Disconnected Miniatures (2) by D.F. Lewis

 CONTINUED FROM: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/disconnected-miniatures-by-df-lewis-1.html

***

A MOUSEFUL OF PINS 

The parlour was as quiet as a mouseful of pins. In the depleting light, a pair of armchairs seemed peopled with stares. There had already been words spoken of ghosts and frights, but neither set of eyes had flinched. The fire had dyed itself black, in recognition of the coal that had given it birth. A knock on the door or an unseen hand brushing against the shoulder might have startled their revery. Yet the simple scrabbling of a pointy creature in the wainscot was hardly worth the mention, let alone the pricking of ears — until one of them took up a second spate of speaking:

“I travelled in a train — an ordinary day — except I listened to a number of ladies from behind me in the neighbouring part of the carriage. I couldn’t see them, but I guessed they were middle-aged or above. They had spent the whole journey so far chortling, gossipping, prattling off — wait for it — knitting! The train juddered northward uncaring, it seemed, of signals and stations — an express in every sense. Their banter ranged from treatises on back-stitches to belly-laughs on chain ones — every combination and convolution of the art of clicking needles together, weaving a web of action or reaction, of colour’s shade or husband’s size, stitches loose or tight, grip or wield, cast on or off. What a nice gathering — how very civilised in this day and age, I felt, listening to a knitting group on an outing. I’d never overheard such laughter and jollity surrounding doubts regarding brown against orange in a knitting pattern — and something about tail-end wool. Then, as I heard the chunky clunk-click of large stitches being made, I wondered if they knew about the two main varieties of wool: shorling or morling, and the difference between them. It hadn’t arisen in their conversation — which was a surprise, since everything else plain and purl had been chewed over and skittishly aired. Well, let me tell you…” The listener nodded, eager to hear about the difference in the full-shrunken light of the parlour, and then the speaker continued, after a pause: “Shorling is wool sheared off live sheep, morling that off those already dead. There is, believe it or not, a difference in feel. One is more suitable for men, the other women, but not necessarily for all men or all women.”

The parlour wore an air of indifference, until the one who had been listening, now spoke:

“I myself was also on a train once — the only time, in fact. Being an agoraphobic, I found it hard to travel. As the oil seed rape glanced by and further yellowed the sunshine, I speculated on my own loneliness in the world. Yes, alone in the whole wide world. For many years, people have believed that several dread diseases only needed a merest flesh-to-flesh contact to flourish. So, today, as we reach the end of the Millennium, there are no handshakes, no fleeting kisses, no rubbing together of shoulders, nothing like this can possibly be countenanced, not even the slightest brush of skin on skin — even with clothes between. Hence train seats have become single ones. This has led me to wonder whether all people other than myself are a dream. I have no means to prove otherwise, as you can appreciate. The simple act of dialogue has never been able to disprove this dream theory of mine. So, that day on the train, I was beset, as ever, with an attenuation of reality. No prestidigitation of philosophy could fully bolster the inferred substances of an otherwise rarified life, even when I took thoughts to the most dependable areas of logic. Simple touch between doubters would have been sufficient verification, but touch was simply out of the question. Yet, as the benighted city landscape made cruel overtures to the yellow meadows, I felt a caressing hand upon my padded shoulder … but it was sheer imagination, a touch of Harry in the night…”

The first speaker had tried to interrupt. Yet nothing came from the mouth, as if it were full of tangled choking wool. A snouty thing skittered across the carpet and plummetted up the cold parlour chimney towards the cloudless, yet starless, night sky. Airborne and thus immune to dying and disease.

***

UNCLAIMED BY DEATH

He descended the stairs, his head, but not the rest of his body, hidden by the shadows. He had entered the large rambling mansion at the dead of night, because it presented the only shelter from the torrential rain. It was called ‘Cloisters’ on the inbuilt gatepost. He had trudged dark hills for days, letting barns and hollowed-out haystacks suffice — but, tonight, he was desperate for proper dreamless sleep, crisp sheets to loll within, warmth from new wakened grates and a proper roof.

