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.

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.

Post-Gestalt Fictions (12)

 HARTSHORN

Abel Martin was never sure whence his mother knew the word, but she used it when raising old-fashioned comestibles of a bready or cakey nature. Not that these yummy cookies were all raised; some remained defiantly flat and crisp from pressurised baking, as was her unspoken wish. No other additives required. A far reach from more modern cookies, let it be said, with which we are recurrently faced when negotiating the pervasive web. Shivered and slivered, as a similar process of the kneading digits. Meanwhile, the substance in question, which he learnt was flaked horn of hart, was good for the human heart, a means of revival, too, especially when old spinsters flounced off into faints, far more efficient for this purpose than any smelling salt, not that he ever noticed salt smelling of anything much, nor spinsters fainting. He did not know much about spinsters and whether he actually knew any. His mother, though, often had a fit of the vapours when he was caught stealing a cake before she thought it cool enough to eat. Your goodies are always cool enough to eat, he responded, however hot they may be. The parlance of his schooldays was ever worth enunciating in its full form rather than merely texting in shorthand. Time as an essence was its own high pressure method to bring people down lower, while we suppose that Abel, in his own precocious way, was as old-fashioned and conservative as his mother’s cooking, with all such personality traits ably assisted by the various vats of collective unconsciousness that still surround all of us in our daily lives, even though only a very few know how to access it without a strong password or even where the tiny spigot, useful for tapping it, was situated. Atomising as a means of becoming one’s own ghost, serving up a seemingly irrelevant thought. Abel, meantime, was able to know things without first knowing them, and this feat was via the chance portals that frequently turned up invisible to most as well as unbidden, a fact that was somehow inherent within his widening knowledge of himself. Mother smiled at him, as her unspoken words came through loud and clear, i.e. not to let any old ghosts arrive through such portals into the land of the living nor to allow anything already valuable today to seep away into them, because, whatever the pressure of time’s unruly storms, you could hardly ever get such valuables back again through any portal at all upon their discovery that the still living past was able to be so much more amenable for weathering than the storms of the present day — any hartshorn cookies included, his dear mother added with an abrupt laugh out loud. Salt-cellar ghosts are quite another matter, she added with a shiver — in hindsight, the last flaky additive of all.

***

ROMAN CASCADE

The Roman villa should bear future witness to a cascade of blinds, the collective noun for especially Venetian ones when in a raw, unhung state, blinds being of finer taste to Alex, instead of what he considered to be the more usual vestigial clunkiness of shutters upon any villa otherwise worth its salt. After popping a few of what he called cardamons, he decided his ambition would be to own such a villa, whether shuttered or blinded, it little mattered. As long as there was  a portrait of a face at the foot of its main  stairway, whether male or female. He soon discarded Olive Villa in Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex, as the building’s up front date of construction proved it was likely not to be Roman. There were, though, many proven Roman villas in England, and most of them were, of course, in Essex, including a singular example at Alresford that Alex eventually could afford, but it had neither of his prerequisites. It had a creek, though, one more suitable for the sound of shutters than blinds. So he painted his own painting, one with a cubist face and modernistic scarring, framing it with as expensive a frame as he could muster from a Clacton charity shop, and he somehow salvaged a so-called cascade of disused blinds from a Shelter Sale on Canvey Island, a place which he had never visited but he knew its infrastructure still must bear the same scars from the 1953 storm as the part of the coast where Alex himself lived. He had  managed to buy these blinds through an indirect method that must remain mysterious. Be assured it was nothing connected with the salt marshes near West Mersea that also housed its own Roman Villa.

Blinds were cheaper than any shutters, even mock ones. He had never really understood the highways and byways of history, especially history as distant as the Roman invasion of Britain, an event which assiduous teachers tried to teach him at Colchester Royal Grammar School using blackboards and rubbers. Everything that was scrawled up was erased, just like his own mind with clouds of psychological chalkdust, just after one teacher actually threw a hard-edged board rubber at him to catch his attention, but knocked any attention out of him instead, in what can only be called a cascade of blinds. From that point onwards , his mind spluttered like a damp candle, of the Roman variety, of course. And, later in life, Alex’s self-portrait at the bottom of the stairs stared back at him just as the visionary fountain of ghosts rattled the villa’s exterior blinds — an ambuscade of whitened shades borne upon a wind that the creek created. But more a haunted  breeze than any empty gales that history still harboured.

