The Song of No Bird

The phone - bakelite, worn smooth, black beetle-like and brooding - rings. Jarring. It had been a quiet day until that smooth shrill sound, the sort of day where nothing happens, but happens so languidly (so exultantly) that nothing becomes everything. Becomes anything.

The phone. I think of alarm clocks peeping softly without electronics. I think of LED numbers (11:11; 23:23) raging red at me until their light dims, until their mad red glow dies sullenly at last. I think of clockwork and razor blades.

The phone. (I give in.) Something crackles at me through the wire, wheezing great racking coughs of static, snow fallen on copper wire. Red, cruel and gleaming, through the white (and the white is everywhere). The static resolves. The sound focuses. My consciousness become a lens, become a mirror, become an over-elaborate sentence that rattles and jangles pleasingly, hollowly. Saying nothing. The traitorous quiet part of me is obscurely pleased.

"You're invited," it begins, the voice, the voice come to me through the wire, and I know what's coming next. "You're invited to a /night at the opera./"

Dead air follows.

All the way home.

Not quite petunias

Oh, not again.

The Devil in the Details

"It comes in shapes," someone said - not to me, I hasten to point out, but I was in the vicinity and really, public spaces are not meant for privacy.

I walked the long way home. Thinking. Hands in pockets. Dead leaves everywhere and it's nearly May. May! Three letters of permissiveness and a built in handshake. Nice work if you can get it.

"It comes in shapes," the woman said, and I remember now that it was called "The Witching Hour." No one else does. That's lonely and strange.

> WAIT

You wait...

Time passes.

It's true. I can't seem to stop it.

Eight letter nightmares at three am

So the scariest thing I ever saw on TV - this, by the way, is by way of an exorcism - was something when I was a kid. Not that I mean to suggest to you I've ever been an immature goat, except figuratively (figures), it's just a phrase. Or a phase. Something like that, anyway. You know what I median.

Anyway, yeah. TV. Television. The scariest thing. I don't remember the programme, really, or the context, or even the linear progression of narrative or the intriguing juxtaposition of thematic elements or even - beyond "doodoodledoo-DOO-DO-DO-DOOO" - the sparks and coruscations of the music, incidental, titular or otherwise.

do-do-dooo.

Just an image. Images. Static and snow (imagine travellers on a mountain path, lost in a snowstorm, emerging into a greyscale world of antique broadcasts, meaning subservient AT LAST to image: all our old friends come again, singing the familiar old songs, hands cupped and mouths pursed to catch the old phrases, the old rope).

...

Mmm. Maybe in the morning. You know. When there's not-dark.

PIN numbers and secret codes

I saw this on the way home, daubed in streaky white paint on the walls of an old abbatoir (don't ask why I know it was an abbatoir). It fascinated and unnerved me in equal measure, and I don't know why. That also unnerves me, but I find that less fascinating. But there it is, palette-reduced to make up for the terrible low-light functionality on my camera.

Maybe later I'll think of something suitably random and whimsical, ward it off, get it out of my mind. Light a night light. Whistle a cheery tune. What did Coleridge say about the traveller on the lonely road?

The strangers are coming.

:-/

Conversation of the week

"The mechanics should offer compelling and tangible benefits to marriage - like access to the spouse's corpse."

The context of this discussion I leave to the imagination of the reader.

Still not part III

'...To-day I have five hundred men in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear.

These men enter every shade and grade of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples; other are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others hold undisputed sway among the 'Fancy and the Talent.' I choose them at my leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough -- they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. So, you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of their fellow citizens, I have in my pay."

"They may turn on you," I suggested.

He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears and adjusted the wax substitutes. "I think not," he murmured, thoughtfully, "I seldom have to apply the whip, and then only once. Besides, they like their wages."

"How do you apply the whip?" I demanded.

His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled to a pair of green sparks.

"I invite them to come and have a little chat with me," he said, in a soft voice.'