Cloisters was indeed an answer to his dreams: uninhabited, perhaps, but in no way derelict. The front door swung easily open on its hinge edge making him wonder what held it fast to the doorframe at the handle edge. Having approached from over the low hills, he felt sure that the mansion was configured of Stonehenge returned to its original home, monolith resting on monolith, edge to edge, shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, back to back, not one crack of moonlight between. When he shone his torch, even from such a distance, it lit up the tall chimneystacks left exposed at the top and caused the windows to glint. In this uncertain light, the mansion appeared to be a series of twouptwodown terraced backtobacks from Britain in the Thirties — forming a vertical jigsaw. In the fever of exhaustion, he imagined lesser chimneys inserted neatly into cellars in an everpresent interchange of smoke and dust blacker than the purest soot. The impenetrable hill darkness literally glowed by comparison with the greasy substances that made the constituent cottages inch up to each other without the slightest grind or grate.

He shook himself free of such ill-considered thoughts. Having breached the building, he decided the best course of action was to clamber to its top. Without understanding why, he predicted increased safety near the real proveable roof. It entailed squirming through narrow hatches and crossing between the sloping dark beams of many barely illuminable lofts. Eventually, he found himself descending again, down barely understandable stairways, his head once more hidden in the darkness whilst his eyes could discern the rest of his body and his own feet glowing upon the treads as they negotiated the half-dismantled stair-rods. He could not recall reaching the very top of the building, having expected there to find a master bedroom or, at worst, servant shacks, where he could ravel those yearned for sheets around his aching bones.

He decided to peer through the next outside window he stumbled across. But the curtains once swept aside in shadows of dust, he discovered that it merely connected with another room. This one was dimly lit. There was a large cat. Then he saw that a woman was seated on the bed, slowly removing stockings. His bed, he thought — folding back his sheets, so crisp he could hear them crackle from the vantage point behind the window. The figure was female, if only by virtue of its silhouette. The beauty had to be concocted from its arching prehensility. Her back was faced toward him and the torch had no power even to meet the other room’s light head on. Her legs swung from the floor and, in a movement akin to scissor-blades, she dived between the sheets, causing the mattress to sag through the springs in several spirals of damp stuffing – or so he imagined.

.

She was too drained to bear any more. Her discarded stockings lay crumpled like see-through dog dirt on the bedsit floor. Their ladders started short of the more heavily coloured tops. Their seams’ scribbling was a knot of ladders. Everything seemed to be running down.

Her latest ‘steady’ had threatened to ditch her a few days before. But the pig wasn’t even worth the poke. Indeed, he never knocked. Came straight in, eyes wandering, hair uncombed, hands wriggling in his trouser pockets. Only here for one thing. And that frequently wasn’t sex – not with her, anyway, it seemed. If only she’d had the get-up-and-go to ditch him first. That would have given her some credibility.

Her cat was curled up on the bed like a big black rose, purring so heavily it concealed the aeroplane drones as they idled above her flat, accentuating the loneliness. Hers was the only bedsit in the whole block of cottage constituents. All the other doors were unnumbered. Or was that one of her dreams? She couldn’t quite remember.

The knock startled. Both turned heads towards the door. Nobody there. She couldn’t be bothered even to check the squint-hole. She could only summon enough energy to stare at the radiator which, to a blazing log fire, was worse than metal fatigue. The curtains hid the windows, moving in a draught, like the eyelids of someone gradually waking. The cat resumed its snooze — now lain out straight as a poacher’s gutting.

The knocking came again. There must be at least somebody there. She shrugged. It was not possible to be her ex-steady, as he would have walked straight in. She tried to recall happier days. He’d never taken her out. Nevertheless, the relationship had a certain something. A vicarious mode of living. One notch above loneliness. As if a saving stitch had been sewn in at both ends. The right words eluded her. There could be no give without take. But that wasn’t right.

“Come in.” The voice was hers, but she did not recall opening her mouth. She craned towards the cat. It had scooted into the kitchenette, without the preamble of a stretch and a yawn. The door opened upon hinges she had never before heard squeaking. A guy walked in without even the least attention to recognition. His clothes were too baggy for a body to fill them — dragged off some autumn piles long since left unclaimed outside a charity shop. The shoes had their tongues showing, insects of black thread hanging from the joins. Another figure followed: this one of indeterminate gender. Then two more, of dubious humanity, let alone gender.

