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“Don’t push me,” snapped Finnley. “Yes Godfrey, I believe picking up rubbish is in my job description. Your job description … well buggered if I know what you do around here,” she said snarkily, perversely annoyed at being telepathically described as ‘the maid’. “Give me that rubbish immediately and I will deal with it,” she commanded, making a grab for Godfrey’s hand. “You go and help LIz with Roberto. And whatever you do, don’t let the blighter jump 3 times in the air and shout stickum lute putty. ”

“Who are you?” whispered Godfrey, keeping a firm grasp on the scraps of paper, aided perhaps by the fact that the honey was adhering them to his hand. “You are not the Finnley we know and … well, the Finnley we know. Is that cucumber on your face really a disguise? What have you done with Finnley?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Finnley, rolling her eyes.

“Help!” screamed Liz. “He’s trying to jump!”

“Why are you picking rubbish up off the lawn, Godfrey?” Liz had felt a certain furtive energy emanating from the old coot, causing her to glance in his direction, while simultaneously giving Finnley a shove in the direction of the house. “Go and tidy yourself up while I fetch Roberto back,” she said to the distraught maid. “I need a closer look at his bottom, without cucumbers flying all over the place. Really, do I have to do everything myself around here?” It really was exasperating.

Aunt Idle wandered around, wondering where everyone was. Had everyone gone out on a day trip or a holiday? Had she forgotten? She clumped across the yard looking for Bert. If she could find Bert, he would know ~ but where was he? Her feet felt dry and heavy. I really must do something about those dry callouses, she thought ~ perhaps a long hot soak in the bath. But first, I must find the others.

Idle continued her search, but her legs began to feel like lead. Funny how some days gravity seemed so much stronger. It was becoming harder to put one foot in front of the other. What was it that guy on the internet had said about a lightness of energy? The unbearable lightness of being ~ well this was more like the unbearable heaviness of feet.

A pair of butterfly’s scampered through the air, fluttering and darting around Idle’s sticky dreads. Be light like the skipping of a butterfly, that guy had said. Hah! she croaked. Easy to say! Unable to walk any further, Idle grabbed onto a straight little eucalyptus sapling to hold herself up. Her fingers felt stiff and inflexible as she grasped the slender trunk.

It’s just too hard, she thought with a heavy heart. It’s too hard to move.

Suddenly there was a piercing scream.

Finnley’s face had turned white—although later she would claim it was not fear but rather the cucumber mask giving her face a death-like appearance—and she was pointing a shaking finger in the direction of Roberto’s derrière. Or more accurately, towards where Roberto’s derrière had been prior to the scream; like the others, he had jumped up in alarm at the ear splitting noise.

“What the devil is the matter?” gasped LIz. She grasped Finnley’s shoulders firmly and shook her. “Pull yourself together; it’s just a bum crack. I know it is a long time since you will have seen a man’s bum, but really as I keep saying to you, if you will just smarten yourself up and make a bit more effort. I mean, look at you; you’ve got vegetables falling off your face ….” Liz shook her head in confoundment.

“It’s not the bum crack,” snarled Finnley, recovering her usual unflappable composure. “It is the tattoo on his bum. The tattoo of the girl with the glass feet. Do you not know what that means?”

Roberto’s eyes narrowed as he began to back away towards the gate.

In all the excitement, nobody noticed Godfrey picking up the sticky and ripped shreds of paper which Liz had let drop to the ground.

Or did they?

Liz wandered out into the garden. There was a stiff breeze but the sun was shining and the sky was a dazzling blue. She spied Roberto bending over a rose bush, secateurs in hand, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of buttock crack. Liz laughed out loud. Tantalizing? She must be getting quite desperate if the sight of a gardeners bum crack appeared tantalizing. It had taken her mind off the others momentarily though, and her impatient thoughts of writing them all out of the story.

It really was a most splendid day.

“Will someone answer that!” Liz parroted the other fat dealer. “Whose the leader of door answering these days anyway? All leaders and no fecking staff, now!”

Glancing towards the open window, where a shrill noise seemed to emanate from that had immediately set Liz’s teeth on edge, she noticed him. Could it really be him? After all these years! Was it really Roberto?

The door bell pealed again, distracting Liz, and when she looked back, the man had disappeared. Did I imagine that? she wondered.

Roberto, rubber duck in hand, walked around the outside wall to see who was making such a racket on the door bell.

“Madre mia! Los Guardianos !” he whispered, aghast. What were they doing here, of all places? Roberto crept back around the house, hoping he hadn’t been seen.

“I love it when we play Mandala of Ascensions!” shouted Finnley. “I will be a leader personality! You can bugger off now, HS cleaner. You were never really needed; she only hired you out of spite”

“What I really love about this, Finnley,” Liz said, “Is that it really is complete rubbish. I mean, it’s not cleverly pretending to be rubbish, it really IS rubbish. But I am feeling the energy, and I feel that I enjoy such utter rubbish and that’s the feeling that counts. Oh, and by the way, where have you been? You’ve been sorely missed, Finnley dear, there’s been rubbish accumulating all over the place while you’ve been gone.”

