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She Dreams

She dreams she is learning to fly. Over a green field with a band of trees to her left and a field of grazing cows to her right. Endless blue sky above. Nobody else in sight. She isn’t very high from the earth and she isn’t very fast. Her arms are outstretched for balance as she wobbles forward. It is exhilarating, but she is still glad there is no one but the cows to witness these first clumsy attempts.

She wakes and hugs her dream tightly. Going over the details so she will remember them later before she slips back into sleep.

Morning

It was 5:22am. Still over an hour before her antiquated alarm clock was due to go off; the clock was a relic she clung to more because she thought it looked cool on the shelf than for any practical reason. Sadie decided to get up anyway and use the extra time for meditating. She had a tough assignment ahead of her that day in Marseille and a bit of extra inner peace certainly wouldn’t go amiss.

Sadie worked as a private contractor for the HTB or Happiness Training Bureau. Their motto was Transit umbra, lux permeant. Roughly translated that meant Shadow passes, light remains. Nobody in the bureau knew who said it, although some sources attributed it to Ericis V Lemonista, the renowned scholar and educational reformer.

The main thing was to start the ball rolling into the winds of change and randomania ~ and just as I wrote that (because in this new thread I can write as myself, and say “I” without explaining who I am) I heard a timely trumpet salute coming from the tv room

The pond was full of black tadpoles. The creatures were wriggling restlessly, following invisible currents, connecting dark stains packed with thousands of them. Benjamin Goat immersed a small plastic bottle into one of the biggest node, it sucked the little buggers like a fat syringe.
“Such a small container won’t reduce their population too much”, he thought. Indeed, he had always wondered why there were so many of them in the early stages and why you would see so few frogs or toads. The remaining tadpoles were beginning to gather around his hand. He repressed a shiver. A new idea for a movie just sprang up from his subconscious. Something to do with man-eater tadpoles. That would certainly hit the box office for months.
He smiled. There were enough of them in the bottle.

“Yuck!” said a fat pink lady before licking her strawberry ice cream.

“It’s for my son”, said Benjamin just before realizing he was justifying again. His psychiatrist had told him there was no need for justifying, it was like apologizing, and he needn’t apologize, he was the great Benjamin Goat after all. He snorted and mimicked drinking from his bottle. This time, she was disgusted. She made the mistake to hold her ice cream too far from herself and one of those Gib’s monkey with the pink ass stole it. She was shouting now, people would pay attention to her instead of him. People always pay attention to what’s more annoying.
Paradoxically, he felt a pang of jealousy. He was not used to let go of others’ attention.

His cell phone vibrated, three long vibrations and seven short ones. The code for his secret society. It was a great idea to put it in his last movie, unfortunately it hadn’t had the desired effect. People were so gullible that they would believe everything that came out in a fiction movie.
“The Jesuit is in the place”, said a vocoded voice. That was all. It could only mean one thing. It was all going according to the plan. He smiled and handed out the bottle to a kid. He wouldn’t need that after all.

In the vast mudflats of the Guadalquivir river delta, a small group of mudlarks on a field trip from London examine strange geometric shadows of what look to be the remains of a ringed city. “L..l..l..la la la looks like that in in in ins suh suh suh insignia, d d d don’t it, mate?” stuttered Dennis.

“The one we found on that old sponge in the mud of the Thames?” asked his uncle Bob. “It does, now that you mention it. Must be a connection. Ok lads, fan out and keep your eyes peeled. We must be close to finding the portal entrance, and we need to find it before the Three Kings parade.”

“My word, I don’t know who that writer is, but her historical accuracy, not to mention her ability to maintain continuity in the face of such … such … such … “ the voice trailed off, at a loss to find words for such brilliance.

“I had no idea we had so many characters, Godfrey” remarked Elizabeth, rubbing her eyes. She was just about to say “and who the devil is Mc Tart” when the door burst open by none other than Mc Tart. She was wearing a black dress teamed with a white pith helmet…

“No, I’m not” said Mc Tart. “This Mc Tart is not so black and white, my friend.” The character Mc Tart stood just inside the door looking defiant.

“Wait a minute, whoa, you’re my character, Mc Tart, if I say you’re wearing a black dress and a white pith helmet, then that’s what you’re wearing!” Elizabeth had no intention of being dictated to by one of her own characters.

“Black dress, white pith helmet, black and white, bore ~ ring” yawned Mc Tart. “We’re bored! What happened to your imagination? Who is Mc Tart anyway? Do you know?”

Elizabeth shook her head, tight lipped and uncharacteristically silent.

Mc Tart was wearing a floor length bright yellow garment which had an inbuilt feature of breeze fluttering about the scalloped layered hem, so that indoors or out, regardless of weather or air currents, the fluttering hem effect was maintained.

{from Elizabeth’s Mote Pad}

Racy Mc Tartshall had been absent for so long that it was hardly any wonder that nobody remembered her, despite the importance of her mission which had long since been forgotten. Mc Tart, as she was affectionately known (or would have been if anyone had remembered her) was a tartist of the highest calibre, consistently producing hugh class tart (which was of course three grades higher than high, and 2 grades higher than hagh, and so forth). Mc Tart had been investigating Nosebook, sniffing out potential distortions, claritortions, connectortions and myriad other contortions, for the distortium, claritortium, connectortium and contortium, respectively ~ focusing mainly on the connectortium, naturally enough.