“Detective Inspector Ludd,” announced the first one, snapping open his identification locket. “Please excuse our intrusion, but we understand you have been going steady with someone we seek…”

As yet, she could only guess to which ex-steady Ludd was referring. She was rather non-plussed, if not a little annoyed. One of Ludd’s sidekicks budged the stocking heap with his foot, as if the key to the mystery lay underneath. His nose twitched. The others were rifling her drawers. She should ask for further identification. But she couldn’t be bothered. These “people” were, if nothing else, company.

They soon departed, however, leaving a waft of damp in their wake. One had actually planted a kiss on her cheek where she feared something worse than a simple pimple would grow during her next incubation period.

The cat had returned to the snugness of the bed, where it proceeded to tease out the loose ends from the threadbare quilt, making a horrible scratching noise with its claws, that stayed inside her head even when it had finished. The stockings were alive, having found the awareness that they had always sought, tiny faces coming and going in the trammelled mesh.

Someone came straight in, without knocking. This must be the steady in question. It could be none other. He found her curled around her cat, thumb squatting the mouth. The pussy was dummied on its tail.

Missed the rozzers just by the skin of his teeth. The steady smiled, slowly drawing one hand from inside his trousers. The other stayed put. The silence was pearl perfect. He knew he was worse than all lonelinesses placed end to end. It was just a question of coming alive. And, as always, he needed blood more than he needed sex. He picked the pile of stockings from the floor and inspected them.

An aeroplane tried to hover above the flat, in reconnaissance, but having lost its helicopter disguise, soon veered off and crash-landed in another part of the city with a dull thud. Nothing could be kept up for long, these days. And so, sadly, she was still unclaimed, even by death.

.

The man originally witnessed arriving at Cloisters was now knocking on the window to her room. Her head abruptly turned on the pillow. Her eyes seemed blinded by his torch, since she had only just before switched off the room light, after acting out some blind mime with shadows and the throwing of men's voices masquerading as policemen. His knocking had earlier matched her own improvisations. Now, she stared along the torch's beam, until the man could feel the shock up his arm.

He felt as if he needed to scream on her behalf. An intruder needed screaming at. But she remained either steadfastly silent or was muffled by yet another intruder already in her room. Her mouth was certainly wide enough to encompass the wildest scream. Before he had moved the torch away, it was a black oval, like a mirror for a miniature of the devil.

The man did scream. The walls shifted around him in their sockets, meshing and unmeshing, the irregular tunnel shafts between them caked with the blackest sticky dust, moving up and down, to and fro, crashing brick gears, belching shadows of smoke, in and out of each other — as if the original masons had intended the endemic earth tremors as a trigger of their first setting the building’s foundations.

He found the front door again, but this time it was way above the ground floor (and the floor surely was being ground). Before he could jump, he was seized by his hair which was long enough for a series of sporadic tugs to bring him backwards into the arms of the creature behind him…

.

He was surprised at the way things had built up. Being his first visit to the city, literally everywhere was strange. And being a street made of a single mansion converted into terraced twouptwodowns, this street was the strangest place yet — supposedly the one matching the address he had in his head.

But which number? The streetwiser who had passed the address to him by word of mouth had suffered from too much tongue. So the number had been ambiguous – somewhere between 1 and 27. Probably 13.

Number 13 was in the vicinity of the widening, except, as he soon discovered 11 and 15 were adjacent. 12 and 14 were opposite — at the widest part. He shrugged off his superstitious upbringing and peered down the alleyway between 11 and 15 — darker than a tunnel with none of a tunnel’s virtues such as weatherproofing.

If he had more than one option as to his next action, then he did not realise he had. He did not exactly feel brainwashed, more dabbed with a damp flannel, and plunged down the gaping alley. The rain was seeping at a faster rate than a drizzle but still barely noticeable to someone of his absent-minded approach to living. He tripped over a clump of tall weeds that had grown in a particularly dank section of the alley – and landed headfirst in a doorway.

He would have looked up from his bruised and dissheveled body, rubbing his eyes as he squinted through the dripping gloom, and discerned the number 13 in Gothic digits upon the door, if it hadn’t opened before he could establish this — and was attacked by a creature that had more slobber than teeth, more guts than filling, more Ludd than anything else. It crawled on hands and knees (as if it had not learned to crawl in any other way) – its purpose blurred by the internal forces of its own mind as well as by the rain driving into its furry face.

