Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (best story books to read .TXT) 📗

Can you still hear me, daughter?

I see a tree. A tree which once was a home to birds, beetles, bats – all taking the bit they need to survive, nothing more. The tree quivers with a multiverse of life, each species coming and going with hardly a twig snapped or leaf dropped.

But we don’t do this. We take all that the tree will ever have to offer and zip it in a bag or lock it in the bank. And soon, no spiders. No birds. All the glorious greens we’ve sacrificed for the assurance of an empty hand. And always we eat, we drink, we bloat.

And now the earth is bitter. But here, inside, wrapped in each other’s flesh, we can survive.

Nut didn’t come home, Art did. He wrote his great novel. It took him fourteen years to do it, fourteen years when I hardly saw him at all. And everything he wanted happened. It was published to great acclaim, nominated for prizes here and across the sea – though it didn’t win any. He thrived off the book tours, panels, and never ran out of words when it came to interviews. There was a point when people started to recognise him when we went out together. He’d be picking up a coffee and be prodded on the shoulder by a bashful fan, wanting his autograph. His face never wavered, and he always remained cool and crystalline. Afterwards, in private, he’d be grinning from ear to ear, his voice somehow louder and quieter than it had been before.

Bookshop windows were decorated just for the launch. Illustrators were commissioned to paint frescos of chalky bones and skulls entwined with ivy. Easton Grove issued a release to the press about his success, which hiked up the book pre-sales even further. I met its cover in every corner of life, from my lunchtime walks and the stacks of copies in our hallway, to folk in cafés – sipping on cappuccinos with their heads buried between the pages. Even shops that I didn’t know sold books set up special displays near their entrances.

On my way to work one day, I passed a cardboard box of them outside a café with no one around, and I – as casual as you like – bent down, picked one up, and slipped it into my handbag. When I reached my desk, I pulled out the book and laid it on my lap. I liked the weight of it, how the physicality of it between my hands reminded me that it was done. It was over.

I didn’t read it that day, and I’ve still never read what Art wrote. I used to wonder if I was in there somewhere or whether Nut appeared in some shape. Art’s daughter. His first daughter. But how can we really know how we exist within each other’s minds, really? Who were we to Art, when it all ended?

During that year of success he was away a lot, talking, talking, always talking, a cuckoo in a nest of wrens. But, as it turns out, no one records anything anymore, and words die off remarkably quickly. Art’s come-down was a slower process, and he talked about the book’s glory long after the cover was no longer gracing the bestseller shelves. Easton Grove had gone quiet, and no matter how many times he contacted them about doing another interview or seminar they kept putting him off. Eventually the consultants stopped replying entirely, and had the receptionists refer him to the date of our next joint appointment, when we’d discuss the future of “things like that”.

And in all that time of triumph, he never picked up a pen or wrote so much as a shopping list. It took a few further years of sitting around the house waiting for offers that wouldn’t come before he realised that it was over, and his great work had been buried beneath hundreds, or more likely thousands, of other great works published before and since.

I don’t think Art ever accepted that his magnum opus was now simply one lost voice in an overcrowded chorus. He reluctantly returned to his study, picked up the pen again and tried to repeat the cycle. I can’t blame him for a lack of conviction. He thought the world would be different after literary success, but it wasn’t. Even if he wrote another great work that too would fade, and he’d be faced with the same blank space again. He never said this out loud, but I know it’s what he thought. I told him so, again and again.

I tried to encourage him. I brought him food and hot tea, and rubbed his shoulders as he sat staring at the empty page. I needed him to keep writing, to help fund the programme, for both of us. Mum’s lump sum would run out one day, and though my salary paid for some of the fees, it was never quite enough. So I spoke soft words in his ear, told him that readers still loved him, that he needed to keep going. My eyes though, they would be looking out to the garden, the berry bush, the sprawling ivy. Art never wrote anything else, not even his penny dreadfuls or pulp fiction. He got by, editing other people’s books and occasionally teaching the storytelling craft at universities, colleges or conferences. He never went into why he couldn’t write anymore, but I always thought it was because he’d tied himself up so much in his great novel that he was continuing to run a marathon even though he’d crossed the finish line. Art was in a phase of unnatural life. He used to say that he’d lost his voice, and as the years went by, whenever he tried to write or speak he could hear hundreds of different mutterings, grumblings, and incomprehensible mewlings all at the same time, translating his thoughts into a chorus of different languages, none of which he quite understood. If his