Destiny’s Sanitation

“The sea is a sort of pants for the earth.”

 “Excuse me.”

“Pants for the earth, hiding any number of crabs and other crustaceans … whelks and winkles…”

“I don’t think that analogy bears much scrutiny, Fred.”

“I prefer to call it a poetic metaphor, Charlie. Not an analogy as such but a symbolic statement, a shorthand for carbon skidmarks…”

Laughter. Like squelches of breath. Or elbows greasing up for a fight.

“I know we humans need to clean up our act, Fred, but I’m sure there are better ways with which to flag these things up than imagining someone’s UNDERPANTS!”

“Charlie, if it gets people thinking, then that’s half the battle.”

The two figures disappeared into their own laughter, like shadows into night, except only one was laughing, the other still complaining that humanity had lost its way. From the other direction, two figures – whether the same or different shapes or silhouettes as those that had earlier disappeared – returned along the sea front. Night had passed around the world like an all-enveloping pair of trousers amid a soaking drizzle and only vague glimpses of the moon between the strides. The sea sounded even nearer when it couldn’t be seen. A plaintive, meaningful rhythm of the waves. A sense of slacks and tights. This time laughter was in short supply. In quick gasping bursts of breathless endeavour. But like with all good stuff, never mind the width, or its girth of mirth, one must feel the sheer next-to-skin quality. There was joy in the marching steps. Made-to- measure footprints in the light of new hopes, new beginnings. The two figures soon passed like strangers in the night, with no need to talk.

Come dawn – and a relenting of the drizzle into just light sprays of ghostly saliva – the sea was more like curdled ankle-sock than untidy Y-fronts. The sun rose as the burning head of a snake upon the ridge of the sky. Fred and Charlie bobbed sluggishly upon the now vaguely perceived swell. Laughter etched upon both faces as if they had resolved their differences with friendly boxer shorts just short of jutting fisticuffs. If it gets people sinking, then that’s half the battle. The wiry appendages of a sea monster dragged them under towards the half-submerged caverns where new races prepared themselves upon unmade seabeds for eventual emergence as denizens of the earth. Hirsute coils moving into alert states of variable concretion or vertical eyes flashing their eyelashes. But it was all a poetic metaphor. A pathetic analogy. None of it was real. Even Fred and Charlie seemed to lack any visible footprints in the soft squelching sand. And their once sharp elbows will soon be in torque to sanitary nirvana.

A Milestone of Mansions and Mentions

I don’t know how long this will last, but I thought I should try to reach a gestalt as I do with real-time reviewing from the guestroom in the mansion-without-roofs, turning to  the full meaning and  assimilation of a smile, the vertical eye, the third bed, the real mucky and the whitening ceiling. We all have to shape up to such a challenge. I know today it has come to a monologue I speak spontaneously as I approach the final, or perhaps not final, mansion-without-roofs that has come to symbolise something far greater than a ‘thing’ with something else missing. At the front of the building, a woman waves at me and tells me to remember the authors whom I have so assiduously reviewed over the years. I will not name them here, but she did mention all of you, every single one of you, and she smiled and invited me in as a woman I knew very well, someone to live with, it seemed, well, what should I say, for 50 years, and still counting, but that was another life in an alternate world, and I thought of the voice in the parcel, the wave and the kiss, the state of being drowsy with divinity, a maelstrom of miniatures, this milestone of miniatures, this eventual mountain of mansion, the thing that is the thing that is a ghost, but it is not a ghost as such however large it grows, because I seek the ghost. The ghost that is the gestalt that is the gruesome guestroom at the top of a bungalow mansion not a bungalow house, a mansion that has only two floors and the guest room is on the fourth floor! So, what happened to the third floor, I asked myself, and I stepped back from the building, knowing that the woman who would welcome me had already gone somewhere else. I see a  huge tree leaning against the mansion, but is it the tree yielding, or the building yielding? The building that had once been a bungalow, and it was actually growing up alongside the tree, so as to fulfil the vision of the further floors above the original two floors that I already knew and the roof was healing itself with some slow and arduous precision. A huge finger from the sky tapping tiles into place, touching chimneys into an upright position, and I knew I had to get to the fourth floor to find the gruesome guestroom, before it became the fifth floor, then the sixth, and so on. And then I knew I would see all you authors I had reviewed in that gruesome guestroom, as I did so much yearn to do so, standing  around me as you would as if you knew that you should. And I continued walking up the stairs, one by one,  slowly in a paradoxical gait that Zeno would’ve been proud of. The floorboards were bare as already adumbrated in the story I wrote yesterday, bearing the dance of dents from soldiers’ boots, and if you look at my list of miniatures, you will find this story in the last few that I linked yesterday,  and there were these dents clear to the eye today. I also thought of the other stories, or miniatures as I call them, and the steps seem to represent each miniature because I would try new steps now because I was just as tiny as them, perhaps like the tiniest Lilliputian and I passed the floors I already knew, and beyond that were a network of attics and lofts choked with a tangle of loft ladders, not real floors or bedrooms or guestrooms, but just interlocking attics with cobwebs and discarded toys and further bric-a-brac, but I managed to get to the fourth floor beyond those attics of which  the third floor was completely constituted,  but the fourth floor was more resplendent beyond the last loft ladder. It was actually what you would expect in a mansion. Now that the roof had been healed and towards the back of this large room I saw an old gent sitting gently intoning to himself as I am also intoning as I spontaneously dictate this about nothing gruesome in a guestroom.  I thought nothing strange, just a sort of homecoming whether it was my doppelgänger or my ghost that I would soon merge with, to join my intoning of words with his, but I never seem to be able to end, but just go on and on walking towards him. Null Immortalis.

Dedicated to the silent author mentions.

Mansions as Miniatures

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