'Odalisque' by PF Jeffery (DFL's comments)

Chapter 20 – Carting

 

I love the word ‘scallimandering’ (in the context of this chapter) – and I find its only google hit is the previous blog of the earlier version of this novel.

 

This chapter tells of further trials and tribulations of Tuerqui as Sam’s cart ‘’orsey’.  And Sam’s dysfunctional family!

 

The dangerous physics of cart pulling and the various surfaces it crosses as the slaves pull it are excellently handled.

 

Tuerqui’s forlorn attempts to glimpse her lost daughter Tuerquelle while a cart-horse are poignant.

 

The sense of the cycle of the seasons is artfully done.

 

They even return (unrecognised?) to the Laughing Phallus to deliver things there, which gives a sense of interconnecting unity to the plot.

 

Some choice snippets from many:

 

A dream from my first night as a cart slave remains with me.  Sam had taken a large spade and was shovelling brass door knockers from the cart.  Tuerquelle looking, perhaps, as she had in her second year, polished the knockers as they reached the ground.  Her fingers moved with lightning speed, but she could not shine every one of them.  Eventually, she vanished – as though drowning – under the mounting tide of brasswork.

 

I wonder if Tuerquelle was using a bunny-cloth to polish in the dream?

 

 

The carter liked to pretend that we were horses – costly beasts quite beyond his means.  He sometimes rewarded us with sugar when we produced realistic neighing sounds.  Anything that resembled human speech provoked furious applications of his whip.

 

I think Tuerqui hints she lost the use of speech because of the above.

 

The following passage is emblematic of the novel’s ethos:

 

We cart slaves were free to pleasure one another, should we feel so inclined.  Although I was usually too tired to respond properly to my fellows’ occasional advances, there was comfort in the closeness of a companion’s body – and luxury in a gentle touch.  As the nights grew colder, one another’s body warmth became increasingly necessary and – eventually – we snuggled together in groups of six, usually preserving the distinction between the right and left-hand shafts.  There was little sexual in this, in spite of intermittently straying fingers.

 

 

A scatalogical passage artfully followed by a striking vision of a more resplendent carriage than Sam’s Cart: leads eventually to reunion by Tuerqui with a past character (not to give  the plot away).  Please excuse the longer than normal quotation below but it is well worth quoting and savouring:

 

Sam was scarcely inside when the stink cart rumbled into the square.  The lavatory man connected his hoses to the inlet and outlet valves, before fixing the other end of the inlet hose to the cistern on the convenience roof.  We smiled knowingly and watched the entrance – the carter was about to be drenched and, forbidden to speak, we could utter no warning.  Sam soon emerged, dripping and furious, his breeches still about his upper thighs.

In the excitement, I almost missed seeing the carriage.  The well oiled axle made hardly a sound, there was no obvious reason for me to move my head.  Indeed, I was almost certainly the only slave to turn from Sam and the lavatory man.  Perhaps I was prompted by the goddess.

The carriage was worth more than a cursory glance.  Occasionally I had seen such vehicles, but not often.  It was lightly and gracefully built – royal blue and gleaming silver– rolling silently on its two well-oiled wheels.  The vehicle’s beauty brought a lump to my throat.

Lovely as the coach was, it couldn’t compare with the twelve perfectly matched slaves at the traces.  They were tall and slim, platinum blonde hair falling almost to the waist.  Stepping high, their knees rose to navel level on each precisely synchronised pace.  Their faces were masks of arrogance – proud of their slavery, they would surely have sneered at a princess.

The fittings were worthy of the slaves.  Their tall royal blue plumes were set in headpieces of what was certainly real silver.  The harnesses were fitted with the same metal.  The leatherwork matched the plumes – no detail was less than splendid.

 

.........................

 

Queries:

 

Looking at the right hand shaft to more closely gauge the other slaves’ mood

 

I don’t usually worry prescriptively about split infinitives, but I do think above would be better as ‘more closely to gauge’.

 

Not only don’t I know what cargoes we hauled, but feel that

 

Would ‘not only am I unaware of what cargoes...’ be better?

 

Sarah was more practical – when she saw duty neglected her inevitable answer was the whip.

 

This only made sense to me when I inserted a comma after ‘neglected’.

 

 

typo:

 

without having to wait for the world come.

 

 

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Posted by: newdfl on 8/16/2008 9:17:12 AM , 1 comments

Submitted by Pet at 8/16/2008 10:43:25 AM

Thank you for that.

