POST-GESTALT FICTIONS (15)

 THE STICKINESS

Joy, oh, joy, no mix of different names to conjure with. Just someone before whom we bow our heads and address as ‘Your Stickiness’. The Real Mucky, if not McCoy. Possibly both at once. A great belief in the slow half-by-half motion of Zeno’s Paradox that shall become an antidote to the Tontine syndrome from which we have all suffered heretofore. The latter condition being a straight upward decline, killing all in our wake for the amassed treasure inherited upon each of such killings, leaving us eventually at the top of the mountainous pyramid that soon fades out into Cone Zero.

Why say ‘us’ when I really mean ‘me’? Just a figure of speech, a collusive shedding of guilt upon all whose shoulders I have stood and then crushed. If they’re dead, why matters it that they should adopt the guilt that should have been mine? Still, with some shock, I realise that the pronoun ‘us’ still applies, and I have not yet killed YOU! There is no room for two of us at the tipping point of reaching the top. All pronouns are so slippery these days, so interchangeable as a caprice or a confident purpose, so equivocal as a shake of a used duster or an honourable right. But little did I know that the toggle-switch of ‘us’ and ‘me’ has been singled out as the most momentous polarity of all. For all of us, not just a few. But the few have now become two, in the most hideous rhyme of all. Half of a half, but on whose latest behalf?  Glaciers calving. Dying Earth reviving. Who knows the repercussions of altering fate?

Miniatures clot together like skin and blood, while tinier feet than mine slow down. I feel I am alone, watching bodiless things still climbing in my wake, some just with empty clogs as a means for being feet and nothing else to see as being ‘them’ at all. I seem to hear the sound of drums, violins and flutes, but nothing that appears to be able to actually make such music. The more normal strains of a string quartet are merely yesterday’s feat of achievement. I gurn at nothing but myself, with no mirror to check either way. Then a mere sticky whisper in my ear that is you. Read on, dear friend. More miniatures may apply, but Real McCoys need not. This is just a disposable prelude to a greater goo to come. Cloy, oh, cloy.

***

WALLOP GAP

This is just a staging post, which must say something about its as yet unreached and unwritten ending. Indeed, the party of Paradoxers struggled through the salt marshes, ever slowly seeking, as was their wont, rare conundrums and other false plurals. Oxymorons were in short supply, and next to no Sherpas at all, so they had to manage their own soft luggage breathlessly in short relays of way-stations. The harder edged suitcases had been forwarded days before for a shilling apiece, so at least that kept one hand free for each  of them to negotiate the unbalanced horizons that thrived thereabouts. The progress was so draining they had to imagine they were trotting or cantering, not wading. Never at a standstill at all.  Dizzy was not a word they allowed, and giddy was eked out as abstemiously as their slow-witted facetiousness to each other. They thought they were heading towards Watford, but at least one of them argued it was a place called Wallop, while, in fact, they were all wrong: the hub of their search was a town called St Osyth in Essex. Glimpses of the sea and the tall mast of a pirate radio ship gave some sort of game away as to where they really were. But none had yet taken the clue, and weighed it against the tuning bar of the wireless that the only woman among them trundled in a trolley behind her, its barely serviceable wheels often getting semi-stuck in the mulchy salt of the earth.  More like a toy than a real trolley. The wireless being the party’s only means of communication, one-way inward, never out. And the signal often wavered, like their purpose itself. The fact that it was Radio Wallop broadcasting on a local channel seemed to prove earlier assumptions had been misplaced. They scorned each other’s  dependence on each other, in this tiresome trudge towards a goal that would last long enough for any ageing memory to barely reach. They gazed through a gap in the high marram grasses and discerned, despite the gluey gloom, the radio mast, now a bit nearer and swaying from side to side. No rhyme or reason to it. None of them knew it was a ship. So they they thought it was the appalling land itself tilting, soft but hardened enough to lurch like a wind-tossed deck, as they waited for whatever history would write about as the wallop to end all such wallops of tectonic uncertainty. They had to re-invent words to describe a sense of their nauseous vertigo. To create rhymes and anagrammatic concatenations. Gawp at a pall of gallop: the major catchphrase or call sign that they misheard from between the static gaps of static — together with an ill-tuned word for tireless. 

***

PIANO RAG

The Ilium was shining on the opposite side of the blue to the sun, and, like many of us, I wondered if it had living entities on board. Perhaps we would never know whether it would run its fingers along our keys briefly and then soar off into the wide black yonder whence it came. A test run, a tinkling with stars, and our lives would continue as before, perhaps with any memory of it erased, hence the haste with which I record this about the Ilium for posterity. Yet, who knows, it may be able to wipe clean even the print of indelible ink upon insoluble paper — while it otherwise needed the future-proofing of the fact that it came, it saw, it conquered and had not, in truth, gone without a single trace. Itself valuing its own indelibility.

We all still nursed our own chronic debility after Big Change, some symptoms of which were distilled by our blinkered denial into the single expression of Long Rhapsody. A malady to which we set a melody, Hankies at the ready to mop our brows from the unforgiving sweat of everything  against which we tried to block our minds, we felt we felt as good as new, little knowing certain churlish powers centring on the indefinable Ilium had their own giant duster to show how house proud they were about potential landing places to colonise. A good clean up before they dared set ‘foot’. We heard the riffled chords upon even dustier pianos that we had forgotten to store safely. An improvisation of cunning durability. And, also, the clatter of broken keys that were beyond repair. But, evidently, once they were cleaned, they would serve a different purpose as yet unknown. Even fittings such as  rests for music scores had cans of Brasso applied to them by those of us requisitioned to carry out such a job for who- or whatever made it a priority. A slow job, a long drawn-out series of dabs and rubs, more sticky than otherwise. It was like wading through invisible glue. But we persevered. Still do.

Imagine our apocryphal frustration when the Ilium vanished without closure for our endeavours as well of for any sign of its own retrospective trace. I was not the only one of us who lost our tempers before we lost our memories. Lost our rags, too.

