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“Do leaves really talk?” she wondered as the smoke of the herb tea dissipated off the kitchen’s mirror credence. “Let’s see about that,” she continued, carrying the tray with the cup of tea and the scones to the computer room, from where a few oink sounds were beckoning her.
Probably her friends asking for a chat, some random rubbish or the last juicy news about the president’s wife who happened to be visiting in the area. In truth, she wouldn’t have even known, had it not be for her foreign friends. The local neighbours really couldn’t give a fig. That was figuratively speaking of course. The fig trees were already full of green fruits, that if odds were good wouldn’t turn up as half-sodden half-rotten food for snails on the cobblestone pathway this year.

She added a zest of fresh lemon to the tea. She liked it bitter. The leaves were starting to settle at the bottom of the cup while she lit up a cigarette, throwing a cursory glance at the tens of messages waiting for her to peruse. Which was more interesting? She could figure out wavy things as feeble and changing as her cigarette’s smoke in between the leaves patterns, as well as in between the lines of haphazard messages from all the contacts. But those she loved the most were the pages she leafed through her books.

Yesterday, she started to do something purely daft, as she liked — a sort of challenge, if you will; or perhaps, a strong repressed desire. Sometimes it takes you years to do things you were thinking about when you were but a child. The moment you allow yourself the pleasure to indulge and overcome the resilient beliefs that it’s something forbidden or insidiously wrong is all the sweeter.
And she was tasting it like a sour sweet, with a touch of forbidden and the zest of excitement. Or more like horseradish. Ooh, does she live the green stuff too. Prickly at first, going up to your nose, and living you crying but begging for more. She makes a note to buy some next week (note that she’ll probably forget).
So what did she do? She took some of her precious books and started to tear up and cut through the pages. A blasphemy almost, for someone like her who revered books. Of course, at first she only took the bad ones, the romantic rubbish and the dog-eared now useless kitchen books, but then realized, what would be the point of gathering new information by assembling random pages cut off from a variety of books, if it wasn’t made from quality ingredients. Well, it surely stands to reason, even though her culinary reason had been on voyage the last twenty years as far as she knew. Anyway. Those leafs were starting to talk better than any bloody tea leaves could.

[link: talking leaves]

After having had a wheel ride in the garden, Grandpa Wrick came back a little less in-tense.

“Mmm, I suppose this game isn’t as much fun as I expected. I want to give it another try, adding a little something more.” he said to the kids when their cartoon had finished. India Louise, Cuthbert, and their friends Flynn and of course Lisbelle (who had been quiet in the background, playing with her pet rabbit Ginger) started listening with a mild interest —the whimsical Lord Wrick having proved countless times he had no qualms at making a fool of himself, and thus at entertaining children.

“What I want to achieve, by playing this game of snowflakes,” he said after a pause “is paying more attention at your stream of consciousness.”

“You see, I’ve been reading the classical Circle of Eights countless times in my young age, and dear old Yurara didn’t have much interest in creating links between her narratives. This is what I want to do with this game: pay attention to the links.

In this game of snowflakes, the stories (flakes) matter less than the links you build between them, and thus the pattern that is created.
We have the choice to continue and detail the previous story, in which case, the link is obvious, or we may want to start another one. But we need to know what, from the previous entry, prompted you to create that special new story you are about to write or tell.

Just like in a dream, when you explore a scene, some object will jump at your attention, and propel you to another dream story. Just like that, I want to spend more time exploring the transitions between each scenes and story blurbs that we tell. The links don’t necessarily have to be an object, of course not.
It can be an idea, a theme, a music, virtually anything, provided that it can make some sense as to why it is used as a transition…”

Seeing the children waiting for more, he pursued: “a good introduction to this game would be for you to try to follow your train of thoughts during the day. Try to do mentally that small exercise before you go to sleep, and remember the transitions of your whole day, and you’ll see how complex it can become, how often you pass and zap from one thing to another.

Take even one event that lasts a few minutes like eating a honey sandwich at breakfast, can make you think of dozens of things like the texture of the bread, the fields of wheat, or the butter, the glass jar filled with honey and the bees that made it, the swarm of bees can carry you even further into another time, or towards a bear or into a movie maybe.

I want that you pause to take time to break this down, so that your audience can follow the transition from one story to another, and that it makes perfect sense for them.”

Wrick rolled his eyes, which made the TV set zap to a cartoon channel which immediately caught the children’s entire attention.
“So much for trying to get them to focus on depth.” he said looking at the daft-looking goat’s head with its tongue sticking out hanged on top of the altar.

“Let’s wheel out of this room and leave it at that.” he mumbled in his breath.
“And hope the cook will cut on the shallowts, it gives me such a bad breath, actually”.

After his failed attempts to gain control over the Land of Peas, and his being thrown out of the Majorburghouse body first and framed head second by an angry mob of infuriated Peaslanders (which was something to be noted, since Peaslanders were usually quite the happy bunch), the Majorburgmester now bereft of anything but his will, was thinking it was high time for a u-turn in his carreer.

