TV Hell by Candy Caradoc

I’ve been thinking lately about television. Not the television that helps me to unwind after a hard day at work. Not the television my girlfriend and I laugh at together. Not the television that I remember from my youngest years: cartoons for my brother and me on the weekend, news after dinner for my parents, movies for the family every other Friday night when my brother and I were allowed to stay up late.

I think about the televisions in waiting rooms and prison cells. In asylums and above hospital beds. In the rooms of hostages and kidnapped sex slaves.

I think about how they put me out in the garage, after Mum left and they had to take me in. I think about the bed in the little partition in the corner behind the bike rack. I think about my brother and my step-siblings coming out to see me, curious about my new possessions, playing with the novelty of my presence. I think about how they stopped coming out to see me all of a sudden. I think about how my dinner was brought out to me. I think about the dust and the cobwebs and the thoughts of spiders in the dark at night. But mostly, I think about the television.

I think about how television can be used on someone. Someone shut away. Someone you don’t want to hear from, but their thoughts … their thoughts still radiate outward like malevolent spirits. So you distract them, dull them, sedate them.

I think it was Dante who imagined Hell as fire and brimstone. I’ve been thinking about a Hell with televisions. Where the dead forget their lives and loves and lose their minds to a lethargic limbo.

I think about my little place in the corner of the garage, and I think about the television. I think that it bothers me most of all.

© 2012 Candy Caradoc

Candy Caradoc lives in Melbourne, Australia. She is interested in hidden meaning, independent thought and personal epiphanies. She is not interested in polite chit chat, the common opinion or “personal achievements”. She completed a thesis at Monash University about uncanny representations of the effects of narcissistic parenting in Hoffmann’s The Sandman and Aronofsky’s film Black Swan. One of her stories, about a woman in love with a straw man, appears in Dog Horn Publishing’s Women Writing the Weird.

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