Drowning In Silt - The Raveller's Tale

Hello! Please enjoy the very first edition of Drowning In Silt - a series of monologued, spin-off mini-episodes, set in the world of the Silt Verses, written and performed for our amazing Patrons.

Warnings: Contains scenes of body horror, loneliness, social anxiety and isolation.

The Raveller's Tale

The lying doesn’t come naturally to you, at first.

But you learn.

You stop flinching when you lie. You control the muscles in your jaw, you learn to hold back the flick of your eyes to a dark corner of the room.

And eventually, you stop feeling so ashamed, you stop stammering over the words of the lie. They come to you smoothly, unbidden and unconsidered, finding the easiest path through the conversation for your own benefit.

It’s better than being pitied, at least.

So when you finally arrive at the apartment that you’ll be calling home - a silent, stifling sanctum in the old textile district of Glottage, tucked away in the highest corner of a dour mid-century warehouse conversion, with bricked-over windows and thick, muffling, confining walls - you find that it’s easier not to admit to the letting agent that you’ll be living alone here, a young person in the full flush of life, living alone, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms all to yourself and nobody to talk to.

So instead you tell him,

“Oh, my friend’s coming out to join me here in a couple of months. They’ll be taking the second room.”

The letting agent nods understandingly, and as with so many of your lies, it seems to open up something in him, a kind of shared assumption of connection between the two of you, a warmth and a friendliness that would otherwise have been absent.

He says that it’s a great space for two friends and room-mates, and asks if you like local history, and incredibly, it turns out that you do, you love local history, and he says that he and a friend join a walking tour twice a month, you should really come and check it out if you’re interested.

That’s so kind, you tell the letting agent, and for a moment, you’re afraid that he might ask another question about your room-mate - what do they do for work, what their name is - which would force the lie to expand and grow.

He seems to sense your discomfort and gets the wrong idea, because he instantly begins acknowledging the faint, tinny noise echoing through the apartment from the neon street-shrines on the other side of the road, which of course you get used to, and he starts laughingly pushing you to sign the contract as soon as you possibly can.

This is the magic of lying. No more stares or raised eyebrows or awkward silences. People welcome the lie, they welcome you making the conversation easier for them, and they move on.

Perhaps it isn’t even lying so much as considerately, sociably structuring reality around you. Creating a fabric that other people can connect with.

You use the second bedroom to store boxes in.

You keep the door of the second bathroom closed, so you don’t ever have to look into the wall-length mirror which is deep and staring and inescapable.

***

When your parents call, crowding about the receiver and passing it back and forth between themselves, you can hear their pity sweating through the receiver. The needy, horrid intensity of their worry for you.

Their worry about you, as if they’ve grown something in you that’s turned out wrong.

You tell them,

“Oh, it’s not so lonely now. My friend’s coming out to join me in a couple of months.”

Your parents positively boil over with relief, and once more it’s incredible how their chatter does most of the work of lying for you: yes, that’s wonderful, it’s so important that you won’t be alone out there, was it somebody you met online? A friend from work, or university? Well, of course we should all meet up for coffee when we come to see you in town.

You give a few details here and there when they ask, keeping the characteristics of your friend as ambivalent as you possibly can.

Perhaps you sound evasive, but again this may be to your advantage - without ever implying as much, it suggests that your friend might be more than a friend, some kind of special friend or as-yet undefined domestic relationship.

Your parents seem pleased. They’ve been so worried about you.

They say,

“Oh, well, we won’t pry. You’re allowed your little secrets.”

And you think to yourself that the lie works so well, it really fills out the corners of you as a person, it adds extra nuance and texture to the person you ought to be.

Someone who’s interesting enough to have secrets.

***

There are a sizeable number of healthy and sociable hobbies out there for anyone seeking to expand their personal horizons and make new friends.

You read about them in magazines as you squat on the dusty apartment floor, alone in the darkness.

Many of them are terrifying. Some seem impossible.

You’d be genuinely interested in the local walking tours, for example, but the chance of the letting agent, perhaps arm-in-arm with his own friend, encountering you there is too much to bear.

