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.