Search Results for 'led'

Pseu deciphered laughter and a rather strange phrase in the burbling language, wondering if she had translated “get your mermaid shoehorns here” correctly. She decided to remove the protocol blindfold for a moment, just to be sure.
It was a strange sight that met her eyes, and she paused for a moment to get her bearings.
Consuela appeared to be in an underwater cave, full of gurgling bubbling creatures the likes of which she had never encountered before. The cave was bright with thousands of crystals, filled with the sweet sounds of music from a multitude of conch shells, chandeliers dripped with hundreds of magical looking keys, and the furnishings were tiled with a million unusual tiles forming a mosaic of endless connecting links.

When Lisa eventually came out of her altered state, she was tired and perplexed. The last words she had heard had been “ I’m sorry I’ve led you to believe it was important, but it’s not, not really. It’s just a ordinary object to lead the philistines astray.” How depressing! she thought. How unutterably depressing! If nothing was important, then what was the point ~ of anything? If being led astray wasn’t an opportunity for another voyage of discovery, then what was the point? If everything was wrapped up and tidy with no mysterious paths to explore, then where did Story fit into the picture? A dull story indeed with no tentacles.
“We may as well just go home and water the garden. Come on Mirabelle.” Lisa’s shoulders sagged dejectedly and she sighed deeply.
“Oh no, not so fast! This doesn’t sound like you, Lisa! Has someone put a spell on you? Snap out of it!” Mirabelle considered whether slapping Lisa soundly would help break the spell, but decided to throw some bottled water in her face from a safe distance instead.
The shock of it, welcome actually, cool and revitalizing, made Lisa laugh at the absurdity of ~ well, everything.
“Oh fuck it, we may as well go and get some octopus tapas while we’re here. Let’s just pretend we’re ordinary people on an ordinary holiday and go to the beach.”

“Adeline, where is Mirabelle? I’ve come back for her again.”
“Igor! Not you again, so soon!” Adeline’s hand flew to her mouth and she flushed in confusion. “She’s not here.”
“Where is she? I must find her!” He began to wring his hands, or he would have if he knew what it meant. What he actually felt was a yellow knot in his solar plexus tightening, more like strong alien rubber hands wringing his stomach out as if they were squeezing the last drops of water out of a yellow dishrag.
“Steady on, Igor!” said Adeline, a little alarmed at the unexpected display of passionate angst or anxious passion, or perhaps it was merely fear and exhaustion. Then she remembered her earlier vows and added, “I will pray for you, my friend.”

Igor rolled his eyes, momentarily forgetting about the yellow dishrag in the warm peach glow of exasperation.

The early morning sea mist was evaporating as Fanella strolled around the village picking up dog shit. She reminded herself to fully appreciate the damp coolness, before the scorching summer sun enveloped them in a bone warming blanket, and then reminded herself to appreciate the bone warming effects of the full sun later. As she retraced her steps she noted how differently everything looked on a return journey, how piles of dog shit had escaped her notice while going one way, but were obvious on the way back. It reminded her of something she’d read recently in one of the books that Lisa insisted she read to improve her English ~ A Field Guide To Getting Lost . Hah! Had there been a cruel irony in that choice of book? Fanella had felt lost ever since she arrived in 2020. But according to the book, getting lost wasn’t a bad thing, not at all.

To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.

Fanella sighed. All sounds very philosophical, but I’m still stuck in the wrong time zone.
Another passage from the book popped into her head:

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

Fanella gazed up at the sky ~ the blue of longing was taking over, as the white wisps of clouds dispersed.

The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle…. how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly….No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Charming, Fanella thought, just bloody charming. Rotting soup of change, that just about sums it up. No wonder I wake up every morning with my bones feeling like mush.

The curly beard of one of the men caught Lisa’s attention, and she tuned in to what he was saying, her focus fully on the windscreen reflection now, the car and it’s concurrent timeframe having faded from view. “It’s an honour to be killed by a bull , Intu ,” he said to the woman walking beside him. “Your grandfather’s death is heroic, you will appreciate that in time.”
“Perhaps in time, Balthazar,” she replied, “But I wish he was still here.”
Balthazar patted her shoulder, and Lisa noticed his ring ~ two dolphins leaping. With a flash she understood that Intu’s grandfather had refocused as a dolphin, many centuries later in the silk like sea off the shores of Faro.
“You can write a story about him on a stone tablet when we get to Almodovar. And I promise I won’t give you a hard time about continuity.”
Intu smiled weakly. She did enjoy writing random stories on stone tablets, often wondering if the people of the future would be able to make sense of them and put the pieces together. She had left tablets of stories here and there as she traveled, sign posts to elsewhere and elsewhen, imprinted with the energy of adventure and mystery, laden with clues for imaginative voyagers to unravel in any way their fancies led them.

