Severe Jam Damage

I went shopping last night. How interesting sez you, but it helps if you know that for me, shopping is akin to someone shoving bamboo under my fingernails while having ‘The Talk’ with an SO and Mariah Carey singing the soundtrack. In other words it is not a favourite past time, but as evidenced by my wardrobe lately, needs must and all that.
Anyway, as I was trawling down Grafton St wishing death and destruction on anyone who looked at me crosseyed I noticed a great number of boyfriends and husbands hanging round looking bored, jaded and lost. Now I have problems shopping with friends. C-Bear and I can last about 20 minutes in each others’ company looking around shops and generally getting on each others wick before one or t’other of us surrenders and we sit in the pub for the rest of the day. So the idea of dragging some fella around with me to ‘hold my purse’ or ‘carry the bags’ would just drive me absolutely bonkers. And yet there are all these foolish women out there browsing for new knickers while their boyfriends stand uncomfortably among all the lace and scanties.

In a Michael Marshall Smith book I read a while ago (apols it’s on one of my bookshelves but I can’t remember exactly WHICH of his books it was) there was a plot point that took this phenomena into account. MMS answer to the issue was to have a large corporation that made, oh I don’t know, gewgaws or widgets or something. Each shop would have a table set up in the middle with the parts required to make the widgets and while the husband was hanging round waiting for his wife he could sit down and build a couple of these things. Like a man-creche. I thought it was a good idea.

In reality of course all that happens is that people get bored and an hour into the shopping the couples are most likely no longer speaking.

So ladies, for the sake of your relationships and my mental health (cos Tracy I really don’t want to be witness to you and Anto screaming at each other in the middle of Oasis) please, please, leave your boyfriends at home.

The chains were added after the first escape attempt. She had managed to rip out her fingernails. They’d grown long and unclean, sharp talons that could take a man’s eye out with a single scratch. Her teeth, rotted and falling from her head, were still strong enough to rip and tear the nails from their soft beds of flesh. With these tools she had forced the lock, the blood from her hands acting as a lubricant.

They found her a mile away on the riverbank raving and insensible. Her hands no more than claws, blood streaked across the white cotton of her winding sheet. There wasn’t much left of her by then. Shrunken and skeletal, a wraith not part of this world, not yet fit for the next.

At night they heard her moving, the whisper and rasp of fabric hardened with bodily fluids and embalming oils. Her voice had left her long ago, vocal chords rotted and snapped. What came from her throat was choked and shattering. Many fled, terrified. Countless mornings the post would be found abandoned.

The chains were heavy, forge strengthened, sometimes she would throw herself at the door and the chains would rattle and ring. To prevent this they doused the heavy steel in holy water. Bathing it with blessings. A scab of rust steadily grew, locking the links into place. Her movements grew weaker. In the early days she had paced the cell, shrieking obscenities and taunting her watchers. Now, she lay in the shadows, too weak to stand. The body that had once thrilled men was now bloated, oozing sores and pus. The embalmer had done an imperfect job. What should have remained pure was now tainted.

So the watchers waited, knowing that it was just a matter of time.

Inspired by Dracula@home by extranoise.

Also playing this week are the Gurrier, teaandcakes and Chris.