Tracy

The pear shaped alien bodies began to falter one by one, treading on each others appendages, and bumping into each other.

“You do exaggerate Arona, ALL these people?” Vinny remarked. “Sue’s the only new one to pass through in yonks!”

They danced as if no-one was watching, as nobody was.

Shelly Dwelling, horrifed ~ naturally enough ~ at the mention of butter and parsley, was immensely relieved to see Frobisher the frog gliding along in his electric wheelchair. “Hop on, Shelly!” he whispered urgently “My wheelchair is super fast, I’ll get you out of this pickle in a jiffy!”

“Frobisher! Oh my godfrogs, it’s good to see you! What timing! But I can’t hop!”

“Well neither can I now, without my legs” he replied, “But you can climb up my wheel, can’t you?”

“Well ok, but don’t move, I’m on my way, this may take a while…”

“Hurry, Shelly! Hurry up! I can smell butter melting, there’s no time to lose!”

Unfortunately for Shelly who was a quarter of the way up the left wheel, Frobisher engaged his electric motor and sped off into the long grass. It would have been far too risky to wait.

“Hang on, Shelly! This will be the ride of your life!” he called, as Shelly spun round the giant Ferris Wheel.

“I suppose this is why your name is Frobisher Ferris” she replied through gritted teeth.

The tunnel, dear mindful reader(s), was used by the members of the Distortium for covert operations into the Claritorium. That was the original purpose of the tunnel; however, it had been such a long time since anyone had visited the Claritorium that the very idea of Clarity had been forgotten, and the tunnel had been misappropriated for other less clarifying purposes.

{link: clarification}

“Well, it clarifies one thing, if nothing else” Frond, the curator of the Murganian Distortium, said drily, “Cleary, this is nothing but a pack of seeds.”

Alfred, preoccupied with worrying about his overdue library book, entered the door of the Murganian Distortium by mistake, which was next door to the Murgatorium Library.

{LINK: CLARIFIED, SEED}

Blithe, affectionately known as Blinky, had to admit that the very idea of anyone licking Arona’s toes was too bizarre to comtemplate, notwithstanding she had been unable to get the image out of her head since she first heard the rumour.

“I’ll catch you up in a minute” said the green fairy, in between mouthfuls of bowler hat. “I’ve nearly finished. Pass me that can of Guinness will you, this hat’s awfully dry.”

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}