Jabberwocky: Life-Like

The peace, the inner sanctuary is gone. The home is the castle surrounded by a fortress that nothing can penetrate. Nothing... The Jabberwocky is nothing. It seeps into the children’s dreams and coats the breakfast cereals in colourful gibberish. Food, forget thought. A nightmare rainbow of plastic packaging. Brightly coloured targets painted on the backs of generations. In the home it is most effective. In the home it can breed without the threat of being preyed upon by awareness, brand loyalty- the annulment of its predators, a consumerist natural selection. This Jabberwocky, this thing is evolving, evolving beyond what the biological can survive. It is astral, orbiting our subconscious, it climbs into bed with us and strokes our heads as we submit to its will. Its will is stronger than its purpose for its purpose will be reached in the end; this it knows and only this. For now, will must exceed any resistance.
Its home, the inner sanctuary, its home is our home. It will carve itself a groove in the couch and curl up next to you during prime time. It replicates and spreads like a disease: no purpose only destruction. A feeble existence with a powerful will. The home, suburbia. A little heaven where people know you but don’t intrude. The little differences, a bush of gardenias or a frangipani tree, a statue of a naked lady or a garden gnome, a birdbath or a dog kennel. The little sames, the garages and garage covers bands, the 10 square meters of grass in the back yard, the three or four bedrooms that sleep little heads on little brand name pillow covers, the malls the common business exchange point and employer and babysitter of its children. A normal suburb, a normal home...
Melanie was a mother and a wife. She had no further aspirations for fame and fortune; such big dreams corrupted the soul. She was content. Her son was two. A tiresome age for a young mother. Melanie was only twenty-one. She had her whole life ahead of her, which is why she chose to become a mother at such an early age. “Why wait till I’m old? See, by then Jason will be a teenager and then I will party.” She said in an attempt to convince her single best friend or perhaps herself. Melanie’s husband was an auto-technician, which is really just a dressed up title for a mechanic. He was older than Melanie, which may be the reason why they chose to have a child while Melanie was only nineteen instead of her attending university, but then she had never aspired to become a University graduate, or even a high school graduate, in fact Melanie hadn’t even finished the tenth grade. She had left school in pursuit of employment. This was where Melanie had met her husband Mick for the first time: in a toy factory.
Mick and Melanie’s relationship was one of those types that relied upon routine. They would greet every day with a kiss and then arise to wake up little Jason. Melanie would make breakfast and entertain Jason while Mick got ready for work. Then it was Jason’s turn to get ready for the day. Usually Melanie would dress the child but every couple of days, Mick would do this for the sake of balancing out the load. This was then followed with half an hour of cartoons for Jason and coffee for the couple. They never really ate breakfast, maybe a piece of toast here or a bowl of cereal there but usually they were too busy arranging their day around Mick’s schedule and Jason’s kindergarten. Today was not any different, the routine was running like a buttered clock: the way it always ran.
Little Jason was bashing a toy car into the TV cabinet. He was doing this because he was watching Sesame Street and if he were bashing the car into the wall then he would miss the full impact of the brightly coloured puppets and the strange voices. “B...B is for Book...” A cartoon interlude said as Jason broomed and crashed.
“What time do you have to do that?”
“About 3:30. Should be finished by about 4.” Mick replied.
“So should I pick Jason up then?”
“No don’t worry I’ll do that you can take him in today. Did you put his jumper in his bag?”
“Yeah. Janet said that he shouldn’t be cold because the heating system is fixed.”
“Finally! They took their bloody time.” The couple sipped their luke-warm coffee. That’s how they liked it: plenty of milk so it didn’t burn their mouths. That’s how they liked their lives too. Insipid, white, the bitterness masked by sweet ignorance. Ignorance is not such a bad thing. At least it’s not stupidity. One can watch the news, ignorant of the world but still know something about it. The world was ending, Nostradamus told them so. So, instead of struggling against it, they went with the apocalyptic tide. The end was inevitable even the Bible told them this...
The government paid for Jason to attend a kindergarten that was only four blocks from the estate that his family lived in. He attended in the afternoons for five hours every weekday. This was Melanie’s break. The mornings were spent with his mum.