His dear blubbits had apparently mostly vanished out of sight, some said trapped in a blinking giant spider’s cobweb blinked out of Peasland, some others said suffocated under shiny duct tape, and even some said baked in ashes and almonds — those last obviously were the maddest of the lot.
It seemed like all the Dimensions had conspired to his defeat.

Now hardly a Majorburgmester, the title having now been offered by the cheerful crowd to the raucous and unexpected hero (after they hesitated for a good hour if it should be given to the herald of the liberation, that stupid Gandfleur whatever its name of a dog), he was now again known as B. Weazeltweezel (the B. standing for Bartabous, his mother having a fondness for names in “-ous” like Precious, his elder sister, and Pulpous his second sister; a chance his father was a man of more common sense, otherwise he surely would have been named Houmous himself).

The newfound venture didn’t wait long to manifest. In the not so distant past, he had already suspected something fishy about Lady Fin Min Hoot and now he knew. She was a high member of the Bridge Tarts Order, and though it was a secretive and feminine order, he had always loved a challenge.
He felt he could muster all the tartiness and bridginess needed to be granted access to their secrets.

Galvanized as he was, were he to successfully infiltrate the order, he knew he didn’t really stand a chance without something else. By nothing short of a synchronistic chance, Fwick, the saucerer had given him the leftovers of a potion he didn’t know what to make of.

In a gulp (and a few gargppls) Batabous was rapidly changed into a rather convincing dame matron, with slight mustache and ample bosom.

Tarty Bridgies, here I come… he said in a falsetto voice that needed work. … soon everybody will know about Lady… Bartaba

And good luck with making any sense off THAT! the evil Messmeerah hissed in a fitful and raucous laugh which made her blink and wink like mad.

Turning to her shrine, she started to prepare the right tools for the job… a fine bloody ritual.
Boy, did she loved carpaccio.

Doily said matter-of-factly to her little troop of headless travellers “Fancy a cup of tea?”

As none of them really cared to answer to the obvious fact that they didn’t have any teapot or sugar not to mention milk, lemon, and of course tea (other than a few random leaves that could have been used as an ersatz) she pursued her inspired tirade “Did you know that the Reunited Landers invented tea-bags by the way?”

Silence again.

“I just suddenly remembered, and it’s the funniest thing believe me… Those bloody Yorkies were sent some tea samples in silk pouches and they thought it the next best thing since the invention of boiled water and asked for more!…”
“Perhaps we should catch the blubbits in silk pouches…” she added after a moment.
“Frankly, anyone wanting to get home?” she then said with a bit of alarm in her voice “This Eighth Dimension doesn’t really got the promises of fun they sold us.”

“I was starting to think the same,” Pee answered raucously, startling everyone off their self induced Kuzhedoor trance state.

Phurt was vaguely aware to have been alive in different times, and in different surrounding. The memories kept coming at the oddest and less practical of all times, like this one when she’d jumped through the talking glass. They were nevertheless precise and vivid enough to be more than just strikes of fancy. Besides, she was but all a fancy spider.

The last one she remembered (and the ten previous ones before it) was being admonished and crushed (literally) by the words (and the one uttering them) “you and your kind are not welcome here!” Actually, if you wanted to be precise, the previous to last time, she’d been drowned in the pipes —but still, she could hear the fateful “you and your kin… gurgle gurgle.”

She didn’t know for certain when and where she’d vowed to gain dominion over these Crushing Others, and all her failed attempts and these strange karmic glimpses that had her reincarnated over and over certainly did help, if so slightly, to get closer to this goal.

Now she needed a nice dark and clean place (yeah hence the stupid tub of last which proved to be clean enough, but barely dark for long enough) to spin a nice thin web and gather enough food for her dear little ones.

Messmeerah (Winky) Maymhe, High Priestess of the Pendulous and Loose Otherworldly Threading, was going for a bath into the Pool of Rejuvenation. Her ineffable beauty had started to show the early signs of time tampering —signs she’d learnt to notice as soon as they’d appear. Luckily, the moons were in perfect alignment for the rituals of Spring Beautusk*.

News were good, very good indeed —which would certainly help in maintaining her perfect brow and forehead in pristine smoothness.
News were so good that she’d sent her minion Minky fetch the boy just right after her white crow Saggin had came back with news of finding him… after all those years (not that years did matter to her anyway, she prided herself on that).

It’d been close to an eternity, and she weighted her words… (in actuality it was a few teens and futile years at most) that she’d been trying to recover the boy, but the dwarfs had played her, and had managed to hide him from her sight.
She had not thought he could be concealed by anyone powerful enough, and it was surely not by the magic of that headless Malvina and her pesky dragons. In fact, the boy had been concealed even after Malvina and her menagerie had left the boy and his caretaker. She was thinking the caretaker in question had a concealment charm far more powerful she thought could exist.

But Minky would surely take care of that.