You may be surprised to hear that not only have I corrected the typo, but have implemented what you suggest on all of the queries (without quibble). I must have scurried over the text too quickly in all the re-writings and polishings of this chapter. (Perhaps too anxious to move on to Chapter 21?)

The strangest slip is the split infinitive. Generally, I am less tolerant of split infinitives than you are. Yet this one slipped through. Not any more, though! Thanks for pointing it out.

"Scallimandering" is a good word. One doesn't need a dictionary to know what it means.

I added a lot to this chapter in its final revision -- including delivering to the Laughing Phallus, Tuerqui's forlorn attempts to glimpse her daughter, and the door knocker dream that you quote.

Another addition at the final revision stage was passing by The Scree (and Rabbit Wood). This, like delivering to the Laughing Phallus, was intended to give a sense of interconnecting unity to the plot (as you remark). In the words of Goldfrapp's song "Monster Love":

Everything comes around
Bringing us back again
Here is where we start
And where we end

I, too, especially like the passage to which you devote a longer than usual quotation. It contains so much precise detail -- and juxtoposes the base and the sublime. It is, in some wise, the epitome of the book as a whole.

 

od 9

DFL’S COMMENTS ON ‘ODALISQUE’ BY PF JEFFERY

 

Chapter Nine - Torment. 

 

Truly beautiful and detailed accounts of the Art of Torment (as a showpiece), the game of calendar-bones, a hilarious inner-tale that has to be read to be believed (Green Wood), more dynastic footnotery, description of the Torment showpiece’s colourful audience, and the coming of barbarians, including the foreboding name of Lewis Ironhand of Clun (for whom Tuerqui is being prepared as dessert?).

 

 Some snippets:

 

According to the tale, Effilia had her personage sucked into a flask by the sorcerer Mandick, leaving her in a state of limbo – known as hipnos – in which she had neither the authority of a person nor the submission of a slave.  Eventually, Effilia’s daughter, Roseblue, managed to uncork the flask – releasing her mother’s personage and sucking that of Mandick into the bottle. 

 

The art of torment is to have precisely the opposite effect.  Through the artistry of the tormentor, the subject’s ability to experience pain is continually refined.

We were to perform Woodward’s third agorole, a lengthy and complex work lasting about an hour and a half and requiring more than fifty tormentors – and, of course, a like number of subjects.  It called for the finest tormentors and required almost two months to prepare. 

 

Query:

collected we tent collectors

 

Typo:

desert course = dessert course

 

======================================

 

Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

 

  

The links to all Chapter comments by me are here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html

 

 

Posted by: newdfl on 7/7/2008 5:14:02 AM , 2 comments

Submitted by Pet at 7/7/2008 8:13:28 AM

Thank you for that.

The typo "desert course" has now been corrected. (I didn't mean roast camel!!)

I think I spot a DFL typo -- "collected we tent collectors" should read "collected we tent decorators".

I suppose that your query is a reprise of the "we slaves" one. The phonetic argument in favour of "we" seems a bit weaker here -- but the subject/object argument may be stronger. The tent decorators had been set what I think was an essentially enjoyable task. Now, they are about to be treated -- more than ever -- as objects.

Submitted by des at 7/7/2008 8:23:13 AM

Thanks for pointing out my own typo! :-0

 

Cern Zoo
The blending of light was carried out with no darkness at all.  It meant we were blinded after we died, not before.

Office Block

 

OFFICE BLOCK

 

Published 'Purple Patch' 1990 

 

 

 

“London is a big, big city with big, big men,

Who sit in offices and count to ten!”

 

The options were poles apart, the possible repercussions incalculable. Therefore, Fred Tyrrel decided to simplify everything down to the bone, ascertain the bottom line and logically remove any shreds of doubt.

 

Fred took a piece of clean paper, much as I have just done before attempting to set out this record of his ruminations, then shaped it neatly upon hia desk and measured it thoughtfully with the span of hir hands. Just the job, he said to himself, turning to me et the other desk with a smirk of triumph travelling diagonally across his pinched face. I tried to appear as if I were ignoring his manoeuvres with the office stationery, by bending over my own with mock-intensity.

 

It needed all my powers of mind projection actually to look through his eyes as if they were portholes, upon the blank lined paper squarely before him on the lilac green blotter.

