Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

‘Can I see it again? The statue?’

‘No, dear.’

‘You put it away?’

‘I threw it away,’ said my mother, coldly. Then, as if to stop me from rummaging in the rubbish, ‘The bin-men already came this morning.’

We said nothing, then.

She sipped her tea.

‘You’ll never guess who I met last week. Your old schoolteacher. Mrs Brooks? We met in Safeways. She and I went off to have coffee in the Bookshop because I was hoping to talk to her about joining the town carnival committee. But it was closed. We had to go to the Olde Tea Shoppe instead. It was quite an adventure.’

Orange

(Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire.)

EYES ONLY.

Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.

Seventeen on June the ninth.

The last five years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).

I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us any more. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.

An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin™, and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mum used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Coloured Bubbles (not actually ™ yet).

Two. My sister, Nerys, who was just fifteen, and my brother, Pryderi, twelve.

Several times a day.

No.

Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.

She’s been buying colours and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly coloured Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.

It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins™ money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.

I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned thirteen she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan ;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.

Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human-coloured, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.

Tangerine Girl. The Oompa-Loompa. Carrot-top. Go-Mango. Orangina.

Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or maths because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little QuickTime films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.

German measles, mumps, and I think Pryderi had chicken-pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the grandparents.

In a small pot. It looked a bit like a jam jar, I suppose.

I don’t think so. Nothing that looked like a warning label anyway. But there was a return address. It came from abroad, and the return address was in some kind of foreign lettering.

You have to understand that Mum had been buying colours and dyes from all over the world for five years. The thing with the Day-Glo bubbles is not that someone can blow glowing coloured bubbles, it’s that they don’t pop and leave splashes of dye all over everything. Mum says that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. So, no.

There was some kind of shouting match between Nerys and Mum to begin with, because Mum had come back from the shops and not bought anything from Nerys’s shopping list except the shampoo. Mum said she couldn’t find the tanning cream at the supermarket but I think she just forgot. So Nerys stormed off and slammed the door and went into her bedroom and played something that was probably Britney Spears really loudly. I was out the back, feeding the three cats, the chinchilla, and a guinea pig named Roland who looks like a hairy cushion, and I missed it all.

On the kitchen table.

When I found the empty jam jar in the back garden the next morning. It was underneath Nerys’s window. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

Honestly, I couldn’t be bothered. I figured it would just be more yelling, you know? And Mum would work it out soon enough.

Yes, it was stupid. But it wasn’t uniquely stupid, if you see what I mean. Which is to say, it was par-for-the-course-for-Nerys stupid.

That she was glowing.

A sort of pulsating orange.

When she started telling us that she was going to be worshipped like a god, as she was in the dawn times.

Pryderi said she was floating about an inch above the ground. But I didn’t actually see this. I thought he was just playing along with her newfound weirdness.

She didn’t answer to ‘Nerys’ any more. She described herself mostly as either My Immanence, or the Vehicle. (‘It is time to feed the Vehicle.’)

Dark chocolate. Which was weird because in the old days I was the only one in the house who even sort of liked it. But Pryderi had to go out and buy her bars and bars of it.

No. Mum and me just thought it was more Nerys. Just a bit more imaginatively weirdo Nerys than usual.

That night, when it started to get dark. You could see the orange pulsing under the door. Like a glowworm or something. Or a light show. The weirdest thing was that I could still see it with my eyes closed.

The next morning. All of us.

It was pretty obvious by this point. She didn’t really even look like Nerys any longer. She looked sort of smudged . Like an afterimage. I thought about it, and it’s . . . Okay. Suppose you were staring at something really bright, that was a blue colour. Then you closed your eyes, and you’d see this glowing yellowy-orange afterimage in your eyes? That was what she looked like.

They didn’t work either.

She let Pryderi leave to get her more chocolate. Mum and I weren’t allowed to leave the house any more.

Mostly I just sat in the back garden and read a book. There wasn’t very much else I really could do. I started wearing dark glasses, so did Mum, because the orange light hurt our eyes. Other than that, nothing.

Only when we tried to leave or call anybody. There was food in the house, though. And Stuffed Muffins™ in the freezer.

‘If you’d just stopped her wearing that stupid tanning cream a year ago we wouldn’t be in this mess!’ But it was unfair, and I apologised afterwards.

When Pryderi came back with the dark chocolate bars. He said he’d gone up to a traffic warden and told him that his sister had turned into a giant orange glow and was controlling our minds. He said the man was extremely rude to him.