Search Results for 'thought'

Mater:

I am concerned about Dido. The silly trollop has taken up drinking again—in front of the kids too. Mark my words, she will end up back in rehab if it goes on. Like last time. And then where will we all be? Those poor little mites without a father or mother and their Aunt fast turning into a crazy slush. There’s no telling her though. God knows I have tried in the past.

I can only hope she will settle down when that kiwi friend arrives—Flora someone. Though I don’t hold out much hope really. I have not met a kiwi with a half a brain in their head yet. And that awful accent! I don’t need this aggravation at my age.

Calm down, remember what Jiemba told you.

I have not told you yet about my visit to Jiemba, have I? There has been so much going on here, what with the fish going missing and that odd guest staying in Room 8 and Dido’s antics, it nearly slipped my mind.

It was Prune who hid the fish, of course. Sensitive wee thing — she has always had a particularly strong dislike of the awful old relic and I can’t say I blame her. Dido went ape when Prune eventually confessed, but secretly I found it rather amusing.

I digress, yet again.

In the end it was Bert who helped me more than Jiemba. The dear man waited out in the truck for me while I kept my appointment with Jiemba. And he held my secret safe from the others. I am grateful to him for that. It felt nice to have someone who would do that for me. On the trip back home he opened up and told me stories about the town. Apparently in its heyday it even had an ice-cream factory; I hadn’t heard that before. Nor some of the other stories he told me. There are not many left around here with the knowledge Bert has. I feel I may even pluck up courage to tell him what I have seen at the Inn. Perhaps he may have some thoughts on it.

But not just yet.

Jiemba gave me some salve made from native bush bark for my aches and pains. It seems he is more modern than his father—things change I guess. I wanted to ask him about the ghost, but what with the dogs and kids running around outside and the heat and the baby screaming in the house somewhere, I could not bring myself to do it. But one thing he said to me has stuck.

“Live from your heart”.

It was the way he said it. Very intense. He went quiet and stared at the floor for a long time while I tried not to fidget. As though he was communing with some spirit world I could not see. Though I would dearly love to. I have thought about those words since then, trying to figure out what they mean.

I’m not sure I can even find my heart, let alone live from it.

Bert crept past room 8 again, listening. There it was again, the voice of a woman. How the heck did the dusty old geezer manage to smuggle a woman into his room? It didn’t make sense, there were so few people in the town that a strange woman would have been noticed, someone would have mentioned it. And the woman had a strange accent, Bert couldn’t place it, but it wasn’t an accent he was familiar with. Sounded almost old fashioned, although he couldn’t be sure. His hearing wasn’t so good these days. A foreign woman in town, and not a mention anywhere? No, it didn’t make sense.

Bert had a few jobs to do, but wanted to keep an eye on the door of room 8. Whoever was in there would need to come out to use the bathroom sooner or later. He decided to ask Prune to keep watch while he fed the chickens, Prune would enjoy keeping a secret, and he wanted to keep quiet about his suspicions until he knew a bit more. Nobody would find it odd to see Prune lurking around in a dark corridor.

“Do you not see that satchel o’er yon upon that fine stout table? Do but hand it this way, noble sir.”

Prune pressed her ear to the door and frowned. It was a woman’s voice, but what was she on about?

“Your Grace, I would sit with thee and spake…”.

Her name must be Grace, deduced Prune, wondering why the old dusty bugger was speaking funny as well.

“…..whence I have received from thee the artefact. Get to it, you lay about excuse for a man, I do ha’e me most urgent and important things to apply my considerable value upon.”

What a rude tart, thought Prune, and she hadn’t even paid for a room. She heard no more from inside the room because at that moment Aunt Idle came roaring and crashing down the corridor with the hoover. Prune scuttled off past her and went to find Bert.

Prune had just started to explain to Bert about Grace when Mater came beetling across the yard to join them.

“Bert, where’s the fish gone?”

Bert and Prune looked at each other. “What fish?”

“The flying fish that’s been hanging on the wall all these years, it’s gone,” she said, pointing towards the house with her walking stick.