While researching something or other that was no doubt relevant at the time but had long been forgotten, Mc Tart met Alfred in the Library. ““Aha! Alfred in the Library with a Book, was it!” she exclamined. “I knew I’d find a clue here”. “It wasn’t me!” he retorted, aghast. “It was Albert in the Chapless Pants club with a Rolling Pin!” Mc Tart, feigning an all knowing expression, replied “Ahhhh” and made a mental note to investigate.

Mental notes, known as m’otes for short, floated like wisps in the air currents and occasionally sparkled in the sunbeams, although more often than not, they clumped together under the bed in bunny shapes, slowly dying of boredom. Thankfully the sheer pointlessness of mental notes ~ m’otes ~ made not a whit of difference in the grand scheme of the connectortium investigation because of the abundant nature of Fluce’s ~ (fucking lucky chance encounters), notwithstanding the heated debates continuing in the Distortium about the precise nature of Fluce’s and their relationship to M’Otes ~ or not, depending on the point one wished to make at any particular time.

And so it was by Fluce that Mc Tart met Blithe, Heck and Walty in “le Tunnel” one dreary grey Noremember afternoon. There was nothing to suggest, on first inspection, any thing of interest for the Connectortium mission, but Mc Tart was not discouraged. “Many a moth maketh maths marbles” she reminded herself as she perused the nenu (which, the reader will deduce, is a hugher class of menu).

[link: high class]

Unable to hear, see, smell or taste in the usual manner, they sensed sound, aromas, sights and flavours with the sense threads that hung from their shoulders. Unfortunately sense threads were out of fashion this season and the aliens had plucked them all out, not wishing to appear passe and frumpy. Without their sense threads, however, they failed to notice that their appearance would no longer be appearing in any sense whatsoever to any of their friends. The senseless endeavour remained unsensed entirely, until the appearance of Eggboot, who immediately sensed (using a variety of sense apparatus) that this was all a strange kind of none sense party.

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}

It was hot, although not as hot as usual for the month of August on the southern slopes of the Serrania de Ronda. It had rained, the black clouds and thunder a welcome respite from the searing dry heat of an Andalucian summer, plumping up the blackberries and washing the dust from the leaves of the fig trees. Blithe Gambol hadn’t seen her old friend Granny Mosca for months, although she wasn’t quite sure what had kept her from visiting for so long. Blithe loved Granny Mosca’s cottage tucked away in the saddle behind the fat hill and there had been times when she’d visited often, just to drink in the magical air and feast her eyes on the beauty of the surroundings. Dry golden weeds scratched her legs as she made her way along the dirt path, and she was mindful of the fat black snake she’d once seen basking on the stone walls as she reached into the brambles to pluck blackberries and take photographs.

Rounding a corner in the path she gasped at the incongrous and alarming sight of a bright yellow bulldozer just meters from Granny Mosca’s cottage. The bulldozer was flattening a large area of prickly pear cactuses. Unfortunately for the cactuses, it was fruiting time, and Blithe wondered if Granny Mosca had first picked the fruits and suspected that she had, those that she could reach. Nothing that could be eaten was left unpicked ~ Blithe remembered the many sacks of almonds that Granny had given her over the years, very few of which she had bothered to shell and eat.

The bulldozer was making an entranceway to the tiny derelict cottage that was situated next to Granny Mosca’s house. Granny had asked Blithe if she wanted to buy it, and she had wanted to buy it eventually, but the purchase of a derelict building hadn’t been a priority at the time. Now it looked as if she was too late, that someone else had bought it, perhaps to use as a holiday home. Horrified, Blithe called out for Granny, who was often in the goat shed or away across the hidden saddle valley cutting weeds to feed the poultry, but there was no sign of her. Two alien looking turkeys gobbled in response, and the black and white chained dog barked menacingly.

As Blithe retraced her steps along the dirt path it occured to her that whoever was planning to use the derelict cottage might be a very interesting person, someone she might be very pleased to make the acquaintance of in due course. After all, she had noticed that the holiday guests staying at the casitas on the other side of the fat hill were all sympathetic to the magical nature of the location, many of them arriving from a previous visit to a particularly interesting location in the Alpujarras ~ a convergence of ley lines. When questioned as to why they chose the fat hill casitas, they simply said they liked the countryside. Either they weren’t telling, or they were simply unaware objectively of the connection of the locations. Blithe could sense the connections though, both the locations, and that the people choosing to vacation at the fat hill were connected to it.

For one hundred and forty seven thousand years, Blithe had had an energy presence at the fat hill, although it was half a century of her current focus before she remembered it. She had felt protective of it, when she finally remembered it, as if she had a kind of responsibility to it. This place can look after itself quite well on its own, she reminded herself. The fat hill had watched while Franco’s Capitan looted the Roman relics, and watched as Blithe stumbled upon the remains of Roman and Iberian cities, and the fat hill had laughed when Blithe first tried to find the entrance to the interior and got stuck in thorn bushes. Later, the fat hill had smiled benignly when Granny Mosca led her to the entrance ~ without a thorn bush in sight. The cave entrance had been blocked with boulders then. Blithe had given some thought to an excavation, wondering how to achieve it without attracting the attention of the locals, but now she wondered if one day, when the time was right, she would find the entrance clear, as if by magic. Magic, after all, was by no means impossible.

{link: feast for the birds}