Smiling expectantly, asking you why you’re here alone, and not with someone else.

You actively consider the possibility of disguising yourself in order to safely attend the walking tour before giving up on the idea.

Knitting, upon reflection, seems like the most appealing.

You like the idea of the silence; the quiet clik-clak of long metal needles as something grows in your lap.

Eventually you order a video cassette from the Lace Church of the Silken Mask, and watch the flickering shape of the host upon the screen as she explains that knitting is one of the most creative and artful of all crafts, a great hobby for when you’re with friends, or even just when you’re alone and need a bit of me-time.

She finishes something soft and purple and intricate with a twist of her wrists and holds it up to the camera.

Easy, she says.

And it does look easy. A graceful, final creation. Something to be proud of.

You could present it to anyone - the letting agent, your parents, anyone - and they’d offer you sympathetic, appreciative words about its form and finish.

“Oh, a jumper! That’s so wonderful. What are you going to work on next?”

A perfect object, offered as a distraction from your own imperfect self.

You follow the looping motions with your own shaking fingers, whispering the ritual words under your own breath as she explains them.

Purl. Knit. Knit. Knit together. Slip. Knit.

***

Other people make things difficult. And it takes time for you to build up to the manifestation of your new hobby in any kind of reality.

When you duck out of the apartment block’s central courtyard, keeping your head low and your eyes averted so the doorman doesn’t try to speak at you, you’re already mouthing the words in their precise order. There can be no risk of embarrassment. You cannot allow yourself to be questioned.

When you get to the haberdasher’s, and as soon as you’re through the door you’re standing in front of a smug-looking young man in a waistcoat and interesting beard, all of your preparation fails you, and you blurt the order all out at once, rushed and clumsy and barely comprehensible:

“Medium-length knitting needles, two-pair of wool darning needles, and the, umm, mixed skein kit, measuring tape-”

He frowns, holds up his hands, and makes you repeat it, slowly this time, smirking at every word, saying them aloud after you, as if you’ve somehow mispronounced them.

“Medium-length knitting needles, yes. And a two-pair of wool darning needles…”

You can feel the horror at your own stupidity and oafishness swelling up from deep within you.

You imagine yourself snatching those medium-length knitting needles from his hands and thrusting them through his staring eyes, through his throat.

Dancing in the blood. Tossing the skeins up into the air, sowing them like seeds, letting them unravel everywhere, over the pooling gore and the twitching body.

As the haberdasher is handing over the plastic bag, he asks you,

“Making anything in particular?”

“Oh, it’s a gift,” you tell him, without thinking. “A gift for my friend, who’s coming into the city to stay with me.”

***

In the darkness, upon the floor before the open magazines and the flickering television, you begin your work. Nothing complicated.

A simple swatch, to start you off.

Purl. Knit. Knit together. Yarn over. Purl.

Wait. What was purling again? You try and leaf through the pages of the nearest magazine with your foot, while keeping everything in hand.

The skeins tumble. The needles fall, and you jab yourself trying to catch them. You curse, as a trickle of blood falls onto the carpet.

This should be coming easily, as gracefully as it always seems to for other people. You should be capable of doing this.

But you’re not.

What you’ve created, after several hours of effort, is a crude and ugly thing, a dimpled patch of fabric-skin, mottled and lumpy, like the object itself has become infected.

You bury it ashamedly in the bottom of your bin, piling trash up over the top of it. You don’t want to have to look at just how badly you’ve failed.

Perhaps it was the tools that were wrong, you think. You go out to a second haberdasher’s, just a short bus journey across town, to try and find more suitable materials.

Soon you have ugly little swatches everywhere. Under the bed. On the kitchen counter. Staring up at you from the bathroom floor. Some of them you don’t even recall creating, as if the work is multiplying, cancerously and mockingly, whenever you turn your back.

Knit. Knit. Knit. Knit together. Knit. Yarn over. Purl.

Perhaps the problem is the lack of ambition.

You’re failing to create something beautiful, something that truly justifies you, because you’re not trying in the first place. These little squares, these childish lumps of fabric, they don’t signify anything. Nobody will know what you mean by them.

