Shedding
What does freedom really look like?
Welcome, dear reader, to The Moon At The End Of The Road!
Our very first story (eee!) is a quick, moody little number that has been described as “poetic”, “real strange”, and “good but I don’t know what I’m feeling right now so I’m going to lie down.”
Remember, you can always let me know what you think with the feedback link below, because I am a masochist. And if you do like this story, don’t forget to share it as far and wide as an early oughts chain email.
Thanks for reading,
Sephy
Shedding
Image credit: Antranias
It was early when he arrived at the lake, so early the grey goose-down mists were just dissipating beneath the rising sun. He turned the engine off but left the keys in the ignition, where they dangled, waiting for a new hand. The lake was big and clear and quiet. He watched it for a long breathless moment, until the water reflected the fat grapefruit above, and it was time to go.
He slid the kayak into the water and began to paddle.
Back on the shore, there were no other cars. The usual early risers — the joggers and dog-walkers and other unfortunate sorts who usually discover what the night left — were not yet out, not here. The lake swished at the side of the kayak gently, its brackish salt smell already in his mouth. The man pulled the boat through the water with grace, heading toward the sun with no plan but putting the land far behind him. He turned back to see the car, big enough for four people, spoiled inside by chip packets and juice spills but with a well-maintained engine, had become a shiny beetle in the sand. He paused, and felt the weight of the car (carried on his back with all the other burdens) had shrunk to the weight of an insect riding on his shoulder. Lightened, he pushed out further into the lake.
The car was not the first thing Oscarre shed. He had been peeling back the layers of his life like dead skin for months now, stripping the barnacles he had gathered over long years until he found his raw self hiding beneath them. There was so much weight, he thought as he glided through the water, accrued over a casual life.
The first things to go were the acquaintances. Not the friends, who were fewer than he thought, but the accumulated people he had come to nod to: at work, on the school run, down the pub. He didn't intentionally lose them. They were bound by habitual orbits only, and once there was no need for him to go to the school, the gravity of their closeness failed. When he did show up (an empty body repeating the motions, forgetting what they meant), they avoided him like a ghost in the parking lot. He began to notice the shroud of silence he had donned accidentally, the way it hushed a room whenever he entered. He stopped drinking in public; he abandoned the bar and the water cooler. If he sat in one place, he found the ambient noise would continue around him, and he could melt into the patter, soothing as rain.
He wasn't lonely without the acquaintances. In fact, he found a small brightness tugging his chest up after he stopped acknowledging them. It was a meditative revelation: pretending to know and like people he could barely name did nothing but pull his head down in that repeated passing nod. Oscarre felt the lightness of their absence, and began looking for other things to shed.
The next thing he let go of was formality. It struck him, sitting in his booth, absorbed into the chit-chat atmosphere of bored-people-yammer, that a tie didn't make him any faster at putting numbers into a spreadsheet. It felt tight around his neck, the arrow of it pointing back to his desk, chaining him. He took the tie off and felt much better. It took a week before his boss noticed.
"You have to wear a tie, Oscarre," his boss said. He was an older man with square shoulders, in a suit shaped exactly like a coffin.
"But I can feel it trying to strangle me," he protested. "I put it on in the morning, and by lunchtime it's cutting off my windpipe. It's like having a snake around my throat!" He looked the boss directly in the eye. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed."
But the boss just told him to wear a tie from now on, and kicked him out of the office.
Oscarre wore the tie around his forehead, where it didn't feel as dangerous. The long tongue lapped at the back of his head, which felt much nicer. As long as he stayed in his cubicle, no-one saw him, and so nobody cared.
Over time he ditched his stiff, starch-smelling shirts for old band tees he'd had for decades. They were soft from being washed and tumbled over and over, the tour dates fading like memories. He briefly wore jeans instead of slacks, but soon rejected the denim for terrycloth pyjamas. His novelty day-of-the-week socks went to the back of the drawer, replaced by the fluffiest Christmas-patterned ones he usually only wore in winter. Finally, his loafers, with their unforgiving polished leather, were phased out in favour of a decent pair of house slippers.
The tie stayed around his forehead, because that was a requirement.
The boss was just back from vacation when Oscarre was again summoned to his office.
"Take some time off," the big man said. "Go be with your — go be at home."
He smelled like coconut sun lotion.
A few weeks later, Oscarre shed the job, or the job shed him. Either way, another layer of Not Oscarre was peeled back. He tingled with the joy of only smiling when he was happy. Away from the desk, his back straightened; Oscarre felt taller without a job.
Wandering now through his empty house, he began to find there were no concrete rules. The sun would carousel through the sky as normal, but the time to wake and the time to sleep was jumbled. Oscarre experimented with the shades of the day, and found he liked best the early morning when the birds hopped for seed in the garden, lunchtime, and the small hours after two a.m., when the sky was inky and the few lit windows held secrets. The rest of the time was only useful for sleeping, so he dozed through the lesser parts of the day and woke sharp and excitable for the hours he enjoyed. So it was he shed the concept of time, of days and nights and months and calendars. His mind felt clearer, decluttered from the stricture of keeping hours.
Still, it didn't take long before the silliness of the house itself became apparent. Here was Oscarre, a man free of obligation, wearing his mis-matched comfortable clothes, bouncing between the walls like a free radical. He was eating cereal with a magic spoon and staring at one such wall, one inconvenience that stood in the way of his liberated movement, when it occurred to him that if it were truly his home, he should be able to cut through corners, squeeze into the cupboards, settle in the gaps between floorboards.
So he tried to find the gaps between the solid particles, knowing there is more emptiness and air than reality, but even though he knew the bricks that outlined the rooms were molecular Swiss cheese, he couldn't force himself to ghost through drywall. He reasoned it must be his brain, unable to really comprehend the vast gaps between the artificial boundaries that should let him merge and split from other materials at will. Fortunately a rubber mallet has no such qualms, and it blitzed through the ridiculous partitions just fine, until the house was made of Oscarre-sized mouse holes and the pipes were crying in every shattered room.
But he'd been watching the birds long enough now to know that houses were just more weight, tonnes of brick and mortar and wiry threads of capital that led to a central sticky cobweb where he remembered he had laid down long ago and agreed to be drained until the debt of living was paid. Realising these were just more gaps, more conceptual nonsense that confined him, Oscarre peeled himself out of the web and headed for the lake.
What was left? The car and the shore it was parked on had melted into the distance. Oscarre's arms were tired. They were strong now, from blasting chunks out of those stupid short-sighted walls, but he'd been paddling a long time. It felt good to just rest on the water. It felt right, to be tired from living in a physical way.
On a small island of wet rocks, seals basked in the midday sun. Oscarre imagined the feeling of gliding through the water, his skin buttery and warm. He pictured his nose wet and sensitive, his tail powerful. He listened to the seals cackle and nudge each other into the water. He looked at his plastic paddle, his fibreglass boat, and thought instead of otters opening clams with their favourite rocks.
Oscarre took off the old band shirt. He wiggled out of his pyjamas and his warm Christmas socks. He felt the salt breeze and the warm sun on his skin. Yes, that felt lighter.
Finally, Oscarre slipped free of the kayak. He had shed all there was that was not himself. The water embraced him as a lost son as he delved into the depths, the shades of blue becoming clearer as his eyes filmed, his swimming faster as his toes webbed. The last of his land thoughts bubbled away, as his lungs swelled to take the pressure of the deep. With nothing more to leave behind, Oscarre swam away from his name, back to the animal he had always been.