***

ROCOCO

More playful than Baroque, it depends on what side of creation’s hard-edged design you’re on. Allow me to wish in your shell-like that you pay heed — namely, the entirety they called the Rhombus, whom a few of us called the messiah, and others called a wayward creature, was no geometrician at all, and even algebra was quite out of range for such a brain reared solely upon an arithmetic without any alphabetical letters to represent numbers. Having been steeped in the three Rs (Reading, Rioting and Rococo), our Rhombus figure knew where its own angles were placed but not the nails on its fingers and toes. Its own ‘it’ being what it’s like to be a real creature turned critter whereby it nurtures paws instead of any furcated fingers or toes at all, so it is then hard to count to ten let alone twenty. One needs hard, not soft, joints or appendages to be able to succeed in even a single math. An invisible forked tongue needed by it, though, with which to discuss the differences between trapezium, parallelogram, oblong, various -agons and the basic shape as its own namesake. Yes, this Rhombus took verging on an eternity to move its shoulders and sides into another configuration, and an average human lifetime would not have noticed the difference in the shape of its empty territory between the narrowest of barely moveable margins, while figurative halves relentlessly split each other into further halves as followed serially by the near infinitesimal bite-sizes of a rogue median of humanity’s lifespan rather than its average leverage between an initial foot in the door of creation and its forced exodus elsewhere. Rococo was the keyword with its meaning’s whorls and curlicues replacing any sane geometry upon which Euclid prospered. And the battle still proceeds slowly as sin, the Rhombus flags ever mustering on the brow of the hill against the rioting marauders with algebraic letters as insignia, an imprimatur of design that constitutes — by employment of such letters as words — this very soft-headed portrayal  of the aforementioned battle’s onset of affray. You can see what side I’m on! Ago, ago, agone.

***

FORTIFIED

The Rhombus was a far call from a perfectly round Forty-Five Single of the old gramophone days. The disc I had in mind was old enough to have its middle punched out to fit a juke-box turntable once  it had  been laid there with a silent clatter by a moving elbow that had been triggered into action after a customer dropped a shilling into a slot for the chosen song that the disc’s grooves diligently carried for conversion into sound. The shape that was our hero in geometric form  looked askance at its own akimbo sides and angles, aching to emulate the circle its first experience the seeing of which circle was embodied in the chosen disc that plopped rather than clattered to the spinning mat. A silent plopping by dint of the juke-box’s fortified encasement within a semi-globe of glass. A whole shuttling wheel of other discs’ edges also revolved in breathless unison as it prepared for the next choice determined by another customer with shilling, or bob as it was then called, grasped in a grubby hand belonging to a young lad who had been abandoned by his guardians in a corner of the establishment with an orangeade and packet of Smiths Crisps complete with a blue crinkly tourniquet of salt. He thought the salt was the best part of the evening’s experience, and as he untwisted its tiny crumpled mitten, he saw this salt sparkling with its own geometric shapes that he imagined, via the magnifying microscope of his mind, to be minuscule ghosts — each beating a rhythm  to the Twist of Chubby Checker that was now being played, followed by Juke Juke of Earl, and finally Blue Moon by the Marcels. A circle always was the eventual winner, as we watched the real and only ghost vanish back into the sides and angles of its own deeply cross-hatched shades whereby corners bred more corners, or lines of draught pieces in squares. And later this ghost abruptly ballooned shut till it was ready to haunt the lad again. The newly fortified silence was broken only by the crunching of crisps being a gentler form of beef joints cracking their bones late at night in otherwise empty butcher shops. Pork bits crackling, too. He waited with the Patience of Zeno for his guardians to reclaim him. The question remained, meantime, regarding the nature of the shadowy third that seemed to have chosen a disc, too, but which of the three discs was it? Flat on its B-side waiting for a  pick-up at best to play it or at next best to rescue it to the still shuttling wheel. Each spiral of grooves instinctively aching for invention of a stylus that could quietly jump the onset of surface cracks. Little did they know.

***

POLYGLOT

The Rhombus ghost, an entity of straight lines and angles, used several tongues even if they were all figurative tongues in its hazy communication with those of us on Earth that it opted to haunt. The bright bone-shaped Ilium, meanwhile, often returned to hang in our mostly blue sky for long sporadic periods, as if any entities within it knew that we still had no knowledge of who they were. Though, it was hinted from various sources controlled by the Rhombus that they were like us but in an overnatural form. Whether we would notice the differences from us should the Ilium land remained to be seen. We were sure, though, that it was more than just a simple Trojan horse. 

We claimed to be the salt of the earth and our own survey said that the Ilium also carried minuscule minerals inexplicably known as optics. Only a polyglot could interpret the nuances of such changes of meaning in otherwise common words as pilfered from between the camouflaged mountweazles in our otherwise traditional dictionaries. A digital apology, a godly agility, too, with dogtail or pigtail as the stars in their wake. Gladioli in bunches ready as our welcome to whatever the Ilium transported. We were blinded by the huge shape, as eventually, now in our own real time, the Ilium lowered to brow level, its moving lights being upon the brink of the nth power of encounter with us natural denizens of Earth. Yet we sense they, whoever they were, were overnatural, while the Rhombus, their sole reconnaissance agent already planted among us, was merely supernatural by dint of its near-invisibility as four mathematical lines with angles. Just an amalgam of made-up words inserted surreptitiously into our dictionaries to prevent plagiarism by doppelgängers.  Figuratively speaking. 

The craft had landed. It looked disappointingly makeshift close-up, once its lights were extinguished. Cobbled together, custom built by unagile analog means. With streamers at its tail that seemed made of human or animal hair. We dropped our glad bouquets of welcome, and started sneering at its ungodly amateurishness as an invading force. It was not even disguised as a wooden horse, though the streamers perhaps were meant to be mistaken as its tail! When the clunky door lifted up as if in an old movie, we jeered even more. But the door’s lift became painstakingly slow, indeed almost coming to a glottal stop, and we are still stuck there today watching it open.

***

A FRACTAL FATALITY

“Eh eh, hold your horses!” he said ending with hisses, this being his customary catchphrase of naive surprise. Spoken to no person in particular, but maybe to the gods above who he imagined might be watching him. Jack gazed around in every direction as he gradually saw a still evolving pattern of landed Iliums, all so impressive and shining like sleek bones when they haunted the blue sky, now ditched and decrepit contraptions with large wheels upon wheels and an endlessly slow opening of what appeared to be wooden doors.  Yet, despite their ugly exteriors, the shapes when in silhouette made them seem in unskewed configurations of mathematics that straightened out any irregular features into a stricter format of tessellation. From above, when viewed by drones, they would show as lop-sided rhombuses, but from below where Jack stood, they became fractious certainties, ghosts with straight edges and black middles. “Is futility ever finished?” Jack wondered to himself, more in hope than expectation.. 

It was only when he got closer he saw their wear and tear. He, too, in later real-time, was silently entranced by one of them and its ceremony of perpetual slow-motion as a vehicle with a door of possible exit, or indeed entrance. No longer his expletive of wooden horses being held, simply a fatal flaw in human attention-spanning that allowed through a re-enacted vision of a broken bridge between birth and death. We never knew the whereabouts of the gaps in its structure so that we could avoid falling through mid-span. And there was a mind-spinning, too, with a giddiness that trustily guided Jack rather than beguiled him. A spinning that made a perfectly whole silhouette from grains that otherwise gurned as they continued to granulate. Calf Art it would be called once the Iliums’ herds emerged in order to call anything anything at all. Their moos as an overarching muse as a maze within a fractal of others like it. Bridges with no abridgements nor aberrations as glottal stops. 