Open mouthed in astonishment, Prune raced back to the house to check for herself.

Aunt Idle:

After all the fuss had died down about the missing Mater, I lost interest in the map and the strange note. It was as if the distraction interrupted my train of thought (some might say another of Idle’s hamster wheels, or another ludicrous tangent), so I gave the maps back to the girls and the mysterious note was mostly forgotten. If it meant anything, well, sooner or later it would become clear.

Truth be told, it wasn’t just the fuss about Mater that distracted me, it was the phone call from my old friend in New Zealand. Flora Fenwick was making another of her arty party videos, wanted to come over to check out some of the empty properties for filming. I’d seen all her arty farty party videos online, and we’d been friends for years via Spacenook, but we’d never met in person.

The timing was perfect.

Aunt Idle:

I took the rolled up bundle of torn maps into my bedroom and locked the door. I turned the key silently, almost furtively, and then leaned my back on the door. If there had been a security cam in the room, I’d have looked to anyone watching like I was over dramatizing. Ham acting drama queen. Hoped none of the Laptop Lazuli’s, my remote viewing buddies, were tuning in. Thinking about them gave me an idea, but I’d think about that some more later.

After spreading the maps on the floor and sending a half dozen dust bunnies scampering off, I went over to my desk to get the note. I found it in the end, after flapping a bit when it wasn’t where I thought I’d left it.

It didn’t take long to start matching up the letters on the note with the holes in the maps. I started jotting the place names down as best as I could work it out, and of course there were plenty of letters on the note without a corresponding map segment. But it was clear that the letters on my note had come from these maps.

The funny thing was, and it was more creepy than funny, was that all of the places on the map with a missing letter were places of particular significance to me. Either I’d been to that place, or it was a place in The Tales, the stories I’d been writing with the Lazuli’s online.

One of the I’s was from Paris, one from Sri Lanka and another from Siberia. There was an R from New York, a D from London and an H from Shanghai, and so on. After awhile I started to notice that all the letters on the signature of Hilde Didier were from locations in The Tales, and that the content of the note, so far, was constructed of letters ripped from places I had been to. Places I’d been to where I’d left in a hurry.

I needed to find the rest of the maps to complete the picture.

The knock on the bedroom door awakened Crispin Cornwall.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“It’s Clove, I’ve brought your supper, sir.”
Crispin eased his limbs into action and shuffled over to the door. As soon as he’d been shown to his room in the early hours of the morning, he’s lain down on the bed and slept like a baby, not stirring until the knock on the door. It had been seventeen weeks since he’d last slept, not that he needed sleep in the usual sense, but sometimes even the Great Travelers needed a complete break with the physical. Dragon’s teeth, he said to himself, it made a body stiff though, all those hours of inactivity.
“It’s beans on toast, Aunt Idle said you weren’t fussy,” the girl said, politely enough, though she looked him up and down. “The laundry and shower room is down the hall, thataway, sir.”
Crispin took the plate off the girl, the corner of his lip curling up in amusement. “Look like I need a wash, do I?”
“Sorry sir, didn’t mean to be rude, it’s just that most guests ask for a shower when they get here, dust on the road and all. Will there be anything else you want? Pot of tea? Bottle of wine?”
But Crispin Cornwall had already closed the door. Clove heard the lock click. Rude filthy old fart, she thought to herself.

Aunt Idle:

The twins and Prune were going on about Mater again but I wasn’t listening, I was just wishing they’d hurry up and finish supper ~ I’m trying to think, Think! Look at the maps and piece it all together, clear my mind and try and work it out.

“Give it a rest will you, and eat!” The kids were exasperating, always going on about Mater.

“She’s MISSING, Aunt Idle!”

“What?” I said absentmindedly. “Don’t be silly, she’s probably on the loo, she’ll be down in a minute.”

“You haven’t been listening, have you?” asked Prune. “Mater’s been kidnapped.”

“She’s DISAPPEARED, we don’t know if she’s been kidnapped or murdered yet, Prune. Don’t exaggerate.”

