Emily Patchwork Toille...

Emily Patchwork is a square girl, she resides even in a square house. All the interior world consists of right angles, corners and more corners...everything just so...all items in their place.

Long ago before her parents passed away in an orderly fashion, the entire house was planned and measured down to the inch...small notches and tiny tiny marks (in which one could only spy if one absolutely scrutinised and examined with a magnifying glass) that indicated exactly where this or that chair was to be located, or the immaculate hem of some rug.

One might think that because Emily's inherent nature was a little controlled fraying, and the fact that she held the many-a-generation family name of Patchwork, one just might think that within Emily lay the temptation, a tiny thread of yearning...

However the days were very much the same, they went about their methodical fashion as if bearing a life of their own, completely seperate from Emily.
The neatly portioned calender, which nightly and ritualistically she crossed off the days with a giant black cross, neatly as possible with out the ridiculous extremes of using a ruler...

However I must interject...this story is all out of linear order! One must begin at the logical start, the rise of the sun, and onset of day...In its expected position slanting across the
morning kitchen's black and white checkered linoleum...


Emily awakes. Opens her eyes, for this really is what is done in the morning. The 8:00am waking and opening. She wakes to the all familiar room, it is not her room though...well it is now, but it in fact used to be the bedroom of her late parents. This turn of phrase, which she finds faintly amusing as her parents would have never been caught dead "late" while alive...

She still in the grasps of sleepy-warm begins the process of clarifying her own identity and agenda for the day, languidly stretching rolls onto her right side, sits up. Then swings one leg after the other to the floor.

After establishing the concept of gravity, and willing herself to walk, she heads immediately toward the bathroom, to wash the night's dream chaos from her eyes and continue the ceremony of morning-ness.

Now upon the completion of grooming, certifiably wrestling the unruly wisps and tendrils, applying flannel and soap, and the oral hygiene daily plan recommended by the most qualified dentists (which includes, she will have you know; regular flossing.) She begins her descent down the perfectly 45 degreed angled staircase.

You may be wondering what the importance of any of these details are...surely everyone, if not a good majority of people begin their day in a very similar maner...you may wonder what the point to this narrative is.

I will tell you, but I am not sure if you will quite understand, or fully comprehend what it is I say to you. It is the oddity that every day she did this process exactly the same! Not one minute is
spared, not one movement overlooked.

In some respects Emily was entirely alert, within some confines of measure and meaning, but in another way she did it all with an unconscious almost somnambulistic ease, of the tried and true, muscle memory and incessant repetition.

Morning and tea...the words are lit up in her mind synonymous, smiling hand in hand like a snapsnot of bride and groom...thus in the small cupboard directly adjacent to the kettle, while absent mindedly grasping for the box of tea bags for the morning cuppa, Emily finds only her hand placed upon the cool flat, santised suface of the empty shelf, where the box ought to be but isn't.

If I was you; I would be prone to thinking, that this is where the story begins to fall apart at its binding, and chaos insidiously creeps within its margins...but in some skewed sense of reality, Emily is merely mildly perplexed, or should I say subtly unnerved in some indirectly indistinguishable manner.

She sighs and turns from the shelf...for the allocated time has passed for the tea preparation...yet there is also no tea to consume...

Upon this revelation I must confess; I am almost spiralling within voids of nothingness myself. Let alone considering how peculiar and utterly perplexing it must be for Emily.

Without the mug warm in hand, the kitchen itself seems different, there is an extra chill she had never noticed.

Emily shakes herself from this reverie. It really wont do to go on standing there, trying to hold the expected -yet-absent tea. Contemplating random observations of little consequence.

She moves through to a small room located on the side of the house to begin her sewing for the day.

Out of a tidy little basket, she pulls the pure unselfconscious white linen for emroidering, it is a small but elaborate piece, only a minute piece of a greater work...

She would like to tell you that her mother taught her how to embroider, or that she payed attention while her Nan, Matilda Patchwork (or "Tilly" for short) futilely attempted to teach her this intricate art...but if the ironic truth be known it is only something she learnt the art of in adulthood, from the women's magazine at the small corner store down in the town below.

Regardless it has been a good few years now, she has become relatively adept...enough so that she may make several pieces a week to sell from a small stall, in the aforementioned town, down the hill from the square house of Emily.

She stitches like an angel, if angels were apt to stitch... she thinks, delicate yet decisive... the two qualities don't seem to adhere in her mind though. They almost leave in their wake an ugly empty ring...

And in this momentary silence, she raises her head to gaze out beyond the window pane, at a windswept black, grey and green landscape...all the while continuing to stitch...feeling somehow lost and surreal.

A curious thing to note now, is that while I continue for Emily in this bizarre moment, and carry this story of sorts along its meandering way...For you the reader it is as if no time has passed at all, one sentence for you merely flows into the next...but you must realise, quite a few moments have passed for Emily, within such a small word filled space...

And the moment does pass...it is as if, it sort of fizzled out, lost momentum...just like that. No exclamation mark to indicate the end, or some great revelation...Perhaps at the most extreme a small sigh escapes her lips as Emily returns to peer at her needlework, now noticing however, the misshapen leaf, loosely swaying and precariously close to the edge.

Her cheeks flush considerably with frustration, and she thinks primarily of time wasted, and of how many of these small embroidery appliques she must complete before midday.