“Is fatality ever final?” he wondered aloud, now uncharacteristically using an over-sophisticated wordiness with further fancy fricatives as a filigree of style, all spoken alongside an eventernal consciousness of equine equations that balanced out any yays nays and ehs in  the otherwise engrained battle of hope and despair as overseen by a shadowy third called expectation.

***

CROCODILE TEARS

There was no denying it, the Iliums or makeshift Trojan Horses, as they may have been seen to be, had been landed here to stay forever, but it also appears that we shall never know their purpose as the crafts’ doors stubbornly fail to open while remaining in a permanent status of painstakingly opening up, with minuscule miniatures of gap between door and frame building upon previous ones. It surely would eventually open up sufficiently to allow whatever was within to slither forth. Although ‘slither’, when it finally transpires, may be discovered the wrong description altogether. There were rumours of mooing noises coming from within, even a bleat or two, and our minds began to shift from crafts to arks. 

Whatever the case, the Iliums presented quite a panoply of dereliction across the widths of Earth, having been previously seen as sleekly geometrical in the skies above. As if their perfect lines without any width at all had become algebraic letters employed to create the clunky words that we used to continue describing their phenomenon, including what is designed here to be read about them in real-time. For example  the word ‘rhombus’ is ugly, while its meaning as a clean uncluttered shape made from lines and emptiness inside such lines was immaculate even if, to our human eyes, we sensed the shape strangely lop-sided and emanating ghostly qualities. 

We should get our story straight, and iron out any differences of perception  between each miniature stab at describing them. No crocodile tears even if eventually those who are subjected to these tiny ‘histories’ should leave confused and shrugging their own shoulders as the doors still continue to open, as if blaming us for what was happening, or not happening. We felt  anyone who took the bother or had the privilege to actually read our descriptions were suspicious, in any event, and had agendas of their own, and wanted to be in ‘at the kill’, rather than us, hence their crocodile tears. Arks are close to Ask, and all they needed to do was open their jaws and bare their teeth or grin-and-bear whatever it was they felt they may lose by not staying for the final grand opening, and to simply ask us whether we would allow them to stay and share the glory with us upon the cusp of the tiniest moment of opening that would shift an imperceptible width to make the doors able at that very point to be deemed fully open enough to allow the Iliums’ crew members to disembark….

The tears, meanwhile, were not those of crocodiles and are turning out to be somehow connected to being part of our very descriptions. Discovering themselves complicit in this way must have discombobulated them to such an extent as they had to remain in order to make our descriptions true, and thus giving hope to the human race that the inhabitants of the Iliums were rescuers not destroyers. Once they shrugged their shoulders and left the scene, the whole of this description’s verisimilitude would collapse like a disused circus tent. A notch in every pole that once held up its canvas representing a trapezium accident.

Because they never did leave. They eventually became part of us. Party to creating the descriptions, not being described by the descriptions. Never to be differentiated again. Examining our communal teardrops under microscopes for evidence of sincerity. The Iliums’ now serrated shapes, come the only remembered nightfall, are now fast turning into jagged lines, around yawning spaces of white light, terrifying even those of us (indeed most of us) who otherwise saw nightmares into neat acceptable segments. 

POST-GESTALT FICTIONS (14)

 DOWNSTREAM

The argument went this far, and thus far only. On a positive note, an upstream or overstream entailed no backstream at all, no tired old characters, no wilting ghosts, no exhumed monsters, indeed, this was a turning of a page to something far more tangible than even Andy Warhol paintings as physical objects. Recast as miniatures in dress-brooches or tiny wall-frames. Tins of soup, canisters of brass polish and unsprinkable salt-cellars had now become silkscreen images that did not exist other than flat-out as lifted paint on porous surfaces. The actual framed results, though, could in turn be lifted as discrete things-in-themselves, wagged and wiggled about, then inspected with single eyepieces. But once upon a time such methods of materials-handling and heat-exchange took human hands to accomplish; later in history, with controllable claws of metal cranes or mobile vices on wheels. But, even more recently, it was easier with manoeuvres of an Ai’s robotic jaws or padded paws instead of gloves with hollow slots for fingers and thumbs. The manipulation of miniatures now derives not from manipulation, but from surface to surface tensions. Friction grazing friction, with sense data sandwiched between. Churlish Tontine couldn’t have made it up, even if he since developed the imaginative ability to retrospectively airbrush his unlikely name first.

He was, in fact, the last nameless person left standing. Then handled and lifted bodily to a prizewinner’s plinth made from concrete bricks no larger than Lego ones. It was a sort of domino rally, with a single domino left upright after the first one was tipped over and he was that very domino. Downstream or upstream, the rally’s ranks did teeter dangerously closer but he never looked back. Remaindered as a specimen of what a human being had been and put in a miniature museum along with other antique items of Pop Art to match in scale. Were humans and their artefacts always that tiny when compared to what or whom? Inevitably a rhetorical question disguised as an empty probe within an endlessly muffled pause.

***

MENDICANT

It was a tabletop land where TC lived with his now reversed but still forgotten names, literally a surface for Bridge and other simpler games like Old Maid and Beggar Your Neighbour. Tarot sessions, too. There was enough leg space beneath it, even for his long ones.  A liminal space, where he imagined his apprentice amanuenses to thrive, these words perhaps written by one of them. But somehow the actual scope of what was happening seemed beyond any words whatsoever. A waking lucidity disguised as a superdream that grappled overnaturally with bigger issues than just the surface situation of certain things falling away one by one leaving the essential thing-in-itself victorious as reaper of all the meanings — not only of its own singular meaning. A Lego model as a plea for being released into a prehensile existence. This was a taunting tontine for words, not for people. It was not even a tontine of Darwinian selection as the essential opting for a supernature. A knock-out contest  without strict parameters of heats, quarterfinals et al. A Swiftian parascaling of Man and Monster.  Each tarted-up playing card trumped by the next shuffle and cut.