“Maybe she was tied up in the cellar at the Brundy place and you never noticed, Clove.”

Bert glance up sharply and frowned at the mention of the Brundy place, it caught my eye, but I didn’t give it any thought at the time.

“Oh shut up, all of you! You’ve given me a headache, I’m going to lie down. Prune, you can do the washing up tonight. Corrie and Clove, you can cook for the dust covered man in room 8, he’s not fussy what you feed him, but he wants to eat in his room.”

That should keep them all occupied for an hour and give me time to look at those maps. That’s what I thought, anyway.

Corrie:

It was the look on Aunt Idle’s face when she saw them that scared me. There’s something strange going on, and not just everyone acting weird, that’s pretty normal around here, but this was a different kind of weird.

When Aunt Idle nearly suffocated me with that big hug while she was trying to hide that piece of paper, I didn’t think anything of it. Probably hiding another bill I thought, not wanting us to worry about the debts piling up. Mater wandering off like that was pretty strange, but old people do daft things. I knew all about it because I’d been reading up on dementia. They imagine things and often feel persecuted, claim someone stole their old tea set, things like that, forgetting they gave it away 30 years ago, stuff like that. So I wasn’t worried about either of them acting strange when Clove and I decided to go treasure hunting in the old Brundy house, we just decided to out and explore just for the hell of it, for something to do.

The Brundy house was set apart from the rest of the abandoned houses, down a long track through the woods, nice and shady in the trees without the sun glaring down on our heads. Me and Clove had been there years ago but we were little then, and scared to go inside, so we’d just peeked in the windows and scared each other with ghost and murderer stories until we heard a bang inside and then ran like hell until we couldn’t breathe. Probably just a rat knocking something over, but we never went back. We weren’t scared to, it was further to walk to the Brundy place and there were so many other abandoned houses to play in that were closer to home.

We weren’t scared to go inside this time. It was a big place, quite grand it must have been back in the day, big entrance hallway with an awesome staircase like in Gone With the Wind where Scarlett fell down the stairs, but the stair carpet was all in shreds and some of the steps banisters were broken, but the steps looked sound enough so up we went, for some reason drawn up there first before exploring the ground floor rooms.

Clove turned left at the top of the stairs and I turned right and went into the first bedroom. My hand flew to my mouth. I wonder why we do that, put a hand over our mouth when we’re surprised, well that’s what I did when I saw the cat mummy on the bed. I didn’t scream or anything, not like Clove did a minute later from the other side of the house. It wasn’t a mummy with bandages like an Egyptian one, it was just totally desiccated like a little skeleton covered in bleached leather. It was a fascinating thing to see really but the minute I heard Clove scream I ran out of the room and down the landing. It’s not like Clove to scream. Well who screams in real life, the only time I ever heard screaming was in a movie. People usually say what the fuck or oh my god, they don’t scream. But Clove screamed when she saw the room full of mannequins because to be fair it did look like a room full of ghosts or zombies in the half light from the shuttered windows. She was laughing by the time I reached her, a bit hysterically, and we clutched each other as we went over to open the shutters to get a better look. It was pretty creepy, even if they were only mannequins.

They were kind of awesome in the light, all covered in maps, there were 22 of them, we counted them, a whole damn room full of map covered mannequins in various poses, men, women and kid sized. Really clever the way the maps were stuck all over them, looked like arteries and veins, and real cool the way Riga joined up with Boston, and Shanghai with Lisbon, like as if you really could just travel down a vein from Tokyo to Bogota, or cross a butt cheek to get from Mumbai to Casablanca.

We hadn’t noticed at first that we’d been shuffling through a load of paper on the floor. The floor was covered in ripped up maps, must have been hundreds of maps all torn up and strewn all over the floor.

“There’s enough maps left over to do one of our own, Corrie” Clove said, reading my mind. “Let’s take some home and stick them all over something.”

“We haven’t got a mannequin at home though” I replied, but I was thinking, why not take a mannequin home with us, and some maps, and decide what to do with them later.

