Episode 6: The Shape of a Story December 2, 2008

I’m experimenting with a third party program to make the pictures, so if they look a little weird and “thin”, that’s why. I’ll figure out how to do it properly soon enough, promise.

Rosemary

Yeah, I know, sulking in a graveyard, how cliché, but I liked it there. People don’t come there in the evenings and the residents didn’t bother me. I like peace and quiet when I need to think. Although to tell you the truth, I wasn’t thinking very much. I was feeling, very deeply. I was about to cry.

I was wishing they’d stayed long enough to explain, to tell us what exactly happened, but I knew they’d be back, somehow. If it’s not them, then who is after us? Because someone or something is, there’s no denying that.

I don’t know how I knew they’d be back. Maybe the four of them are somehow connected to the four of us? Maybe I should have looked it up on the net, but to tell you the truth I was sick of magic and elements and I didn’t wish they were real any more. I know they’re real now and I don’t like it.

I thought it would be better than this, you know? I thought there would be… things to get on with once you found out it’s all real. Like in books and movies, people find out they can do magic all the time and straight away there’s someone to tell them what to do and how to do it and by the end of the story they’re heroes, but it wasn’t like that at all.

We weren’t heroes. And we didn’t know what to do. Just stupid kids too dumb to know that you shouldn’t mess with things you don’t understand. Like silly little puppies that pee on the rug because they don’t know any better and nobody told them not to.

We all received visits that night, but none of them felt like the beginning of our great adventure. In stories you know when big things are about to happen. But they weren’t there to take us away towards some great adventure.

I like things to be story shaped, you know? But things that happen in life aren’t shaped like stories at all. They’re a mess. Things happen for no reason and then people like us react badly and in the end nothing really changes, no doors close and there’s no shape, no new chapter.

If life were shaped like a story, we’d all get our explanations that night, someone would come and tell us what to do and how to go about it, and in the end we’d all learn something about ourselves and band together to defeat… something that’s bothering us, I suppose.

Life isn’t like that. Things just happen. You do something, and someone else does something and sometimes you understand why and sometimes not, and you deal with it. Or not. And you never understand all of it, ever, and the story sort of unravels and you have to start a new one before the old one is finished.

China Doll never cared, but I do think she knows about stories and how life has the wrong shape. She makes her own stories. Her life isn’t story shaped either, but she pretends it is and that helps. It’s like that square peg, round hole sort of thing, but she keeps banging away at it regardless until she gets it done anyway.

And Kimmy, she just gets into horrible fights to give her life a better shape. You’d think that would make it even more of a mess, but she likes it when life is… prickly, with lots of angles and complicated pointy bits.

That’s not story-shaped either. But it’s complicated and hard and I guess that sort of gives it a shape of its own, even if she gets snagged on the pointy parts every now and again.

And Kendra, she doesn’t know anything about the shape of things. She just gets on with it and doesn’t bother with stories and angles and shapes, and I guess that’s a good thing because she’s the one who came up with a plan.

We were all military kids, did you know? Our dads and China Doll’s mom worked in some desert compound not that far from the town and we weren’t supposed to know, but they dealt with weird things. I think they were working on some project that fell through some time ago, but last we heard the place was still there.

That almost looks like the shape of a new story, doesn’t it? It’s like I said, you never understand all of it and everything goes so fast, you’re forced to get on with the next chapter before you properly understand the old one.

Me, I prefer my life to be story shaped, properly, like in the books and movies, but I guess it can’t be done. Because magic is dangerous and big, not fun, and nobody’s there to take me by the hand and tell me what to do and how to go about it, and maybe in a couple of years there’ll be new friends and new places and all this will be gone before the story is over.

It’s not important. Really, I’d be surprised if you even knew what I was going on about. But this story is stupid, with too many pointy bits and angles and soft squishy spots. But I’m along for the ride now and I guess I’d better make the most of it.

Mom always said that life never works out the way you want or intend, and I always thought that if you worked and dreamed hard enough, you could make it happen anyway. But you have to know what you want first, and I don’t know that.

If you’re going to write a story and give it shape, you have to know how it’s going to end. And I didn’t. And I think the most valuable thing in this world isn’t love or compassion or laughing babies or any of that shit. It’s clarity. Direction. Absolute knowledge of where you’re going and how to get there. But it’s not like that, the shape is all wrong, and it’s about time I realised that properly.

So we left for this military base my father had told me about. He had worked there for a bit, low level stuff, so all he knew was that it used to deal with weird things like this, it was abandoned now and it was called Area 52.

We got there easy. There were some obstacles along the way, but if you’ve got magical little friends, fences and alarms aren’t going to stop you, are they?

But I’ll tell you what can stop even the most magical thing in the world: a decent surprise.

See what I mean? We came for help. We wanted someone to tell us what to do and how to go about it and get us back into the story, but that didn’t happen.

Talk about things being story shaped. I’ve been spouting a lot of bullshit here, but this? This was proper story stuff, I imagine. Shame I wasn’t concious to see it happen. And that’s where it ends, I guess.

“Nothing happened after that?”

You tell me, man. I haven’t got a clue. I’ve told you everything I know and so did the others. You tell me. It’s your story now.