A knock-on effect of massing hordes, bleating herds, bleeding chunks, whereupon TC assumed that beggars can’t be choosers, not even counted as medicines to be decanted or to merge into a flabby Earth-ball with which to exercise and play catch. The long and the short of it was preternaturally leg-over, as he became ill-tempered enough to climb down a strut of the foldable table to kill the particular bosscat among the many other aspirant hirelings for the opportunity to write this about him with such a nefarious lack of clarity. Indeed, there remained a hive of so many suspect amanuenses down there with various types of pens to choose from to morph his nibs.  And all these upcasts forthwith scrawled ‘Spartacus!’ with a composite quill on a singular card. A curse for any tontine worth its salt. 

***

MORIBUND

CT had his initials corrected by re-reversal, it seemed, and, under this new shortening of his nomenclature, he searched for the bosscat so as to curtail the source of the infestation. A spanner, though, he needed, to turn it full circle until the squealing sound was truncated into piercing pinpoints of silent light, alongside slower revolutions of the round tabletop. A tocsin reversed, just as his own still forgotten name was only recalled by its consonant plosives of initial engagement by needle and groove. The C was plainly a plosive by dint of being pronounced like a K when affixed to the rest of the word it ignited. The T was already thus triggered even when left alone without the rest of its body.  A tontine of letters striving for the winning zenith of semantic meaning without revealing what letters they were! 

He felt his way into corners of cards which had been masked by such corners’ use as scrapbook affixings, just like snapshots in photo albums, except these were stylised pics of royalty and jokers. One of the latter splayed moribund, as if asphyxiated by clamping so close to its own image. CT knew he was nearer to finding the bosscat, but he almost enjoyed being made to feel moribund himself, wilting like any ghosts used to be when he hunted them instead of seeking spanner fodder. He grasped his brute force instrument of turn and torque in case he met anyone who turned ugly enough to have their heads screwed off. Until he was disarmed by the charms of two women called Barbara and Hannah, who remained important enough to remember their forenames at least, still alive and kicking somewhere. At first CT suspected they were agents of the bosscat, for which both women were eager to keep such a secret clamped down on its steampunk urgings to escape by any valve it could find.  Any trunk or local calls on whatever technopunk equipment that happened to come to hand.

Hannah had the prettiest palindrome, and nothing could be feared to lurk there, under plain bolt or grooved. Barbara however had to bear the burden of an approximate Abracadabra, and this stress showed on her face. They managed to talk, however, as if they were nearly human. In shortened temper, CT scrutinised their demeanours while blocking their ear-shrill tintones; he sought the incognito shadows behind them for unlikely skirting-boards that had cartoon arches over-neatly cut into them large enough to hold rats or small cats. Even Dumbo hid somewhere, he guessed, perhaps within the word where he started writing above in predictive parallel with precisely simultaneous events. The scariest tontine of all is the one that nobody notices, until it is too late to worry.

***

GURNING

It was inevitable that Barbara would hold one of her knit and natter sessions as soon as settling into a new community after, on the face of it, a fracas with a cat at her previous property. She loved pets of all kind, so it was ironic her being driven from home by a single puss, but it had eyes like grooved spirals and paws padded beyond their means. Who had wrapped the latter was anyone’s guess, and nobody is even trying.

The ladies’ casting-on and -off of needles’ stitches still wrapping back on them, till the knitted fabrics grew under the gentle onslaught of fingers. And between times the so-called breathe-holes of looser areas, where the plain and purl had merged, began to create tiny gurning faces which would later be carried over into the intended garments even when someone wore them as normal jumpers or cardigans. Bending and bowing of bodies making the holes in the unshapely surfaces even more noticeable. Holes that needed the torque and bite of mending. Or so Barbara feared, as she listened to the chittering ladies while they clicked their needles as a coda before leaving under a cloud of social unease. Because, in a  corner, was one man with a folded umbrella who incredibly seemed to be adeptly creating a 3D pyramid of knitting. He had initially chauntered on about something he called a nematode from which he suffered badly and then about morling or shorling wool, the former as shorn from dead sheep, the latter from live. But he had since put his face where his self-evident skills were and not where his mouth was. A stunning totem of ancient Egypt made with its own deliberate air-holes that literally breathed in and out as if alive, unlike the accidental gaps knitted by the nattering ladies. He had whiskers he wagged and long since he had changed chauntering to mewing as a model for dignified silence, while gradually the other knitters held their breath or had it taken away by the sight of what he actually extruded from his neatened rows of tiny knots unknown to sane knitting, even while the ladies themselves were now tatting more successfully despite the sound of their mouths tutting explosively. An atonal music of renewed intent as derived from a cross-purpose series of crochets and ravelled lace.

Barbara took one last look at the inscrutable man whose own evolving face was now being darned on a wooden mushroom as stitched by a series of different expressions, all of them unreadable.

***

THE RAZUMOVSKY QUARTETS

Nothing to do with a Corrida Call, but the viola player Barbara shouted Olé at the end of playing the 3rd string quartet that evening in a packed hall near what was once called Madrid. She and the other three players then took a deserved bow after such a magnificent performance of what had became their trademark inspiration of the world’s ears. Each time seemed more powerful than the last. Talk about practice makes perfect. Not that they needed actually to practise at all, merely to travel from town to town throughout the expanse that was once called the EU and then, each time, give it their guts with gusto as well as with  more gentle aplomb inside the finite space of  whatever venue had been booked for them. She gazed at her three compatriots in music, Hannah a bolted-down palindrome of a person, and a young bearded man who remained nameless with the other three never really knowing much about him other than as someone else’s long-term replacement who kept himself to himself  and, to complete the foursome, an older man who was once well known as a cellist but he had the nickname, for whatever reason, of ‘Cat Stevens’, his real name having been shoved off into even more lost rhymes of reason and past time. Perhaps shyness, or qualms about his previous performances casting a shadow over his new ones. 

Cat the Captured one was often a headline in the English newspapers when the quartet performed in English speaking countries. In Spain, however, none of them spoke Spanish, except one of their roadies who only got an E in Spanish A level. His T shirt today bore the words ‘Corrida Call’, and nobody knew why, and nobody dared ask why, as roadies generally could be very strict with their secrets, and why the words were in English not Spanish was yet another mystery. Their whole set-up had made a speciality of Beethoven’s three ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets, such music having this as its own nickname the derivation of which by-passed scrutiny other than by the most assiduous of music historians.  They had never performed in Russia, and probably now, they never would. Even the countries had their own nicknames, and history was swallowing up the original ones as well as their flags, and hardly anybody studied history anymore for fear of what they might read.

