The Wedge Question
First published '9th Issue' 1991

The couple were crouched around the roaring coals, counting the sparks that marched up the black chimney bust. The room, other than their faces, was in shadowy darkness.

"Have you noticed?"

"Noticed what?"

The two questions were images of each other in a buckled funfair mirror. The voices were of similar pitches, but their faces were from opposite ends of the sexual spectrum.

"...that most things you decide in life are trivial, but now and again something comes along that is all important."

"Yes, but you don't realise at the time which are trivial, which not."

"...unlike the wedge question."

One of the faces withdrew into the gloom while it pondered the imponderable.

It soon returned to the flame's blessing with a rejoinder:"When I was a kid, my father used to make me cottonreel tanks, with a rubber band, a matchstick and a wedge of candle. I thought that was all important then - but now I've almost forgotten him, let alone the tanks. They used to climb over things, because he carved treads into the reel rims. The candlegrease lubricated the torque of the rubber band upon the match traction. I don't suppose you played with them when you were a little girl?"

"No, I had too many dolls, to keep me busy. They cluttered up the bedroom, sitting around in their finery as if they owned the place. At night, their eyes opened and shut without me lifting them up at the optimum angle. One of them had dewy tears upon her petal cheeks come the light early summer mornings. Another doll was actually bigger than me..."

She broke off, having realised she was intoning an unlearnt speech which had once been prepared for an audience. Knowing no more, she retracted her head like a tortoise.

The man groaned from his chair by the fire, so as to take a poker to the coals. He churned them up as a way of avoiding an embarrassing silence.

As dawn broke, they decided independently to go for a walk along the sea wall. So, with a mixture of indifference and pleasure, they found themselves both strolling in the same direction, carried by salt wafts towards the bereft creeks - hardened mounds of belched quicksand beneath the mutant umbrella claws of the scrawny gulls. In the distance, the Essex marshes oscillated in the uncanny light of the reflected horizons - giving hope, if not ultimate belief, to the Flat-Earthers they were.

She had never thought of the planet as more than a clump of dried mud snapped off from the tussocky heel of reality. Whilst he, the man, had never been beyond these sodden parts and expected the ruptured lands to stretch forever...

It was more difficult to believe in endings.

The blackened curds of smoke billowed from the chimney fire into the matchless leaden grey of the sky. They had turned their backs on the diminishing doll's house.

A tractor crawled along the horizon, its sole sloping pinion guided by the straight furrows but spasmodically turning full circle as its trencher wheels slew sideways in the loose mud.

Hand in hand, the couple disappeared into the far distance.