So that’s what we did. We gathered up the biggest fragments of map off the floor and rolled them all up and used my hair elastic to hold them together, and carried a mannequin all the way home. The sun was going down so we had to hurry a bit down the track. Clove didn’t help when she said we must look like we’re carrying a dead body with rigor mortis, that made us collapse laughing, dropping the mannequin on its head. Once we got the giggles it was hard to stop, and it made our legs weak from laughing.

We got home just as the last of the evening light disappeared, hauled the mannequin up the porch steps, where Aunt Idle was standing with her hand over her mouth. Well, that was to be expected, naturally she’d be wondering what we were carrying if she was watching us come up the drive carrying a body. It was later, when we unfolded the maps, that the look on her face freaked me out.

Mater:

I feel myself moving slowly today. The thought of death and my poor little guinea pig is still nagging. It occurs to me that perhaps I am walking slowly because I don’t want to move too fast into the inevitable.

Or perhaps it is just that I did not sleep so well last night. It is so damned hot and night time offers little respite from the heat.

At least the kids have stopped fighting. I worry about them. Always shut away in their rooms on that internet thing.

I am so tired. More tired than I should be. It is not the usual aches and pains. Something feels wrong. I have made up my mind to go and visit Jiemba, the local aboriginal healer. It is a wee bit of a walk, so I will need to start early, before the heat gets up. I don’t want to ask Dido to take me. “Just go and see the doctor in town!” she will say to me. For all her alternative ways, Dido can still be pretty closed minded about some things—and she thinks I am a crazy old fool anyway.

But I think Jiemba has the gift—special healing powers—and he comes from a family of aboriginal healers. His father was a healer and his grandfather too. I went to see him once, his father, years ago. My back was bad and the doctor in town said I would need an operation. He did some chanting, calling up spirits I think, put his hand on my back and pulled out a stone. He said the stone was the sickness causing my back pain, or some such thing. I was sceptical at the time, but my back never did give me any more bother. I’ve read up on it since then and I think there is something in it all. The older I get the more I realise I don’t know it all.

Besides, there is something else I want to ask him about and I don’t know who else I can talk to. That’s the problem with getting old—one of the problems anyway—people tend to assume you are losing your marbles if you say anything out of the ordinary.

But I think the Inn is haunted.

Another bang on my bedroom door, my hands suspended over the keyboard. “Go away Prune!” I shouted, exasperated. “If you bang on my door again, I’ll come out and give you such a wallop, now bugger off, will you!”

“It’s me, Corrie” came Clove’s voice. Walked over to the door and unlocked it. A chat with my sister might help me with this project. Unlike Prune, who would be guaranteed to disrupt my train of thought.

Locking the door again I tell Clove what I’m writing about. We don’t go to school, me and Clove, we’re what they call “homeschooled” but what that actually means in our case is that we’re left to our own devices most of the time. Aunt Idle asks us (when she remembers) what we’ve been working on, and as long as we’ve been writing something or researching something, she’s happy.

So when I saw the group project about alternative timelines to avoid the disaster timeline, I had some ideas. Well, to be honest, I didn’t have any definite ideas until I saw the other suggestions. All Americans, and all of them talking about changing the timelines by changing the results of presidential elections!

“Not much chance of a different timeline there then!” remarked Clove astutely.

“Exactly!” I knew Clove would get it, she knows were I’m coming from, but then, everyone knows twins are like that.

“So this is what the plan is, right: “The goal of this exercise is to discuss amongst the group and choose significant past moments, and then As a Group, focus on creating alternate histories, thus sparking alternate timelines. We should vividly imagine moving forward from those probability forks and creating a more viable and desirable future.” Oh, and this bit here: “ our current timeline is convoluted to the point where many probabilities are leaning towards a disaster scenario simply to shake out of the current focus.” And then all these suggestions about different presidents, and then this: “My suggestion would be also to consider how we would like our current time frame to appear,” so I’m thinking…”

“I’m thinking” interrupted Clove, continuing my train of thought, “Of all those states and communities that got with the programme ten years ago, and took their kids out of school and built those Earthships so they didn’t need money for water and electricity..”

