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The blizzard mircaulously stopped as soon as the fountain erupted, and the icicles on the trees in the square twinkled, casting long blue shadows on the snow. Mari Fe and Pearl had just finished a second helping of cake, and were feeling optimistic and relaxed in the warm cafe.

Mari Fe sighed in contentment. “You know what Pearl? I’m considering retiring early. Because quite frankly, I prefer eating cake.”

“Can’t you eat cake and carry on? You’re eating cake now, and you haven’t retired yet.”

“Well I suppose that’s true enough. And shopping for flying carpets is hardly grueling labour. But all the sudden portalings, and the problem of weather, and clothes…it does get tedious. The evenly temperate global climate is a long time coming!”

“It’ll come alot quicker if we do well at our job!”

“I suppose there is that…”

“Take a look out there, Mari Fe ~ look at the weather in the square now! Sun’s shining, birds are singing, children are coming out to play…but it’s still snowing in Moscow.. Come on, let’s go and see about the carpets, and make tracks for Moscow.”

“What’s the cake like there?”

“Sweet, beautiful, as light as air, just like the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova?”

Eventhough Stu was not very bright, he had always been successful with women. Thanks to his young and handsome body. He’s been working at the gas Station in Cottonwood since he was 15, he’d figured out at that time it was the best way to meet women. Some of them were even coming as far from Phoenix, and his boss was rather content about it too. He’d even encourage his employee to take off his shirt more often.

Days were following days, and it was the same routine, washing cars, filling gas tanks, meeting women. Nothing particular had even happen in Cottonwood. Of course there were often weirdos as they were close to Sedona. Some of them were asking if he had seen any ETs lately, or some guys asked him once if he’d ever been probed by aliens.
It was all part of the job, and he didn’t really pay attention. His best response was no response at all and play the dumb. Except with women. He would always find something to say to make them laugh and he especially loved to see those sparkles in their eyes, that’s when he knew he could ask them anything.

Sanso rubbed his sore head.

“Oh well, just one of the hazards of the job, I suppose.” he said philosophically.

“Okay, coast is clear,” he whispered into the portal.

One by one, Arona, Vincentius and Yikesy piled into the small bathroom.

“Don’t forget me!” hissed Mandrake.

“You know,” Mandrake continued, snootily, “there are some who will say we should not be here. There will be some who will be tsk tsking for all they are worth.”

“Positive energy, please Mandrake.” smiled Arona. Mandrake rolled his eyes.

“It will be fine, just remember: nobody must know who we are or why we are here, and positive intentions at all times.” Sanso was tremendously excited. It was a long time since he had had such an exciting mission.

“Why are we here, again?” asked Vincentius, in his deep melodious voice.

“It’s a good job I’m firm yet yielding, stiff yet malleable with staying power, Mari Fe” gasped Ed as he opened the bathroom door.

Madam Li was gorgeous in her red silk chinese dress. She might be the eldest of the Team, but she appeared to be one of the youngest. She was proud of her Chinese ancestry. The two golden dragons on her dress emphasized her silhouette and her hair artistically arranged like an empress.

She had just received the invitation to the Tartessos’ 3 King’s parade. Eventhough she didn’t much like travelling, it might be an occasion to go somewhere warmer. It was snowing again in Shanghai and she had been sent there to investigate this strange occurance in that part of the country. Not that it was really strange to her, she had been raised in Harbin, and its ice festival. But having cars half burried in snow in Shanghai was not a normal sight.

At the moment, she was staying at an over-heated serviced apartment near the Pearl Tower of Shanghai. One of the perks of being part of the Team. Ed had always offered them a good salary and an apartment provided with the job, and they could use the red fleet whenever the wanted.

When she had tried to open the window, and didn’t succeeded, the night sight from her window gave her chills. Reminding her that she so loved this city. All the lights, blinking in and out, creating organized or random patterns at every corner. The city had changed so much these last years.

Madam Li put the invitation on the table, she would think of it later and checked with the red fleet to book a flight as soon as she had found out about all that snow in Shanghai.

Tina was working in a very unknown departement at the online payment company. Part of her job was to make sure the information provided by the customers were genuine and she only had to validate the payments in a mouse click.

That day however, she was feeling a bit mischievous and when she realized her mouse wasn’t functionning correctly, instead of asking for a new mouse, she continued with it a bit. At first it had been random transactions and she found it quite boring. But when one person was persistant enough to go again through the pain-in-the-ash process of paying online, she felt a tingly feeling in her chest. She clicked with her dysfunctionning mouse and invalidated the transaction again.

Several minutes later, she realized it was the same person again. Apparently a French guy. God, she hated France ! They eat frogs, frogod sake!
He was using another website to make his transaction. Obviously not knowing that all the payments were coming through the scrutiny of that secret service departement. She exulted and clicked again. She was so excited that her colleagues looked at her suspiciously when she made that hysterical laugh of hers.

Click! Click! Click!

She had even been hesitating to have a break lest he would present his transaction again and would pass through her vigilance.