Spain was still its own nickname. And bulls snorted olé at every turn of the next century along. The applause died down, as the four string players left the stage, each a picador when the demands  of  pizzicato called for pointy fingernails. Next time they hoped to play Ravel. Barbara returned to the stage as the lights in the whole place dimmed and she thought of what had just happened. She relished her own religious space. One of the apprentice roadies dismantling the music stands hummed Matthew & Son to himself. No residual earworm from the Beethoven performance for him. Who knows with what label the next Messiah will be nicknamed? Watch out for red flags and then, if need be, seek advice, they say, especially where there is no option but self-diagnosis at the initial stages of any disease. Once let snorting out of their pens, even words have their own nicknames to hide real identities and meanings. Barbara and Hannah often called their cultivated fingernails horns. And the quartet’s bearded stand-in often seemed to want to get too close for comfort. Barbara now left the empty dark stage to see where Hannah was hiding.  Nothing was plain sight these days as human customs now cowered within the latest ravelled loophole of frontiers, borders, grey areas and no-man’s-lands — or down within the echoey corridors even further down which the talented and famous had once walked safe from physical harassment if not perfectly immune to any subliminal interferences phoned through to them from above. Their names now forgotten. Even Beethoven’s.

***

CONVOLVULUS

An invasive plant but with enviably trumpeted bloom, this was designed upon one of the cards in a pack of others depicting images in a game called Pyramids leading to a certain goal of scaling the eventually smoothed-out sides of a towering cone looking down from its very peak. Out of bindweed erubescens, to reach a nirvana of zero at its spiritual heights of projected convolvulescence was the winining goal for each player, when a Corrida Cri-de-Coeur would ring forth with an explosive strength quite beyond any combined distillation of its even louder echoes. Not an Olé as such but more an unguent called Olay. Blended from the eponymous plant from which we started this fanfare of words. Not a farrago anymore but now an offshoot of the great big cheese in Heaven sitting under a huge red flag that managed to flap from airlessness..

The members of the String Quartet and its roadies played the game together during the interludes between concerts. Not the interlude dividing each half of a single concert, when the audience could cough its heart out with impunity. But the interludes of travel between specific concert venues. The cellist usually reached the top of the tontine first, but was churlish in victory. Even more churlish than he would have been with discovering a cheat or his own defeat. However, his skills, he considered, were with the deep scrape of ‘art’ and the more intimate niches within, not the mere fickle laughter of players overplaying their trump cards. Yet these skills gave him a secret pride, and a desire to progress to playing a double bass as the bosscat towering over the others, thus standing up on his huge hind legs while he bowed. 

The second violinist was uncomfortably silent. The first violinist, also, was too self-possessed as she stared at her own lap, as she felt past and future performances with a violin tucked under her chin, its base throbbing from the bow’s passage across the strings while it rested upon a crushed hankie that had already mopped up any residues of bodily fluid once escaping the drying qualities of the ointment she earlier used on such occasions, having itself left a visible trail in her wake. The cellist was never close enough to know the ins and out of essential oils — a mystery beyond any intricacies of the names given for otherwise easier gynaecological reference. Till the glory of an ever approaching morning intervened. Some of the card players would soon be off to a prearranged meeting of their cocktail murder club.

‘Olé!’ shouted one of the roadies with the onset of dizziness as a sign of victory, while the others’ minds were elsewhere with fundamentals as well as the inwardly practised notes of a future concert. This brought our pianissimo miniature to an equally abrupt conclusion as a ‘dying fall’ — itself a coda rather than an insistence upon having the last word.

***

CORRIDA CALL

The viola player now knew what being alone felt like. Upon a surprisingly sufficient plot of land to accommodate her resting position and squashed legs, surprising because it formed, she assumed, what would appear from the ground to be the pointed peak of a huge mountain. She was surrounded by a so far silent fog. It had started off as the rising sun’s reddish mist amid the dew of dawn. The means by which she had reached there she knew was uncertain. Above all, she felt alone, because there was no sign of her viola. During her lifetime she had never been without this antique instrument since being gifted to her by a rich uncle when she was a four years old. And she could remember next to nothing before then.

However, she seemed to have been left with a pen and a crossword puzzle to complete. Pens were called pens because they were fenced enclosures for words the narrow gate of which you opened now and them to eke out its denizens one by one to express what you needed to express, like lancing a boil and then pushing out slowly what was harboured within it. A boil, she thought, not any similar sounding word she had first thought of before dreaming up such a wayward analogy. Some words were red flags for the more dangerous elements within them, i.e. meanings that, if one released them, would mean more than they were ever meant to mean. 

She always carried a red hankie ready to tuck under her chin when she was called to play her viola at a moment’s notice of spontaneous need to do so. This redness of prop seemed to work well, and, as well as being a cushion for the rump of the viola as an overgrown fiddle, this hankie had also become her gimmick or trademark during an illustrious career as a member of a string quartet that toured every country under the sun, even here in the region of the Pyrenees. Performing spiky strains of Xenakis as well the more welcoming depths of Beethoven. And she guessed it was in the Pyrenees where she still travelled, having originally set out to walk around the area, and to take in the scenic views, before returning to the local area’s hotel so as to share breakfast with the other three players. They were all different people but made the four points of a feasible rhombus through the power of the music they made together. 

So, how had she reached, more than just literally, this point in her life? Alone with a crossword on a mountain. Unsighted and unseen. Pen poised to solve the ‘corrida call’ clue. And now another clue: ‘cardiac railcard’. And then yet another: ‘cloacal collar.’ The valves and spigots of semantics in squared-off compartments. And so the clues emerged, becoming more and more difficult, thrusting and bopping to silent and invisible crowds with chewed-up pencils. Her only hope being that the fog would clear and she would find her way back through more amenable veils and peaks. But the once foggy air now seemed like oily mist among the scrapes of land lower down rather than the earlier dew of dawn over-promising calm for her troubled contemplation. A temper tantrum taking its curtain call as red mist. A crossword made even crosser by a viola’s violation. And her body started to squat itself into a tighter geometry of straitened vales and sudden piques.

***

WALLING

Please treat this as if it is the midpoint or endpoint of a serial. But the question remained — why  did a touring string quartet need as many as twelve muscle-toned roadies. Point blank, nobody among them felt obliged to answer. It was evidently part of the group’s mystery, as mysterious as some of the music they played, like the double-stopping of notes as well as the pointillism of plucking called pizzicato. The four main protagonists out-stared each other when playing, often while masked during the the strains of 2020, but when each curtain was called amidst applause they broke out into the small talk of suspiciously false bonhomie, any airy smiles breaking out whenever the smiles could be seen without barriers and outside walls. 