“And started cooperative worker owned businesses like they do in South America….”

“And they all started a guaranteed basic income years ago, so everyone was doing what they did best, especially the kids, cos they had such great ideas and weren’t stuck in boring schoolrooms…..”

“and there was no poverty, and nobody without a home…”

“Yeah, and they all stopped paying taxes so there was no money for the military, and then loads more people stopped paying taxes too…”

“Good one, Clove!”

“So nobody gave a fuck what president was elected anyway, because they were all sorting themselves out, and those states and communities were doing so well…”

“Because they’d already been doing it for years” I added.

“…that other states and communities started doing it too.”

“So that it snowballed, like dominoes, and there were more and more of these places..”

“And they had exchange students and stuff like that to learn from each other, and shared stuff online..”

“So when the disasters struck, it wasn’t half so bad because there were already a bunch of people managing perfectly well without dollars or oil, and they could help the people in the disaster. Makes more sense that electing another blimmin president, huh?”

“Bloody obvious if you ask me” replied Clove. “Pity we don’t have basic income, did you see Mater’s face when she was talking to that debt collector?”

That made me laugh, remembering her waving the stick around. “Her face was as purple as her cardigan.”

In unison, we both starting singing Start Wearing Purple and dancing around, acting the fool. I had a purple wig hanging on the back of my chair, so I put that on, and Clove grabbed a purple feather boa off the coat stand. No shortage of wigs in this town, though god only knows why. Just about every damn trunk in every empty house is full of wigs.

Unknown to the family, Bert is Abcynthia’s father. Her mother, now dead, had an affair with Bert, so when Abcynthias left the town to go to university, she thought that both her parents were dead. Some of the remaining old codgers had their suspicions, but it was a well kept secret ~ not least, because of Horace Hogg’s (Abby’s father) violent and unpredictable nature. Fred’s family, Idle and his mother, are new to the town, coming only because Fred married Abcynthia (from now on known for short as Abby because it’s a fucker to spell)
Abby’s mother, Hannah Hogg, died in somewhat suspicious circumstances shortly before the mines closed.

Fred poses as a teenager on Flitter social network and makes friends with his daughter Clove. Fred’s motivation was to keep abreast of the family news without eliciting any questions about his own whereabouts, and his intention was to remain a casual acquaintance merely, but Clove has developed a strong attachment to this “girl” and shares all her troubles and secrets with “her”. Fred struggles to remain neutral, and respond in the character of a teenage girl, but is emotionally unable to break the connection. Thoughts of his real identity becoming know to her appall him.