 

Strange, it surely was, to suffer someone else’s writers-block: the blaring white of the A4 grew almost unbearable, searing as it did the very medium to which I had consigned my consciousness. However, he soon placed pen to paper (to rule the box grids for his tolerances, margins of error, potentials for synergy, rounding differentials, windows of statistical opportunity, top & bottom slicing of returns for median efficiency and, finally, the inevitable bravado guesses) and, consequently, I felt myself relaxing into a more laid-back, devilmaycare attitude.

 

…until I saw the error. It stared out at me: a sore thumb with the curling back of the quick like the eroded feeler of a large foreign insect. The error was in an insignificant box halfway down the third column, between the ballpark trends and the brainstorming projections (oh ho, that was a bit too close for comfort?), and I thought it must be blindingly obvious to Fred, too.

 

But he forged on: the whole set-up becoming infected by that one statistical Quirk, confusing all the figures into one conglomerate non-truth, causing all the itemisations to dance before Fred’s bleary eyes. He looked around appealingly at me, but I continued to pretend to ignore him. I was enjoying this.

 

…until (horror!) I realised that the Quirk had even infiltrated the media ways and I was trapped inside his head: the pen in his hand took off far too glibly for its own good, forgetting all the margins and tabulation frames, and even scrawling beyond the confines of the white paper on to the blotter. It was only fitting that the word “blotter” itself appeared on the blotter ... I suppose...

 

Pricking The Conscience

Published 'Sierra Heaven' 1998 

 

 

 

Too late to pretend I'm not writing something. He's spotted me with a pen for one thing and, not only that, sporting a piece of paper on my lap over which the said pen seems to be moving in tandem with my hand. I can't even depend on the distance between him and me to blur the distinction of writing or drawing or - what else? - scribbling, doodling, fashioning figures, tabulating, sketching, cross-hatching...  

 No, he can see I am allowing a language, of sorts, to be trailed evenly across the paper. As yet however, he must be uncertain as to its subject-matter or whether, indeed, I'm pretending to write words whilst actually perpetrating nonsense.  

Although he is convinced as to the meaningfulness with which I wield language - judging the evident concentration upon my brow - he still fails to give me the benefit of the doubt.   

 

He is now looking over my shoulder, I guess, making me shudder. I can feel him breathing, stirring the hackles on my neck. I sense his eyes upon the business tip of my pen trying to trace a foreign template which none of us can predict, whilst inferring a message from the very semaphores it eventually imprints.

 Pause. 

  

But he's still there.

  

Nothing to see, mate. I've already stopped writing. Perhaps he'll go away now, due to the stock of words having been expended. No concentration left. No concentration right. Only his pinpointing the centre, pricking the heart of things - forever concentrating upon that erstwhile pause.

ODALISQUE by PF Jeffery (Chapter 4)

Chapter 4 - Departures 

 

Read by me today, Litnight 17th 2008 

 

We emerged on to the parade ground – packed with persons and slaves.  There was tumult of cheering and shouting – walking into which, from the quiet of the palace, felt like leaping into hot oil.  At first, I could see nothing but a confusing mass of bodies.  Neither slaves nor low born persons parted to make way for us. 

This is a bit like entering the novel itself!  Very cinematic in this chapter. Hitting all the senses. 

 

Two example snippets: 

It was now clear that several persons had been skewered by arrows – and a larger number trampled.  The slaughterhouse smell brought the taste of blood to my mouth, and then I was sick.  Vomit was added to the blood that already glued my blouse to the skin beneath.  In the increasingly rich blend of stinks, I now detected piss and shit. 

Slappa selected a large but unripe plum from a fruit bowl, tossing it above her head.  Her right arm and weapon became a blur of movement, the fruit landed neatly sliced in half, stone as well as flesh.  

 

Then the concept of canal pirates!!  

“How can there be a canal pirate?” Jenna asked.  She sounded irritated.  “Pirates at sea have plenty of room to escape the law, bandits on a road may take to the woods or hills, but where can a fugitive escape justice on a canal?”

  

 

Two possible typos I've noticed:

 

Nadine Next’s well discipline force

“Not basking our victory?”

