Jerry’s built environs

/ Doug Jacquier

This piece was written for the weekly photo prompt from the Unicorn Challenge, hosted by Jenne Gray and CE Ayr.

To describe what Jerry had built as a ‘structure’ strained the definition to breaking point and made Escher’s multi-dimensional fantasies seem like a housing project blueprint in comparison.

The foundations, to the extent that they existed at all, consisted of a tissue of lies laid haphazardly on top of the quicksand of his adolescent fantasies of transcending his mundane suburban origins.

The walls seemed like Japanese-style internal sliders but were made of little more than recycled pizza boxes covered in a decoupage of graduation certificates, attendance records, little athletics participation ribbons and degrees purchased online.

The floors (or, more correctly, flaws) comprised remaindered books rescued from a rubbish skip, including ‘The Wit of L. Ron Hubbard’, ‘1001 Ways With Tripe’ and ‘Brain Surgery For Dummies’.

The doors had been salvaged from building site toilets that had reached their use-by date, complete with graffiti of historical significance on the insides, such as ‘Call Samantha for a good time’, ‘Quinoa causes cancer’ and ‘Gravity sucks’.

The stairway to the upper floor included a bannister, topped with lubricant to aid sliding, and a captain hook for attaching a bungee rope for thrill-seekers facing their fear of losing their ability to reproduce on the newel post at the bottom.

Immediately after its completion, with a roof consisting of knitted strands of titanium barbed wire designed to both deter pigeons and block the mind controllers, Jerry invited architectural prophets to review his edifice and their words are written on the subway walls.

15 thoughts on “Jerry’s built environs”

  7. I liked this story a lot because, for me, it speaks, in a unique way, to our perceptions of other people. One person’s reality is another person’s madness and all that stuff.

    I was drawn to this line: “a tissue of lies laid haphazardly on top of the quicksand of his adolescent fantasies” because I thought it was beautiful.

    My only complaint is the discovery an the L. Ron Hubbard book in the trash bin. People don’t really throw those away, do they?

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