“How very strange” said Igor, when they eventually reached the waterfall.
“What?” asked Mirabelle, who was paying more attention to the parrot perched on her shoulder. She tickled him under the chin. “Who’s a pretty boy then? muah muah muah pretty parrot, where have you been?”
Igor rolled his eyes at the kissing noises. “Look!” he said, pointing at the waterfall.
“It’s a fucking waterfall, yes, I see it!” snapped Mirabelle. Finding Huhu had distracted her from the discomfort of hunger, thirst and an aching body, but Igor’s questions brought her back to the reality of their situation.
Then it dawned on her. The waterfall plummeted downwards, in a seemingly infinite series of cascades and pools. It was impossible to see the bottom with the spray and mist, especially in the fading daylight.
“But we are still at sea level, Igor! The waterfall should be going up, not down. I mean to say, we should be looking up at the waterfall flowing down. This isn’t making any sense. But look” she said, pointing to the first pool on the right. “There is a little hut there and some people. Fat people.” she added. “I bet they will have some food, let’s go and ask.”
Igor stepped cautiously to the edge and and peered over, looking for a way down. He looked down, then looked back at the little stream they had followed from the sea, and then back down again.
“This water is breaking all the rules!” he cried. “It’s flowing in both directions!”
“Don’t be silly Igor, are you delirious? Everyone knows that water flows downhill towards the sea.”
“See for yourself then, look!” he put a stick in the stream and they watched it flow gently back the way they had come, towards the bay. “Now watch,” he said, as he tossed another stick over the edge of the waterfall. It quickly disappeared from view as it rushed downwards, in the opposite direction.
“Where is the source? Where is the water coming from?”
“Those fat people might know. Have you found a way down yet?”
It appeared that the only way down to the pool of the fat people was via the waterfall itself. There were sheer cliffs of malachite and rose quartz on either side of the waterfall as far as the eye could see.
“I think we will have to go down the waterfall itself, Mirabelle.”
She gasped and took an involuntary step back.
“We will have to steer ourselves towards where we want to go, that’s all.”
“Oh no, not me, if you think I’m going to just throw myself over a waterfall…Oh! Huhu come back!”
The parrot flew down to the pool of the fat people, and settled on a banana tree, watching Mirabelle above looking down at him.
“Fucking parrot,” muttered Mirabelle. “I’ll clip your wings when I catch hold of you, I swear I will. For your own fucking good! Well?” she said, turning to Igor. “Are you coming or what?” and she launched herself over the edge and into the waterfall, with one thought in her mind ~ the bloody parrot.
With a great splash, she landed in the rose coloured pool, bobbing to the surface like a cork. Disgruntled silvery fish leaped out of the water, one of them landing on the barbecue. Mirabelle waded out of the pool, oblivious to the fish, and the looks of amazement on the faces of the fat people, and walked over to the banana tree.
Huhu ripped a banana off a ripe yellow bunch and dropped it, squalking in delight as Mirabelle caught it in her hands. When Huhu saw that she was focused on peeling it and eating it, he fluttered down and perched on her shoulder. She gave the parrot the last bit of banana, and then turned her attention to the fat people and the barbecued fish.

Indeed, Sadie was initially appalled and dismayed by the actions of Anna Purrna, however, not wishing to start building a grid of appalling and dismaying whatnots, she had quickly changed the direction of her thoughts.

Phew, I hope it did not take me more than 17 seconds!

Seeing the shock on the boys’ faces at her earlier stern, but nonetheless heartfelt, words, Sadie softened.

“How about we all sit down, right here, right now, and meditate for a bit.”

Consuela’s eyes widened in horror and he opened his mouth to protest. Sadie hurriedly continued.

“You can do this, guys! I have faith in you. How many times do I have to tell you — It’s all about vibration”.

Under the cover of invisibility, she boogied a bit on the spot, to illustrate her point.

After a couple of hours trudging along the beach, their thirst and fatigue increasing with each step, Igor and Mirabelle came upon a stream trickling into the bay. They followed the stream inland, hoping to find a place far enough from the sea that would provide them with fresh water to drink. The sun was sinking, casting a pinkish glow on the water, giving it the appearance of molten coppery rose gold.
“Listen! Do you hear that?”
“The parrot?” asked Mirabelle.
“No, not the parrot! The waterfall! I can hear a waterfall!”
“I miss Huhu”
“Never mind Huhu, come on! I thought you were thirsty.”
Mirabelle has stopped walking, cocking her head to one side to hear better. “Igor, wait! That parrot sounds just like Huhu!”