 

   The author has kindly provided me these names for the months:  

Chillflurry (January)
Iceflake (February)
Windrush (March)
Drizzlemoon (April)
Cornsprout (May)
Litnight (June)
Glarehaze (July)
Thunderhead (August)
Swellbelly (September)
Mistream (October)
Dankfog (November)
Blinkday (December)

 

 

CHAPTER COMMENT LINKS: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html

Wooden Box

 Published 'New Hope International' 1996

 

A death-rattle from behind him. The stumps had been ripped by the weird spin off the seam – and the batsman walked like a ghost with nothing left to haunt except the whites he wore. The thwacking thud of leathery grenade upon the thick edge of a willow paddle dug another run from the hard pitch a half an hour after the nex batsman’s stricken stride for strike. The turning pitch had, for once, failed to beath his guard, producing a fielder’s stifled squawk of leg before! The stump camera broadcast a magnified insect of back of bat’s wing, hinting at one more potential spectator of the next ball’s padding off. The leg-spinner had already taken the skin off his fingers as a result of his relentless bowl at the resistant forces of the opposition’s tail. He rubbed the stain off the dead ball to his inner thigh. The swing which the air wafted to and fro teased his blonde head-top as he prepared for yet one more incisive curling lob towards the crease. The stitched pod’s natural line diverted as it dizzied off the skimless rough – bruising straight past the dead bat into its wielder’s box – spoiling the lunch he was to have gnawed for eternity: the corpse with pads on.

The Forgotten Envelope

Collaboration with Anthea Holland

This is the last call for flight number …

Marcia tuned out the metallic voice. It wouldn't be her flight - she was going nowhere.

So what was she doing here at this metropolitan airport if she had nowhere to go?

It had seemed like a good idea when she had got up that morning - a trip to the airport where she could get caught up in the excitement of holiday-makers jetting off for places in the sun; could look on as friends and relatives greeted one another with hugs and smiles and tears; could have lunch in the restaurant where she could lap up the ambience - maybe some of the joy that those around her were feeling would rub off on her.

Instead, she had arrived bright and early to find people in evening dress milling round the bar. It was obviously the left-overs from a party the previous night and as she studied the dress-suited men and the women in peacock colours, she thought how seedy it all was. Hair-styles were awry; bow-ties lurched drunkenly; silks and satins were stained with food and red wine; and some of the stains down the men's trousers didn't bear thinking about.

In the corner one lone individual had given in to sleep, his head on his arms which were, in turn, on the beer-drenched table.

It must have been a good night, Marcia thought, if they wanted to carry it on into this morning. Haven't they got any homes to go to?

Then she wondered how long the bar had been closed. Facilities hereabouts were notoriously unpredictable: and--given the nature of time zones that often seemed to overlap at international Way Stations such as airports--one could sometimes catch a cocktail when most others were crunching through the fried bread of an early all-day breakfast.
Marcia knew, though, that these folk were several seasons past the binge. There was even mould growing on the dregs they hadn’t quite drained.

She heard the roar of the latest take-off as its undercarriage brushed the rooftop. More skyquake than thunderstorm. She cringed. After all, she had a phobia about flying (no wings, you see) and an almost equal phobia about the danger of those who did manage to fly crashing down upon her miraculously pinpointed position below. Why she came to airports then was a mystery. Someone once said, perhaps, that fears needed to be faced. And if not faced, scrambled.

Her brainstorming was interrupted by recognising one of the new-born down-and-outs in the bar as her ex the one before last.
He looked as though he had taken root in this God-forsaken place, had actually headed here straight after reaching "ex" status. Seeing him meant she could kill two birds with one stone - facing her fear of flying and of seeing Jake again.
She watched as his unfocussed eyes travelled around the waiting area. Saw how they passed over her then swivelled back as if not quite believing what he had seen. Probably, if some flicker of a brain-cell remained in his skull it was making some weird connection between her presence in the airport and the fact that her refusal to accompany him to far-off climes was the cause of their split.

He shook his head, befuddled, then, the remaining cell obviously deciding the connection was too wacky to consider further his gaze passed on, until his eyeballs rolled in his head and he passed out.

Well, she thought, she hadn't lost much there!

The man in the corner who had been sleeping off the drink suddenly woke up with a shout. None of the other left-overs took any notice of him, indeed, such was the roaring from the winged creatures overhead that it was only the fact that Marcia's attention was focussed on him that she realised he was shouting at all.

Suddenly one of the swollen birds flapped its wings and swooped down. A feeling inside the head rather than a tangible vision of reality. She watched one of the airport officials approaching her, clasping a narrow green envelope; seemingly so intent, he must be delivering (she believed) a summons or an injunction or notification of the lottery jackpot she’d always imagined she was in the process of winning. But how did whoever had instigated the delivery known she was to put in a random appearance at the airport? It wasn’t as if she had booked a ticket. She had told no one. She hadn’t herself decided to abide by the morning’s plans till the last minute’s alighting from the underground train.