When the group toured a number of communities in the Swiss Alps, the four players were blindfolded in transit  so that the scenery could not take their figurative breath away nor interfere with the inspiration required when later playing late Beethoven in a church hall. Hence, the roadies acted as a sort of composite tour guide, without the need of the four players to carry white sticks that were invisible anyway because of the snowy conditions. It all made sense at the time, squared off when their routines became more and more rooted — and were later patterned into neat walled-off compartments of intrinsic faith in what they were doing for the sake of their music. A few of the roadies, justifying their roles’ very name, were employed to corner off roads to facilitate private access between mountain passes. The rest of the more musically minded roadies, set up stands and settled scores upon these stands with the pages’ corners turned up for easier, quicker and more reliable turning between notes, without the player’s bows tilting unduly out of true into tangled blinkers preventing sufficient glances of cohesion for the sake of the music.

Once, in the Himalayas, there transpired what was called Chinese Wall Day in the coded parlance between different sections of the roadies. The chief roadie, for example, instinctively realised that the four participants were in ugly moods with each other and needed insulating from their own social intercourse despite the later impulse for a coherent coming together to produce the morning glories of music, as many concerts near Everest were performed for an audience of Sherpas having their breakfasts before shepherding a would-be breed of Tensing and Hillary towards the highest peak as totem of achievement, even as attempts were made to avoid the residual bodies otherwise littering the slopes, these being climbers that had failed to do so. Just a slice of life from beyond the blocking and muting so common today on social media. But often when you open a page by accident, unwelcome music screams forth which you can’t stop other than by rebooting the whole computer to stifle a bleeding chunk of sound that, even now, is panning out beyond the atonal barriers of serialism itself. Finally, in the Pyrenees, an abrupt attack of wailing: a Corrida Curtain Call: a coda to its own ‘dying fall’. 

***

HOPSCOTCH

The quartet eventually had ambitions to climb solo the scales of a musical career, but which of them reached the heights of Cone Zero impugns the other three with some sort of failure, something about which common human feelings should not be hurt, and, indeed, it is often the winner of all laurels who is speared by the sharpest point that is fame. Not necessarily the best in their field of endeavour, but the one who once cultivated those others whose shoulders were stood upon. A hopscotch frame — not the ‘crossword’ of numbers in illateral squares that we chalked out to play the game of that name as children — but a pyramid of wedge-shaped staging-posts with a mathematical sequence of numbers within each of them, a serial of series quite beyond the ken of modern brains. Coefficients, quadratics and irrational digits that only music could possibly express with the spiritual smoothness of harmonic strain punctuated by deliberately churlish atonalities.

This is a horror story fit for an old Pan Paperback of yore, now lying dog-eared in once forgotten memories.  The reading of childhood fairy stories with grim goings-on had in many cases of persona evolved into such genres as the gothic and the cruel, especially at Halloween. Not that we knew anything about Halloween when I was a child in one of the terraced backstreets of England. I looked up at the windows as I negotiated my way to a meeting of Wolf Cubs in a dark church hall. No street lighting, so I carried a torch. For one so young, it seemed very heavy, as I parted the curtains of even heavier shadows containing the creepy calls of night’s denizens. Down back-alleys and corridors of echoey jitters, I often looked up at top windows and saw cuneiform faces looking down imploringly, wondering why they had been implicated in some strange future writings about them called hopscotch, or so I imagined. No tiny ear plugs with string quartet music playing. Just the disconnected undertones of tangled tongues chanting random numbers. I desperately hopped to avoid further terrors. Any pavement cracks or jaundiced pumpkins verboten. 

***

ILIUM

When Ilium is spelt with a capital i and a small L it looks like a place in Wales rather than the Troy of Trojan Horse fame or even the name of a bone in the body. A body in a bed. A welcome in the hillside. A device for latching man-made things together in outer space. The top of a totem. The nirvana often reached when playing music. I have a dictionary for every mood. So did Jack Blanche and a man called Cat, not to speak of a few women’s names who became more important the more they were written about rather than left nondescript. The men in fact faded into the background, while the Ilium shone forth like a Bethlehem star or a morning glory of a newly arrived moon as satellite rather than a disguised comet or meteor. A convolvulus of meaning that might run on forever, while any characters got on with their business with nobody bothering to record their doings towards a personal ‘tontine’ that entailed sacrificing others in their cohort along the way. If they did it with cold aplomb or a grumpy mien, nobody else seemed to care even when being abandoned to each and every ebbing wave of closure. Nobody could see where it was all going, nobody cared, as they stood, sat or remained supine while gazing dumbstruck at the now blazing Ilium in the sky. Men went first, women last. Some in between lingered in either camp for optimal self-sacrifice whether it was to stay longer or leave early. It was the Tontine that ultimately counted, an accounting system for all that we had done and all we would never do. No point in being cross or crosswordy enough to be worthy. Amenable was now the watchword, uncurling the tightly curled, unchurning the churned up, stripping back the stroppiness of spirit, unfurling the back’s painfully hidden wings, unleashing bodies from beds as well as notes from staves. A shadowy woman in a tall black hat and a demobbed soldier with a daffodil in his lapel walked hand in hand towards the now grounded Ilium. They knew what it was, even if we didn’t. Perhaps we were inside it already?

Post-Gestalt Fictions (13)

 THE OVERNATURAL

This being a far cry from the supernatural, he guessed. He wrung his hands together as if they competed in squashing each other flat.

 AS His Own Alias — to be known as Ashoa forevermore with this name’s initial hyperlink thus represented by its imposed italics — peered at the row of yet uncounted salt-cellars lined up in the engine room of a structure that, he believed, because he had been brought here amid a cascade of blinds, was either a ship in a derelict dock or a static factory at the edge of dystopia. Except, his eyes now unshuttered, he could see that one of the salt-cellars had been replaced by a single can of Brasso polish. How many cellars make an engine room this deep, he puckishly asked himself, while ignoring the conundrum that he had been set by persons unknown. He liked jokes as a form of calm therapy, the sillier the better.

Jack Vance, a science fiction writer of the 20th century, had owned the official Eyes of the Overworld, when the Dying Earth itself was next to finally over with. 

The sun had blinded itself. And Ashoa believed in Vance as a sort of deified being to whom he could pray for deliverance from any ‘overnatural’ phenomena that might turn plug ugly after being recruited to Ghost-hunt  as a sort of catalyst for optimisation of any spirits that were usually more amenable than ugly. But when they seemed on some tipping-point towards the latter negative, as indicated by the OCD-shattering insertion of something out of sane symmetry such as the Brasso can, he tried to summon Vance’s Servants as competing spirits under the auspices of a dead author — no stronger support could be imaginable during the quandaries of a potentially failed optimisation. And so he did. And so the summoned one did come.

A double bass voice struggled frighteningly into being from behind the engine’s pipe work, one with ominous foreboding, but all it finally managed to say with a sense of ridiculous gravity was: ‘Opt for the odd one out.’

