Where a pile driver’s chant, fast as the twining rain, left a frangible coil of rope in the open docking floor, the nest of phoenixes and dung scarabs, where the many look through the chinks and knot-holes of the planks, even there did the rhythm of dreaming fords lay the long causeway, ending in the bridge to the pier. The bell in the fractal spire did not answer this, too late to measure the border of the tide of shadow to the brim awaiting depth. The breath of the beam beneath, soaked, sprinkled with saltwater, it answered this, and long before time.

The motherly rake turned up the atmosphere to the jagged and bristling underside, a concatenation with multiple architectures in antiquity, above the mountains higher than can be named; wreathed and came down, even to beneath, to the smell of goats in the morning, taken to the beam, the beams, the binding taken from the coil, freshened in the cameras’ looking. Broken over one monolithic handstave across the tendering mill: this was the breadth of the floor between every chink, in the venerable concatenation, and the voice which spoke:

“Prepare yourself, and pluck the flowers, and bring the tawny flower with the black mark, with what you will find.”

One prepared herself, the young Sardius Tosi, a girl of twelve, with red buttons on her shirt; she plucked the flowers, walking among the weeds, the willowherb, plantain, and tansy, finding and picking the flowers sought. She came to the tawny one, like a low earthen star, with the mark: she bent, and pulled it. Its tiny roots pulled out the earthen plug from a hole, the mouth of a hose, from which leaped a stream of blackish liquid.

She opened her mouth to scream in surprise, but instead of a cry coming out, the stream went directly in, point first and headlong, rushing down her throat, spreading and flowing over and covering her face with the liquid as it swirled into her; swirling over her eyes and she did not blink: she saw through the swarm of suspended grains; rather than splashing, the droplets stretched out and snapped back elastically. It was like clear oil, and full of dark crumbs and bits that were of some organic or animal origin. She could not straighten; staggered, but could not move her head, as though the liquid was running down her throat, up her nostrils, into her tear ducts, with endless running feet, pulling her down as it ran up inside her.

Then the other end came up out of the hole, leaving it dark and empty; at the sudden release she straightened and staggered again, the last of the liquid swinging and writhing like a semi-transparent eel or baby elephant’s trunk, vanishing into her face like a tremendous spaghetti noodle, into her mouth as into a drain, a thin upside-down whirlwind filled with meaningful detritus. Then it was all in her, and dragged her mouth shut with a click behind it. She pushed her hair back, thinking it would be wet, but it was not; she felt her face, and it was dry as paper.

The mystery had filled not only her belly but her veins, her skin, and her heart in her bosom. She put her hand to her bosom, and squeezed with her heart, deliberately pumping with her heart, driving the visitant liquid throughout the thinnest reaches of her form. In her other hand she held the flowers, and the flower. She returned in her preparation and brought all to the brokenness, the breadth of the tendering mill between every chink, in the venerable colossal chain, the voice.

“When the time comes to plant it, my Sar-Sar, and water it with your tears, find its name “Andreas”, which will bear the vital seeds in the due withering time.”

2023/03/01 #DailyWrittenOOM

One Andreas Hawforth, eight years of age, loose fawn hair, wearing a thick jacket of mostly red, was bouncing a yellow golf-sized rubber ball on the slick floor of the hallway. He skipped around it to contain its movement, with solemn and precocious deftness.

Then the ball struck the floor like a heavy globe of lead, rolling slightly rather than bouncing so much as a millimetre. He saw the legs of a man standing before him, in pressed beige trouser legs. As he looked up, he squinted in the breeze, which carried spray or mist. He heard the voice of the man as if on the other side of a tunnel:

“Hello, son.”

It wasn’t his father, just the sort of older man who called boys “son”.

“Hello, Sir,” he replied.

“Do you want power?” the stranger asked.

“Yes.”

“That is good. But what do you want most of all?”

“To be worthy of it.”

