Kettle!
kek-w

In the small hours, The Department of Works surreptitiously erected an enormous whistling-kettle in the plaza at the centre of his block of flats.

The kettle’s eerie banshee-howl drew out the residents, who gathered and stood, shivering, in the sullen, monochrome square. The kettle was lit from below by a quartet of powerful white lights which gave it a dignified, almost heroic aspect. A vast, swirling plume of steam jetted skywards from its spout, corkscrewing upwards into the night, so that its quivering soprano howl was accompanied by an unexpected but ephemeral sense of physicality. Presumably, this symbolism was intentional and had been deliberately devised by an employee of some arcane sub-bureau of the Department of Psychiatry. Nearby, the four concrete plinths that had housed stark, figurative representations of The Liberal Martyrs were now conspicuously empty.

“This is an outrage,” growled Pushlost, his dour-faced neighbour from upstairs, on Landing Six. “Look at this thing … this abomination! How are we expected to sleep?”

He studied Pushlost. With his shaved, scar-pocked skull, his stained vest and standard-issue grey towelling dressing-gown, the man could easily pass for an inmate at a diabetes asylum. Pushlost claimed to have fled the Hair-Colour Purges that had eventually swept the northern cities of industry, light and life, but what if his story had been a fabrication? He could just as easily be a government informer or a provocateur. So he placed his fingers in his ears and walked away from Pushlost, briskly, as if he carried some nameless disease.

———

The kettle howled like an angry ghost.

Plagued by constant fatigue, his clerical job at The Traffic Inspectorate suffered as he struggled to maintain his quotas. Most of his colleagues lived at nearby Gorinki Block: here, a colossal domestic steam-iron had appeared the same night as the kettle and was creating widespread misery. It hissed and spit clouds of boiling water that filled the central plaza with steam until the inhabitants’ living quarters were rotten with condensation. His work-mates’ complexions were raw and blotchy, scalded dark pink by steam. Their mildew-speckled clothes had become rank with damp and they eyed his unmarked skin with growing suspicion.

———

Pushlost’s jaw had been wired shut and he could no longer speak. He showed his neighbours a typed letter from the Department of Orthodontics which politely explained that his teeth had been deemed “unsuitable” and it was no longer permissible to display them in public. His mouth had been downgraded to F6-Minus, but the letter assured him that there was no shame attached to this and hiding his teeth was for the greater good. Certain metals no longer existed, so the doctors had used cheap baling-wire, painted so that it resembled brass, in order to maintain a semblance of national prosperity. Pushlost was issued a plastic straw through which he could imbibe fluids.

Small rosettes of dry blood had blossomed where the wire emerged through his cheeks and chin. It looked painful. The letter explained, without apology, that “due to unforeseen shortages, no anaesthetics were available for this procedure.” When they passed each other on the landing, Pushlost viewed him with undisguised hostility, his savage, wire-muffled snarls and dark, recessed eyes giving him the gruff demeanour of a muzzled bulldog.

———

He began to notice that more and more of his neighbours and colleagues had their mouths sewn shut. They openly shunned him, grunting and turning their backs as he passed, walking away when he whispered, in vain, that he was not an informer. His wife disappeared one day, but he was so exhausted from the kettle’s shrill whistle that he failed to notice her departure for a fortnight and had soon forgotten what she looked like.

———

Soon he was the only person not wearing one of the wire-muzzles. He applied, in writing, to have one fitted, listing numerous reasons why it would be to the state’s advantage, but he was rejected for reasons so vague and abstract that he struggled to follow their logic. Meanwhile, his neighbours had decorated their own muzzles with household emulsion paint, hanging key-rings, ribbons and good-luck charms from them while he was forced to look on with exhausted envy.

———

They would no longer serve him in the Block’s tiny convenience store. He was reduced to foraging for scraps of food from the recycling bins and dissolving sugar in a cracked cup filled with water. In the evenings, he would sit and stare for hours at the kettle, whose smooth, pseudochrome contours seemed to have now taken on an almost totemic appearance. He watched the steam disappear upwards into the dark, momentarily forming images of eyes, mouths and faces in its wake: it was a metaphor for something, he was sure, but for what he could not quite fathom. Sometimes he would imagine entire operas embedded deep within its shrieking harmonics, epic song-cycles built from a single unending scream.

———

As his kidneys, liver and eyesight slowly began to fail, he took to his bed, but the kettle continued to infect his room with its unceasing wail. Towards the end, he was so weak that he finally drifted into sleep. This was his undoing.

He woke to find them around his bed, six of them, standing in the twilight, in heavy Cossack-style overcoats and bell-shaped iron helmets that covered their eyes. “There is no one else to blame, citizen,” said an Officer in an accent he couldn’t quite place. “You have brought this upon yourself.” The man produced a syringe and bent down over the bed, pinching at his emaciated arm as he searched for a vein.

As the needle’s contents emptied itself into his blood, the world went syrupy and dark, the colour of old cough medicine. But the kettle’s ghastly voice continued, undiminished, and it followed him into the void, expanding outwards on fingers of sound until it completely filled the vacuum and eradicated, for once and all, the concept of oblivion.

Land-locked deep in the dark, mythic heart of England’s West County, Kek-w is Somerset’s own twisted renaissance man. A music critic and alt.culture obsessive, he writes regularly for U.K. magazines such as FACT, Dazed & Confused and Woofah, as well as Groove Magazine in Germany. He has written comic scripts for the weekly U.K. comic 2000 A.D. and is one half of the psychedelic-surrealist music collective Ice Bird Spiral. His short fiction has appeared in Chimeraworld #4, Nemonymous #7, Venereal Kittens, Otoliths and Starfish Journal. Other fiction is due to appear soon in the Twisted Twins, Read by Dawn #3 and Magic & Mechanica. He is currently typing this in his sleep.