Hustings in the Age of Uncertainty

A man in a blue suit speaks in a whisper but carries a megaphone, tunes his preparatory breaths to the pitch of air raid sirens, and coughs up fragments of glass animals. His voice is a crack in the polar ice, through which sabre-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and other apex predators crawl, shaking crystals from their shaggy manes and blinking blood-lusty eyes. It’s a predictable avalanche that leaves peaks denuded of snow, with frostbitten corpses staring at the sky, toilet tissue wreathes, and flies. The man in the blue suit pays his own audience in luxury flights, flattery, and fast-tracked passage through loopholes paved with false intentions, his wheezing laugh lingering long after the last plant is plucked and the last polar bear blasted through its hot skull. When the bombs come, or when the Sun catches in bare branches and refuses to set, the man in the blue suit needles tears from the corners of his eyes as he photoshops his hands out of pictures of star-struck girls; and when he waves from low-slung cars and ornate balconies, he’s just a stand-in for himself, or a shop dummy with a blue suit slapped on in cut-price paint. Meanwhile, mammoths and mastodons march two by two, waving fire that turns mountains into cracked glass, while a disembodied voice gags in the throat of a dropped megaphone, summoning the two-faced faithful to free lunches, free holidays, melting ice creams, and blue suits for each new wailing infant.

Bargain

Contrary to counterindications, we are not flying. We are not fleeing the scenes of crimes in which we may or may not have been complicit. It’s complicated, but we were not created – in God’s image? A dog’s image? A cat, perhaps. Me? How? – to comprehend, any more than to combust from the fire in our bellies. Believe it or not, we are falling, in love like teenage sweethearts, and into the machinery like nameless sweatshop drones. We’re like kids in a sweetshop: not children but goats, sorted from the sheep by Disgusted of Godalming, Surrey, with his fringe on top. Stop. Why-oh-why-oh-why must we distrust the scores and indentations spread out as plain as the noses on our faces? Two wings don’t make a plane. We walk with backs bent through a stately pile falling down. The relationship of verb to subject remains. Ambiguous.

Interpretive Malacology: The Arecibo Division

We monitor the snails with cameras and trackers, then chart their movements with coloured pens on sturdy paper. The technology’s changed, but it’s much the same as it was in our parents’ day and, for all we know, their parents’ day, and on and on, until the Gods of your choice and their analogues and avatars first created snails. To the casual observer, they’re just scaling the fence for the finest leafy greens, then retracing their trails to sleep through the day beneath rusting bins and barrows. But if you look at the charts – here, and here, and particularly here – you can see the patterns and their relation to language, the script of slime on weathered creosote. We send out scouts in the cool of morning to scour chewed stalks for our new Rosetta stone. See how the lines caress the edge of meaning. We know in our bones that this is important, but we don’t quite yet know why.

The Assassin’s Last Bow

Reviews are in and they’re not looking good. Three stars at best, and one of those is O-type, hot and massive, its hydrogen burning out as it swallows itself into a black hole. Another is a washed-up lush in a downtown bar, repeating the same tired tales of the road to anyone who’ll listen. No one will listen. The last one’s more ambivalent, pinned to a five-year-old’s jacket, a tangible signifier of law and order in a clapboard frontier town. He looks at his tears in the mirror, as if they belong to someone else, as if they’re the binary stars he can only dream of. The reviews, he reflects, are disappointing to say the least, peppered with typos and tired tales. Maybe he should jack it in? The old man in the mirror weighs a gun in his innocent palm and aims it at the stars.