Search Results for 'coincidence'

In an effort to shake off the troubling feelings that lingered long after she awoke, Mirabelle went to find Jack to tell him about her dream. She found him hunched over his computer, frowning.
“Ah, Mirabelle, pull up a chair and let me tell you about the strange dream I had last night.”
Intrigued, Mirabelle listened, saving her story until after he had finished relating his.
“There are too many coincidences for this to not mean something ~ something important. The parallels are everywhere! Look!” he said pointing to the screen.
“Crumbling cities, structures smashed to smithereens and clouds of dust, facades of houses blown off revealing ordinary objects and furnishings in hideous juxtapositions, and crazy angles. And look here” he said, “ nothing as far as the eye can see but rubble, but one wall left standing, almost intact, with the map still hanging on the wall.”
Jack turned to Lisa with a tear in his eye, and with a shaking voice he said, “I dreamed of a city like this last night, with all the facades blown off the constructs, and all the people were faceless as if they were wearing masks, but no! not like masks, there were empty holes where the faces had been, like bottomless black holes that made me dizzy to look at them.”
“But it was just a dream Jack” replied Mirabelle, wondering if she was reassuring Jack or herself. “It doesn’t mean anything, probably that cheese you had for supper.”
“Lisa was in the dream” Jack replied. “And Ivan, and Fanella.”
Mirabelle shivered. “They’ve been gone a long time, do you think something’s happened to them?” she paused and then added, “I had a disturbing dream too. It was my parrot, HuHu. He was calling me, oh! he was calling and calling, but I couldn’t see him in the fog, as I tried to follow the sound of his squalking in the swirling mist, I’d hear him behind me ~ no matter which way I turned he was always behind me, as if I was always facing the wrong way.”
“Well” said Jack, squaring his shoulders. “Faced with these two dreams, and with the delayed return of Lisa, Ivan and Fanella, I think we should face up to it and send a search party to the island. Now, enough of that long face, Mirabelle! Run along now and find Igor, and tell him to prepare for teleporting. He can go with you.”

The ten dogs circled the round kitchen table, all the eyes were focused on the left over roast potatoes including Mari Fe’s. Suddenly there was a little bang just in front her and she froze and glanced up. A mouse had appeared on top of the microwave, and he froze too, and stared at Mari Fe. Time stood still for a long moment as they looked at each other. Mari Fe wondered if he would like a Marie biscuit, remembering the last time he was here, and how he would only nothing else.
It wasn’t until later that she began to wonder if anything had gone wrong with the teleport arrangements with Baltazar. It was a remarkable coincidence, the time travel mouse popping in like that unexpectedly, after such a long absence.

Ann glanced vaguely over the bookcase, wondering where her dictionary was. Did people still use dictionaries in book form? I suppose any book will do for the purpose, she decided, and reached for the nearest book, a book about Rembrandt. She opened it randomly five times, using a ball point pen as a pointer, and selected five words for Prof Underbaker’s assignment.

…now…excite…

What a coincidence, I might be able to kill two birds with one stone here, Ann thought, with a slight shudder at the bird killing metaphor (if it was indeed a metaphor, Ann tended to skip the Labelling Words classes)…

…someone…

Ah, but who? Who shall I excite?

…pointed…

Pointed in the right direction? Addressed someone pointedly? Not to put too fine a point on it…

….time

Ann was interested to note that her selection of words started with the word NOW and ended with TIME, and popped it into her clue box in an effort to stay on course and finish the assigment.

There was no time like the present. Indeed T’Eggy was well aware that All is Now, she’d heard about that theory in Wicks, the online magazine that she’d found so enlightening. She’d been reading a copy of Wicks (a reproduction, the originals were now collectors items and very valuable ~ in an artifact rather than a monetary value kind of way, monetary value having been devalued in the early part of the century) in the teleport waiting room when she met the handsome foreignor in the dusty blue robes. Of course, it was not unusual to meet foreignors in the teleport waiting room, not unusual at all, but the tall, dark, and handsome stranger had excited her. Perhaps it was the flash of long lean tanned thigh that she glimpsed as his robes caught on the door knob. Of course, even the ‘waiting room’ was a retro touch, because there was no need to ‘wait’ for teleport travel. It seemed ironic in a way that folks in the old days had perceived ‘waiting’ as an onerous thing, an somewhat unpleasant period of clock watching and crossword puzzle books. These days ‘waiting rooms’ were popular places to meet people and choose probability pools. The latest trend was Turtle Nights, and Frog Nights, where men and women gathered in waiting rooms to choose partners, to find that special someone, loosely based on the old Hen and Stag nights.

“Do teleport stations have door knobs, Ann?” Pedro interjected.

“Oh!” Ann was momentarily non plussed.

“Non plussed? Is that a word?” asked Pedro.