Frowning, Dispersee pondered the latest impulse and hesitated before including it in her report. The imagery had shifted from pools, to bubbles, to vapourous mist rising in shafts of sunlight, which sounded dangerously akin to ascending into the light, and that would never do. There was already far too much mumbo jumbo circulating about ascension and light, and altogether too many people sitting around on gluten free arses, ignoring everything, waiting for the shifted salt free shaft of the rapture to beam them up to the higher realms.

No, it was no good, she couldn’t possibly share the new imagery, it would be misconstrued and counterproductive. Dispersee waited for the next strange impulse, and further clues.

She didn’t have to wait long: the next morning, seized by another compulsion, she slipped out of the house into the dense swirling fog. Normally a big fan of bright contrast and intense colours, the diffused monochrome scenes were somehow restful to her senses. Water droplets danced in the air like common eye floaters, gathering on her skin and hair, wetting her as effectively as a dunk in a pool, but without the sudden shock of a plunge. It was insidious, almost sneaky, the way the mist pretended to be air but was mostly water. The fog connected everything in its path with its swarms of moisture droplets, drenching everything. Dispersee wondered if her wellington boot had sprung a leak as her left sock became coldly saturated, but it was the rivulets of clinging fog dribbling down her trouser leg.

The bucolic scenery in shades of grey reminded her of the common phrase “it’s not black and white” which had been much bandied about of late. No, it’s not, she mused, it’s shades of reflected dispersed fluid, masquerading as spaces and solid matters. Poised to take a snapshot of a particularly large dewdrop which was reflecting an interesting twisted sapling, Dispersee blundered into the stalk of the plant, causing a furious shivering along the stems and seed pods. She watched with a feeling akin to fascinated horror as the glorious individual droplets merged into a channel of least resistance, spilling down in streams to gather in the mud.

“…..salt free inquisition born of effete privilege…”

Dispersee shook her head and cackled to herself while reading Stinks Mc Fruckler’s (a double agent posing as a descended trickster) report.

“These dupes, so arrogant in their idiocy have become an incredibly powerful voice which effects us all, this being why I rail against them, they are the new repulsive face of self righteous sanctimonious evangelism, a salt free inquisition born of effete privilege, modern day ill informed witch-burners intent on removing choice, blocking scientific advances….”

Stinks may well get lynched for that one, she thought with a fond smile. Nobody expects to get away with criticizing the salt free inquisition. It was a position only a former salt smuggler would understand, as Dispersee well knew. “Salt of the Earth” was a well known turn of phrase (though not nearly as amusing as “salt free inquisition born of effete privilege” as turns of phrase go), but few took to heart the actual meaning. It was to be a good few years yet before the Return of the Salt to the turbulent planet, and salt, for the meantime, was still public enemy number one in the collective mind.

Dispersee closed the report and turned her attention to her own.

Despite her demonstration with the pool (complete with illustrations), throwing spoons haphazardly into the murky pool with no regard for the hidden fishes and broken chairs in the depths of the dirty water, despite the resulting swarm of earthquakes, only a handful of individuals understood the point she had been trying to demonstrate with regard to what was known in new age circles as “pooling” ~ not to be confused with team flow, which was something else entirely. (The fact that she had not understood what she was illustrating at the time, merely following a strange impulse, was neither here nor there ~ the point was quite obvious in retrospect, which was all that mattered).

Pooling had become almost as popular as the Salter lynchings, and the unfortunate common denominator was “best intentions” ~ best intentions, vaguely pasted hearts, and no real understanding or questioning of the contents of the pool they were all diving into. The Pool Lemmings dived in one after another without washing off their associations, weighed down with their constructs and baggage, splashing the foul slime outside the pool where it seeped into the common water table, tainting the entire neighbourhood. The best intentions sank to the depths, perhaps to be fished out by an especially skilled fisherman of best intentions, but likely not. It was the clingy slippery algae of the associations that really thrived, and they attached themselves and flowed back out of the pool. Really it was a mess. Even her practical demonstrations of non return valves and two way valves had gone over their heads (as had the contaminated water).

The second part of her demonstrations had been to illustrate the importance, and indeed the beauty, of bubbles ~ dewdrops suspended along webs ~ connected via gossamer thin but extremely strong networks, perfect reflective bubbles that kept their shape and individual purpose, rather than forming a dank puddle of slime in the overflowing muddy ditch. Admittedly Dispersee has not been aware of what she was demonstrating at the time, she was just following another strange impulse.

She decided to finish her report tomorrow, and await todays strange impulse for further information.

The old woman looked him up and down before pushing past him, curtly telling him to knock because they were all asleep. Quentin quaked inwardly. He’d arrived at his new location, a dilapidated old hotel, although not without a certain other worldly charm, at an ungodly hour of the morning. Hovering on the porch, he was unsure whether to risk waking his new hosts. He didn’t want to make a bad first impression. He felt even more dejected and confused when he realized he had no idea what kind of first impression he wanted to make.

His first encounter saddened him, and he hoped they all weren’t as unwelcoming as she had been. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling like such a stranger, or so nervous and shy. What made it even worse was that Quentin was quite well aware that his lack of confidence would be bound to make everything worse.

“You’re not another one of those story refugees, are you? Did I frighten you?” the girl asked, as Quentin jumped at her sudden appearance from behind the spider plant.
“My name’s Prune, are you Quentin Quincy? Aunt Idle’s expecting you, but she’s not up yet. Are you going to be in the new room ten story?”