It sounded strange in Andreas’ mouth, but it was what he wanted to say, and he had been able to say it. His eyes had turned to glass, so that he could not see; but images came to his imagination without his imagination asking. A face being smeared by many hands or paws, being covered and hidden and masked by mud; he couldn’t tell what kind of face it was, but it seemed young, or that of a girl, or both. A hand reaching through a wall of bricks; a regular net set up as a wall, which, incongruous with its orthogonal structure, consisted of living vines – or roots, as there was no green. This was being climbed by many shapes silhouetted against the paleness of the unknown; he noticed that some of the shapes were human, and some were not.

The stranger handed Andreas his ball, which felt the same as before, and the stranger smiled at him, though the stranger’s eyes were hidden by a dark blindfold.

“What would you do with this power?”

“Um…” he thought for a moment. “I told Ma I would shell some peas, so it could help with that.”

“It might help a little, but it is unlikely.”

“So it isn’t a very useful power?”

“Its uses are as mysterious as its sources, but you will find both in due time.”

The stranger was gone, and only then did Andreas wonder why there had been wind indoors, why there had been mist which had made him damp – the ball in his hand was bedewed with droplets. He was glad he had still been wearing his jacket.

He went on bouncing his ball, not knowing that, unseen under his hair, an intricate symbol in dark lines had appeared.

2023/02/28 #DailyWrittenOOM

Seven shorn pinnacles of latticed angle-iron stood, the teeth of the anchored. Wild breath sweetens on the brim of the standing, braced with united screw threads. Foam of the unkempt deep wades onto the lap of the earth in time to drink of its drought to the glittering dregs. The disco ball hangs like the spider’s egg sac, a pregnant droplet dry and full of life. Tracing the warm lode through the grin of ill savour, one who rocks the dory is with us. Soon the collar will close about the stage, the veil fall across the crisscrossing thinkers, and a rail in the floor will carry all through the ears to the shorn pinnacle, the iron struts of the cold theatre.

2023/02/27 #DailyWrittenOOM

Slivers in a scourging wind found my safe square and swept it to the border. Today, rebuilding the tower of lenses brick by bar, I drank of the winter sun in the same chorus. The white painting on the windows, in answering, file past the gate bar I swung to a bolt, but the legion of fine particles would not release my wrist from the tendrils I had woven second.

Bearing of the compass: going hard in the orchard of long moss, the touch as of unthinking fur in the obscurity of groping night. Running my cool wrist along, I find the lashing slivers again.

2023/02//26 #DailyWrittenOOM

Before the camera stood the totem of small repeating raised triangular wings, thick and bound, made and covered in carpet of coarse synthetic turf green, and greying embroidery bronze filling it with texture of tightly knitted and thinly chained wire wool. This could never fall, for the core of a palm tree, though it could never have been guessed, reared it to its height. No faces appeared in its pattern of innumerable joints and ants’ nests of detail and order. No straight line, however small, could be found except in manifold general trends. The eye and gaze hovered, slipping, less than half a millimetre from its detailed rind, its covering binding, impossible to reach closer and deeper with such a thing as sight. A haze of sharp and dim focus abrades the thought of it as seen, and it stands still, and cannot be looked away from, for it is before the camera.

2023/02/24 #DailyWrittenOOM

Tremors of water grain turning granular over the dome, slipping over with a whisper of dust, curling as hair. They thrust down the fanning beams, the scattered pockets eaten into the stone that I left for mothers to care. Dream silver fell from melting to pierce the back of my eyelids and escape the room through ten hundred thousand windows in the wind.

I arrayed carefully the sheets and bolts of the master’s dyed carapace, to find the scoundrel dead for the forehead of mitres. Grim silt settled granular layers across it, for all the world like the furrows in my darling’s field in Seville. Tremors spread out from there, pinning down the curling dust, and we are under the beams again for home.

2023/02/23 #DailyWrittenOOM

A bird neglecting its wings in sport skids down the slanted roof of the sky on a dusty piece of cardboard. Within, a copper closet rings with the concourse, rubbing shoulders and vibrating tread, voices match and mismatch a wall of colour picking samples; I receive a nosebleed on board the high Vimana.