“You look just like your father” was Lisa’s mother’s only remark when Lisa had thoughtfully sent her a couple of photos from Portugal. No compliment coming from her, thought Lisa, rolling her eyes. And it wasn’t even true ~ she looked nothing like her father, something else must have triggered her mothers comment, some other association.
“Remember your new policy, dear, don’t take it personally” Mirabelle reminded her. “Just another cranky old crone stewing on an old trigger. Besides,” she added, “What about Frank and Molly? Can you get a more specific remote view? Stuck in a carob tree could be almost anywhere.”
“You’re rather sweet for such a bossy tart” replied Lisa with a grateful smile. “Shush now then while I access their location.”
Lisa closed her eyes and waited for the images to appear. There was an explosion of purple and a great deal of static before an image began to appear of carob pods on a car windscreen. As Lisa viewed the glass a strange thing began to happen and she started to focus on the reflections. There were dozens of people approaching, all wearing brilliant white robes trimmed with gold. The robes were short, and revealed a considerable amount of tanned muscled leg, and a murmur of appreciation escaped her lips. What handsome fellows, she thought, but there’s something odd about them. Either this is a fancy dress party on a dry dusty hill, or another time zone.

Linda Pol was struggling with the contracts formulation. Things had evolved almost too swiftly in the past —or should she say future, it could be confusing at times—, and now they had to rephrase a few paragraphs. Of course, the herd of lawyers were doing all that, but she had to check after them, she had to be sure they didn’t make a mistake.

The e-zapper buzzed. First, Linda Pol dismissed it as she would have done with a fly of no importance. But you know how flies of no importance can really bother you when they keep buzzing around when you are trying to focus on something arduous. The fly kept buzzing until Linda Pol couldn’t stand it anymore. She looked at the name on the transparent screen and caught herself whining inwardly.

It was her mother.

She breathed deeply twice and prepared herself. All that took a lot less time that it took to write it. She answered with a deep male voice.

“What do you want mum ?”

“Your father and I…”
Linda Pol shrieked silently. It wasn’t good when her mother began her conversation with those words. But she waited patiently.

“… have been discussing about this book you told us to read. The Sands of the Species I think it was.”

“Spices”, Linda Pol corrected automatically. And she winced about that. She could see her mother smile triumphantly. She had her son’s attention.

“Well, that’s what I said.”
No point arguing with that, Linda thought, _you know that’s what she’s looking for.

“Anyway”, continued her mother after a pause, “your father and I have been discussing about who the grand-father really is. He thinks that it’s the main character’s mother after her operation and time travel, but I’m sure it’s his second grand son that was also his uncle and his niece.”

Linda sighed, they already had that conversation before, and he struggled not to use that excuse with her mother, which would certainly start an argument, and he didn’t really had time for that with the new contracts. His mind noticed that it had started to rain. The drops rhythmically punctuating her mother’s sentences at the beginning, and then as the one way conversation went on, one drop per word. She always had a sense of rhythm, it was in her genes. Or that’s what people said anyway. Unfortunately, with his mother, that sense was mostly coupled with irritation and restraint.

But the brain works in almost magical ways, and the rhythm of the drops associated with his assistant’s bum made him thought of something.

“Mum”, she said when she could place a word, “I’m sending you a link that explains it all. Sweet dreams, I love you too.” She hanged up quickly. Don’t let her place one more word.

The drag asked her e-zapper to find the link and send it to her mother. It’ll keep her mother busy for a moment, enough for Linda to finish her reading the contract. She realized that it made a lot more sense now.

By the time Lisa and Mirabelle arrived in Lisbon, it was too late. Frank and Molly were already heading south in a stolen car, the whale portal tile on the back seat, next to an assortment of other tiles of various colours and sizes. They were approaching a small town not far from the coast when Madam Li the navigation robot said turn left at your peril in Chinese. Frank hadn’t mastered the arts of intonation fully in his efforts to learn the language, and merely heard “turn left” and something else as incomprehensible to the ear as any other Portuguese town, and besides, the narrow goat track looked marvelously less traveled and enticing.

“Tuna wars!” Jack said as the alarm clock bleeped. “Tuna wars?” asked Lisa, but got no response; Jack was still asleep.
There had been an impromptu gathering the previous evening, various friends had unexpectedly called round, some bringing their holiday visitors with them and they had sat drinking beer and wine on the patio until well after midnight. Lisa started clearing away the ashtrays and bottles, noticing the racket the sparrows were making ~ they seemed unusually agitated this morning, darting between the overgrown foliage flapping and shrieking. When Lisa had finished clearing up the debris, she kept looking around, wondering what was missing or out of place. Something didn’t seem right. What was it, what was missing?
The tile! That strange convoluted tile shaped rock that she’d found on the beach was gone!