Ashoa thanked his lucky stars. As Above, So Below.  And he laughed out loud as he carefully removed the chosen one from the domino rally line-up and forthwith polished it off as an integral item by means of his own brute force. And thus this latest mission was hopefully successful. At least it was well and truly over.

***

RAMPANT

Ashoa eventually learnt he was not an alias of the Ghost Opter calling himself Jack, but more in the situation of acting as the alias of a woman called Shona. But this was only the case because someone else thus wrote it down here — an uncertain figure with a quill pen that presided over events and recorded them in this way, but with due regard to the uncertainty of the events themselves and whoever on earth wrote them down on coarse album paper. 

This was a question of the nature of ‘over’ as an ability to be on top of a job to be done, and this ability became autonomously exponential as a rampant covering. Small objects, each a minimal close-up by a form of digital photography with its own form of blinking more than once to give a tiny video of itself. Every act of crystallisation was an over-naturalisation by revision of what had gone before. For example, Ashoa, in his heart, knew that the line of single objects in the engine room was almost entirely made up of Brasso cans not salt-cellars, with only one salt-cellar to break the symmetry. The latter object being the glitch he was meant to snitch, not the other way about. So who had got it wrong?  Who or what was more rampant with its eyes of the overworld than anyone or anything else? More spreadable?  More pervasive from on high? More unterrestrial with each movement of its limbs? Photos are said, these days, to capture rather than take. But whatever else is trapped at the same time was only worth guesswork. Prana was a code word for a binding ingredient in esoteric yoga.

Ashoa felt himself to be more adhesive than free wheeling. And Shona spoke to him from hidden corners of broken brakes and shattered gearboxes. And those responsible for sifting these words could only work on the assumption of trust that over would never be over. Over and over again, with a hyper-reality belied by its own blurred photo of itself. As Ashoa peered at the fuzzy image of a couple from Victorian times, judging by the date written in ink on the photo’s blotted back. A black and white snapshot that bore stickily its now dislodged corners from when it was ripped from the album where it had been glued over a smaller photo of seemingly the same couple in quite a different pose. This time, more carefully, he prised the second photo from its own corners and read the ink on its back showing the names Jack and Anne. And, what was this? — in uncertain pencil with a question mark was the name Shona. So, Ashoa looked more closely at the ancient image on the front. But neither top or bottom of the photo seemed respectively over or under! The couple were hanging upside down together, as Ashoa pored over it and deciphered hidden details in it that might or might not be corners of his own face. So, he tried to sprinkle himself across the old grubby surface rather than slowly tipping over it whatever came from within the short-lived and slow-motion mantrap of these very words. 

***

THE EKER-OUT

The Ghost Hunter has ‘Truth’ in its very letters of engagement, his services stretching from Llanelli to Walton-on-the-Naze. The establishing of his real identity became as scattershot as Dabbling with Diabelli. An Argue of Aliases was, we’re told, the correct collective noun to use. His methods  of amenable harvesting of ghosts — rather than the dead exorcising of them — derived not from the Supernatural but from his belief in what he tentatively called the Overnatural. No clever-clever word tricks here. This is as it is. Simple as pie.  

But, just as an experiment, let’s opt for a moment of pretence — a moment of optimising Ghosttruths towards a lubrication for the often slanted wheels in story-telling with turning-points upon serial tipping-points, thus revealing further Truths as enmeshed by a skein of choice that Fate seeps out to us day by day. Destiny with its slow gift of some slack. A determination of probabilities as an Eker-out of Free Will. And Jack the Hunter, alias Shona or Ashoa, aka AKA, never allowed himself to feel brassed or even browned off. He took his tasks seriously, never hiding, in hindsight, the Truth of dead-ends as a means to polish off any memories of the difficult pathways to reach such ends in the first place. He merely threw a pinch of salt back over his left shoulder into the Devil’s eye, and continued on his way beyond the end of each dead-end. As we all did, too. Still do.

***

THE PURFLING

The edges of guitars do not necessarily make for edgy music. Even one of Segovia’s softest melodies was played on an instrument of high purfling. While the most strident of Led Zeppelin outputs were visibly frayed or desiccated along each and every contour of the curves they vigorously strummed with every high pitched rock. Even Prince had hardened blades in his regency period before asking his purple reign to start.

Violins, violas and cellos, too, in every string quartet possessed variable hard-endings, some of these instruments, having been mashed by mindless entropy, just returned from the repair shop, some others, however, worshipped for their very crumbling of antiquity in each belt and brace giving pungency to the seasoned menu of music. It was the sound quality that counted. And what did purfling really mean for the spirits let loose in the guise of music? Dalena and Anne played duets on various string instruments and they feared the taut guts were rope that laid flabby under their fingernails or their bows, but the notes played somehow remained precisely ear-tingling. Pizzicato purfling of the highest order, whatever the associated nightmares the women underwent while performing to the masked audiences during Covid. 

Saltings represent the generic name for various Essex marshes, but salting can also be a method of preservation for food. Dalena insisted that music was the food of love, and thus she kept piles of salt beside them on the stage, and, once, during a transcription for violin and cello of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, she could be seen sprinkling it in the air after each visitation by the gods above as tempted into ghostly existence by every swell and culmination of the music. She needed to maintain this unique perfect moment of music forever, she thought, and Anne, covered in white grains, played on obliviously but wondering why she ever thought Dalena could ever be a reasonable partner in music’s motivation beyond its own mutation.  The ghosts were newly serrated, too, and helped bolster the sparse audience with a hard-cornered presence. Wearing masks or not. They just stared up with wide-eyed faces, hooping semi-silently to the now sharpened flats. Many unique perfect moments, not just the usual singularity, in unfolding threats of merging with the the serialist once-in-a- lifetime ‘perfect storms’ that arrived edge to edge. Till the frets of time fled up the women’s arms from the bending bows or fraught fingernails dead straight into the very unfurling of their sudden harp-like wings, denoted, as it were, to accept the nearest Repair Shop since the actual stairway to heaven itself softened short of where their toes could pluck. Desiccated coconut instead of salt. The onset of fully purflèd rain thankfully making it all seem more like unrepair than otherwise. An easement of relief at there being no punch-line climax at all. Perhaps not even a sodden coda.