“Tina ?”

Her boss! A moment of inattention and it was over! She felt a surge of disappointment flooding her when she realize the transaction had been taken by another of her colleagues… and validated.

Ann Aspect had started the evening course “Free the Fiction Writer Within” without much hope, but much to her surprise, she loved it. She enjoyed it so much that on impulse she quit her day job at the Frozen Flounder Company and signed up at the Fiction Writers Academy as a full time immature student.

She was right. Maybe he needed a job as a janitor instead, and draw on walls, or write some sotteries pardon my Medieval French.
“I’m leaning towards valuing the imagination parts of me.” he’d answered, not quite convinced, as though it were told by someone else, or something he’d read earlier somewhere, on a wall probably.
The vole was still there when she’d left. She’d kept moving back to give it space to run off up the dry road, but no, the little thing even held its hand up when she tried to pick it up as if to say NO! thank you I’m fine.
He too was fine, surrounded by converging ripples of emotions, but oddly calm.
“Too neatly organized stuff gets dusty and boring” he’d said to her.
“I know,” she’d answered, ending their brief encounter with a limerick

The housekeeping lady of China,
Said she’d never seen anything finer,
than a wacom of dust,
that she sponged and brushed,
that housekeeping lady of China…

“You know, I think they got a name for your condition” Franlise said while throwing another piece of rotten furniture and a dusty half-plucked stuffed pheasant from the window.
“Oh no!” Elizabeth was crestfallen “not my favourite plucked pheasant, let’s at least keep this! A perfectly functioning piece that one, Lewis Someteenth, French expensive furniture dammit!”
“You’re a bloody compulsive hoarder, that’s what you are!” Franlise said authoritatively. “Now, move along, let me do my job.”
“Your job? And what are you now?”
“A professional organiser, of course.”

There was no place like home, notwithstanding that home could be considered to be anywhere at all. Home in this case was Blithe’s patio one balmy September evening. Citronella candles flickered on the table, and coloured fairy lights strobed in strings along the facade of the house. A rosy glow emanated from the bedroom window and Blithe took a snapshot, noticing later the fly screen visible, overlayed onto the bedroom scene. Not only was the view of the bedroom limited by the width of the camera lens, it was also limited in the sense that the wire screen was obscuring almost half of what would have been visible if the photograph had been taken from the other side of the screen, or, with no screen at all in between the lens and the view of the room. However, despite having such a partial view of the whole, the remainder that was viewable was still identifiable as a bedroom.

Blithe wasn’t about to remove the screen however, because it was doing its job of screening, or filtering out, the unwanted insects. That wasn’t to say that she was denying the existance of those insects, or that they weren’t welcome on the other side of the screen, just that she was selectively screening the unwanted items from a particular scene. If, for example, the room was full of insects, Blithe might have been preoccupied with them, to the exclusion of whatever else she might have preferred to focus on within the bedroom. Out on the patio, however, the insects were, if not always entirely welcome, appreciated. The praying mantis and the dragonfly were welcome, and the butterflies and moths were always welcome, because Blithe had associated the energy of those insects with familiar welcome energies. The wasps, flies and ants were not translated in the same way, but were appreciated for entirely different reasons, being an aid to exploring such issues as irritation (and occasionally, pain). Blithe had to admit that despite the praying mantis and dragonfly being welcome, it would not be true to say that they were welcome in the bedroom, however.

There had been times when Blithe wished that the whole patio was enclosed in screens, but the trouble with screens was that they tended to filter out everything of a certain size, although perhaps that was more a beleif about physical screens than anything else. Was it possible to filter out flies and wasps, but allow dragnflies and butterflies? Possible surely, she thought, but perhaps not with physical wire screen devices and associated beleifs.

A few days previously Blithe had cleaned the mesh filter on her kitchen tap, unrestricting the flow. Coincidentally, her friend had also had a tap mesh restricted flow incident, and had removed the mesh filter altogether. Another friend had removed a window screen for cleaning, and had chosen not to replace it, as she was appreciating the allowance of much more light. And then another friend had mentioned a dream, of dragonflies under a screen that was covering a pool. She had lifted the screen in the dream, to allow the dragonflies to escape, and yet some of the dragonflies chose to stay under the screen.

Intrigued with the words screen and mesh, which meant the same thing in one respect, but not in others, Blithe investigated the definitions. To screen could be to filter out the unwanted, but to mesh was to weave together. But were they so different, really? A screen was also a blank place on which to project images ~ meshed and woven selectively screened and filtered images, perhaps.

{link ~ weaving}

They were thick as theives, freinds for thousands of centuries, or even more; sometimes thick, sometimes theives, and anything else you might imagine. They got together again and again in this time and that, here, there and elsewhere, just for the fun of it. There was nothing they liked more than a puzzling occurance, or a riddle, or a basket full of clues to ponder over, unravel, and turn around and around, toying with meanings until they found one they liked. They had a home in The City, sort of a home base so to speak, where they met regularly each night in the dream state, regardless of which time or place they spent their waking hours. It was sometimes a releif to meet up at home in The City and always a pleasure: sometimes it was hard to stay under the radar back down on the ground, it was part of the job to stand out in the crowd, which often resulted in a lynching, or a ducking, or the stocks, at the very least. All too often it ended up on top of a bonfire, tied to a stake.