The dogs barking woke Lisa up; at first she assumed she had woken up disorientated and disgruntled because of that, but then she recalled all the screaming, no, more like bellowing, she’d been doing in her dream. Intense passionate bellowing howls, like an expulsion of pained frustrated energy, of outrage. Frustratingly, she recalled no details. There had been a similar dream the previous Easter when she was sick ~ the same kind of howls, and she had felt much better afterwards, but she wasn’t sick now ~ in fact, she had been feeling better than she had in a long time.
Sipping her tea and still feeling cranky at being woken up, Lisa recalled the strange phone call she’d received the night before, and had a feeling it might be an element of her dream. One of her neighbours from just outside the village phoned, Clarissa. Clarissa was a young widow; since her elderly husband had died some months ago, and she had lived alone with her eight dogs. There had been nobody to ensure she took the medication she needed for her condition, which had resulted in a series of challenging episodes, alarming the locals. A few weeks ago, one of Juan’s sheep had been talking to her and wouldn’t stop, so she killed it in the lane outside her house. The sheep kept talking to her, so she cut it’s head off (a gruesome struggle by all accounts, although thankfully Lisa hadn’t witnessed it herself). The severed sheeps head continued to talk to the troubled Clarissa, so she kept the head on her verandah. That was the last thing that Lisa had heard when she received the unexpected phone call.
Clarissa was polite and friendly on the phone, inviting Lisa and Jack over for drinks ~ insisting really with an edge of desperation in her voice. Lisa declined the invitition, and omitted to mention that Jack was out playing poker. If it had not been for the sheep incident, Lisa might have responded differently, but her sense of responsibility to her own animals made her cautious. Then, to her horror, Clarissa offered to come round and feed Lisa’s dogs.
As soon as the long and insistent phone call ended, Lisa gathered all the dogs up into the gated top patio; a little later she was gratified to hear a noisy game of football going on in the street outside. Had she over reacted? Should she have had more compassion for the distressed young woman? Lisa lit another cigarette, feeling confused. She had only met Clarissa once, many years ago, and had no idea why she had called her, or where she got her phone number from. She knew of her because of the convoluted connecting links between them ~ Clarissa’s husband had been her own friends father. And she had heard about the various incidents since he had died from other neighbours.
Lisa had the unsettling feeling that she had refused a call for help. On the other hand, she felt that she had responded to the call for help in merely speaking to Clarissa on the phone. Lisa had been kindly towards her, although not encouraging of any physical contact.
Lisa sighed. She felt a stronger connection to Clarissa now, but was unsure what it would entail.

“We’ll think about this later” continued Lisa brightly to the troubled girls. “Today we’re going out, so let’s think about that instead and start getting ready. Ignore and avoid what doesn’t make sense at first, I always say, and hope that it makes sense later, that’s my motto. Chop chop!”
“Where are we going Lisa? I think I’ll just stay here and go for a walk in the woods instead.” replied Fanella, starting to feel anxious.
“Oh no you won’t my girl, you need to get out and integrate more. You’ll enjoy it, it’s a music festival in the mountains.”
Fanella groaned inwardly.
“Will there be lots of plastic?” asked Adeline hopefully.
“I expect so, there usually is” said Lisa.

The corridors seemed unusually long and Adeline ran quickly to apprehend Igor, ostensibly to retrieve the shell as Mirabelle had ordered, but perhaps she could also plead his forgiveness for slapping his handsome face? He will surely be angry with me! thought Adeline, so she gathered courage as she ran by singing a well know song from her childhood.

Au clair de la lune, 
Mon ami Pierrot. 
Prête-moi ta plume. 
Pour écrire un mot. 
Ma chandelle est morte, 
Je n’ai plus de feu. 
Ouvre-moi ta porte. 
Pour l’amour de Dieu.

As she rounded the corner she bumped into Fanella.

“Tsk, tsk, Adeline. Where are you running to in such a hurry and making such an awful racket?”

“Fanella!” gasped Adeline, “have you seen Igor? I must find him …” Her words trailed off as she saw the shell Fanella was holding.

“He gave me this beautiful shell but a moment ago. Poor Igor, he seemed most distressed. I suppose we have that bossy tart, Mirabelle, to thank for that. Heaven knows I have no time for the brutish fellow, yet even I could not help but feel some modicum of pity for him. But look, dear Adeline, how beautiful is this shell! Let us put our ears to it and see if it will speak tenderly to us. Perhaps it will give us messages of home,” she added softly.

“Yes get lost!” muttered Adeline rudely. “Go back to where you belong and stop depriving some poor village of his idiot!”

Just at that moment the plaintive hoot of an owl was heard in the far distance. Adeline recalled the strange way the flock of birds had been behaving the previous day at the beach. With a feeling of foreboding she remembered her promise to the Virgin Mary in the chapel.

Were the birds a sign sent to warn her?

She was filled with remorse for her cruel thoughts and actions towards Igor. The Queen and her men could not touch her now, but was she out of reach of all those Saints and Angels?

“Would you like some toast with your coffee, dearest Mirabelle?” she asked sweetly, anxious to make amends and appease the powers that be. I promise I will say a prayer for the soul of dear Igor later, she silently vowed.

“Thank you, you dear sweet child,” said Mirabelle. “What a terrible shame though that Igor took that beautiful shell with him. Be a dear will you; run after him and see if you can’t get him to leave the shell here with me. Quick, quick Adeline, don’t dilly dally. Run like the wind or you will miss him!”

Adeline deftly dodged Mirabelle’s flailing hand, almost spilling the mug of coffee all over the mangled bed sheets. “It’s just a dream, wake up! Here, I’ve made you coffee.”
Mirabelle rubbed her eyes. “милый Adeline, you’re so kind and thoughtful. What would I do without you?”