She tends to pride herself on her prescision, and timeliness, yet today...it all started with the teabags she thinks...no wonder she is a groggy and straying...

She begins to unpick her work, perhaps if she only re-sews the section she completed while mentally removed, out tumbling in the landscape with the wind and leaves...perhaps, she hopes, she can salvage the piece.
Haste makes waste, haste makes waste....and in this case injury as Emily has unwittingly pricked her finger...

The blood droplets and flourishes upon the seemingly virginal fabric, seeping and exploring the weave hungrily, consuming each fibre.
A sort of portentous exhileration overcomes her, she definitely does not understand its meaning...and such a small prick to create such expansive crimson blooms...




Emily retires that night with a cumbersome sense of dissatisfaction. She reviews the day as she believed it occurred, proceeding through this scene or that...like a hazy story board, out of coherent order, a mixed metaphor naively floundering its way across the page.

She experiences a sense of profound loss. Literal time lost, [while going about her daily activities,] and a more abstract loss of her character,[or plot direction.] She feels a little rinsed out and weak...or perhaps murky like recycled bath water.
Emily has always held a smug certainty in her ability to sleep at night. [As much else in her life, clockwork and reliable. ]But tonight... so like the day's missing teabags, she reaches out to find nothing. Only a gaping, starless obsidian void of unease.

At the death of her Mother and Father, which seemed to occur almost simultaneously. (Or perhaps it was that she secetly regarded them as the same person, so alike they were in character.) Even then, she had never once felt a moment of uncertainty or questioned the meaning of their deaths.

As their lives were faultlessly planned, so in turn were their funerals...and not one instant was appropriated to her own personal grieving.
And being not in the least inclined to late night cogitating, was completely unaccustomed to the distinct possibility of insomnia occurring. (Unlike the narrator who frequently gropes and claws her way through many a nights tedious elongating...)

Much shifting appears to occur after dark, deep cerebral landscapes and a whole manner of mysterious subliminal sleight of hand. It is a tricky, tricky place to find onesself caught vigilantly cognisant yet intellectually unscheduled.

If you are developing a bit of an impression of melancholic inertia, seedily loitering and lurking beneath each sentence...fear not...for




The new day finds Emily without the lingering desolate feeling of the previous day, she awakes as if upon an entirely new canvas...

Possibilities for the hours thereafter flutter amok in her mind like moths, she can barely contain within herself a certain sense of an event impending.

While ceiling staring, is when Emily notices the smallish hole above the bed.
She has to admit that she had never spent enough time, lying idly after the moment of waking to notice the existence of the thing, or the fact that it seems there is a sort of flickering light beyond.

It is a curious experience, when one spies a thing so unnervingly anomalous, in a room which one is so accustomed.
Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she waits for her sight to clarify and while still lying there, peers at the ceiling, and the appearance of the hole.

But either her range of view fails her, or the shifting light up there renders it difficult to determine exactly the dimension of the hole, or if it is infact a hole at all.

Childishly scrunching the bedclothes down with her legs, to stand haphazardly on the matress, attempts to get a closer look...heart beating ferociously with anticipation she is almost sure that somewhere there is a drum beating.

The years have taken their toll on the old matress and the lazy middle sag smile, which normally preoccupies her every morning, to propel her outward; is now the precarious balancing act she performs on trembling legs, neck craned upward.

She determines at this stage, that it does appear to be a hole, but it looks even more puzzling now, little closer. It looks rather different than a few moments ago. There seems to be some thing there...
On her toes and lightly steadying herself with her hand upon the wall, she again tries to look closer.

The surface of the object seems soft and slightly glossy...a sort of coloured sphere within a watery off white.
what comes to her find immediately is a marble. She knows somehow, this isn't right. Nausea and anxiety begin to flow inside her. Prickly with perspiration, she comes to understands that it is an eyeball. An eyeball gazing at her.


Emily stops breathing entirely. The most appalling lurch occurs in her chest. Her head sways.
And as if upon recognition of identification, the eye vanishes suddenly leaving the hole uniformly black and flat, as if something had been placed over it on the other side, Which it in fact had.

Her thoughts run rampant through her mind...she slowly crouches down, eyes unblinking, face expressionless. Her movements retarded and sluggish with horror.

I have to also mention that I too am somewhat in shock at the event that has taken place...
All the days before this point in time melt away from her, all the mornings and all the nights...thinking herself alone, how long has the eye's presence been there? How many unguarded and natural moments of Emily have been stolen with secret observation?

I suppose I really should feel more guilt, that this has gone on like this. I had though no idea, that the removal of the teabags would cause such a stir. Perhaps it was that after all this time I had wanted to be found out.

She was such a creature of habit, and it was just far too simple to exact her routine...To know at what intervals to be utterly silent, at what times to creep down the ladder within the false walls of the next room, and into the house...

And for whom else in her solitary life, would be there to record, to take account of all Emily's moments?
For Emily Patchwork was a square girl...

Dear Diary,

Today I shall continue to manifest my complex subconscious process of death anxiety. By continuing to blatantly anthropomorphise you as my comforting presence.
To sporadically record my mundane activities until the day that I cease to be.
If I am writing to you my dear personified diary; I most certainly crave less, a witness.
Other than those inevitably haphazard and often anonymous readers, to pour over these words with remote curiosity at this singularly isolated existence.