Hot on the heels of the previous post about the short stories contained in my collection Fluctuation in Disorder (and also available as individual e-books), here is yet another, with a very different style and content.
This is an experimental story, which I wanted to make thoroughly disrupted, intangible, and irreal. The events are presented without explanation, the reality-status remains undeterminable.
The balance between the recognisable, ordered world of consensus experience and the unexplained, uncanny one is in the process of shifting. The ordered world is unstable from the start, with the details of the everyday realm obscured by fog. That B is perhaps primed to respond to these intrusions of the uncanny is hinted at by her speculations about the Taurid meteor shower, that is ‘invisible to the shrouded city’ but which occupies her mind as she walks; or by her experience of disrupted time and space, when she seems to see the escaped parakeets miles after she had passed their tree.
The artefactual Boar is much more concrete than B. It is the Boar that appears to have autonomy—the Boar takes an action that B does not understand but which profoundly affects her. Many of her own actions are so routine as to be automatic (‘she had walked the memory into her muscles’); others are taken only with the permission of or at the insistence of external forces: entering the building she works in, for example, requires an electronic pass, while her reluctant engagement with office birthday celebrations are a social obligation.
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