He felt as if he were inside a glove-puppet, except it was not just his hand. His whole body was within a pantomime horse, except it was not a pantomime, nor a horse for that matter. It proved to be a living being which was utilising his mind as motivational energy, except he did not think it was his mind being utilised — it was simply an easy way of harnessing his very bones.

Barely visible through the hairy-lashed apertures of the creature’s eyes, he spotted the end of the alley — whether it was the opening into the street where Cloisters sat did not appear to matter. Abruptly, he realised he was not looking from the eyes but through the nostrils. Perhaps this creature did not have any eyes in any event. His thoughts were growing stranger all the time, as if the mind was adapting itself to a sudden unexpected evolution.

Then, with a sudden shaft of self-awareness, the creature distinguished his body shape framed by the alley’s end, topped by bleary-eyes from too many sleepless nights in dosser-stacks. Feeling utterly sick to the back teeth, the creature’s innards vomited, with one giant gulping hiccup, into its correct apportionment of time and space. There could be no argument with corrective reality. Nor with the fact that it was feline – and female. Stuck all over with see-through nylon laddering.

.

He had escaped the city and shone his torch upwards to examine the craggy interfaces of the moon, to while away the rest of of what he considered to be a peaceful night. He did not notice the dark edges of cloud building and straightening along the tops of the mountains behind him. It would yet be quite a time before the rain started in earnest. Meanwhile, Cloisters was quietly narrowing — buildings edging nearer to each other so as to cope with closing alleys and abandoning dreams. Voices at bedroom windows called, between the cat-fights, for crisper sheets. Then silence. 

***

THE HAUNTED TIREDNESS

Sleep had long been serialised as quagmires of broken sweat and lucid dreams. The opposite of spit is swallow. There’s an animal in the room that’s gnawing the legs of the bed.

I  woke with a start — with those two fleeting images: all that remained of my dream. Indeed, I usually remembered nothing of what events my sporadic  sleep surrounded. 

But tonight was different. The darkness glowed brighter than the  luminous clock beside the bed. There was a lambency filling my eyes. I was unaccountably crying — the tears acting like tiny lenses, focussing the dull shimmer upon my retinas, almost blowing the optic fuses. I felt sick. But not with food. More with an over-fill of my own saliva — welling up like clear syrup from every corner of the body, along with mysteriously relentless urine in sore spirts. My pores seeped this fluid, too, like the slow-motion eruption from very tiny volcanoes. Surely all this was the dream and the animal-thing gnawing the legs of the bed was within real life: an event I’d left behind each time I fell at least partially asleep? 

But, in my real life, there should not be any animal in the whole house, let alone in my bedroom. Was the real life I’d left behind — to fall asleep and enter this dream of dull shimmer and bodily regurgitation — derived from earlier intakes of food? 

The real waking life I’d left behind surely must have an animal gnawing at the legs of my bed … because I was soon half-awake and half-dreaming and heard it coming from outside the dream.

I must now fully wake up. To face whatever it was. I called this animal (whatever it was) the Night Gnaw. But that was only because I called it this name from within the dream, the dream from which I was now trying to escape in order to cope with the danger represented by the Night Gnaw. I would no doubt call it something else in real waking life. To call it the Night Gnaw was decidedly a very dream-like thing to call it. So surely I must be dreaming to call it a Night Gnaw at all. Meanwhile, I was terrified that my sleeping body — the body that contained the mind that called it a Night Gnaw — was threatened by the thing in real waking life that I currently called the Night Gnaw while dreaming.

I was sweating, plain and simple, with dripping drops. My sleeping body felt slicked and slippery enough for the Night Gnaw to slowly — oh so slowly — swallow me whole, like a python with an ass. Then for it – even more slowly — to extrude my back out, covered in the thick curds of the Night Gnaw’s own bodily fluids — like a slow motion salivation now without appetite.

I must wake up before this happened. I  needed to battle against the Night Gnaw that I did not dream about but knew existed somewhere. And the darkness lost its lambent glow. My snores were no longer the dry gunning that they once were but more the rhythmic, rhyming gnaws of some animal with deeply irritable bowel syndrome, each of my limbs transmitting spasms of pain towards a new day’s haunted tiredness. Meantime, I knew the creature was to be reborn when I tried to sleep again. One day, I thought, it will vanish for good, and I managed to smile.