The breeze was brisk and refreshing despite the weighted heat of the sun, and there were windblown plums and oleander flower heads like dried roses scattered over the patio. Lisa turned the pump on to hose down the dog piss, and started in her customary fashion of starting at the bottom of the patio to wet it down to prepare for a smoother flow from the top near the house. A bit like whetting it’s appetite, she thought, for the stream of diluted yellow piss and detritus. When the bottom was lubricated, she dragged the hose to the top and meticulously hosed every leaf and dog hair from every nook and cranny, behind plant pots and chair legs, under the welcome mat, and the surface of it, chasing the debris with a narrow intense focus of water at times, and at other times with a broad spray, depending on which method was more efficacious in the situation. If it was very hot, sometimes she would spray the tree tops, for no reason other than to stand under the false rain and cool down. She avoided doing this in the middle of the day however, for fear of the water droplets becoming magnifying glasses and scorching the leaves. Making jungle showers was best done as the sun was sinking, when the heat of the day shimmered from every thing saturated with dense warmth.
But it was morning, late morning, and not too hot yet as Lisa continued directing the cleansing flow. She realized that she was very meticulous about hosing the patio, minimum twice a day, and always flushed the rubbish from behind each and every obstacle, even though it was not really necessary to do it so often; merely washing away the smell of dog urine would be enough. It was like a ritual, and she noticed for the first time that she was much more conscientious about, and indeed proficient at, manipulating a hose than she ever was with a broom or a duster. In fact, Jack had once said to her that she handled a hose like a Moroccan, and that had she been working on the building site that he was working on at the time, he would have given her the job of hosing. He said not everyone could handle a hose in such an efficient manner. Lisa was not known for being adept with tools at all, preferring to get on her knees to rake leaves with her hands than struggle with a rake. But with a hose, she was good, very good.
Lisa always checked that the bird bath was topped up with fresh water, and the water bowls for the dogs, wasps, and other creatures were replenished.
The levels that Jack had constructed worked marvelously well, and as the hosing continued the various streams gathered speed and joined together for the last slope into the garden, and down the path to pool at the bottom, next to the well from where the water was being pumped to the top from. Back to the source, full circle, impurities filtered through layers and layers of rock until sparkling clear once more, to restore and refresh another day.
Oh go on with you, Lisa giggled to herself, What a load of flowery nonsense.

“Are you sure this is the right direction ?” asked Sha.
“The young guy at the Hotel d’El Refugio said it was down South the Sea of Bee Leaf, past the mangrove and the mystic wall”, said Glo.
“Are you sure about that ? Look, the brochure indicate the pyramid is past the misty wall”, interrupted Mavis.
“Mystic, misty, what’s the difference anyway ?” Glo tentatively rolled her eyes, but gave up the gym. “The young lad said mystic”, she added, not wanting to let go so easily.
“What young lad ? You mean the one at the swimming pool that tried to flog the helicoleopter trip over the underwater tunnels of Lacuna to Sha ?”
“Oh! I recall him well”, said Sharon, “He told me his name was Jube Lee ? He’s no older than eighteen. Don’t tell me you turned cougar Glo.”
“Bloody hell, what ? Noooo !”
“Here it is, the fog wall looks quite thin.”
They heard the sound of big flapping wings.
“Oh! Are you an angel ?” asked Sha. “What a beautiful face you have, young lady. As pure as vodka.”
“My name is Fanella”, said the sphinx with a wide smile, “Answer my question and you’ll be free to cross the corridors of time.”
Excited by the perspective of some fun the three ladies listened carefully.
“What’s the difference between a cat and a complex sentence ?”
“What the f*%$k ?”
“Is that your answer ?”
“No, no, no. I’m just thinking aloud”, said Glo.
“That rings a bell”, whispered Mavis to her friends, “I think that’s from one of Steven Kong’s books. It has something to do with the claws and the paws. Yes ! That’s it. I have the answer”, she announced proudly.
“Are you sure ?” asked Glo. “What happens if she give the wrong answer ?”
“You won’t be able to enter the pyramid for ten years.”
“Oh ! That’s all ?” said Sha disappointed, “I thought you were going to devour us or something similar.”
“You must have mistaken me for someone else. As you are already in transition, there isn’t much that we can do to you. So, what is the answer ?”
“A cat has claws at the end of its paws. The sentence has a pause at the end of its clause”, Mavis articulated clearly.
The sphinx smiled, and let them pass.
“Just one last thing”, she added as the three ladies were entering the Lion’s mouthed gate, “As you choose to go through, only go further, don’t stop or try to turn back. You may get lost in time and never come back. If you complete your taks, you may well find a new life.”
She disappeared, leaving only her enigmatic smile in the memory of Sha, Glo and Mavis.