story
Tim cycled by the house, and saw that the blue shutters were firmly closed. It was like a code. The days that Emily was OK, they were open. Anything remotely wrong, they were shut tight. And it could be anything. The shutters served as a coded form of communication. Emily might smile brightly, but the shutters would tell him if his conversation the night before was acceptable. Sometimes, if he crossed the line way too far, they would remain shut for days. Delivery folk were the only people allowed to cross the threshold, after which time they were banged shut once more. In this way, they served as a barrier, and a method of saying what Emily could not. After five years you'd imagine he would move on. He could not. Her eyes had given him hope where her words could not. Every day, he cycled past her house, and would continue either happy or deeply dejected. Emily, for her part, had no idea the power she held over this shy boy, who she often saw cycling past her cottage. She had seem him looking at her one time, and since then had wished he would stop by, but he never did.
Grey metal flashing across fabric. Tired, crumpled clothing becoming new, pristine. Hours and hours spent, pressing the hot metal across sheets, trousers, shirts. The badge of the invisible. Grey metal, flashing across fabric. Dreams dancing in droplets of steam, uncaptured. Ironing, proving you're part of a secret club; people nodding approvingly; but who is going to iron out your own sense of identity which lies crumpled in a heap somewhere deep inside of you?
The rough-hewn seat of my longing; a swirling mass of coarse fibres drowning in an ocean. I am drowning.
"I miss you" I mouth in the darkness, but the night betrays nothing of what you are doing or where you are. Neither does it transport you by my side in my dreams. It simply stretches out into an endless night of infinite possibilities; none within reach.
Fading between the lines, moments passing, time in a hurry, seconds dancing, life is blurry
- - a strange, strange song that echoes inside your body, a song that has long-burrowed its way into your heart, an old friend that you have not seen for years with eyes that are as old as the stars themselves, burning with secrets.
The calico cat licked his paw and rubbed his whiskers as he crouched, silhouetted against the sky as it steadily crept from twilight to dusk bringing with it a deep sense of mystery and spiritual nourishment that perhaps only the feline population could read and understand perfectly.
He loved this time of night, the sheer magic of it that you could feel from whiskers to paw. Sometimes it was a subtle magic, like the time he became lost and a single gold leaf fell from the sky to point the way home. Another time it was more potent, like the time his very being dissolved and he crossed a luminous threshold into another realm created entirely from spiders’ webs. He delighted in this magic; wished that humans knew of it, but they seemed too caught up in what seemed superficial concerns. (He could have perhaps blamed this on the Industrial Revolution, or mankind’s interpretation of seemingly mechanistic Cartesian duality – although Descartes had even come up with an elegant theory that said animal spirits could interact with humans via the pineal gland – but when did you ever read about that?!) But really, the Calico cat privately thought that actually you could lay some of the blame at Thomas Edison’s feet with the invention of the light bulb (that and the fact mankind was already losing its spiritual footing). The artificial, electric light seemed ruthlessly clinical in a negation of Mystery, an erosion of shadows that carried with them footsteps of panther, or the flicker of moths wings. A decaying of old ways and truths that humans used to just somehow know. Just like cats did.
And what did bleedin’ Edison do? Go and distract those pesky humans from the whisperings of the universe; got them thinking magic wasn’t real. He yawned loudly and scratched his ear.
The call of the night was now too great as the stars and the moon became bright overhead, and the calico cat felt, as always, an inexorable sense that his home was not on this planet but instead nestled deep within the canopy of stars above. At this he wandered off to become enveloped by the night; an occasional deep-throated meow the only identifying feature for the unwary.
--Updated version! for 'delighted'-- :)
The calico cat licked his paw and rubbed his whiskers as he crouched, silhouetted against the sky as it steadily crept from twilight to dusk bringing with it a deep sense of mystery and spiritual nourishment that perhaps only the feline population could read and understand perfectly.
He loved this time of night, the sheer magic of it that you could feel from whiskers to paw. Sometimes it was a subtle magic, like the time he became lost and a single gold leaf fell from the sky to point the way home. Another time it was more potent, like the time his very being dissolved and he crossed a luminous threshold into another realm created entirely from spiders’ webs. He delighted in this magic; wished that humans knew of it, but they seemed too caught up in what seemed superficial concerns. (He could have perhaps blamed this on the Industrial Revolution, or mankind’s interpretation of seemingly mechanistic Cartesian duality – although Descartes had even come up with an elegant theory that said animal spirits could interact with humans via the pineal gland – but when did you ever read about that?!) But really, the Calico cat privately thought that actually you could lay some of the blame at Thomas Edison’s feet with the invention of the light bulb (that and the fact mankind was already losing its spiritual footing). The artificial, electric light seemed ruthlessly clinical in a negation of Mystery, an erosion of shadows that carried with them footsteps of panther, or the flicker of moths wings. A decaying of old ways and truths that humans used to just somehow know. Just like cats did.