***

FLAT IRON

I am a classical composer of music; by adding ‘of music’, though, is perhaps unnecessary, for what else do classical composers do other than compose music? However, it is necessary to clarify this in my case, because many people do not class what I compose as music at all. Some call it utter rubbish, being, to their unacclimatised ears, a noise or racket of alarming ugliness. Yet … I still compose it. I sit in a serious stance with my old-fashioned nib poised over the staves, believing every note I write is a mark of genius. 

Concerto for Ping Pong ball and Orchestra. Black Elegy for flute and zither. Wild Onions, a chamber opera for water sounds and Welsh harps. These are just a few of my works, as you know. There are many more as yet unplayed, unperformed, unheard. Most reside in my head, giving off their own vibrations to the skull. I am serious about my music having a deeply aesthetic value as art. And I am proud to report that a few unlucky souls turn up at my concerts and pretend to enjoy the sounds they open their ears to. 

Edna was one of those. She did enjoy it, I’m sure; either that or her overtures to me as the composer were completely false. If she did not wallow in my music like a whale enjoying a bath in its own blubber, then she was a good actress at pretending to do so. She even bought the CDs!   Edna couldn’t help being fat. These were CD times, as well as pre-woke, as you can see.

Well, it was she who suggested the flat iron.

Now, I ought to make it clear. I was never completely in love with Edna, There was something quaintly homely about the tender caresses she often gave me. She was a touchy feely person. One day, I would reciprocate, I vowed. But it was always put off until tomorrow.  It wasn’t because she was fat.

She had been married in the past to someone she called Alfred. Apparently, he was fan of pop music and endlessly played the Everley Brothers in the bath. They had not really got on. That was a pity, I’m sure, because Edna was a fine housewife, one who cherished the dusting and the washing and the ironing. She had a thing about ironing, even in the age of drip dry and non-iron shirts. 

The thing about the flat iron happened during the interval of the biggest success I’d ever had with my music. A concert which was more than half full in Huddersfield, and only ten people got up and left during the performance. One even shouted ENCORE! at the end.  I was sitting with Edna at the back, watching the heads move in time to the music. Wild shakings and noddings that had no rhyme or reason. Even their clapping was ragged and ill-coordinated. Yet, most of them stayed the course. And the reviews were singular in their acclaim. Reading between the lines.

Throughout the first half of the concert, Edna had rested her plump hand in my lap, where I let it stay. I often unplumped her hand from its berth upon my body, but tonight I was thrilled by the reception of my music. Tonight, I even felt warmth towards those to whom I owed warmth (like Edna), as I had often given undeserved warmth to those who had ridiculed my music. It is often difficult to explain such skewed emotions. I suppose my music described my emotions best. Tonight I tried to be more human, and let my words and face express my inner feelings, instead of my music.

So, I smiled at Edna, encouraging her to speak. We very rarely had real conversations, especially at my concerts. Silence seemed to be the best option; indeed, some of my pieces incorporated that very silence into the fabric of the sound world I was trying to recreate through the scoring for various instruments. Instruments both conventional and outlandish. One whole movement of my Siren Suite depended solely on the ambience of the audience and concert hall. Each cough was an audience-inspired moment.  Even farting.

Still, the intervals allowed more scope for non-art communication. We could shift away from the pretentious modes of stony-faced listening and become less self-conscious and less stylised.

“Have you thought about using a flat iron?” she asked.

“For what?” I was half-listening to her, whilst trying to catch the eye of one of my faithful sponsors. A sponsor who was deaf, but seemed to enjoy patronising penniless composers like me. I wanted some more backing. But my heart melted. I was in a good mood. I had actually replied to Edna’s question, albeit with another question. I may have said it or I may have thought I said it, viz:

“As a percussion instrument?”

I smiled again. Two smiles in one evening were unheard of, but I instinctively had pricked up my ears at the suggestion of a flat iron. I actually tried to extend the audit trail of the conversation, much as a viola often does in conventional String Quartets.