“Pedro, stop interrupting! The assigment isn’t to design a teleport station!”

The teleport station had been designed in retro style, a facsimile of the Atocha train station in Madrid. Lack of need for physical details had not resulted in a lack of appreciation for physical detail simply for it’s artistic merit, not to mention historical educational value, and the TRANS (Teleport Relative to Any Now Space) Station was an award winning example of old fashioned detail. Why, it even had doorknobs, even though doors had been dispensed with several decades ago.

“I thought the assigment wasn’t to design a teleport station?” asked Pedro.

“Does it bloody matter?” retorted Ann, with a hint of exasperation. “The overall point is to write rubbish, and that’s what I’m doing!”

“I’m glad you pointed that out, Ann” remarked Pedro helpfully.

“Oh my god, look at the time!” Ann exclaimed. “It’s time for class!”

“Bugger that!” snorted Pedro. “I’d rather hear about what happened with T’Eggy and that tall dark stranger!”

CRASH! What was that? Yoland exclaimed. She quickly made a tour of the house, and discovered that an antique print of a mother cat and her kittens had fallen off the wall onto the telephone. Well, what a coincidence, she said, as she cleaned up the shards of glass. It was Al and Sam’s first day with the new kittens.

Well, what a coincidence. Yoland noticed that Jemima the cat had something wrong with her nose, just a few days after noticing that the white cat, Hilda, had something wrong with her nose.

Yoland decided to stick to fiction for awhile rather than the reporting of facts. She would even go so far as to disguise the facts to look like fiction, because fiction never got you into trouble, so she was inclined to think after the mornings rude awakening. If she simply said ‘I made it up’ in future, well, it seemed an easier way. Yoland decided to talk to herself for the forseeable future too, rather than to anyone else. She would make up characters to talk to, but it would all be made up, none of it would be the reporting of facts. She was through with facts, facts were too much trouble. Making it all up was easier.

While she was eating her marmite buttered toast, she opened the book at random that she had taken to bed with her the previous night, but hadn’t opened.

Once again, Yoland exclaimed “What a coincidence”, and wondered if coincidences would ever cease to be enchanting and fun. She doubted it, somehow. Each coincidence was always such a tiny tantalizing glimpse of so much more.

“…..you merely perceive a small portion of any given action,” Yoland read, “and when you cease to perceive it then it seems to you that the action itself ceases, and so an artificial boundary is erected.

“It has not occured to you, you see, to attempt to look OVER this boundary, so to speak, because you have taken it for granted that nothing exists on the other side. I am not here speaking necessarily of death, though this is the obvious instance of course. I am speaking of something much more subtle. I am speaking of ANY small seemingly insignificant action that you perform during an ordinary day, and HERE we are coming close.”

Yoland reckoned Seth was pretty close to what she’d been saying the previous night.

“You percieve only the most initial elements of such an action. It is as if you threw a ball, and could only follow the ball three inches away in space ~ then the ball would seem to vanish to you. The action would therefore seem completed. You would think it idiotic to imagine what happened to the ball when you could see it no longer, for habit would work in such a way that the disappearance of the ball would seem natural and normal, and a part of the nature of things.

“So, comparing the ball to an action, you perceive but the smallest portion of any given action, even one performed by yourself. It does not occur to you that there is more to perceive.”

Yoland was inclined to agree. Then she suddenly remembered that she was making it all up from now on, and went for a stroll around the Kasbah.

“ As we have stated previously, these terms are quite limiting for explanation purposes. The terminology is not incorrect, by any means. It is only expressing a much, much smaller impression to you than, in actuality, these terms represent. If your interpretation of these terms is too literal, you may find yourself accepting concepts which have only been explained to you partially; for our explanation of concepts is only a minute portion of the entirety of any idea, or concept, or “doctrine.” Only playing, my friend! These concepts must be taken in at this present time, within your present understanding, to the intellect; and the intellect must be allowed to trigger the intuition, allowing a full circle of thought, so to speak; this full circle being a continuous flow of information to assimilation, to actualization, to creation ” — Patel

Not AGAIN!! shouted Becky. For the past week every time she tried to open her blog page, it always opened on this old post of Patels. Usually, by a circuitous route, she did eventually manage to arrive on her most recent post…..but not today! That monkey Patel wouldn’t let Becky look at any other post but this.

Funny coincidence really that she’d watched the cartoon last night called Madagascar, starrring Patel himself as King of the Lemurs. Becky had to laugh. A rave party of dancing lemurs on ecstasy!

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Yoland. “Fancy landing on that Patel quote again today!”

Yoland knew Patel was around when the frying sausages had popped and spit fat at her. She had lost count of the amount of times that Patel had popped in with this quote. More strings and circles….and lemurs, too! At the lunch party the previous day, Yoland had been discussing evolution, and the missing link, and the next day a lemur-like skeleton was being heralded in the newspapers as the missing link.