And what did bleedin’ Edison do? Go and distract those pesky humans from the whisperings of the universe; got them thinking magic wasn’t real. He yawned loudly and scratched his ear.
The call of the night was now too great as the stars and the moon became bright overhead, and the calico cat felt, as always, an inexorable sense that his home was not on this planet but instead nestled deep within the canopy of stars above. At this he wandered off and became enveloped into the night; an occasional deep-throated meow the only identifying feature for the unwary.
The calico cat licked his paw and rubbed his whiskers as he crouched, intently watching the sky as it crept from twilight to dusk, becoming as it did so, loaded with a deep sense of mystery that perhaps only the feline population could read and understand perfectly.
He loved this time of night, the sheer magic of it. Sometimes it was a subtle magic, like the time a single gold leaf fell from the sky, simply to point the way home. Another time it was more potent, like the mysterious stranger who told the cat of some of the mysteries of the universe, or the time his very being dissolved and he crossed a luminous threshold into another realm, created entirely from spiders’ webs. He delighted in this mystery; wished that humans knew of it, but they seemed too caught up in what seemed superficial concerns. He could have perhaps blamed this on the Industrial Revolution, or a mankind’s common interpretations of seemingly mechanistic Cartesian duality – although Descartes had even come up with an elegant theory that said animal spirits could interact with humans via the pineal gland – but when did you ever read about that?! But really, the Calico cat concluded that a good place to start could be with Thomas Edison and the invention of the light bulb – that really put a few nails in the coffin for Mystery – for how could you see and sense the magic in the night sky when dazzled by artificial light? At that the calico cat felt, as always, an inexorable pull deep within; a sense that his home was not on this planet but instead nestled deep within the canopy of stars above. At this, he ambled off, disappearing into the darkness completely.
The calico cat blinked slowly in the darkness; surrounded by twilight in howling skies. He was waiting for the magic to start. It usually took around an hour or two of night to drop before it revealed itself. And it never tired of revealing itself in myriad ways, from the banal to the utterly, draw-dropping. He never ceased to be delighted with the results. One time, the magic was simply revealed as a single gold leaf that spiraled slowly out of the sky. The leaf landed solemnly at his feet, pointing the way home, glinting in the semi-dark. Another time, a mysterious stranger revealed to him many mysteries of the universe, before vanishing at his feet. Strange, he thought, that humans never tapped into this ever-present source of insight - caught up as they were in a world he had never properly understood, involving celebrity and empty junk that glittered but, upon closer inspection, crumbled into dust. And at this, he stretched, purred, and sauntered into the night, blending with his surroundings completely.
Madame K's culpability knew no bounds. She was guilty - plain and simple. She had been in the room with Madame H, had stirred the lethal mixture and poured it without remorse, into her whisky. smiling as she administered it. Just the thought of it now gave her the vapours; feeling frazzled she took to her bed, unsmiling as she stared up at the ceiling, imagined herself behind bars for a life sentence - if they did not hang her! Even now she was not certain of why she had committed the crime - although it had taken several weeks to orchestrate the perfect circumstances so as to cover her tracks as much as possible - what had her reasoning been? At the time it had felt so... necessary. She searched for fragments of memory to help guide her. But the memories which had seemed so important at the time teased her by dancing on the fringes of her imagination. The reasoning seemed limited, ridiculous. And now, haunted by her own thoughts, she felt that in order to cleanse her soul she would have to turn herself in. There was no other choice.
"Exploring the nature of reality isn't easy" - Detective John Constable was chewing on a sandwich, watching the rain exploring the windowpane in a contemplative downward trajectory, through eyes that had already seen the best and the worst of humanity. "I was just saying this yesterday to Captain Scarlet, when, well. You know."
Manley Hall did know all too well. They had been sitting in the car, much like today, and it was as though the everyday world around them dissolved into tiny fragments. Behind this lay the night sky, a vast sea of stars. Yet instead of the expected static nature to this, this scene had felt more alive, more vibrant, than anything he had experienced. Tears poured down his cheeks as he was filled with the greatest love he had ever known, and beings he had never seen before danced before him, just playing for the sheer bloody hell of it. He was home. Trying to vocalise this seemed crude - as though his tongue, his thoughts of his means of expression, were as a blunt hammer trying to extract the sweetest diamond from the most fragile rose.
And now they were back, in the same car, in the same world, doing the same job. Why had they , a couple of normal policemen, been gifted with such a vision? It didn't stop that drunk over there from drinking until he could stand no more, but slump to the ground, a twisted, painful vision of his childhood self. It didn't stop anything at all. And he already felt the gorgeous memory begin - ever so slightly - to fade, like a ship in twilight.
What of reality, indeed?
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