-coloured eyes were looking directly into hers. A silence immediately settled between them. The silence took out a cigarette and started to smoke. “Um... hi” , said Lou after a while. She was embarassed, she was never normally hesitant like this. And the smoke was getting in her eyes. “Hi”, said Erin. They both stared at each other for a while. Then, before Lou could introduce herself - “So”, said Erin, “Um... I guess I should get this out of the way. I’m not completely certain about this. I don’t even know if I want to be going on dates right now. I don’t know if I’m... ready... if I can cope with going on dates right now” . She paused. “I’m sorry, I am aware that I’m doing it anyway. And I don’t want to overshare. I just wanted to tell you”. “Um, it’s ok”, said Lou, slightly taken aback, “I mean, I’m also not...” Not what? Ready? Dating? Not... Erin looked at her through the two ponds in her face. “I mean, it’s ok. This doesn’t have to be a date” Lou tried to recover some composure. Being reassuring was something she was good at. She breathed deeply and got a lungful of cigarette smoke that the silence was still puffing out. “Could you stop?” she snapped. Erin said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you or anything. I did sort of want to talk to you.” “Not you”, said Lou , “And yes, of course, I wanted to talk to you too. That’s why I replied to your ad.” She paused. “I do dream of her...” The silence leaned in excitedly, perching its chin on one hand with long glittery fingernails and twirling a strand of its hair with the other. Lou tried to work out what to say. She had been hoping that Erin would start to talk about Shellcreature first. Lou picked up the menu, “um, what do you want? Coffee?” “Tea, actually”, said Erin, “if you don’t mind.” “I’ll have a martini”, said the silence, blowing a heart shaped smoke ring through its nose. 'Stop', said Shellcreature. The voice sounded close, as though all the water was Shellcreature's breath. Erin breathed shakily, then she felt a warm hand touching her waist. It moved across her skin. It was joined by another hand. Shellcreature was behind her, holding her. Erin's body flooded with gratitude. 'Who are you?' asked Shellcreature softly. Erin could not answer. 'I dream of you', she said. Shellcreature traced a hand up to her chest and left it there. Erin moaned. 'You came to find me...', said Shellcreature. Her other hand was on Erin's back scraping in small circles with her nails. Erin pressed her back up to meet them. She wanted desperately to feel Shellcreature's rage in her own skin. 'Oh...', said Shellcreature. She pressed the nail deeper. 'Do you want me to...' 'Yes', said Erin. 'Please, please...' She breathed and Shellcreature dug in another nail and dragged it slowly and deliberately across Erin's back. She carved like she carved into the walls of the shell, allowing more and more of her rage to flow out through the tips of her fingers, making beautiful intricacies in deep grooves that held some of the force that flowed through her. Shellcreature started to trust Erin the way she trusted the hard walls of the shell to take it. She started to allow herself to be soothed by the way Erin's skin strained and broke. Erin felt her blood blooming into the water as a gift. She was entranced. She was ecstatic. She let Shellcreature use her and she let her skin open to welcome the world and the sting of salt. When she woke up she was drowning in the tide pool. She felt a band of pressure around her lungs and water thick in her throat. She thrashed her way to the surface and spat out gushes of seawater and gulped the air and gulped the dark and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. Lou to Erin: Dear Erin, My sister just got a job looking after an abandoned building. It's a warehouse, and she has to evict any birds that start to settle in so that they don’t ruin the place with their nests and their shit or something. She offered to let us in if we want a place to meet... What do you think? I thought that we could maybe start a group for people who dream of shellcreature? In case there are more? Also, we can meet without having to pay for coffee haha. And with less pressure, less like a date (even though we didn't go on a date the first time, obviously, haha) Anyway, let me know, Lou Lou to Erin: That's a strange question. I haven't thought about it as much, but maybe I want her to hold me and pour her rage in slowly so that I hardly notice that it hurts but when she is done I am almost gone because she has made me a rage-thing and she is so blissfully calm and I am so happy to see the look on her face. It's odd, I don't know why I feel like that. But yes to Tuesday. Erin to Lou: Yes. Yes please. Shall we meet this Tuesday? Also, can I ask a question? Do you want her to hurt you? Shellcreature? I think I want to feel