Patel, as the missing link ~ Yoland had to laugh.

_{‘The tiniest piece of celery can leave me gasping for breath’: Rising number of children allergic to fruit and veg}

“Well what a coincidence.” Ann was beginning to sound like a broken record, but the article in the paper was rather a good synchronicity with her recent entry.

_{the brothers can’t eat most fruit as it gives them an allergic reaction}

Ann had to laugh, she’d often wondered why people chose to be allergic to all the nice things like chocolate and peanuts and cola and ice cream, how silly was that. Finally people were waking up to the fact that ice cream was spinach to some folks, just as cod liver oil was cola to others. Those brothers, surmised Ann, were creating just what they wanted.

Ann had forgotten to post the paragraph she wrote for the Play the previous evening. Perhaps that was what Godfrey had been referring to. Truthfully, Ann was feeling increasingly befuddled.

_{Phunn, the new puppy, was skittering and lurching around the kitchen, paddling in a saucer of mashed cat food and learning how to growl at chair legs. Yoland sat down at the computer with a weary sigh and checked the random quote. Well what a coincidence, she exclaimed, and not for the first time. The random quote generator really was remarkable.}

Ann wondered if it would matter that the entries to the Play was now out of order. She doubted it, but she did feel that it was symbolic of something else, but she couldn’t put her finger on it….

A strange smell of fish

Well, what a coincidence! Ann had woken up to find herself scribbling notes in her dream notebook, nonsensical words and phrases as usual, not that she was complaining, she loved the nonsense riddles and clues. The Fermented Village, she’d written, and Shopping for Parasites. The Fermented Village had reminded her of her childhood so many hundreds of years ago in Baelo Claudia and the stench of rotting fish in the garum factory down by the beach.

“Well, what a coincidence!” exclaimed Bea, as her freind Baked Bean Barb described the book she had just started reading. It was all about ancient inscriptions in Antartica, which was what Bea had been reading about online just before Barb arrived.

“Some of it’s fact” Barb was saying “But the rest of it’s made up; interesting though!”

“Oh, I can’t wait til they find remains of the civilization under the ice there!” Bea said, to which Barb replied “There’s no civilization there. Nope. There’s nothing ever been found, nothing at all scientifically proven about that. The book’s fiction.”

“Well, they haven’t found it yet, Barb ~ if the scientists had proof, it would be found already. Until things are found they don’t exist?”

“There’s nothing there, there’s no proof!” Barb said firmly, shaking her head.

“What about all the new things we keep finding out about, before we knew about them, they didn’t exist, is that what you mean?” Bea persisted, trying to get her point accross. Then she wondered why she was trying to get her point accross in the first place. She knew what her point was.

Well, at least I think I do, she said to herself.

“Fancy a cuppa, Barb? Leo bought some nice nettle teabags, how’s that sound?”

“Ooh yes please! Got anymore of those gingerbread men?”

Sometimes the actual point wasn’t at all the same thing as the point you thought you were making. Bea gave herself points for noticing this, although she wasn’t at all sure what the point of the whole thing was, objectively anyway. Distraction tactics always worked, but once summoned, the distractions were indiscriminate and chaotic. On the way to the kitchen to put the kettle on, Bea glanced out of the window and noticed a shaft of light illuminating the rocks and casting deep shadows into the crevices, the resulting effect looking for all the world like mysterious ancient inscriptions. She reached out for her camera, which was always conveniently handy, as she strode out of the door, single minded in pursuit of the capture of a moment of light as if drawn by a magnet, or reeled in like a fish.

Barb eventually found her, some 57 minutes later, pruning the oleander down by the stream.

“Wait a minute, you’re telling me that you’re a Parcel Delivery company, and you don’t have a map? You deliver parcels and you don’t have a map, you don’t have the internet, and your delivery man doesn’t have a phone?”

Bea was beginning to sound exasperated, Leonora thought. Must be the parcel people. “Parcel people?” she asked. “ A mobile phone wouldn’t be any use here anyway, Bea” she added “There’s no network cover.”

“My address?” Bea said into the telephone in an increasingly desperate voice. “Three people have called asking for my address” Bea took a deep breath and tried to change her energy. “My address is The House Down The Road Behind The Black Horse Bar” Bea paused for breath and continued “Through The Green Gates which are Behind The Fountain And Next To The Palm Tree. Tomorrow? You were supposed to come today! You were supposed to come yesterday as a matter of fact so I stayed home all day…”

“You weren’t going out anywhere anyway, Bea” Leo said mildly.