***

GELLING AGENT

Whether by means of sugar or agar-agar or even some other industrial complex beyond cooking, our own freelancers knew what they must do — blend the two: a culinary ingredient plus whatever chemical semi-solids are manufactured, as a by-product, for the mass market economy in manufacturing waste products just for their own sake, a process just as industrial as steelmaking or iron smelting. The essence of being freelance was ever thus especially with such eventualities envisaged by the darkest dystopias imaginable.  Gelling Agent, by name, gelling agent by actions. This particular maverick shall remain nameless other than by this self-assumed title that gave him rank as well as kudos, a chutzpah mixed with panache to give a most pliant charisma moulded into shapes by a thousand other selves, or many more, some of them actual elves as near-miss avatars that thrived both in the real world and on-line. Gelling Agent himself masqueraded as a popular chef on Tv, opening posh restaurants in his real name, but also as a magician with sleights of hand, he called legerdemains, and prestidigitations galore. One favourite trick of his was to line up a whole row of Brasso cans —Brasso being a common household cleaner of  many metals that needed polishing, yet his way of polishing was polishing off. An agent provacateur as well as Government spy, but which Government, and by whose instigation? To cut a long line of such cans or could-bes short, he replaced one of the Brasso containers with an old-fashioned salt-cellar full of what appeared to be its namesake substance suitable for sprinkling should it be turned upside down. Yet ithis substance seemed more pink than it was white. He stared at the studio camera and said to those watching from home: “Which of these containers is a ghost?” And he waved his hand along the line from one end of the studio to the other, as if they had, in hindsight, been set up in preparation for some form of domino rally, whereby tipping the end one over would set all the others upon their own tipping-points, only to halted by the steadfast salt-cellar, which would need to be hurdled over in order for the rest of the ‘dominos’ to complete their collapsing.  The deep and dark metaphor for today. Dank and depressing, too. A negligent and inelegant eglantine as a seemingly fragrant thorn between not just two roses but a whole endless queue of them. Who could complete the trick of vanishing now? Who the catalytic agent? Not this semi-solid cooper’s barrel in his famous fake fez, that’s for sure.

***

PURPLE ROSES

Goodbye Gladioli, hello Roses,’ said a latent Dalena in muted tones while slowly returning to a more substantial existence above the hand-mirror’s reflective surface that by now she could actually hold upright by her own will-power in opting for its use in surveying her face, still scarred despite the healing cryonics of the mirror’s glass where her existence had mostly lived for so long.

Tantamount to being resurrected to cultivate blue roses following her earlier success with gladioli, Dalena discovered, time and time again, that they always turned out to be purple.  Not even close to blue, in her fastidious but determined eyes. Likewise her rivals in this activity. Yet, she had reached the nearest cross-breeding liable to produce blueness in roses than anyone else, but she refused to sit back on her laurels, even if she was quite unready, in any event, to ‘own’ sufficient of her retrieved body to sit back on anything. 

Meanwhile, her apportioned apartment in the centre of Birmingham overlooking the central library, was literally littered with purple roses all discarded, in random splays and sprays, as not being blue enough. There were even other examples of her splicing, grafting, cleaving and breeding as trials for hard and fast colours that did not run loose nor lattice with soft light just as ladders in low denier stockings, often with colourless frailty, sometimes did.  These offcuts and offshoots approximated various shades or hues that real roses had never been able to flaunt. More or less successful examples of Florentine florescence, but never entirely blue, as they slowly shifted into corners where Dalena dared not peer for fear of the swelling purpleness incubating therein. The whispers were the worst.

Crying, she eventually retreated into her hand-mirror, leaving a hand, whether her own hand or someone else’s, holding it still upright. Therefore, she could not see that, reflected in its upward-facing glass, there was the purest essence of a blueness subsuming the whole room she’d just left. The whispers turned out to be those of ‘goodbye, Dalena’, hushed words sounding quietly gladiatorial in some sort of paradoxically victimless victory. Thumbs up, in irony, from some latter-day Florentine Caesar first salting then munching on his own named salad, thus, by such manoeuvres, causing the mirror to clatter from his now perceived grip to the petal-carpeted floor. Purple bruising, not scars at all. Or was it a quick turn-around into a thumbs down at the sudden shivering, then a bodily upheaval of shuddering at the cusp that bordered some edge of icy-blue cryonics?

