Nickel Splinter Works

Countless Voices. One Mind
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-8192-7144-1
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 252 Seiten

Splinter Works is a vibrant collection of short stories written across three decades, fragments of thought, feeling, and imagination shaped into self-contained moments. Sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholic, often unexpected, these stories span fiction and truth, therapy and creativity, diary and daydream. Each piece stands on its own yet forms part of something greater: a mosaic of one man's evolving inner world. Whether you dip in briefly or linger long, there's something in these pages that might surprise you, or remind you of something you've forgotten.

Michael Nickel is a German writer, educator, and lifelong storyteller. With a background in English and History, he has spent over 30 years capturing thoughts, emotions, and observations in the form of short fiction. His writing blends introspection, wit, and a touch of the unexpected, often drawing from personal experiences, yet never bound by them. When he's not writing, Michael explores his love for music, technology, and the small wonders of everyday life. Splinter Works is his first published collection.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nickel, Michael

Leseproben

THE FIND

The apartment was silent. An unnatural, heavy silence lay over the sparsely furnished rooms, as if they were the interior of a forgotten crypt. Outside, behind gray curtains, the world seemed to have been immersed in a leaden gray for hours, a winter that had been wrapping itself around the city like an invisible hand for days. The room the man was in was sparsely furnished: a narrow wooden table with chipped edges, a single chair with a stained fabric cover, a bookshelf on the wall - crookedly mounted, some boards shakily hung in place. On the shelf were randomly jumbled volumes, loose sheets, notebooks, a few folders. In one corner was a garbage can filled to the brim with crumpled paper. There was no television, no radio, no computer, just a faint glimmer of light from the ceiling lamp, which bathed the scene in a pale, almost morbid light.

The man at the table - let's call him Elias Roth, even if the story might never have revealed his name - sat in front of a stack of papers, handwritten tightly, with margins full of little notes, arrows, exclamation marks, cryptic markings. In his right hand he held a pencil whose lead was about to wear out; his left hand lay flat on the paper as if he wanted to stop it from flying away. His face, sunken, his cheeks hollow, his eyes sunk deep into his skull, betrayed an inner restlessness. He was wearing a crumpled shirt, too big, faded at the elbows, the cuffs frayed. The pants were dark, shapeless and colorless, without a clear cut. He looked like a man who hadn't shaved for days, who barely slept, who concentrated his entire existence on these sheets of paper in front of him.

Outside, somewhere on the road, a brake screeched, then it was quiet again. Elias paid no attention to it. His thoughts revolved around what he was writing here. He was no ordinary writer. The way his pen raced across the paper, the way the letters flowed into each other, the way his breath sometimes faltered, as if he had to put something extraordinary on paper. Perhaps he was a scientist, a researcher, a man who worked on things he shouldn't have touched. Something had crept into his head, something that consumed him, and he was now desperately trying to write it out, to press it into words, formulas, diagrams.

In an adjoining room, as good as empty, stood an old closet with broken hinges, a mattress on the floor, next to it a few empty bottles of stale water. There was an acrid smell of sweat, fear and concentration in the air. The man, Elias, could hear his own breathing in his ears. He put the pen down again, scratching over the paper as if he were confronting the invisible enemy in his head. You could almost see the artery throbbing in his neck.

Hours passed - or was it just minutes? Time in this apartment was strangely stretched, displaced, as if it lay outside the normal world. From time to time, Elias raised his eyes and stared at the wall, at a faint stain in the plaster or at the books on the shelf, as if he could find an answer there. Then he continued: scrawling letters, flowing sentences, fragments of formulas that unfolded over the edge. You could see that he was trying to tame something incomprehensible, something far bigger than this page, bigger than this room, bigger than his ability to understand it.

Over time, his movements became more hectic, more manic. His breathing became faster, his hand more tense. The pen met with resistance, as if the paper itself wanted to refuse to accept this message. He whispered words, barely audible: "No ... that can't ... impossible ..." Then louder: "Damn it! Why doesn't it fit? Why... why..." He bit his lip until a small bloodstain appeared on the paper. But he kept writing, slipping deeper and deeper into a realization that blazed in his head like a raging fire.

Suddenly he paused. The pen froze. His eyes fell on what he had written. For seconds - or was it minutes? - he did not move. Only his breathing could be heard, shallow and intermittent. Then he dropped the pen, the clatter on the tabletop echoing through the silence. Elias straightened up slowly, the chair creaking as if he was in pain. He stood in front of the table, staring at the pages, at the carefully piled sheets, the notes, the marginal notes. His gaze was blank, almost dead, as of someone who had just written down his own damnation.