Cut through the dull brown skin of the potato to reveal the crisp oil-slick iridescence beneath, and the smell of rain on incense rods. Jumbled leaves of tile scale the broad lizard, each of its many legs the strut to girder the ground; but the ground is far, far below. Nascent smells from under a bird’s dusty feathers broaden the high roof, the slanted Vimana sides, sliding above the flattened rays of iridescent incense vibrating beneath us, beneath the great tread that rings with the jumbled voices innumerable.

2023/02/22 #DailyWrittenOOM

Governor beetles ramped on the crowd, circled and spun on the multi-cloned chessboards as whirligigs on a still lake. Bright lights gleamed in the background, the stars were pictured on the high walls, a wing spread abroad overshadowed the bowers and arbours that had no verdure. Rembrandt’s rhapsody tangled between my chewing teeth; while members ever recall nights in the Mexican draw, wilting froward faces of lettuce frown and brown, talling the grey cases in two-by-two stacks.

Brain felt matted between the grates to dry indoors with the hand gale, twisted sharpeners stashed under the threshold cry out; another white keeping in the annex braved the membrane to speak to faces. Sacked potato meal sprayed from a height on the breadth of the chessboards, turned them edge to edge for the palm of a circling wing, diverse from tiles in a simple game. While the crowd departs, others sweep up the shavings from the high walls.

2023/02/21 #DailyWrittenOOM

Behind a house, a square, trimmed grass lawn, flowerpots in the corners, a short white picket fence at the back with a gate. A path of fine tan gravel leads respectably straight through the gate, beyond which the grass continues, no less trimmed. A yard wide is this space beyond the fence, and the far side is bordered by white plastic flowerbed edging. Past this, a few inches of grey bedrock and undomesticated bits of stone, and then day turns to profound darkness in the space of a few inches. As far as the eye can see in either direction, the grass and gardens end at that edging, and a strip of lifeless wilderness ground is exposed, like the skin of a workman’s finger pulled back from the quick of the nail, and that vanishes quickly into sunless night. Upwards, the blue of the sky and the snowy stretches of cloud also vanish into the shadow. It would not seem so dark if it was black as black paper, or even the space between stars – in the depths and distance of the obscurity, as in a mine, a well, or train tunnel, straining eyes can sense that there are shapes: near or far, large or small, common or alien, no more can be discerned.

A “shore” residence. Voices are heard in front of the house. A child comes out of the back door to water the flowers with a watering can; a sparkly pinwheel spins silently in a brief tasteless breeze that drifts out of the blackness.

2023/02/20 #DailyWrittenOOM

There was not enough light to make the surface above him gleam at all, only enough to make it distinct in the surrounding gloom, and turn it to a dull opaque red, like a sheet of plastic, moving with gossamer fluidity, tingled by the scattered drops falling like sparse rain from the utterly unseen structures above the surface.

He worked with quickly numbing fingers, and with just enough light to see the inset group of handles, clamps, and levers. Struggling to fit the rod-key in the right place, he found his mind was beginning to act drunk from lack of air. All at once, the inset controls dropped downwards on hinges, twisting his fingers; he hadn’t noticed when he finished undoing them.

The suddenly open chute jerked at him with a suction like a living grip. The shadows of silt it drew in made the dark aperture look as though it had instantaneously sprouted tufts of dark hair. His hands were too near, and he was too distracted: the current caught his sore fingertips like a vacuum cleaner catching a loose string on a scarf: his arms shot in, followed by his shoulders, body, and legs, hyperextending his knee on the edge so quickly was he whipped inside.

As quickly over as begun, he was then floating on his back in a pool of water that moved aimlessly around him. It was just as well that he could breathe, as the passage through the chute had driven what breath he had left from his body. The water was moving? It was being moved, by many things which filled it: snakes, of every size, a slithering swarm suspended in the dark medium like roping, crooked fish, framing his supine body as he drifted motionless.

“Ah…” he whispered to the lithe teeming that he lay in, “to be surrounded by unlooked for friends in such a time; ‘tis the breath of the heart.”

2023/02/19 #DailyWrittenOOM