The disarranged man in the corner was no longer in the corner. Still shouting, he intercepted the deliveryman, snatched the green envelope as if it were a baton in a relay race and skipped the rest of the way towards Marcia wielding it like a cross between a deadly disease and a religious icon. She then realised that he was yet another ex. One from trillions of years ago; almost her first date; now grown as old as the hills in her blouse.

“Derek, what you doing here?” she asked. It seemed the obvious line to play. Fitted the context. Sheer terror at being faced with all her exes at once, in a hung-over state, would have been the more obvious natural reaction. But she decided to stand and face whatever was panning out. Implausible and far-fetched as the long-haul repercussions were bound to become, she wanted to stone-wall till the bitter end.

“Marcia, may I say how beautiful you’ve remained,” said the uncornered man

Derek had been a bad start, at the best of times. Now she was convinced he had been a loser even before there had been nothing to win. Full of smarmy shit? Well, each corner of his eyeballs almost oozed earwigs of it.

"I'd rather you didn't," she said.

"Oh," he hung his head, abashed. Then he brightened. "This is for you." He thrust the green envelope in her hand.
She glanced at the name on the envelope.

"No it isn't. Look, it's completely the wrong name." She held the envelope and Derek peered myopically at it. Any brain cells he had left struggled to make sense of the beautiful copperplate writing.

"O-oh," he said finally. "That's not your name."

Marcia tutted exasperatedly. "Of course it's not, you fool."

"But … but …," he stammered, looking backwards and forwards between her and the delivery man who was still standing with his mouth open.

Marcia helped Derek out, some vestige remaining, perhaps of the affection he had once instilled in her.
"You thought it was for me," she said, because that guy over there seemed to be heading this way with it." She glanced behind her but there was nobody near her, nobody, at any rate, who looked as if they were expecting delivery of an artistically addressed envelope.

"The best thing you can do," Marcia said, pushing the letter back into Derek's limp hands, "Is to take the letter back where it came from."

They looked up together, but the delivery man had gone. Derek somehow knew that postboxes had their mouths open not through surprise or exasperation but a rictus of yearning desire for someone to make a collection down below. All those billets doux from sexy exes crammed to the mail’s rafters – and, on top of which, the Christmas rush had somehow started with every child in the land sending something to Satan and his reindeers via this one postbox.

The blistering sound of a jumped-up jet dispersed Marcia’s machinations of self-doubt--just another whining berserker coming closer and closer with each attempt at fresh disaster.

Jake and Derek were waddling across the concourse, arm in arm, aspiring to a fuller monty than they had managed the previous night, before the drink kicked in. No doubt, they were due to take off for some Spanish resort where they’d prove that the British could sport hairy buttocks, whatever the jungle.

Marcia cringed. Why had all her exes been such uncouth bastards. Many more exes were, by now, emerging from the airport drinks lounge, wide-eyed and legless. Some lacked arms. Discrete elbows like stick-insects. Some bodies were glued to the stools over which they’d found themselves lolling. Plum-voiced lushes lurching between bar and bog. Joe and George. Cecil and Grot. Puke and Podsmith. How many more would she remember? All venturing abroad to seek the sun and sangria she’d once shared with them in headier days. The bane of air stewardess and courier. Blousy and brass-necked. Here was come-uppance, as the tannoy respoke:

This is the last call for flight number 666.

It was like an x-rated movie, Marcia thought, with all these exes coming out of the woodwork. Then she remembered that it couldn't be - she wasn't an actress. Although she had to admit that her current profession did involve some acting but at least she wasn't required to have a lot of talent.

No, this was reality. The best she could hope was that no more of her exes would actually remember her; it could be embarrassing to have every Tom, Dick, Harry, Jake and Derek greeting her as one of their exes! They had recalled her face, certainly, but she had been through several incarnations during the years they had been apart and, strangely enough, at this very time was looking very much like the Marcia that had existed 10 years ago - save for the extra pleats in her skin.
She tried to stay low profile while watching the group of exes gather themselves together for the onslaught to whatever booze-and-bronze destination they had planned.

She peered myopically and searched through her memory banks. Ah, among them, yes, there was Pierre - she remembered him well - how could she forget? Still slim and neatly bummed, after all the intervening years. How could she have forgotten his nut brown eyes and the oak-knotted richness of his voice? He waved at her with a cheery smile, as if to say how could you have possibly relegated the likes of me to the ranks of your exes? He was the last to vanish and she thought she caught a tea-leaf sparkling at his eye, but no last message. She’d been a wilful lady in those far-off days of concertina liaisons. Too picky for her own good, even at half pace.