***

SINKERS

Sinker anchor ballast bob counterbalance counterpoise counterweight mass pendulum plumb bob poundage rock sandbag stone. The nameless author went to town on the provision of the word ‘sinkers’, indeed he took it to heart, took it hook, line and salted doughnut! Until he, too, was tugged from being sunk by his own Slough of Despond, this being at least a little progress of the pilgrim that had been him. A slow mud that bubbled as if to cook him with coldness. A doe, a doe, a sweet sweet doe, limbs akimbo brought eventually into the light as an old and doddery man, coughing his soul out rather than swim against the thick tides that the light of day had threatened to become. Saved by a sinker. Helped by a bell. Straight after the first line of print as a hook for readers, and now he felt repeatedly in the thick of the text’s tense density. Only his thoughts available as needful counterweight to an unbalanced body. A sandbag against the encroaching weather outside. Wind and rain made as prehensile as him. Fraught with voices.

Yet the anchor tangled his feet, just as he got up for ablutions. The cough as insistent as the moist backwash that pursued him. He needed words to calm the soul, to ease the house’s plumbing that often seemed conjoined with his own, a spirit level with no sink gauge, not even a float accumulator, just a steady-state aura that the letters of Ghost Opter would have optimised as their own when merely fraternising with the spirits or spectres that were meant otherwise to be expunged — the photoset of grottoes, the hoopster in the ghettoes, the catalytic spotter from among the poorest of the poor. And more.

The swing shaft’s halt-line of the gateaux. The density of doughnuts remade as crocks in alleys. The stealth bombers soaring above the hobbity and the hop hop. The spirited plumping by the doddery residues of the swamp monster. Sinkers that the world around the author reskins as the would-be souls of bodies plunging and lunging through hidden grief and greed. Health and wealth weltering in the holy sinkhole of space. 

The pendulum at last swings the other way. The ballast of being who one surely is. The author thankfully as his own final anchor. 

***

MARSHMALLOW

There is a difference between marshmallow and marsh mallow, but which one most needs the intervention of the raconteur Gelling Agent to create? The story he told one day seemed to cross the boundary between both, but dealing with exactly neither of them.  The pale flower that straddled both entities was an ingredient in just one of them, too, that being the well-known sweet and sticky comestible  of childhood, and his story was in itself a sort of confectionery in words as after eight mints of meaning as well as of people and events within such meaning. This is not that story, but it is the story of its making. People and events that stood outside his story that ended up in it.

Except the people had not yet been given their names nor a means of identity — those details will come later in a future, as yet unwritten, story that will be just as miniaturised as the packaged sticky sweet in a crinkly bag of many others perfectly like them. And the event had not yet happened, but merely on the brink of happening should they be able to extricate themselves from the white glue that would stitch the pages together. One of these people, with a pale flower in his or her buttonhole, stuck a probing finger into the still slightly tacky glue and put the tiniest dob upon the tongue to savour what was assumed to be its sweetness. Yes, oh so utterly, butterfly tactile and, yes, sugary. The words themselves were manufactured from the darkest chocolate of high cocoa percentage, that when melted of their meaning, would cover any amassed retrievals of still pliable epoxy, and, lo! the buttonhole bloomed with its own endeavours to be what it was meant to be, an efflorescence of memory disguised as a schooldays nostalgia that never happened. 

Gelling Agent put down his pen, uncertain of the fixatives of his fiction, whether it was yet to be written and, if so, where was it now. Whether it marshalled further attempts at archiving a plot to be spun like candyfloss before committing its strands to a ghost story in potentially indelible print in celebration of All Hallows. Or merely a shallow exercise in something else altogether. A miasma of a million marshy landscapes without profile or definition. Even ghosts, however low-key or will-of-the-wispy, bear real half-sewn buttonholes — tangibly a series of death’s missutured wounds, each bearing a pale flower with possible purple middles. Gelling Agent never even reached the middle of his to tell.