—

• It should be said that one of the effects of the rituals of Spring Beautusk were a slight stiffness of the overall face (and other dipped body parts), which earnt Messmeerah the cute and albeit ironic sobriquet of Winky, as she hardly managed to blink and was often victim of bouts of winking when she tried too hard.

The Peasland Majorburgmester rubbed his hands with an evil glee.

Fwick was knee deep in kneading for what appeared to be a lunatic idea bound to failure, and more importantly, it’s been weeks that no one had heard back from the expedition to the Eighth Dimension… And frankly, anyone having spent more than a few days in the Eighth Dimension usually was never to be heard of again —or heard speak anything intelligible for that matter, which didn’t make much difference either.
In fact, there had been some reports of sightings of the poor souls’ dog, what was its name already, Gandfleur or something equally ridiculous. But a single dog was hardly a problem, and now he couldn’t see how Peasland would be able to avoid the unavoidable blubbits dominion over Peaslanders.
He’d made that surer than sure; he’d gone again no later than yesterday, concealed under a waterproof floak (a floating cloak for inundated part of the lands), deep into the heart of Peasland’s plains now ridden in burrows to feed the breading mother of all blubbits a healthy dose of blunips. It had cost him most Mungibs he thought he would ever allow to part with, but it was Mungibs well placed. Soon people would plead for a real game changer. And he knew well who would step forward, and it was nothing like those headless twats.

He was in such a jolly mood, he’d called for a party. Well not officially called that, of course —Peaslanders were such worryworts about their crops and the famine that may occur… But a little friendly gathering to celebrate their heroes gone to the Eighth for answers. What a masquerade.

He was indeed in such a jolly mood that he took the sinewy and allwardly beautiful Lady Fin Min Hoot by the waist, and invited her to a delirious dance —it was indeed a dandy day for dancing— and for a little after-hour in his carriage when they are done jiggling their bodyparts (at least in public).

That was then, all tied up in leather ribbons and pillows’ owl’s feathers, when he (and Lady Fin) heard the raucous voice calling.

Gnarfle !
Yes, that was it! that was the stupid name of the dog!…

How come they’d managed to come back?!

“What?” The Majorburgmester of Peasland almost laughed of surprise at the incongruity of Fwick con Troll’s idea. “You’re telling that this…”

“Little spider, yes”
“Contains a potent venom that could wipe the blubbits off the face of Peasland?”
“Absolutely, dear Majorburgmester”
“Are you out of your Fwicking mind, Fwick? What breading this nasty spider could possibly bring us any better than a plague of crop-eating blubbits in rut?”
“I was actually talking of breeding them, sir” Fwick objected
The Mayor continued unperturbed “Besides, we already have our fierce constable Stoll drill the mythic Eight Dimension for answers.”
“That would be placing a lot of trust in that foolish venture, I’m afraid to say, Majorburgmester. To date, very few people have managed to return safely.”
“Oh, who cares if they ever bloody come back Fwick! Come on! All we need to do is extort the answers from his spouse who’s kept all their heads in a safe place, I have no doubt of that.”
“Well… I wouldn’t place my head on this bet if I were you…”

“Ah, bugger off then with your stinking spider, and do your bloody experiments… As long as it doesn’t involve my name, and especially in case any misguided and sad assassination should occur, ahahaha. I’m joking of course.” The Mayor’s face (which was framed and hanged on the wall of the Majorburgmester Hall’s main office) suddenly shut any hint of humanity that could have been left on it.

WEEE FREEEKING OOOooOOOHH!

“Aaah, that feels better” he thought after a squab tubby lady, all pimped up like a stolen truck, came to ask him in a vulgar trailing voice of a transsexual hormonal troll if he had any carton box left up his nose (too bad he had not thought of asking her whether she had already looked up her ass).

Almost unperturbed by the sudden distraction coming from the remarkably head-in-the-clouds Doily, despite her seemingly headlessness-lessness, and applying instead his famous adage, Better stick to one’s own nonsense than follow another’s Mewrich thundered “Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll explain about the beard, so that we can all get back to our business, and you out to your quest (and off my home)”.

“Yes! Will you finally tell us about the bird, the notes, and all that buggery to get to that Eighth dimension and vanquish the darn blubbits invasion!” Pee Stoll almost cried out.

Carefully, Mewrich reached out for a tiny peacock in his aviary, a poor thing which was plucking its feathers after all that noise, that he may as well have chosen at random from the menagerie.
“Take this bird, and make it sing four notes, I said FOUR! not one more, not one less! in front of the great portal of Nibabuz and you should be able to get past the old Keeper… JUST DON’T try to interrupt me, by the coils of the great Snakipooh, you rude tart!” “You have to get past the Keeper, but he’s old and a bit arthritic, so all you’ve got to do is have him walk on his beard, and get past him.”

Dolores was about to add a little flourish, but all of them, the headless Stoll family, and Doily’s eccentric entourage where ushered out of the cave by the angered Saucerer. And every Peaslander knew you wouldn’t anger a Saucerer without having to deal with dreadful consequences. The green wig of Dolores being probably the remnant of one of these consequences.