You’re going to make a jumper.

A jumper, you tell the third haberdasher in the north of the city, which you’re making for your friend, your friend who’s been delayed with business, but who’s travelling into the city to join you here in the next few weeks, and you’re going to surprise them with a wonderful, heartfelt welcome gift.

Knit. Knit together. Yarn over. Knit. Yarn over. Purl.

Yes, you tell your parents, forcing the enthusiasm into your voice. A jumper for your friend - yes, Dad, I know I said they’d be here last month, but they’ve been delayed, it’s unavoidable, a business thing, no, they’re definitely still coming, there’s no need to worry.

No, you tell them. No, you’re not lonely.

The jumper is keeping you busy.

Your parents begin to call you more frequently, even though they have no news to share with you and even though you would much rather remain focused on the work that lies ahead with you. Their worry and pity begins to feel threatening, a kind of gaseous, toxic substance emanating from the little holes in the receiver, drifting into your apartment, permeating everything, making all that you’ve built seem small and shameful.

Soon you begin flinching when it rings.

They keep asking you about when your friend will be arriving, and their tone has a blade beneath it that cuts closer to the surface, never quite breaking through.

You seriously consider pulling out the phone cord.

But you have to maintain the battle-lines as you’ve drawn them. You have to keep answering, or they’ll come down and visit you and they’ll stand in your unfurnished apartment gazing over

In your unhappiest moments, standing under the heat and steam of the shower, you begin to wonder whether you should admit the truth

But no. It isn’t the truth, you think, as you towel yourself off.

You’re not someone like that. You don’t need to be pitied, there’s nothing wrong with you.

Normal people aren’t alone. Normal people don’t need to be alone.

Human connections flock to them like midges. Connections are built, and connections last.

If you don’t have these things, then what would it say about you?

So then it stands to reason that you must have friends, and you must have a friend who’s coming to live with you, here in the city.

No. There’s no other solution.

You need to prove them wrong.

Your friend has to come and join you out here. And soon.

Knit. Knit together. Yarn over. Purl. Knit. Knit.

“You get a lot of packages,” the doorman says, as he hands the latest shipment of yarn over to you.

“Yes,” you tell him, and the words come easily and smoothly. “I’m making something for my friend, who’s coming to live with me very soon now.”

Slowly, the jumper is coming together.

It doesn’t look like the jumper that appears at the end of the video. A neat, collared, ordinary thing, so pristine that it could almost be mass-produced.

Yours is very different.

One of the sleeves is coming out longer than the others. And, in fact, there are too many sleeves, and altogether too many neck holes.

You don’t try and correct these mistakes - because after all, who’s to say that they are mistakes?

Instead, you follow them to their natural conclusions, knitting out row after row, letting the sleeves grow and climb and shape themselves as they please.

You begin to wonder what kind of a friend it is that could fit into a jumper like this. A strange friend, an unusual friend, certainly, a friend with long and twisting limbs, too many limbs, perhaps a long and stretching neck to fit into that collar, larger than a person, taller than a person could ever be.

But then the jumper is for your friend, your friend who is coming to live with you, so it stands to reason that the jumper must fit your friend, so this must be what your friend looks like, this must be the shape of them that you’re tracing with all of this diligent hard work, and the greater the silhouette that grows, stitch by stitch, row by row, the more fitting and right it seems.

“It’ll be ready for you,” you say brightly, to the darkness of the apartment. “You don’t need to worry, dear friend. I’ll have it ready to welcome you just as soon as you arrive.”

The doorman asks sourly, as he hands over the latest package, “When did you say your friend was coming again?”

Very soon, you tell him. Any day now.

Knit. Knit. Knit together. Purl. Slip. Yarn over. Purl. Knit.

Phone rings.

You snatch it up with great energy and excitement. You ask,

“Is that you, dear friend? Do you have a date yet? I can come meet you at the station, if you-”

Your parents. Mewling something unimportant. It’s a distraction. Ignore it. Slam the phone down.

You begin to dream of its arrival, this friend of yours, the friend that’s so very much taller than a person, with more stretching limbs than a person.