***

MASKING THE BOATS

One of them was called Flbbitigibbet, another Träumtrawler, but most of the boats had their names masked by nets on the day that she visited the coastal town as her next port of respite. Her own face was, of course, masked by a skein of scars with which she was born, a collectible phenomenon known as a caul, similar to David Copperfield’s caul that was later auctioned off as a talisman for 15 guineas, if the Dickens plot is recalled correctly. Or was it a raffle, not an auction? 

It was no accident that ‘caul’ rhymed with ‘trawl’, Dalena thought, peering at the nameboard on one of the boats that Dalena could see clearly. Today, indeed, she was hypnotised by the sea’s waves against the harbour wall, a sporadic soporific, a comforting down, comforting down of her turbulent thoughts, a confection of spiritual gelling that she had sought, it seemed, for centuries. No accident that some of her thoughts and expressions were repeated, time and time again, a tidal refrain, an incantatory swaying, a refrain of swaying, just saying.

 Scarred faces galore appeared on the surface like a scum of salt that, if dried out, would be fit for sifting, then bottling in cellars. Scarred faces, scarred faces, and then more scarred faces. A dream or a trauma, who knows? A whole swarm of  flibbitigibbets come to ease her despair at still unfinished ambitions. Her fingers dredged the scum for some message, only to find the whole hand squashed painfully between the side of a nameless boat and the harbour wall. But it ended up more a winding ravel than a knotting anguish.

Where she had skimmed the water, its tides seemed to recede leaving a saline mirror, unruffled by sea’s undertow, a surface in which  she saw her own face as if for the first time. She had ‘masked’ all her life, whether with a pile of shutters or a cascade of blinds, and, here, despite the salt’s clouding, or because of the salt’s cleansing, she saw clearly who she was. Her knuckles had been raw, too, but now healed after the boat’s abrasive ambush of flesh against harbour wall. 

Stripped to the bones of truth, while everything else was also scoured by a sudden wind. It was not Brasso as an oily substance or even as an agency for gelling, but somehow the paradox of a frictionless astringent. Not a medicine for inflammation from Boots but more a reflective moonshine that added buoyancy to boats and their sympathetic chemistry with water. Some waltz from Die Fledermaus in continuous loop. The gallows humour of the hearty songs of stevedores about her at the harbour wall  adding to the effect of resolutions unravelling. Shantih Shantih. Now more a whisper than a loud rhythmic chant.

This wind was a movement of earth’s breathing that swirled with increasing repetitions of onomatopoeia till it blew itself out. She made a smiley, as clouds vanished from around this cheery crease expanding through crusted skin. More than just a riffle. It was sheer unction. 

***

LINOLEUM GAMES

When children were children and not screen-hogs, they put dusters on their bare feet and slid about the lino as if it were a rink. When they grew older into adults, they busily spent hours dusting things as this was before screens were invented to keep them otherwise stymied. And if they managed to grow really old, they were then enabled to be hypnotised by the clunky black and white versions of the future’s tinier screens that were sure later to entrap their grandkids and the latter’s grandkids alike. And these old ones remembered the days they put dusters on their feet, laughed out loud at things that other people said face to face, flesh to flesh, in the same room, and ended up, as they imagined, with flattened features for faces  to match the weather-scarred windows of their homes. The first Olympics I really remember watching was the Rome ones in 1960. The previous Melbourne version was broadcast too bittily for me to remember from the black and white TV  of the day, with ill reception and fading definition, if there was any definition at all to be discerned through the snowy interference. Nicks and scars within the screen — a flickering up and down beyond the reach of the TV’s vertical hold as well as of its horizontal one.  Revolving like a fruit-machine display with no colours to differentiate apples from oranges. It was as if a cascade a blinds were sporadically shuttered down across not only my eyes but also the window of my whole face — a rhythm of shadowy blemishes that any broadcast glitches as stitches failed to give any long-term healing for my large white face as a naturally featureless flatness. Today, the old man who once was me grabs the dishcloths untidily near to hand and attempts to wrap them around his numb and tingling feet, eager for the linoleum rinks of yore. Yet, they keeping falling off, and there is only a sort of new-fangled linoleum in the hall, far too narrow for figure skating or those earlier somersaults made to the music of Bolero more suitable for gymnastics than any other Olympic sport. He still proudly held the gold medal, though, he once won in Rome for curling. He felt his head still bore a handle on top for ease of its polishing the floor, his face now more scared of bumps into skirting boards than scarred by them. He got up to give the floor of his icy living-room a speedy sweep with a broom; it was covered with irritating crumbs from his latest vision of a  bacon sandwich. Dust in invisible eyes, instead of tears. 