“Well I won’t be here tomorrow, can you just leave the parcel at the post office? What? Of course they’ll know who it’s for, it’ll have my bloody name and address on it! What? No, I don’t know what street the post office is on, haven’t you got a map? No? Well Google it! You’re kidding. You’re a parcel delivery company! What’s your name, by the way?”

“Well would you believe it, she hung up on me!”

“How wonderfully Spanish” said Leonora. “Remember the last parcel people? Wouldn’t deliver to houses without a number. So if I go out and paint a number, let’s say 57, on my gate, you’ll deliver the parcel, I said to them, and they said, well yes I suppose so, so I did. I went out to the shed and grabbed the first paint…”

“That swimming pool blue”

“…yeah bit bright isn’t it, that blue paint and I painted the number on it, and the neighbours came out and asked what I was doing…”

“They delivered the parcel though, didn’t they Leo”

“They did. There’s a knack to dealing with parcel people.”

Bea was quiet for a few minutes and then asked “What’s that then?”

“What’s what?” asked Leonora.

“What’s the knack? How do you get parcel people to deliver?”

Leo laughed and said she didn’t really know. “Change your energy, make a game of it, see what happens.”

Just then the phone rang. Bea answered it.

“Well how about that” said Bea, hanging up the phone a few moments later. “That was the parcel delivery man. He’s on his way now.”

Five or six hours later, just after the parcel delivery man had finally arrived, Bea beamed as she opened the brown cardboard parcel.

“I’ve been dying to read this, it’s the sequel to T’Eggy Gets a Good Rogering. I ordered two copies, I thought Baked Bean Barb might want one too, you know, as a bit of a thank you for the book she’s bringing round for us.”

Leo said “You what!” and rolled her eyes. “Really Bea, couldn’t you have chosen something better than that?”

“Define ‘better’, Miss Prim Prunes” retorted Bea. She was too happy about the books arrival to mind Leo’s remarks. Then she shouted “OH MY GOD! They’ve sent the wrong books!” so loudly that Leo jumped.

“Good grief!” exclaimed Leonora, taking a closer look. “Circle of Eights! But that’s the book that Baked Bean Barb found on the rubbish tip, the book she’s bringing round for us!”

“I don’t believe it!” Bea whispered, awed by the bizarre coincidence. “That’s the book with us in it.”

“What a hoot!” said Leo.

Becky looked at the pebbles in her hand and then looked up at the little jars of sand on her kitchen shelf.

“Pompeii and Ville Franche, I’d like you to meet Grand Canyon, Valley of Fire and Zion” she said ceremoniously, and placed the little shard of black rock and the smooth taupe pebble on the shelf next to the jar of Zion sand.

In her hand she still held the aquamarine quartz crystal. “You’re different” she said “And I’m not sure what to do with you yet.”

The previous evening she’d found herself holding the sea green stone in her hands as she listened to an unexpected voicemail from Jane. As Jane sang the Sumari song, Becky had felt the crystal glow and vibrate. She wasn’t quite sure what it all meant, but somehow it seemed significant that these unexpected gifts — the aquamarine quartz, the pebbles from Pompeii, and the Sumari song of Creation from Jane — that arrived on the same day, were all connected.

The second voicemail she felt sure was for Sean — Jane singing Molly Malone , and at the end of the voicemail, laughing.

Becky smiled. Whatever it was, it felt good.

“Aquamarine is excellent for the 5th, or communication chakra. It can help singers and orators get the full quality of expression by releasing emotions that get blocked in the throat.”

“Well, what a coincidence!” exclaimed Becky. “Singing sync! That’s a good start”

She returned to her research.

“Listen to this, Bea” Leonora said.

Bea looked up from her book “What’s that then Leo? I’m just getting to the juicy part where T’eggy gets….”

“Listen to this” Leo interrupted, and read from the book she was reading, “As a writer I feel free to do anything I please, investigating anything, saying anything…..as a writer I feel free to be psychic as a bird, do what I please and use my abilities psychically quite freely. When I think of me as a psychic I get hung up because I seem to be in the company of so many nuts. Writers may be as nuts as anyone else but it’s a nuttiness that doesn’t bug me ~ there’s no dogma attached…..”

“What on earth are you reading, Leo?”

“The memoirs of Jane Roberts” replied Leonora. “What a coincidence this is! I was just starting to think about writing some fiction, you know? Because when you write fiction nobody really questions what you write, it’s easier, somehow.”

“Well if it’s fiction you’re after, I can recommend T’Eggy Gets A Good Rogering, it’s brilliant.” replied Bea helpfully.

“Bloody hell, Bea!” said Leonora in exasperation. “I want to write tasteful enlightening fiction, wonderful stories with a moral and a point and a lesson ~ I don’t want to read the trash you read!”

“Suit yourself, you judgmental cow” replied Bea huffily. “And anyway, you haven’t even read it, so how would you know?”