Dora in the morning
In the morning, before work, Dora leaves the old wooden beach hut where she sleeps and climbs the steep pathway which curves behind the old church near the top of the hill. She carries a metal chamber pot, hand painted white by one of her grandmothers: one of those inconsequential trifles without value, inherited alongside other once-useful objects, piled up any old how in an old wicker suitcase that no one could be bothered to open.
Once beside the bench she marks out her territory with stones, useless jealousies and kitchen utensils that she has collected and which she plants vertically into the ground. She waters them for a long time, whistling almost noiselessly but loud enough to hide the sound of falling liquid from a passer-by who might otherwise have become lost there. Finally, she empties her pot onto a bed of flowers, behind a screen of bulrushes.
The ordnance
It seems that there exists an ordnance survey, a sort of mythical plastic-bound report with melted edges, written in ink, faded by the years and covered by a fine layer of green and white mould and dust; a survey which holds a current record of where every townsperson in the League of Tesseract lives.
The legend states that: a map will reveal the precise location of everyone's address. Road name, house number, floor, door, each exact detail.
It's a legend without name, one we tell each other in the evenings whilst we keep vigil and to avoid falling asleep. We tremble at the mere thought of what dangerous consequences such an object could have if it were to fall into the wrong hands, so we don't speak of it much, for fear of it falling into the hands of someone who, for a nothing, or maybe to ensure their own safety, might whisper the story into an Echthroi's welcoming ear.
Father Patrick
On the way back, Dora often comes across Father Patrick's cassock, emptied of its contents and swinging from a lantern at the whim of the wind. The man who so recently wore the garment and whose smell still lingers in its cloth is kneeling in the cemetery, crying and praying in front of four or five ancient graves which someone forgot to move after part of the hill-side fell into the sea.
Far below, through the mist, you can hear the echoes of the naked man's lamentations, each lament like a stake in the heart: 'It is a holy precaution', he cries, 'hide your children because the Echthroi are coming to reveal your dreams and eat your daisies.
Another way to live
The townspeople feel at home outdoors and in the majority people are friendly, there are no lack of friendly hellos even from people they do not recognise. Some push this addiction to amiability still further, by installing their living rooms outside their front doors so that passer-by’s can make themselves at home should they feel like it. If one neighbour puts their sofa outside their front door, it is sufficient excuse for another to place a coffee table that he no longer uses next to it, a third may add a mini-bar with the bottled dregs of some forgotten spirits and some chipped glasses inside, another a television stood in a flat pack cabinet which comes with everything necessary for television viewing enjoyment other than electricity, and so they proliferate alongside side-streets and pavements like wild-flowers; tiled bathrooms, modern kitchens, comfortable living rooms, real open air apartments that you can live in, and which appeal to the eye before even you enter the front door.
No-one ever leaves home, whether going between house or covered market, bookshop or coffee shop. The town has become a large house where everyone feels at home. There are no homeless people. For a long while, there is nothing much else but passer-by’s, passing from one room to another. Every street corner, each underside of a bridge, is a home without an address, where everyone lives for at least a short while.
Too many doors
The door of my wardrobe opens onto a desert inhabited by vagabonds. It moves and opens on a different region each day. I can hear the caravans’ slowdown at the sight of the white wooden door which blocks their passage. They have heard of it in ancient stories, and they know to avoid it without making a noise. They know this because I have stuck a note to the door explaining that my children are asleep in the next room and to avoid making any noise.
The Holograms
They have created a memorandium of the imaginary in the circular avenue which leads down towards the town centre, number twenty-one, the reception of a shabby and deserted museum. This is where they place the holograms that the towns people have sculpted from air to show others what they think of the Echthroi: the kind of head they have, if they have one, long arms which scoop up everything in their path, eyes bigger than their bellies, and steel jaws. In short, a little bit of everything and nothing at all.
The missing ordnance
It’s not a peculiar place, it has a nearly-new chair and a table and a polished leather sofa. And a lamp which is lit even during the day. There reigns a bizarre sensation, a soft coloured agony of unquiet stillness, something that tastes not quite sterile. By the way the lost ordnance can be found somewhere near here.
Old Joseph's memories
Old Joseph had been a pioneer of the preservation society. He began really very young, well before the others had begun to put things to one side.
He stilled lived with his parents and had already laid claim to the loft, the cellar, the summer house and was currently eyeing up the garage. He had filled each space with, and piled one on top of the other, the elements of his everyday life that he felt was absolutely necessary to keep, but nothing that he did not believe was not absolutely necessary: the first shoe he had worn and others, a nearly complete collection of half drunk bottles of milk, clothes, a stone which he could have kicked but didn't, all his old hamsters in jars filled with formaldehyde, some drawings, some letters and much more.
The deflated football
How can you play football with a deflated ball? All the players would break their feet trying. Instead it'd require a new football, well inflated, with coloured segments that you could see in the dark, and a great florescent line around the middle; but not this soft and deflated vacuum which scoops up gravel and creates clouds of dust and that will never ever score a goal.
In-between the world
The streets are like an in-between world; purgatory for dead things. Though Megan is sensible when she walks there, she is never quite sure whether she will be able to walk out again. Obviously she goes out walking rarely. Even so, she was once seen standing for hours, hypnotised by a yellow plastic-covered book, unable to move. Some things are known to take control of people after a while.
When the hill-side last fell into the sea
There is a body buried in the cemetery on the hill-side which has been there for centuries and which has a tendency to move around. The body was placed in a number of individual graves, unmarked graves, save for a brief description: Right arm, left arm, a leg, another, a torso and a head.
Like that wasn't enough, the graves still have a tendency to move away from each other like something was pushing them from below. Regularly, or so the theory goes, one should dig up and move the graves closer to each other, in order to rejoin the disparate body parts, but this takes a lot more effort than is ever available.
Ballroom dancing without bristles
I don’t know how you can keep surfaces clean using only the handle of a broom. A sort of pole which ends in a flat rectangular lump of wood, where bristles once sprouted. It’s been a while since it had any bristles. It’s been a while since I danced.
Bazaar
This kind of place has existed forever, its façade indescribable by familiarity. Where the eye can’t discern anything tangible. It is called “Bartholomew’s bazaar of all-sorts and cheap bizarities”. When you look for a thing that isn’t elsewhere, or a corner which you can browse for an indeterminate while, when there is nothing else to do, or you just fancy a gossip, that’s were you go. Not that I’m recommending it.
Where we forget about the missing ordnance
Amongst a pile of folded garden chairs, the police are intent on lifting suspect fingerprints from a paper-machier mask. Right next to the mask is a plastic-bound manuscript with melted edges, probably full of detailed annotations, that contain the answer to how this literary tesseract shows molecules breaking down, planning destruction and the complexity of god, or it could just be the missing plastic-bound ordnance survey everyone thinks they're looking for.
Seven knocks at the door and a heavy step.
The ambulance came to get Dora, last night, after the weather report. The weather report has always seemed slightly absurd, since we don’t know whether tomorrow will ever come. It’s a little like the lottery. The ambulance men knocked and let themselves in, as the patient was busy. They carried her off sweating like a suet pudding, stewing in amber scotch. They had found her chilled out on her bedroom ceiling in the middle of religious images, kitchen-utensils and diagrams outlining some theory or another on the creation of the solar-system, amongst which they also found some photographs of an ant-eater, an iguana and a Proginoskes.
partly inspired by lots of things, and by 'the wind in the door' by madeleine l'engle
