C. M. Rosens

October 21st – Flann O’Brien – ‘Two in One’ (1954) – Read it here. The challenge list is here.

I really loved this story – unsurprisingly. Himself enjoys Flann O’Brien and has been wanting me to read At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1967) for a while now.

I absolutely love the idea of being stuck in a dead man’s skin, but not personally. There’s just something about the body as costume I really connect with, and the horror of being trapped in a role that causes elision between the self and the persona. This reminded me of some thoughts I had while reading Body Gothic by Xavier Aldana Reyes (my full review is here).

Reyes says the aim of splatterpunk and of body gothic more generally is ‘to recreate and exploit a moment of “meat meeting mind, with the soul as screaming omniscient witness”.’ I think this is definitely something you can see happening in this short story, where there is a physical loss of identity from a violent, traumatic action. Being on the inside of one’s body looking out, when the skin people see on the outside does not match what is on the inside, is also both a really queer and a dysmorphic experience, so I think that is something that speaks to me, too.

I’ve already shared Sea-Skins (Day 5, in response to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, The Kraken). I have also explored something like this in my novel Thirteenth, (re-published by Canelo Horror, 2024) and flash fic piece ‘The Lonely Girl Dreams of the Dead’, published by Black Hare Press in their anthology ALONE.

Here’s another piece about body as costume, which is a continuation of my necromancer story from Day 11 (when the challenge story was An Itinerant House by Emma Frances Dawson).

Isabeau

For four centuries, I have lain in my tomb, a prisoner of my mouldering bones. I have withered in the silence, my body prepared as I instructed, waiting for my servants to follow the instructions in my painting. I had no way to reckon time, or to know what was happening in the world beyond my sleep, and my ever-cycling dreams.

I relive my life, over and over, all the years I had of it, from cradle to grave. I recall fantasies, and live those, lingering in scenes that last forever, and moments that went by in no time at all.

It will take skill to wake me, and more to clothe me.

It will take one who has experience with the soil, one who understands the ways of sap and seed, of root and leaf. It will take one who knows the growing, one who feels the striving plant as it breaks the surface of its burial ground, as the seed dies and bursts into life, as the roots spread and suck, as the plant seeks the light. It will take one who knows the layers of time are as tangible as the rocks under their feet, who can hear the sound of the centuries in the creaking of the forest, in the pulse of the heartwood.

First, a layer of soil on my bones from the year I died. My servants must awaken it, moisten it, enrich it. They must perform the first rite, a rite of such passion that it touches me in my sleep, and I begin at last to stir. The seed must crack.

Then come the next layers of soil, slowly, slowly, each enriched by my servants, each layer accompanied by the rites of the sowing, of the growing, of the pruning. I will absorb the memories of the soil, the messages of the earth, passed through webs of roots and fungi, footprints and scents, and countless insect signals. I will learn what happened in the world, the mundane things of small lives and small triumphs, and the things that broke their small world apart. I will learn of the wider world, the ebb and flow of the powers within it. I will listen to the tales the soil will tell. I will dream, closer and closer to the surface of waking, and with the final layer, I will wake.

I will wake with a body that is not mine, that is made of all the time and all the depth and all the powers of the world from the moment I died, to the moment I rise.

It is not a body I will know. When I look at myself, I will not see myself. I do not remember myself. I will see a skin moulded onto me, a body formed over the frame I have inhabited for four hundred years. It will be what binds my servants to me, flesh to flesh.

When someone cuts me, they will bleed.

When someone cuts them, I will feel it, but I contain so much within me that it will barely leave a scratch. Yet I will not forsake them; how can I, when they are adhered to my very bone? And I will keep them safe, and when they fall, I will raise them.

For now, I sleep on.