One day in one of the Decembers, in amongst all the sweet dreams they often shared, they started having some unsettling group dreams, where they all felt like they were betwixt and between, falling through the cracks you might say. It was a feeling similar to dying of thirst, although it wasn’t really a physical thirst, it was more than that, a hungry yearning sort of thing. Some of them had strange nightmares, of a monstrous beast, and some of them actually saw beasts in the daytime too, especially on those falling through the cracks days. When they met up at home in The City, they compared notes about the beasts, and not always, but sometimes they found they were mirroring each others beasts. That often ended up in a heated debate, because the more mirroring that occurred, the more real the beast seemed. Some said that the beasts that appeared when you fell through the cracks were in a deep ravine, in a manner of speaking, and not of this plane at all. Others argued that if the beasts appeared through the cracks, then they were on this plane.

And so it went on, and on. There were many more puzzling occurances to come, and lots of meanings to be considered, rejected, or taken on board for the friends, as thick as thieves, to turn around and around, and hold up to the mirror for closer inspection and dissection. They were making a tapestry, a huge rich colourful tapestry, and all the puzzling occurences, and even the beasts, were depicted in the colourful threads and patterns. They were the warp, you might say, of the weave. Love was the weft.

“Congratulations, Liz” Godfrey remarked drily. “Are you supposed to use three months worth of creative writing challenges in one entry?”

“Don’t be silly, Godfrey, of course not. Rules are meant to be broken, that’s what they’re for.”

It was a good job that Fwick had a handy dose of Backing Powder. He needed all the backing he could get for his new production, “Fried Spiders Bite Back”.

“You see, by no manner is it an issue if things aren’t continuous” Walter was saying, which immediately brought to Ann’s mind the latest development at her end of the group project. For some reason lately she found that she was permanently signed in, as opposed to previously, when she’d had the dickens of a job to stay signed in long enough to make an entry. Permanently connected, as it were.

“….and I know it’s almost blasphemous to say that” Walter continued, causing Ann to raise an eyebrow, “…but the crux of the matter lays in the measure with which things are expanded and linked together.”

“If I may be so bold as to interrupt, sir,” Ann couldn’t restrain herself from interjecting, “Surely that is what readers are for? Is not the purpose of the writer, or indeed any artist, to simply offer particles, or pieces, for the viewer to add, or not, as they choose, to their own continuous storylines?”

Walter opened and closed his mouth like a godfish. (Ann had to laugh at the typographical error.)

“For example” Ann continued, warming to the subject, “When I random read book pages, then channel surf the TV, followed by a random roam around online, interspersed with perhaps a few phone calls, or various incidents throughout the day, I’m making a continuous story of my own, with pages and screenshots and conversation snippets borrowed, if you like, from many external sources (and before you say anything, I am aware that no source is external, but don’t let me start digressing). The era of being ‘told’ a story to beleive in its entirety is over! Everyone knows these days that we each make our own story, with a bit of this, and a bit of that. It’s The Age of Random Tips & Snippets, after all, everyone knows that! It’s T.A.R.T.S. time now!”

Godfrey stood looking up the pigeons sitting on the statue of the Academy’s founding father, Walter Melon, pondering the symbology.

“What do you reckon the symbology of that is, Aaeiulie?” he asked his colleague, this years alien-Xchange visiting professor, Aaeilulie Gub, from the Worserversity in the Slooperniff Dimension.

“No idea, God, I’ll use this as my next class assignment, see what the students come up with. Anything else, or just the statue and the pigeons? Keep it simple, profound? Or convoluted but with lots of options?”

“Oh keep it simple, if I know those students, they will manage to convolute even the simplest ideas.”

“If they didn’t, we’d be out of a job” said the alien.

“We don’t call them ‘jobs’ anymore, we call them S.M.I.L.E.S, or Something Marginally Interesting, Lucrative & Enlightening.”

With a perfectly straight face the alien replied “What rubbish.”.

Ann Aspect had started the evening course “Free the Fiction Writer Within” without much hope, but much to her surprise, she loved it. She enjoyed it so much that on impulse she quit her day job at the Frozen Flounder Company and signed up at the Fiction Writers Academy as a full time immature student.

After a few weeks of juggling the struggling to look after the children and cook for her husband, keep the house clean, and all the other things a busy wife and mother does, as well as her assignments, Ann decided that it would be much more fun to stay in the students accomodation. She left them a note on the kitchen table saying simply “Have Fun Dears, I’m off!” and left, taking nothing with her but the clothes she was wearing (and the red wig). She called in at the cash point machine on the way to the Academy and withdrew as much money as it would allow her, and then threw her bank card in the gutter. Free! A clean slate, a new life!