She watched the plane take-off. Off towards a raucous reunion of souls who’d never realised they’d enough in common ever to be able thus to reunite. A wing clipped an obstacle at the edge of the runway and the resultant ball of fire was too frightful to recall. In all the newspapers with literally countless dead. Many recriminations as to safety concerns. Even the pilot had taken an early binge, they’d say. Yet, Marcia, that fateful day, smiled as she saw a shadow shrug off the conflagration and soar, in the winged shape of death, heavenward: an echo from the past fixing the future good. A ghostly aeroplane that would fly the skies forever.

It was not her flight. She’d be going nowhere. For ever and ever, ah men.

Yorick
Chaos snatched me up and, before I could gather my bearings, dropped me amid a romance, a family row and, worst of all, a life I had been trying to avoid at all costs. I yearned for the return of that state of pre-embodiment with which many were satisfied for as long as eternity took. She welcomed me into the man’s body with a gentle squeeze of the hand, followed by a light kiss on the cheek. It was an instinctive reaction on her part, since she was unaware that I had not been possessor of her sweetheart’s body for as long as she had known it. Reluctant souls, like me, torn screaming from the substitute-bench of Fate are bound to provide a seamless transfer of responsibilities for those involved with the emotions of the receiving body. I thus returned the kiss. Surrogates of all shapes and sizes gathered around. These were, on a superficial level, relatives of the woman, who had arrived for our engagement party. However, I knew most of them as others of my kind. The individual, whose disguise as my future mother-in-law was wearing thin, winked an involuntary twitch of the cheek-muscles, perhaps, but one I took to be a romantic enticement to another actor such as me in a theatre called reality. Here, then, I had been landed with two romances: one dictated by the logic of a pair of human-beings ineluctably intended to be in love both mind and body - and the other romance generated in the shape of the foul old winking bird who was being surreptitiously spiritual behind the wrinkle-ringed eyes in her attempts to dupe Fate. I could not possibly reciprocate the latter, since the former was meant to be my whole preoccupation for the next few decades. Furthermore, the rest of the family members had begun arguing. They were picking at the carcass of a roast chicken, one that some had intended to save for tomorrow’s dinner, others to consume now at the party. It was a trivial row, yet with a high significance derived from the objective viewpoint of timescales far in excess of human comprehension — simply an extrapolation, a spoiling tactic, a diversion, a decoy, a wild goose chase of small talk since wild chickens were indeed rare. Ill-cooked, in any event - and I hoped that food-poisoning would rectify the few flinches from Fate now being rehearsed by such rogue spawndrift of Chaos. However, I suffered the abrupt realisation that I had not given my sweetheart an engagement ring. It was evidently expected of me, the climax of current proceedings, one that my predecessors had forgotten, either through the typical inefficiency of deputy souls who have no material or spiritual incentive to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s — or, more likely, sheer bloody-mindedness. More likely, of course, because, when minds bled, realignments inevitably ensued. And I ripped out the red-dripping wishbone and raised it like Yorick towards my smiling lips...

Published 'Weirdmonger's Tales' (Wyrd Press 1994)

Death Where Is Thy Sting?
It was a fat-barrelled fountain pen with a nib worth dying for. Not a Parker, not a Waterman, but a sweetly handleable embossed implement containing an ancient quill as its skeleton: a long core sprung against the nib’s base with its sharpened bony spindle reaching beyond the well of ink, while remaining clean by means of a filter or baffle towards the eye of the nib. The wielder of the pen aimed the cloven nib-end above his skin as if it were an antique tattooing device – soon to write an indelible phrase about an assumed indelible life. He had earlier fondled the cap as he unscrewed it from around the nib, unaware of the quill poised as a second fluted point to pounce out on a hair-trigger not only to enbed words into the skin but suck the same ink back in a gulp of self-syphoned poison. Poison letters from a poison pen. The double jab made him wince – one jab to inscribe, the other to proscribe. The words would remain for the rest of his days, so short-lived they must have been written with invisible ink: silently echoing the same words carved upon a hidden heart where the permanent ink was indistinguishable from its haemorrhaging message to nobody.



'A Work of Art' written the day after tomorrow HERE
'Seascape' HERE