***

LLANELLI RISING

fighting for justice

those in the formroom whom the writer monitored were doing just that and he had thought he would get in quick with fighting for justice as the title so he would not need to think about it later making it fit with what he had already written and he was indeed writing a manifesto for the pressure group or what they used to call ginger groups whereby they battled for righteousness and strove for fairness or argued for consensus of conflicting views in as balanced a way as possible even while he still scribbled these turns of phrase that meant the same thing but he realised he need not have worried about what to actually call his manifesto or what was now becoming a mission statement for let it be said here halfway into his screed as well as upfront as its title fighting for justice and he decided that was all that needed to go upfront because what else could be said about it question mark and he had now forgotten what particular injustice was to be fought against in other words behind all the words he had already so far written and indeed he could not stop his pen writing towards a conclusion when all would become clear and the injustice resolved simply by reaching a final sentence for the writer who had once committed the injustice more loosely called a crime of coercion for its readers to acknowledge the common sense of what had been written at all 

The milkman was early that morning 

exactly that no quibbles no argument not even any hyphen to interrupt the flow of narration amidst  the rattles of bottles the click at the gate or did the click happen before the rattles sounded out question mark and I could not be sure as the double clink of two milky white pints met the front doorstep while I still remember the third of a pint we were each  given at school with straws and all heads bent over amidst sucking noises while teacher was rubbing the chalk off the blackboard swish swish and I was milk monitor and suddenly I thought about the man today who left the milk bottles on my front step as now involved in these memories of my old school days when I was in charge of which pupil received which bottle of milk as it is now too easy to assume that each bottle was identical but far from the truth as some were warmer than others having had more of the sunlight upon them and after the clink clink I heard the gentle brushing to and fro of something soft across the outside of my front door swish swish and surely was this not a ghost since literally nobody delivered milk these days let alone early that morning question mark

Do not go lightly

not too lightly into the night for punctuation to be airbrushed like the ghosts they surely were with each full stop a white salt grain that could haunt a whole mansion the odd comma a curl of creepiness question marks written out in full to make a mockery of doubt even while a few actual words helping the haunting by turning themselves into italics as laterally slanting wormholes in contrast to the rising workaday handicrafts of human love even with spectral tambourine men on board and further hauntings and wraiths each battling for so-called justice against monsters who hated the ghosts and welcomed the mother of all battles and the call of a word that made no sense but sounded like the town in the main title above by which they’d rather be spooked than eaten alive so please do go gently into that good night oh milk monitor amidst schooldays of recorders sucked or blown and tambourines tapped in our tiny hands with jingles not clinks and piano accompaniment by teacher for any words we sang as a welcome in the mountains often using words from a nonsense sounding language being words swishing spookily echoing more than just the  sensible truths of justice but something far more intrinsically wayward as an accidental truth truer than most other truths while the milky-white haunters of the haunted watched out for any risk of being monitored by the hyphen that he just forgot to airbrush and the hyphen remains visible should he raise his reading eyes back to the final grain of truth or grain of salt in which form’s shape the hyphen justly still resided as a third of its proper size after widening into a short straw or was it the last straw question mark

he forgot to lightly airbrush the apostrophes

***

A MIXTURE OF MERMAIDS

Merfolk collectives were most commonly known as pods or tribes or schools or herds or aggregations but just the female versions of these creatures were often paradoxically or ironically called a ‘mixture’. If only.

As if these creatures existed at all in the land of the living — other than just as ghosts or if deemed as dreams or even when they were trusted truths within childhood fictions that were read with bated breath at the child’s creation of real ‘imaginary friends’ appearing in every corner of the nursery dormitory — even if without sufficient saltwater available to buoy them up particularly when the child was fully awake.