These mornings were hard for Melanie to deal with. She had a break down when Jason was two. Not a big break down, a semi-breakdown. A momentary lapse of emotional control. This is why there were bottles of pills in their medicine cabinet. Valium and Prozac; a generic cure for a generic family. The pills hadn’t been touched for months but Melanie felt reassured that they were there, just in case.
Mick drained his coffee. This meant time for work. Melanie got up to take his cup to the sink. “I’m going Ok?” Mick said as he pushed himself off the couch. “Bye Jason.” He said in a higher tone.
“Bye daddy.” Jason slurred in his toddler talk.
“Bye darls. You gonna pick up some dinner tonight?”
“Yeah I’ll bring home some hamburgers ok?”
Melanie looked at Jason. “Hamburgers daddy? That’s our favorite!” She gasped. Jason looked at his mum and smiled. He didn’t want to play this word recognition game, even if it was about hamburgers. He was too interested in sucking on the toy car. Melanie picked up the child. “Ok daddy’s going to work now. Give daddy a kiss goodbye.” Jason relented and kissed his father.
“Bye bye Jason.” Mick said as his car pulled into the internal street of the security-fenced estate.
The houses in this estate were all the same. They were not built by independent development companies or designed by individual architects. A conglomerate. A mould for many more like it existed on the desks of a thousand company employees. It was efficient and economical. It was like a mini suburb; a suburb within a suburb. A maze of streetlights, lawns and flowerbeds. Not a nuance in sight. The people who lived in these half-houses liked life that way. That was the corporation’s view. Melanie liked it that way. It was safe despite the rising crime rate. It was safe.
Melanie and Jason wandered back into the lounge room. Nice white walls. Nice cream carpet, nice peanut butter stains on the cream carpet. Nice furniture, nice Mattisse prints on the walls. Nice. The TV was nice too. It watched Jason for Melanie as she made herself another coffee. Insipid, sweet, tan coloured coffee, the kind you get in a tin, the same average flavor every time. Even if it was only average, Melanie didn’t drink the coffee for its flavor. The caffeine was what she was after. A little kick in the side to get the ball rolling.
Jason broomed merrily to the sounds of the alphabet sung like a calypso. Melanie watched over him lovingly from on top of the kitchen bench as the caffeine kicked in. She had several things to do that day. The first would come after the coffee. As she neared the end of the cup she slid off the bench and shuffled the three steps to the sink. She gulped the last sip and she was into her laundry.
The machine filled with water. Melanie grabbed the clothesbasket and piled the washing into the machine. She grabbed a brightly coloured box of powdered detergent. “One scoop for a fresh lemon scented clean.” It boasted in bold shadowed promises. Melanie scooped the powder and sprinkled it over the load. The machine clunked into the rinse cycle.
The lounge again as Melanie shuffled into the hall for the vacuum cleaner. Vacuuming was the chore she looked forward to the least. She didn’t like to anticipate it but she enjoyed it once she got started. It hummed its assertive call and Melanie turned on some music to drown the noise out. Alternative pop, you know the type of music I’m talking about, Offspring more specifically.
Melanie sang along with the music. It suited her trained voice, rebellious but not too extreme, loud but not distorted, a simple pop song. Melanie had been trained in the catholic school choir. Her voice had been taught by a shriveled hippie. The kind of teacher who is leftist but never commits to any cause or morals. She had taught the girls never to sing out of key, never to raise one’s voice beyond a certain volume and never to attempt anything so rusty as a blues. Melanie’s voice was good but it had no individuality, it was not human.
The vacuum hummed in key with the song. It had a voice too but it was even less human. Jason’s brooming had now subsided and now he was just screaming in short bursts, in an attempt to mimic his mother. The TV was still on and the washing machine was still clunking. Melanie pushed the vacuum into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. She didn’t anticipate making it until later on in the afternoon, after her nap. She slid the mouth of the vacuum under the bed. A once over was good enough, I mean it wasn’t like anyone had asthma or anything.
The CD clicked off and the blare of the TV could be heard from Jason’s room. A commercial for a well-known furniture shop. Melanie shouldered the hose under Jason’s bed and around his closet. The commercials ceased. Jason must have the remote “Shit.” She said. Melanie turned the vacuum off and walked into the lounge. Jason didn’t have the remote. The TV was blank. It was still on but it was blank. “Don’t worry it’s probably just a break in transmission. I’m sure the cartoons will be back soon.” She said to her son.
“Mumny wfook.” Jason said in his best English. He referred to the blank screen. “Yes mummy knows. The cartoons will be back soon.” The washing machine clunked off. Two heartbeats later the sound of another commercial assaulted the room. Melanie packed up the vacuum and detached the fixtures. She lugged it into the hall closet where it would hibernate for another week and then tended to her washing.
The detergent smell filled the laundry and stuck to Melanie as the sheets and clothes that she threw into the basket slapped against her, dampening her T-shirt. She heaved the laundry basket outside to continue her work.
The back yards of her estate were considerably smaller than those of an actual house. A house has about 10- 20 meters of lawn or trees, these half-houses only had about 6 meters of lawn. Three meters long, along the length of the house and two meters wide along a wooden fence that divided the individual lawns, a clothesline in each. A rectangular clothesline ran along the side of the house. It could be folded away for more space but, because it was off the lawn, tucked away on the side of the house instead of out the back, it didn’t move from its unfolded position. There was always laundry on it anyway. Melanie would do a load every second day because she didn’t have many clothes, especially for summer.
Melanie looked at the sky. There were a couple of clouds shaped like mud flats but no rain around. She dropped the laundry basket at her feet and flapped the first sheet out from it. A breeze grasped it gently and took an end while Melanie pegged it to the line. She took out a T-shirt. A small blue and red striped shirt that she thought was the shirt that best suited Jason. She pinned it to the line. Another of Jason’s shirts, a pair of her husband’s shorts. She picked up a skirt. It was one of her favorites, purple with little black and silver flowers embossed in velvet on a layer of chiffon over stretch polyester. The flowers had begun to wear off and there was a small ladder at the seam. She pegged it and moved on. A pair of overalls, a pair of smaller shorts, some y-fronts, some bikini cut satin, an old comfortable sports bra, another sheet. The breeze had picked up by the time she had finished hanging out the laundry. The sheets made courtly graceful writhing leaps, sweeping emperor gestures that dismissed the absurdity of being hung out on the line with these mere peasants of garments. The sheets slapped Melanie in the face, as she was the one who arranged this abhorrence. The washing was done, now she could watch TV and relax.
Maybe she would play solitaire, maybe later, now TV. TV and potato chips. Jason was into his toys. He threw the ones that didn’t please him out onto the floor and took a box of blocks out and carried them over to the TV. His mum watched on as he clapped the cubes into each other. Melanie collapsed into the couch with her bowl of chips and stared into the box.
A large man dressed in a suit was discussing the complexities of cleaning products. “Mummy look.” Jason said again referring to the TV. Melanie ignored him, nodding with a smile in the general direction of the TV. “Mummy...” He said louder, “Mummy, look.” His voice was different. Jason’s English hadn’t improved but he sounded hoarse. Melanie looked to the child who was still attempting to place several blocks in and on top of one another. Melanie sighed. If he had been ill it would mean something exciting had happened to her, something she could tell her single best friend about. But alas she was not so fortunate. Melanie didn’t think her best friend would mind so much it’s just that whenever they spoke Melanie would run out of things to say and felt obliged to make something up. She didn’t like lying to her best friend, but then it just proved that if she was willing to listen to the lies and still be her friend then she would listen to the truth and still be her friend. Melanie didn’t realise how insecure she really was. She had an inkling from her visit to the counselor but never really bought into it. All she needed to know was that the pills she was given worked.
Melanie absorbed the radiation of the TV’s glowing pixels. A cooking show was about to start and Melanie had her notebook ready in case there was a nice recipe for apricot chicken or beef casserole.
It was 10:30 am: time for Jason’s nap. She bundled up the boy and swung him playfully in her arms. Jason squealed happily as his legs flung out from under him of their own volition. Melanie rushed up the hallway and plonked Jason into his little bed. On his quilt cover was a picture of Bob the builder. Jason watched as his mummy undid his trousers and changed his big boy undies. She squeezed the talcum powder into her hand blowing some of it in Jason’s direction. Jason giggled and scrunched up his nose. Melanie pulled up his pants and gave him a little tap on his bottom to let him know that she was finished. “Ok Jason go sleepy now?” She bent over and kissed his forehead. “Nigh, nigh sweet heart. Mummy wuves you.” Melanie signed to him.
“Mum-mum look.” Jason said pointing at the closet. Melanie looked curiously at the closet door. It was shut. There were no posters on the door. “What did you do in the closet Jason? You haven’t pulled down all your nappies again have you?” Melanie slid the door open. Everything was in place. Everything except a teddy bear that usually stayed on Jason’s bed all day and night. “Did daddy put Rudolph in here?” Melanie picked up the bear and placed it on the boy’s pillow. “Naughty daddy.” Jason throttled the bear between developing grubby stubby fingers. “Daddy smacks?” Jason inquired.
“Yes Daddy is going to get big smacks when he comes home. Kiss Rudolph better.” The boy slobbered on the polyester fur. The bear poked out of Jason’s elbow. A noise came from it. Melanie heard it. Jason seemed blissfully unaware of it. He pulled the cover up to his neck and blew his mum a kiss. The bear let out a sickening groan, the kind of noise that gives you an after taste like seasickness. Melanie frowned. It was just loud enough for her to hear it and regret her second coffee but not so loud that she could definitely decipher it. She picked up the bear. It eyed her with black plastic beaded eyes. It wasn’t the kind of toy that was made with a recorded voice so that when you squeezed it, it said: “I love you.” Jason was too young to have those toys anyway. It was a simple old-fashioned plush toy, stuffed with foam. She turned it over in her hands and looked at its back. Nothing there... “Must have been next door.” She said aloud. She turned it over again and looked to Jason. He had drifted off into a semi-nap. His eyes were shutting and opening slowly. Melanie bent over the child to place the bear back in its rightful place. “Dead skies.” the bear said in a mechanical voice like a tracheotomy patient’s electronic voice box. Melanie started. She dropped the bear on the child’s bed. Jason laughed a boisterous giggle. He cuddled the bear and looked at his mum as he laughed. It came from the bear but its mouth remained a series of stitches. Melanie looked at Jason. She couldn’t comprehend this occurrence. She walked towards the door and looked back as she closed it. Jason’s eyes were closed in the gentle precursor of dreams. She shut the door and walked swiftly up the hall into the lounge.
Melanie sat down carefully. She was unsure as to what had just happened. The TV was no longer her friend. She turned it down. Melanie had never had hallucinations before. She wondered if it had anything to do with her breakdown. She wandered into her bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Some Valium would do the trick. She took one and shoved the pills back into the vanity.
Melanie wandered out of the ensuite and into the bedroom that adjoined it. She threw herself onto the bed. “Sleep...I just need some sleep. I’m tired that’s all.” She pulled the cover over her and reached over and set the alarm. She drifted off into the dark of Valium.
An hour later she awoke to the buzzing beeps of the old clock radio. Jason was screaming. Their house was small but the main bedroom was separated from the rest of the bedrooms by the lounge. This should have been enough to drown out most noises but the walls were as thin as a supermodel’s track mark dappled arm.
She pulled herself up and out of bed and, blinking off the nap, staggered out into the lounge and down the hall to Jason’s room. Jason’s screams reverberated through Melanie’s newly conscious mind. Melanie didn’t mind, the nap had refreshed her.
She reached the door and fiddled with the childproof lock. The crying ceased as the door opened. Melanie looked at Jason. He was sleeping soundly with his fingers curled in a loose fist that rested on the pillow next to his face. The presence of the screams lingered in the air with the smell of talcum powder. It mystified Melanie. This was too much to deal with for Melanie after her nap. She wandered out of the room closing the door lightly as she went.
The kitchen smelt of instant coffee. Melanie lifted her legs, one by one over the child safety-gate. She put the jug on and prepared the coffee. Melanie stared blankly into the suburban oblivion stretching into a horizon of terracotta roof tiles. The bubbling of the jug sent her into a trance, she blanked out the noise of the TV and the passing car. The jug clicked and broke her trance. Melanie poured the boiling water over the coffee grounds and sugar. Jason was calling her. She added milk and wandered back to his room. Sure enough he was awake. Melanie picked him up and put him outside the door. She followed him back down the hall. Jason’s nappy swung behind him as his little legs ran into the lounge. There wasn’t anything exciting there waiting for him but since Xmas he had been under the impression that when one woke up one was sometimes rewarded with toys or great amounts of food to slop over the table. Melanie grasped her coffee from the kitchen. She sipped it as she watched Jason. He had his back to her and was watching a bird on a tree in the neighbor’s yard. “Birs” He said pointing at the sparrow. Melanie strolled over and sat in an armchair next to where the boy was sitting. He looked up at her but it wasn’t his face that gazed so maliciously; so intent on germinating the seeds of a thousand dreamless nights with its black, crude semen. The face that looked upon Melanie was Jason’s but it was different. It was the jaded, determined, half living, half automatic, insentient face of a counterfeit, a machine: the Jabberwocky. The innocence of the 3 year old had drained out of his eyes leaving only blood black holes. His cheeks were lifeless, hollowed and so pale. So pale they were transparent and the veins gave his skin a bruise blue hue. His lips were dry like age ripened headstones, the skin flaked and peeled. “Mummy wook.” Jason said. Melanie didn’t look. “Yes, birds. How many birds can you see?” The TV subdued Melanie while she ignored the child. “Dead skies,” Came an inhumane voice from the boy. Melanie jumped. Her coffee cup thumped onto the soft carpet and the brown liquid poured out of it, soaking into the underlay and squelching in-between Melanie’s toes. “What do you want?” The thing laughed. A giggle so resemblant of Jason’s but only resemblant. It was intense, deep, hollow with the void of emotion and humanity. “I wrote a poem for you Mummy.” It giggled again. “You wanna hear it?” Melanie stood stricken with fear and doubt. She froze as the monster mimicked the mannerisms of her son. It smiled.
“Dead skies in the winter,
Rotten skies in the fall,
decayed skies spring and summer,
soon there’ll be no skies at all.”
It giggled again. “Do you like it?” Melanie took a backward step towards the television, which suddenly shuddered and hacked the room with distortion. Melanie jumped. She glanced at the analogue snow and once again fixed her eyes on the monster. Its stubby arms toppled aside some blocks and pushed its body up clumsily. “Don’t you like my poem mummy? I wrote it all by myself.”
“J...Jason?” Jason would you please...” Melanie dropped onto her knees. The Jabberwocky was manifesting.
The thing grew. It dispersed corporate-black tentacles out of its torso. Its skin shone like PVC, slippery with deceit and propaganda. Its eyes black; black with the blood of the billions of souls it had consumed; a billion dead aborted souls: fetal waste sparkling off the recesses of its retinas. A mouth like an abattoir, consuming, crushing; its breath in wheezes: the screams of the unwilling victims of a user-friendly holocaust. The thing rose to the ceiling in a writhe of liberty, stretching its visible spine out, the mounds moving under onyx rubber skin.
“Noooooo!” Melanie screamed. She stood in awe of her absent son, frozen, fixed on this monster, the Jabberwocky. “What do you want mummy?” It said mimicking Jason’s voice. The mimic chilled Melanie’s spine. In awe, in fear, she ran. She jumped over the child safety gate clipping it with her shin and sending it skidding over the kitchen tiles as she went.
She dashed outside. Out through the lemon scented laundry. Out through the generic screen door, out into the 6 square meter back yard. Into the alley, into the drying laundry. The sheets caught her. Melanie struggled against them like a bird in a net, tangling herself in the brilliant white cotton trap. Her mind scrambled. She didn’t know where she was going after she had liberated herself from the confines of her bed sheets. She didn’t know what had happened to Jason. She didn’t know what the thing in her lounge room was. In a matter of minutes her world had crashed down around her. Around her and morning television. Melanie threw the sheet off her. She stood there for a second, her mind scrabbling over the Jabberwocky. She turned and crept towards a window.
The lounge window showed the combined lounge and dining in panorama. There was nothing there. The back of the TV cabinet, the lounge suite, the dining table, dining chairs, kitchen bench, Jason’s blocks, china cabinet, phone and key rack. No sight or sign of Jason or the monster.
Melanie stared into the lounge whilst contemplating her next move. She could go back but what awaited her? Where was Jason? She could go through the lattice gate. ‘What about Jason?’ She could go through the screen window and straight to the phone. What if the monster was waiting? Melanie’s maternal instinct tugged at her conscience. Something deep inside her told her that he was alive but she felt a disturbing numbness. It meant that he was alive but unsafe. She desperately wanted to run but where and to whom? Who would actually believe this? Even if she ran to tell someone they would probably lock her away and take Jason from her. This thing... the Jabberwocky was to blame. Fear trembled within her stomach as anger, uncontrollable anger, fizzed and bubbled. Fear was the catalyst and when mixed with anger this produced a shocking new sensation. Something entirely foreign to Melanie’s system: rage. Shock like the immediate effects of an overdose. Shock and rage unharnessed. They galloped around her stomach and reared at her neck and shoulders, stomping on nerves and tripping over arteries and blood vessels. Melanie determined herself. She gave the lounge a fierce look. “That’s it fucker.” She spun and took two steps through the laundry. The T-shirts flapped in the breeze. She flung the sheets apart and they sucked together again, like heat sealed cling wrap, as Melanie walked through them. Melanie wrenched the cotton from her face and dissected a visible path through the sheets. A flash of green lawn and the sheets sucked back together for one last embrace. An updraft caught them and pulled them out of Melanie’s path. And standing there with a block in his mouth was Jason. The rage made her jump. Her heart leapt through her mouth. “Jason!” She cried. Her son stood about 2 meters away sucking on an extra large piece of Leggo. “Jason come to mummy.” She whispered loudly as she gasped for air. He stood still while Melanie threw the sheets out of her path. Another updraft caught them and revealed Jason to her. The ground behind him shook. The updraft took the sheets straight up, it blew Melanie’s hair out of its ponytail, it flicked at her face before standing on end. Sand from the neighbor’s sandpit rose out of its box. From the lawn behind Jason, the ground cracked. A crevasse opened to reveal the Jabberwocky rising gracefully as though the soil were frictionless. Rising like a tsunami out of the black water, like the serpent, the Jabberwocky ascended into the atmosphere like a mushroom cloud: cancerous, noxious, sinister and silent.
It writhed and thus displayed its full stature. It stood 3 stories tall, black toxic tentacles thrashing about, whipping the sand into swirling chaotic spasms. It shrieked. Its voice was digital distortion. “Jason come to mummy now!” He stood in silence, his short, cropped hair standing and swaying in the radioactive updraft, and sucked on the block. The Jabberwocky eyed the boy with its sickening dead glare. Tentacles lashed at the air behind him. A clawed hand swiped out of the rubbery black web and dissected the child like a tree slasher, his lifeless limbs skittled, his blood flicked onto the sheets and Melanie’s face like a Jackson Pollock. She screamed but it was drowned, stifled by the Jabberwocky’s presence. Melanie’s rage returned. It flung her forward into the knots of tentacles.
Melanie was determined. She made it to the laundry. There she found an extension lead. The Jabberwocky arched its back and peered in through the tiny laundry window. Its toxic breath steamed the glass as it evaluated its next victim. Melanie dashed into the kitchen, tying the electrical chord as she went. She pulled out the draws and rummaged through their contents. Cutlery clanged as the entire set hit the vinyl tiles. Melanie found a pen. She dug in the second draw and pulled out a Christmas card. She scribbled something on it and returned to the back yard. “You mother fucker!” She sobbed at the creature. She pushed its tentacles aside and marched to the washing line. Melanie tied one end of the electrical chord around the supporting beam of the line, the noose around her neck and dropped. She stared the Jabberwocky dead in the eyes as the breath left her body.

Melanie’s body was found by Mick that afternoon. He came home to a cleaned empty house. The Christmas card that Melanie had composed her suicide letter read: “I’m sorry, please forgive me. I love you Mick.” Signed by her. Mick found Jason’s body in tact and hanging beside his mother's body. The detectives that investigated the murder-suicide found that the blood on the sheets was Jason’s but he had no cuts or abrasions on his body that could have produced it.