Spools of Red Twine

By Rachel Pacelli

SPOOLS OF RED TWINE is narrated by Rebecca Stonewall, a painfully frank and self-aware young woman who finds herself working a soul-sucking job as a cashier at a health food store. This timely satire critiques society, ridiculous individuals, and the emptiness of being forced to continue on with the status quo. Haunted by a dream of being chased by Madness, she becomes aware of her own hypocrisies. Unable to move, she realizes that fear is acting as a glue, and madness a beckoning hand she is unable to follow. Just as she falls into the suffocating pool of insincerity and emptiness, she meets James, laconic on the surface, but intensely focused on what really matters, who brings her back into herself. He is the antithesis of order and control, and inspires her to rebel back against society and her own burdening expectations. But did her dream predict the future? Is James real, or is he Madness– and he’s finally caught up?
Spools of red twine will seal her fate. Wake up. Wake up. She can’t be late.
If you want to laugh, or find yourself desperately needing to read about an individual’s rebellion against society and the harmful effects of capitalism, SPOOLS OF RED TWINE does not disappoint!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Propertius Press
• Release date: May 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463641729

Book preview

SPOOLS OF RED TWINE

Rachel Pacelli

SPOOLS OF RED TWINE. Copyright 2020 by Rachel Pacelli. All rights reserved. Published in US by Propertius Press, Martinsville, VA. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-46364-172-9

Available in eBook and Paperback from Propertius Press. Design, graphics and layout by Raven van den Bosch. Copyright 2020 by Propertius Press. All rights reserved.

Propertius Press

Martinsville, Virginia

Contents

A Beautiful Madness

A frightful thing called adolescence.

The soul-suckers.

Everyone should have to wear a nametag.

How it began.

The Game Changer

People Are Careless

It’s hard to throw away free things.

Weed-Induced Time Lapses

Existential Musings on Identity

Time as a mirror.

The light bulb shatters.

Cue the clichéd saying.

The Bleating of the Sheep

Hands moving about.

A Never-Ending Trope of Untruths

The undoing of the ties.

The unpredictability of the tongue.

A memory is a fickle thing.

Wake up.

About the Author

A Beautiful Madness

One of these things is not like the other…

One of these people are not like the others…

None of these people are like the others…

All of these people are like the others.

On the back flap of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, it says something along the lines of the character going under, maybe for the last time. At first, I couldn’t completely understand what that meant—at least not the full extent of it. Even now I wonder what exactly it feels like to ‘go under’. Like you’re suffocating? Gasping for nonexistent air and coming up empty? Like you know that there’s no point in trying anymore but still, your body won’t give in. Not until it’s too late.

Maybe I know better than I thought I did what it’s like to ‘go under’.

But what is it like to come up?

Is there even an ‘up’?

Perception. Perception. That’s what the professors would say—the Buddhists, psychologists, the pretentious fuck in your yoga class who thinks he’s got it all figured out. Well joke’s on you: if you’re taking a yoga class, you’re just as pretentious. That’s a fact.

I think life is like one of those hourglasses—the ones with sand filled in, that drop, grain by grain, building more and more momentum as it fills and becomes a miniature mountain. And just when you’re about to reach the top, the last grain is about to drop… some asshole flips it back over and it starts all over again. The struggle occurs once more, like all previous events never even happened. The cycle repeats, the sands of time are erased. This asshole, I’ve discovered, is life.

Now I’m imagining that up to this point you’re probably thinking something along the lines of Why am I reading this? or What hypocritical, quasi-intellectual, unoriginal (though it thinks it is) thing have I picked up now? Or maybe even, I’ll give it a shot, it can only go up from here, (that is, until the hourglass has flipped—see what I did there?).

No matter what it is you may be thinking, if you’re even consciously thinking at all (I’m convinced that the vast majority of adult humans, especially Americans, have mastered the art of becoming mindless drones), you should know right now what you’re getting into.

This isn’t some inspiring story that you’ve come to expect from books mentioning the word ‘madness’. This isn’t about my slow decent into oblivion, my few months or years in a facility, discovering the joy of life once more, finding a handsome husband to settle down with and pretend that everything I went through was merely a warped, enigmatic dream.

No.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

This isn’t a story about my descent into madness. It’s about my ascent into it.

And so, curious reader, you’ve either just rolled your eyes at this line or upturned your mouth. Or maybe you did a triumphant fist pump (though, really, who actually does that while reading a book? People will think you’ve gone crazy). Whichever action it may be, prepare yourself for what you’ve gotten into. This is no easy read, just as there is no easy life.

There is only hardship, pain, suffering…blah, blah, pompous psycho-babbling. There will be much of this throughout, though I can usually recognize when I’m doing it. You’re welcome. Though feel free to shout out at any point if you notice my ego being strewn about over the page. Really—scream anything you wish at me, whenever you wish. Do it. I dare you. It’s not like I’ll be able to hear you, so what do I care anyhow?

All right, rambling to establish how self-aware I am, officially over.

And so begins the journey into my ultimate being, acceptance, power, and above all else, liberation.

Come undone, maybe for the last time…

One of these things is not like the other…

A frightful thing called adolescence.

I had a dream once. Many times. Every single night. But these other flashes of crazy, absurd, eccentric images are not the point. I had a particular dream that really struck me, and since experiencing it, I’ve had difficulty crossing the street.

Freud could easily analyze the significance of this, I’m sure—though, I highly disagree with Freud the majority of the time. I have no desire whatsoever to fuck my father, if anything, I’d want to fuck him over. But with this specific case, Freud would probably say the fear of crossing the street for me is a fear of change, of going forth, because I’m worried something bad will come of it. Something irrefutably violent will occur and I’ll never be able to turn around and peer back into the past ever again. In this case, he would probably be right. Also, in this case, Freud would have predicted my life better than any magic 8 ball.

The dream was that I ran into someone I really did not care for very much. It was someone in my life—a dweebish, shy individual who, though seeming to be very nice, is also one of the most ignorant people I have ever met. Genuinely stupid. And no, he has no learning disability, he’s just incredibly naïve and this grates on me so deeply.

In it, I was crossing the street with this boy and he was a foot or so in front of me. Suddenly, a large white van drove down the road at too fast a speed. I took a step back but the boy did not; the vehicle hit him and he promptly flew back. Dream me gasped in shock and watched as the most horrific part occurred: the driver of the van backed up and ran over the kid again, and then drove straight off so no one could catch him.

Myself, and a group of people who suddenly appeared, watched in utter horror as the boy—he was still alive at this point—became someone else in my life. It was no one of significance, but instead someone who most people in my class absolutely despised because he was, what I called, the definition of overcompensation (I’ll go more into this person later).

But the group and myself watched with our mouths agape as the boy, whose body had become distorted, bloody and mashed-up like a broken doll, gasped for air and couldn’t stop his morbid remains from violently twitching. I couldn’t look away in the dream, no matter how badly I wanted to. I was in utter shock, and even now as I think