That welcome knock on your door, the vast silhouette gazing down at you, the friend who will make sense of everything and fit into what you’ve created for them.

The skeins roll out across the apartment floor, wrapping themselves around the furniture legs, long trails that cut across one another and merge with each other, a chaotic tapestry, extending in every direction, converging upon the needles that dance in your hands.

Your fingers feel clumsy now, whenever you put your work briefly to one side to try and eat, or drink, or bathe. Objects slip through your hands. Glasses shatter.

But when you hold the needles, when you’re entirely focused on the work, you’re a different kind of animal.

You find yourself dropping off to sleep on the floor of the apartment, mid-work. Waking up to the dim light through the shutters, the empty needles still in your hands, still dancing, forever dancing.

The phone is still ringing, but it’s buried in yarn, invisible, unimportant. It belongs to a different world, an unfocused and distracting world, far from you, far from the work.

Knit. Knit. Knit together. Slip. Purl. Yarn over. Slip. Knit.

***

And then one morning, quite abruptly you stop knitting.

Because somehow, the work is finished.

The final sleeve is grafted. The ends are bound.

Your friend’s jumper is ready for them.

It’s perfect. It’s perfect, and it’s ready at last.

Reverently, you lay it out across the apartment floor, admiring it, delighting in it, imagining just how happy your friend will be when they finally get here.

But they’re not here.

You turn, expectantly, towards the door of your empty apartment, waiting for a knock, waiting for a ring, waiting for that shadow under the threshold.

Waiting for something, anything to happen.

The clock ticks on.

The minutes pass.

An hour passes.

The work is complete, the work is perfect, and your friend is still not here.

You open the door. Look this way. And that way.

There’s nobody there.

The corridor is perfectly empty.

“Hello?” you call. Your voice echoes, unhappily.

You open the door. Look this way. And that way.

There’s nobody there.

There is no vast and twisting shape standing in the threshold. Nothing for you, with many long and stretching limbs or otherwise. You’ve failed, somehow, to summon it into being.

The corridor is perfectly empty.

“Hello?” you call. Your voice echoes, unhappily.

***

You wander down the corridor, down the central staircase, and into the courtyard.

People are staring at you. Avoiding you. Giggling faintly at the sight or the smell of you.

They don’t matter.

Only one absence matters.

You can hear the doorman’s voice, faintly and thickly, as if from a great distance.

“Hello? Hello? Is there anything else I can help you with?”

You ignore him, staring upwards, waiting for a sign to come, any sign at all.

The sun rises high over the polluted violet sky. The smog-clouds part.

And then, quite suddenly, you understand.

You begin to laugh, frantically and deeply, a great roaring laughter up from the belly of you

Suddenly, it all makes sense, everything makes sense.

You can feel the savage points of the needles, the ones that come from within, pricking at you from deep inside your stomach, feeling at the walls of your trunk, driving you onwards.

The work isn’t complete. Not quite. Not yet.

You race back through the courtyard, dashing past the staring and giggling couple, up the staircase, pounding through the door, back into your apartment, where the jumper is waiting for you in its vast, many-limbed glory, laid out across the carpet.

You dive into it. Squirming deep into the comforting, thick, fresh-smelling darkness of it, burying your limbs, burying your face deep within it, until you can hear or see nothing outside of the work itself.

“It’s not for anyone else,” you whisper, rapturous.

And the new limbs come pressing out of you on all sides, the fingers with needles stretching out and up through flesh and skin until it snaps like yearning, tortured rubber.

Coming out bloodied and reaching, your body twisting and reshaping itself to perfectly fit what you have made-

Your neck pulsing and throbbing as the bones snap and the flesh stretches and extends forth, nuzzling up through the jumper’s collar, back up and out into the light, home at last, and the apartment door crashes down as you stride forth, your shoulders breaking through the rubble of the threshold-

Scuttling on skewering needle feet out down the long staircase, shattering the glass of the window, finally rearing up and out over the rooftops of the courtyard and into the sunlight of the city-

-ready to show a screaming and unready world just what you’ve grown.

It was never made for anyone else.

It was made for you.