her rage flowing through me until my muscles and bones are replaced by rivers of rage I want her to put her hands on me looking like she wants to tear me apart but also like she loves me more tenderly than anything, I want to let her use me to break things. I have just been thinking about that lately. O n Tuesday, Erin and Lou went to the abandoned warehouse. There were birds in it. There was a beam that they seemed to have chosen as the central perch from which to circle and look for bugs, or whatever it was they looked for in the woodchips on the floor. Lou set up a table and two camping stools underneath the beam, put a flask of tea on the table, and laid out her notebook where she had been writing about Shellcreature. Erin walked around looking at the boarded up windows and the remains of gutted filing cabinets. The birds watched them sit down together. Erin poured the tea. They started to talk. The silence, which had been perched on the beam with the birds, drifted further out to dance around the edges of the room, waving its feather boa absentmindedly and kicking up vortices of dust. Erin and Lou laughed. The silence watched them sipping their tea, leaning closer together to read from pages of the notebook. They became less awkward and hesitant; they stopped having to think about the fact that they were talking to each other and became completely absorbed in the vision of Shellcreature that they were working out. The silence wasn't jealous, exactly, but it knew when it wasn't needed. It skulked closer to the walls, climbed on top of a filing cabinet and started to hop nimbly from one to another, more focused now on the balancing act than on Erin and Lou. It didn't even notice when they folded the chairs away quietly and went out into the night together. The silence circled the room like a cat trailing feathers, dropping glitter, gradually forgetting itself. Outside, Erin and Lou said goodbye. While Lou looked down to figure out the quickest way to walk home, Erin vanished, slipping behind a row of bins and a chain-link fence and a layer of darkness that slid over her goosebumped skin gladly. Lou looked up, disoriented, and then, after a pause, set off along the pavement. Her head was full of Shellcreature. Shellcreature had become so real in the space between her dreams and Erin's dreams, yet she did not know whether she believed Shellcreature was real , in the way that this lamp post in front of her casting dim yellow light was real. She looked closely at a lamp post. The pattern in the metal was like ice or lichen, layers of crystaline structures overlapping and merging into one another. Flecks of brighter metal reflected the yellow light. She realised that she had never looked closely at a lamp post before; never realised that it was beautiful. Lou thought about Shellcreature's rage. Except in dreams, she could not think of a time she had felt that kind of rage in her own chest. She could imagine what it would do, tearing things apart, and she could picture a great wave of fury breaking, but she could only imagine it as though she was watching from the outside. She wondered if her kind of destruction was the opposite kind, the kind that her annoying date described disintegrating things through attention. She wondered if she was disintegrating the lamp post. She wondered if that meant that she was loving the lamp post, too. S hellcreature turned and turned and turned in the shell and wanted Erin wanted to feel Erin's skin break under her nails again wanted to hold Erin turn her over in her hands like an artifact Shellcreature was restless for the first time and she didn't know what to do with her wanting she planted her palm on the rough shell wall and traced it along tearing at her own skin and the roughness soothed her and she breathed out until there was suddenly cold against her fingers She traced her hand back and yes there was cold and there was also a deeper ridge with jagged edges there was definitely a deeper break Shellcreature felt her heart stutter there was was there? yes, there was a crack in the shell E rin stopped walking to look at the grain of the wood that the sign on the fence was made from. Suddenly the whorls within the wood had crept up the line of her gaze to envelop her eyes, and then they had flowed out over her face to surround her entire head. The detail of the wood filled her peripheral vision and she felt a great scream circling like it was a shrieking fly hurtling around a light bulb that was her head and she felt terror. Something was wrong. She could feel Shellcreature reaching for her through the screaming air. She could feel Shellcreature trying to grab her through the seething wood grains so that she would have something to cling to. She could feel Shellcreature crying help, please, HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP ********