The Never-Ending Narrative
‘The Never-Ending Narrative’ is our collaborative, unlimited work of fiction. We want to see what a story can be when the traditional parameters of an ending, single authorship, genre and expectation are done away with. A writers’ relay, the story is a continually developing work of writing, with contributors offering the next 100-250 words at a time. Where will you take it next?
Enny used to say she was fine. If she were asked, she’d say she slept OK, drank about enough water, could probably be more active, snack less. She tried to avoid politics with her friends, tried not to cause an argument. She dressed in a way that she thought looked nice, may garner a compliment, but wouldn’t get too much attention. She was on her phone too much. She worried how much time her parents were spending on their phones and what they were watching on them. She worried what her nieces and nephews were doing online, too. She supposed – mainly from the internet, but also from polite interactions with her female colleagues – that she was unremarkable in all these things. She didn’t go home and unmask herself, unlock a private box kept under her bed – and she didn’t think they did, either.
There may have been a little void within her, a sense of something large and fundamental missing from her life. But it was an emptiness that filled and emptied like the moon. It passed. Things carried on. She had her cat, kept up with her friends’ children’s birthdays. She had a gym membership, suffered occasional dates. Then she started therapy.
At 40, she could remember when it had been called, quietly, ‘nerves’ – though she had never used the word. So too could she recall, though not precisely, when all the shame of ‘mental health’ was replaced by earnest encouragement to take heed of it. So she started attending therapy with a faint embarrassment, but an overriding sense that she was doing something good, like buying iron supplements. Perhaps it was the little void that had made her go; in her first four visits to Gloria’s office, with its curved chairs and mint walls, it didn’t come up. At least, Enny didn’t bring it up. Of course, the question was asked. Possibly it was the first question:
‘What brings you here?’
Enny said things were generally OK. There was no big problem. She thought the boat of motherhood might have sailed, but she couldn’t really afford to do all that anyway, and she’d heard the horror stories and her life was OK and it just hadn’t really happened. Sometimes she got bored at work – she was in the finance department of a furniture retailer – yes, she could get bored for weeks, fortnights at a time. But it was OK. Her colleagues were OK, her boss was OK, the pay OK.
‘So everything’s OK?’
Which was just the sort of question that Enny thought she might get. It wasn’t a real question but a therapy question, with implications, a tone of gentle analytical disbelief. It was a question that seemed to say, ‘if you say so.’ Yet Enny wasn’t prepared for it; if anything, the simplicity of the challenge was what was so disarming. There was a possibility, Enny perceived, of getting the answer wrong.
She said, ‘Yes, mostly.’
Gloria tilted her head.
‘But I have these dreams sometimes.’
Kieran Cottrell, 11/7/24
Enny’s therapy hour was up, and a week would pass before the next session. And the dreams would still go on unresolved, despite her words spilling unchecked for three unexpected minutes of babbling relief.
‘You’ve made significant progress this week; shown great courage,’ Gloria summarised.
Had she? Wasn’t talking about your dreams self-indulgent? And embarrassing. Particularly the one about Greg from sales who, on their first date, had been less than OK. She excused the donkey-like laugh and went back for a second date; there being little to do on a Wednesday since the Sewing Bee ended.
Clingy, he’d called it, when she attempted to hold his hand as they talked. But wasn’t that what couples did? He’d brought an Instamax camera and suggested Enny invite him back to hers for a drink and ‘a bit of fun, if you get my drift.’ She’d declined, blocked his number, and been avoiding him for weeks. Then casually stalked him and a mousy blonde when she spotted them together in the M&S food hall.
The dream about pinning down and emasculating Greg had woken her bathed in sweat, tangled in four-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton, and closer to orgasm than any physical encounter had ever achieved. She wondered, for a moment, whether she should have told Gloria she’d misplaced one of her Sabatier knives.
Wendy Markel, 2/8/24
But ownership of Sabatier knives would hint at a certain lifestyle, and as she had never used them for anything more than opening stubborn packaging, she shelved it for a quiet moment in a future session. When she needed a breadcrumb to appease Gloria’s hunger. The elephant in the room was her real concern, the thorny issue of what she was doing online. The shame raised a violent flush on her neck. Would Gloria have the stomach for it?
Really, her tendency to plunge into the Dark Web was only like following Greg around M&S: a matter of curiosity and a real wonder as to how others filled the void. Would Gloria have experience of this? She doubted it.
Sarah O’Loughlin, 20/8/24
Her road to the Dark Web had been a steady one. If you start exploring the internet when the sun drops on an autumn evening, you can cover a lot of ground.
Many videos existed about the darker recesses of the online world. Enny watched dozens before making her own trek. A lot of these avoided the practicalities of accessing content, and instead charted the creator’s own experiences of playing with this space.
All were slippery in their veracity. One showed off a package wrapped in Christmas paper bought from the worst of unlicensed marketplaces. Inside was a virus-filled USB stick, six black candles and a blood-stained knife. But was this in itself a fantasy, a dream of the truth?
She had to satisfy her curiosity. Make her own journey into this darkness.
Enny was a tiny fish at first, watching from the cave entrance. But she soon descended within.
It was this experience that she decided to take up with Gloria.
Dylan Spicer, 28/8/24
Where will you take the narrative next?
Submit the next steps of the journey.
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