He raised a hand and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he walked slowly through the room, purposefully, as if he were looking for something. In a drawer, a chest of drawers or perhaps behind a pile of old newspapers - it wasn't quite clear where - he suddenly pulled out a pair of scissors. Simple household scissors with blunt, worn blades. Not a particularly dangerous object at first glance, but in his hand it looked like a tool of pure madness.

Back at the table, he leaned forward slightly, his breathing now sounding raspy, as if he was wrestling with himself. His eyes wandered back and forth between the manuscript and the scissors. He did not say a word. His hand holding the scissors trembled. Then, almost silently, he pointed the tip of the scissors at his own forearm. You could see how it pressed a little into the skin, how it hesitated. Then a jerk - and the blade went in. Elias' face contorted in silent pain. He pulled the blade out, the first drop of blood falling onto the leaves, deep red and telltale.

But he did not stop. With frightening determination, he stabbed again, this time deeper, in a different place, on his chest, his lower abdomen, as if he wanted to cut a path through himself. His breathing turned into an agonizing gasp. He gasped, moaned, struggled for air. The manuscript in front of him was stained with dark red splashes. A disturbing image: the man who creates - or deciphers - and destroys at the same time, slashing himself open as if his own existence were the last obstacle between knowledge and the world.

After some time, he sank to his knees, his hand still clutched tightly around the handle of the scissors. His vision blurred, his body went limp. He slowly toppled over sideways, barely able to breathe. The pool of blood beneath him grew, flowing towards the table, the legs of the chair, but could no longer make the silent lines on the paper unrecognizable. The words were there, captured in ink and blood. Elias' eyes rolled upwards. With a final, half-gurgling breath, he left this world. The manuscript, his last message, remained behind.

Days passed. In the city, the winter did not fade, but rather became more oppressive. People hurried across wet sidewalks, warming their hands with paper cups, while outside in this dreary, cheap rented apartment a dead man lay at the dining table. The neighbors hadn't heard from him for some time. There was a peculiar smell in the hallway, a musty exhalation, but in houses like this hardly anyone cared about strange odors. The city was full of neglect and ignorance. Perhaps someone had knocked, perhaps the letter carrier had simply slipped his letters under the door.

At some point, after half a dozen days had passed, the knocking on the door became more insistent. It was no longer timid waiting, but a demanding knock. No one answered. The door - locked. Whoever was standing outside did not give up. A firm kick on the rotten wood, then a second. Finally, the door lock broke with an ugly sound. The door swung open and a man in a long, dark coat entered. His face half in shadow, a scar on his cheek, eyes watchful and cool, as if this was not the first time he had seen such scenes.

He looked around. The smell of decay and coagulated blood was in the air. The man didn't make a face, just put one hand over his mouth and breathed shallowly through his nose. In his other hand he held something, perhaps an ID card or a photo. His gaze glanced around the room, lingering on the motionless body on the floor. He walked slowly closer, paying meticulous attention to where he stepped. His coat almost touched the edge of the table as he leaned forward to look at the dead man.

The victim already lay in a state of increasing decomposition, his face waxen, his eyes open, torn open in a final, silent scream. The wounds left by the scissors were clearly visible. The man in the coat pressed his lips together. He knew something like this. He knew that this was no ordinary incident. Too deliberate, too absurd. Someone had discovered something, understood something, written something down - and it had driven him mad.

The man in the coat straightened up, turned to the table and examined the notes, the scattered papers. Some of the sheets were stuck to the table top, caked with dried blood. Others lay on the floor. He took out a handkerchief to carefully lift the pages without destroying any traces. His eyes flitted over the letters, the drawings, the cryptic notes. From time to time he frowned, as if he recognized something he was not comfortable with.

The manuscript consisted of dozens, perhaps hundreds of pages. It contained texts that looked more like excerpts from scientific treatises, peppered with technical terms, mathematical formulas, anatomical sketches, geographical coordinates and references to historical documents. But there were also strange remarks, as if the scribe, in a feverish frenzy, had tried to capture the inexpressible in words.

As the man in the coat read, his face grew paler and paler. The shadows under his eyes deepened, his hand trembled slightly, as if the weight of these words was crushing him. He discovered passages in which Elias had obviously come across something that was beyond his previous imagination. A pattern, a theory, a secret that shook the foundations of what we know.

A soft cracking noise...