***

‘I’M NOT TRYING TO BE AWKWARD’

It was a day of dull weather. Jack aka Aka as his latest Alias had not heard the above homily said before as a default refrain, until he heard a stranger in town — someone with whom, while sitting next to him on a park bench, he made small talk — yes, he heard repeated the same homily again and again. She was an elderly lady who was seemingly excusing her own controversial statements of belief with just such a homely homily disguised as a reflex of speech. It is perhaps laughably true to say that Jack gawped if not gawked at her brass neck, but decided it was not worth his latest alias arguing with each reactionary viewpoint that came out of this lady’s mouth; he humoured her, instead, as he would have done to any recalcitrant ghosts during the course of his business as an Over-Opter of such spectral apparitions on earth and the need to harness them for good or ill.

He did, however, allow his face to gurn slightly, a quasi mode of cringing from within, as he nodded at her constant barrage of contentions about life and the people who lived it. With each backward nod of her own head punctuated by a slightly different rhythm of ‘I’m not trying to be awkward’.  But awkward she was, as if she knew who Jack was, and was trying to double-bluff what spirit lurked within her as simply her outer self. Her skin-surface personality merely a veil over what she chose to remain within. Something quite different lurking beyond the insides of any bony insulations of her aging shell, something not awkward at all.  Something unnatural she naturally harboured. A sanctuary vaster than Notre Dame as visualised by the wreck that visualised it. 

From over the town, Jack heard the distant tolling of a pair of bells he had never heard before, despite having visited the place several times in the past. He discerned an awkward cracked tone amidst the finer honed ingredients of the truer one that Jack had once memorised in a list from a bell’s over to its under: 1. yoke or headstock, 2. canons, 3. crown, 4. shoulder, 5. waist, 6. sound bow, 7. lip, 8. mouth, 9. clapper, 10. bead line.

The poor lady seemed stuck at stage no. 10, judging by the now scrawny cage he saw beside him on the park bench. A mere mode of almost Jack, whilst the lady seemed now to be made much smaller and less lumpy and more scarred than anything he visualised his own body to be. He wondered who was trying be less awkward and who outshone whom on a whim in such dingy weather. The bells  had ceased before one of them had evidently stopped trying altogether. 

***

ANABASIS (THE TEMPERING)

Pains never go away. Jack the so-called Over-Hunter aka AKA as his latest AliAs thought it more as if he were tampering with what should be left untouched! Let sleeping ghosts lie, as an intrinsic truth to embrace. He had indeed lived through many missions of harnessing rather than hindering these ghosts, and today he was to tie up all the loose ends as a legacy of optimisation by judicious opting. Tempering, in essence, the bitter  antagonisms he had engendered from each campaign as well as the more sceptical of friends and the now more friendly of foes, the latter having watched the eventual result of his endeavours. He started wrapping from the middle outwards. As you do.

Over and over with layers of salted flesh, and polished slivers of precious metals as foils for fools. All foes and friends, by now, having been assuaged. Between each layer the aliases he had known, some that shone and others that were dull. As he reached the exterior of the bundle of achievements, he used more jagged pieces, including broken mirrors, all of which were soft-packed, for fear of jabs, by choicely skinned faces of once fleshy ghosts before their scars had been wished away. And he watched as he found his fingers with their own finishing touches. Tamping down rogue corners. Tipping points with blunt instruments. Topping and tailing straggles of loose material with neat scissory snips. Eventually a smoothed off morass of compaction now outshone by his own future sense of overtly never-over duties. A collusion of compunction with us all, alongside recurrently reopened cases of ghosts to avert towards better lives — a marching army of attention-rapping wraiths yet to be unwrapped as gifts for us all at Christmas. Not a single exorcism to sort cellars from haunted attics. All done without tantrum or ill temper. Opting for dulling the pains rather than outshining them. Untold pains yet to be told, never over-topped but detailed within.

***

‘JACK VANCE LOVED CLASSICAL MUSIC’

…on the bridge with a natterjack toad beneath it. The questionable words themselves were scrawled in red paint along the side of this carefully constructed bridge that spanned nowhere to nowhere. No way were the words perpetrated  by a true artist, the scrawl, unlike any iteration of Banksy, seeming in fact to be a spontaneity that the scrawler thought important to say, and to say very quickly before he or she was caught saying it with such indelible methods — indelible short of demolishing the bridge itself. The paint itself was surely thought to be as indelible as the thought it expressed. 

JV was, of course, a writer of Science Fiction and had no connection with our man also called Jack, nor with any of the aliases involved as doppelgängers’ eyes that the latter Jack employed as a means to view the dying earth from his vantage point directly above even the overworld itself.

The strangest eventuality evolving from over-thinking the above scenario was the silence that seemed embedded beyond the ramparted root of each bridge end. In the mind’s eye, at least, there could be envisaged the sound of the opening notes of Hector Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’, but not a single ‘symphonie fantastique’ in sight, let alone a post-nativity scene even to begin to believe in. But Jack felt as if he were the wandering hero represented by the  viola as soloist within the overall music, in melancholic adventures quite beyond the scope of Lord Byron. Though, thinking about it, the latter poet did create the rarely read but astonishingly apocalyptic poem entitled ‘Darkness’. Even Wagner had his Gollum moments. So maybe, just maybe… we are each to be our own Childe Harold. 

Space Opera itself often had a troll or two in the increasing emptiness between overture and overwith.

The question remains, though — what is scrawled on the other side of the bridge? And how do we get there to see it? 

***

OVERWRITTEN

Blackstream, jocular Jack climbed the bridge at its middle instead of crossing over it from one of its ends. The sun was nearly out, the sky was in an awkward mode, and the weather changed as fast as anyone’s mind. Backsteam, a hiss of sibilant mud either from river bed or a gap in the bridge wall, not sure which direction whence it came and whereto it went, bypassing his upper toes. He had somehow been thrust on his back legs against the surly brick, some crumbling like salt and sand mixed down his calves.  Midriver, blackstream now a wider rush, he grabbed at a useless reed to steady his floating off into the current like a pooh stick below the shadowy arch where the nattering toad squatted eyeing him quizzically with words of fee fi fo fum. Jacked-up toes now desperate thumbs against the roughness of  it all. Jocular no more. His dreams no longer underwritten by the insurance of what or whom? Overtaken by events, conscripted out of existence, before his story ended. 

As an editable aside, a nemotode squirmed in a riparian oubliette nearby, watchful if not fully alert, making an impossible stand of overlooking events from low down on the riverside’s eroding bank. There is no role for it to play, so a miracle if this bit of text is left as any legacy of narration at all. 

Meanwhile, Anne, Dalena and Shona, now no longer grown up even as Alcott’s child women, leant, gossiping and giggling, over the bridge’s sigh, dropping lolly sticks into the swollen facials below, as broken by other reflections from behind them, smoothly dark but with bits missing. Their giggles became gurgles — then stopped intestinally. Which girl’s lolly stick floated furthest only the knitjack’s natter knows.