 IF is a big big word. AS IF are even bigger ones — especially when placed together. WHEN was weaker than either of these, as its truth was needed to be tested against a competing IF.  Which brings me to introducing today a new character whose real andadopted name was ALIAS, or AS for short when called in short order or impatient demand for his attention — if or when he happened to exist as a reality being quite another matter. He matters now! 

Alias could seem to turn a feint of a faculty as soon as blinking at him. As tall as a totem, by dint of twitching beneath his gaze. Alias was also as quick as a shut blind when investigating an exterior shutter. He was, indeed, as slippery as an eponymous mixture of heroes and villains, as well as flounceable in his own right as a singularity of unbroken scales, with a choice of beauteous butts, and an urgency of ugly uppers hiding softer apertures lower down. Nevertheless to say, he was as stolid as an accomplice pair of private eyes that never flinched, alongside quick fire reactions within a body that actually moved more realistically on two legs than any amphibian actually trained to strut upright for eons and eons.

 Ifs were one matter, but there seemed no need for purposeful whens, as AS (or Alias as he was sometimes called) was obviously made for action as an action man as well as invested with an instinctive sense of constructively iffy optation and a judicious exegesis as a mutual exorcism. Ghosts were never truly ghosts, but something in between as parallel phenomena. He was based in Llanelli, ever since his first successful case of investigating an infestation of seeming sea-creatures that clambered from the local docks as if in the shape of a mixture of mermaids disguising themselves as a swarm of grim residuals that had survived from when Llanelli’s name was Y’ha-nthlei, and someone called Pth’thya-l’yi had ruled over the people there. No need to tell the whole story as I seem to have already destroyed any suspense by prematurely using the word ‘successful’ somewhere in the text above.

Alias now resorts to investigating, nay, literally hunting or haunting me as the legendary Spoiler fit to rival someone else’s Joker — a plotbreaker as an unreliable villain now cast as a reliable narrator whose presence I myself created in such a role when this very villain’s domino rally of motives became set at its tipping-point to topple all his successful tales one by one into an aggregated mixture worthy of any writer worth his salt or salt-water. No ifs, no buts, no tails.

***

PINTAIL

At first Alias (whose own actual alias was disarmingly As for short) thought about a  childhood game — often conducted between sporadic bouts of Forfeits and Charades — and that game was called Pinning the Tail on the Donkey which was a cross between Blind Man’s Buff and close-up Darts. As we all know was a gracious man of many roles, and he kept up the illusion that these were memories of games rather than happening at this very moment all around him via some method of being beamed there and back. Arguably, any children involved were never children at all, so any coercive cheating involved remained consensually competitive between the grown-ups whose memories of being children were fake regressions. Have you noticed there have never been any children in Dr Who? As you were. As effective as salt on a bird’s tail. Stand by your beds. Time to duck.

***

IS IT A TENCH?

Alias as his alias As was called anonymously to investigate a lump of lumber that had been washed ashore near Clacton, and when he was taken to the spot by a beachcomber of his acquaintance, he heard this crude rhetoric from a third as an onlooking busybody: “Is it a Tench?”

  Alias gave this interfering gongoozler the finger, and then said to him and to the beachcomber alike: “Not one whiff can I detect from it. It has just been shaped and shorn by cruel currents into what looks fishily like something that might give off more than just a salty aroma!”

All three laughed, as the apparent lumber gave off a low hum, as if wishing to make contact, while its wood grains were straining to send gurgling words to its evident mouth in shadowy thirds of whole meaningful words. Then it managed these words as gargled as clear as clear could be: “Google the title as an entirety and you will see a sign.” 

The gongoozler, a genuine saltsworth, a self-styled powerhouse with words, busy as a mind if not a body, immediately snatched out his phone to see first if it had any signal at all this far east in Essex, let alone the ability for it to connect something with something else. But bingo! — the tiny search box and keyboard appeared.  Meantime, the other two men had vanished from the site, having been confused as to who was the alias of whom. Neither of them even left any spore as evidence of prior presence.  And the gongoozler had forgotten to use inverted commas around his search term, so he shrugged and anonymously left the scene. This was his eventual response, alas, to everything in his life, whatever any near-miss revelation might have been upon the horizon’s very edge. A benchmark as cusp.