“You mean hitting it with a metal hammer?”  I could actually hear the chunky clink inside the bone basin that served as a container for my brain. All composers, I guess, have these strange ideas and words for feelings they feel about their own body. Only ordinary people think of the head merely as a head. There’s something special about artists in all walks of art, or they wouldn’t be artists at all. Even one’s limbs became ownerless appendages, given the all-consuming force of art that takes over the mind as well as the body. Still, Edna was a simple soul. I never really troubled her with these preoccupations.  She had enough to cope with, being so fat.

“Do you know what a flat iron really is?” she asked, with a mischievous look about her. I stopped staring at a woman in a low-slung ball gown (you didn’t often get those at avant garde concerts) who was tackling a huge cocktail at the Interval bar. I could see what Edna must be driving at. It was quite an arresting thought, and the thought drove out all my wayward desires. A flat iron kept the heat after being left among the red hot coals, kept the heat whilst you ironed the clothes. It didn’t run off electricity. It was an old fashioned way of storing heat. And, so, if it could store heat … the logical continuation of the thought need not be made. Music was just like heat, wasn’t it, a storeable force. So an acoustic musical instrument that could store the music played on it during live music was a brilliant conception. And I owed it all the Edna. I gave her a peck on the cheek.

We would have made love that night, had the second half of the concert gone to plan or even just followed the example of the first half. But there were several illnesses that beset the audience during the abrasive coughing movement of my Aubergine Dreams for French Horn and Prepared Piano. The after-shocks and echoes that had been pent up all evening in the sound-box of the hall’s rafters suddenly erupted with full force and rained down plaster (some claimed it was asbestos) upon the audience, Edna and myself included.

She had scowled at the state of my shirt’s detachable collar and I could sense she imagined the terrible creases of its tail. But love is often tantalisingly unattainable — although my dreams, later that night, homed in on the woman in the ballgown at the bar. Edna’s flat iron was entirely forgotten for a long sleep of complete bliss as I dreamed of better leaner fish in better deeper seas.   Edna was only indeed one such dream that only sometimes escaped into the real world outside of dreams…….

I was rudely woken in the morning by screeching seagulls and car klaxons betokening a new day, new accidents, new encounters, new sound systems and dustcarts clanging as they collected the world’s rubbish. I washed and shaved in a daze, and then I pulled on my scored wrinkles, without even a single thought for my erstwhile young body thus wrapped up in them. Irons have sharps, as well as flats, you see. 

A END

***

A WEB ACROSS THE DOOR

As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

He didn’t even comb his night-strewn hair. His face was not ugly, nor was it handsome. His figure was without even a sign of portly or lean.

His clothes were drabber than they were smart; so drab the darkness could hide them in further folds of themselves. His voice picked out words from silence, words which meant little more than the creaks of the floorboards. His touch was like touching one of my own hands with the other. I put him down to nothing but a haunting thought – or, perhaps, at least, the ghostly residue of some man who had once anciently been an infant chimney-sweep since become a man.

When I reached the top, I looked back to see his back backing off down the stairwell, disappearing into nothingness — if something could disappear that was never there in the first place.

I lowered myself into half-a-kneel, half-a-bend, all mixed with a crumpled crouch, and picked up from the tousled stair carpet a loose strand that must have floated there from his head of night-strewn hair. I held it closer to my child-young eyes and watched it scribble like the filmic interference on old celluloid, in shapes of words that meant nothing to my childish mind beyond their mere audibility as softest carpet-slipper sounds.

”What you doing dear?” asked my mother, as her tall figure half-filled the slanting yellow shaft of her half-opened bedroom door.

”Following myself up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire,” I said as pipingly plaintive as possible. After all, I had a childish image to maintain.

“Don’t be a soppy and go to bed. It’s high time, darling, you were in dream land.”

My mother’s voice was the only one that could hold sweetness as well as righteous anger.
I dropped the hair that wasn’t there. I let out my lungs with breath blacker than the sooty air and sucked in a new draught, one that was tinged with the yellowness still left there by my mother’s now extinguished light from her now shut bedroom door.

I was suddenly a child again, one that no longer needed any childishness to remain my mother’s darling. But upon reaching the door of my erstwhile childhood lair, I found it wasn’t there. Only a mop of hairy air. 

Just like any woman,…we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It’s all the same.” 
― Francesca Lia Block

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/disconnected-miniatures-3-by-d-f-lewis.html