Post-gestalt fictions (11)

 THE IMPROPER GANDER

Dalena stared back at herself in the mirror quietly intoning phrases like ‘hold your horses’ and ‘whiffling through the broad leaves’ — and ‘a sure opportunity for helicopters’, the latter being, for her, a brand new out-loud recitation of a poetic earworm as an unwitting portal. She scrutinised her own face for scars, but instead of those haunted sutures to which she had grown accustomed as a language of her life that had been writ large enough throughout the decades, the face itself was now relatively clear of scars or any nicks at all. A perceived process that seemed to be working in reverse since the wormhole’s era of what many people called the Big Change. This was similar to the losing of memories: a natural sea-change that old age eventually brought. The ghostliness of backroom staff in the hinterland of the brain, left unspoken.

The opposite of proper is not improper, as the latter tends to indicate a sort of human perversion rather than a reversal of what is proper in the actual scheme of reality itself.  Dalena now whispered ‘what is bad for the goose is bad for the gander’, which seemed to pervert the alliterative resonance of the original homily. These words indeed seemed to constitute an impulsive rebellion against the power that onomatopoeia wielded as a means of semantic cut-through — or was it  simply a spell of indoors weather?  Finally, she spoke, more loudly, more defiantly, more insistently, without repeating herself as an incantatory refrain: ‘Goodbye, Dalena’. And she left the mirror’s jurisdiction for the chores of the day. 

Who had got her gander, and was he still in the so-called lady’s chamber? Whetheroriginally upstairs or downstairs, Dalena could never relocate the whereabouts of such a regal boudoir, although the attic spaces she knew had by now spread above her were left unexplored. And as she heard the churn of many rotor blades circling her roofless mansion, she failed to intone the only words she knew would work against their noisily pervasive spell of spinning locks and barrels. Without even one hook, line or sinker between them.  

She realised, by now, that her voice had vanished, along with all her facial scars, and what she had last spoken out loud would prevail forever, the sound of which would also be lost forever, too. 

***

SAVELOY

Many people thought Jack to be a theatrical lovey of the most precious variety, acting out all sorts of ghostly mysteries just for show, but recently he, as the darling of his audience, had come to terms with the thought that every turning of fate, in a series of stages in one’s life, was not a free choice, but  a pre-determined one. 

Today was not a lovely one for any darling of stage or screen, as he stared at the ugly helicopter the shiny, sharply shivered blades of which would soon be spinning with the offlandish sound of loudly frictionless churning, a sound fit to grind down the bravura of even Honoré de Veil himself. A foreshortened helix to be opted for by the outline of ears alone, as the stumps — that his legs now felt like — were set to stumble aboard because he simply needed to go somewhere faster than any other semi-exorcists in the days of gridlock and panic  that preceded Big Change. Not that he knew about the latter’s future alternation in existence then.

Jack waved at the ghostly face of Anne now staged as a picture of sorrow at their home’s window screen, a shuddering pink shape of features behind real net curtains to replace the false ones, an aperture also denuded of shutters as the neo-defenestration laws had by now forced on all who needed to be spied on. Not that bricks were easier to divert seeing through than glass, but who knew what the next docketed stage would be after the issuing  of Dalena Mirrors as ways and means of providing concealed rearviews without the need to turn the human head. Periscopes as flat devices to replace the very windows themselves. Blinkers as optional extras. A saveloy just a common law to encourage buffers (or filter baffles) to rescue the existence of a building’s rudely vestigial plumbing that made urban photography the highly focused force of art it was truly meant to be.

Jack now noticed Anne’s window veils were already scarred and torn like net stockings by tinier, barely visible rotors that echoed those of the mother copter, and he equally feared that the tips of the bigger blades atop the now veering vehicle that he was about to board were within touching distance more than just to decimate the whole building let alone just blindly widen the few windows that the walls still managed to maintain against the odds around Anne’s last scored vestige of a face.

 The rotors’ clatters shattered the shuttered silence with a sudden disregard for narrative piety. No way was the next change of paragraph a deliberate choice any more. Nor was the narrative to end where it actually did end, with the marching crowds in the urban byways sensing a significant paragraph change towards a longer history of our times, if not a change helped through an even bigger one triggered by plagues or politics. They indeed became tantamount to a dystopia mob salivating over hot dogs in mustard buns rather than a singularly theatrical chorus with wands of Elgar, as they now uttered muddled screams a few of which, when merged, sounded — under the harsh clattering above — like ‘Jack is a lovey!’ Munch munch.