The Purple Swan

The Blame Game

No good times, no bad times, there's no times at all, just the New York Times -Simon and Garfunkel

Elves Like Us

Me-Yo and GR!O got into the best parties, ongame or off, dressed to dazzle and always sporting the latest grooves, but after they crossed the line at Becky Bermuda's and went too far, they would never be invited out again.

"Look at these toy people," Me-Yo said, "it's disgusting." She was neck to toe in spandex embroidered with eyeballs, a rainbow of irises that never blinked. Going up to the closest guest, she promptly spun on her heel and stove in their head.

GR!O might have sneered slightly. It was difficult to read his expression through the cloud of pink bees.

That weekend it was Becky Bermuda's turn to host at her chalet. This was a party not a panic, where random acts of violence were encouraged, and it caused no small reaction to see an otherwise respected member of the circuit so summarily slain without so much as a chance to defend themselves. To everyone's surprise and temporary relief, it was not a person at all but a cricket -temporary, because Me-Yo didn't stop there.

The bloodbath that ensued was no great loss to society but of greater concern for Bermuda's finances, which after this would be in slow recovery: it wasn't cheap to put on a cricket show, especially when the last thing anyone wanted was to see artificial bodies slaughtered for no discernible reason than pique.

It might have been a complete loss had not elves intervened.

The pair descended through the skylight, wielding personal smoke deployment devices that attacked Me-Yo and GR!O's higher functions and disabled them entirely. Within seconds of their dramatic entry, the elves had put a stop to the cricket rampage.

First crickets, thought Becky Bermuda from her saferoom, emerging once assured by the uninvited pair that the danger had passed, and now elves: I'll never live down this disgrace.

The elves were quite ordinary. Attired in checkerboard cloaks and pleated spider-silk nappies, the only thing the otherwise two plain-looking men had going for them were the inlaid smoke deployers running along their green-and-white sleeves.

"Mistaken identity," explained the taller one, assisting his partner in sewing up Me-Yo and GR!O, totally inert like the crickets they had so remorselessly assaulted. In moments the velour bodybags were sealed and whisked away through the skylight.

"They crashed my party," Bermuda said, "and I invited them! Who do they think they are?"

"Elves, like us."

Repressing a shudder at the bodies lain about, the tall one said, "Instead of the crickets they really are, yes." Enmity between elves and crickets was no secret, the former despising all false forms, holding them to be blasphemous and venal; the Church of ELF -Eurhythmic Love Forever- loved to dance, but hated posers.

"The worst case of elf-loathing," said the second, "we've ever seen."

"The worst my chalet has ever seen," Bermuda said. One look at the carnage confirmed that her reputation would be a long time recovering. They might be artificial corpses, but recycling them was going to cost a fortune, and the friends and relatives who sent them so confident of their safety would forgive her only once she had been made equally to suffer such a dire loss of face.

Me-Yo and GR!O owed her big this time. If she had anything left after this, Bermuda would spare no expense tracking them down, wherever the real ones might be keeping themselves, and bill them for every last broken item -including her heart.

Alimentary Fragment

Gastronomy: astronomy with a capital G. Related to God. The divine science. The depth of hunger but the height of taste. If there is one link twining through human history it is the stomach, the shape of which resembles a fetus at its embarking point. Go so far as to say we proceed from the belly. Gastronomy asks the pertinent question: What are the components of a wise stomach? Heraclitus: "It is divine, the seat of reason, made not of beer." Thus every gastronaut is confronted by this multifaceted but mysterious repository. If not beer, then plastic or waxpaper? Surely not flesh. Phenomenological study bears out the latter and describes an aura of interior emission that eludes all scholarship; Borborygmus, thus called by St Webster, is in man but not of him. Flesh may only produce flesh, therefore the stomach, producing such inhuman product, cannot be human and cannot either be made of human substance. What, then? The question haunts history, more than a noise, a disease of silence.

Minute for What (conclusion)

Sally waited in the car, his angel, and soon, if things went as expected, his executioner.

For five minutes they drove without speaking. Water splashed under the wheels. It was half past one and she took Princes Street, beyond it glowering in yellow light Edinburgh Castle.

"How did he get it, that kid? Pop gave me that gun when I went into the service, the only thing I had to remember him by, and now it's locked up as evidence. Wonderful."

"Sally, I know how you must feel..."

"Forget it," she said, turning the car. The rear wheel bumped over the curb and they were both jostled in the cab until it righted. "Don't mind me, Rob, it was a long day. I'm just glad you're okay."

"I'm fine."

She had stopped off at the bank after leaving her office that afternoon, to confirm that the deposit went through. It made her late, she explained, or else she would have caught him before he left the house for groceries.

"What deposit?"

"The one we talked about this morning." She steered down the narrow lane. "During breakfast?"

"Guess I forgot," he said lamely.

Sally parked and was getting out when she stopped. "It just hit me," she said. "We still need the groceries. The cops didn't recover them, did they?"

"No," he said. "I can do it tomorrow."

"Right. Nothing's open, anyway."

The house was quiet without Dylan's hat and beard to decorate it. Rob was unexpectedly wistful. A different ghost inhabited the place now and he would have to come to terms with it.

From the bathroom, as she got ready for bed, Sally said, "Bad habits will be the end of you, Rob. You had to get thrown in Saughton like you used to, and for what, to help a kid down on his luck."

He sat on the bed in his boxers. "This was different..."

"I thought Luna changed all that."

"It did."

"You forgot?" She slipped under the covers and stroked his back, compassionate laughter lightening her voice. "It's not the end of the world, you'll get back on your feet. For now you count on me, your doting bride."

He joined her and held Sally against him. "My beautiful bride."

She was quickly asleep but he lay with head heavy on the pillow. Everyone, even his wife, believed the lie of what had happened tonight. Only a total stranger who had sacrificed his freedom knew the truth. It was the kid's choice, wasn't it? Rob just had to get over it. Life was good when people believed the best about you, true or not.

He woke later from a strange dream and shook Sally awake and told her everything.

Minute for What (continued)

The boy repeated what he said at the pub, that he was trying to help, shadows from the cell striping his dredlock mane. So much like Rob at that age. Philosophy of invulnerable youth took many shapes but amounted to the same kind of cage within which to stew: nobody could unlock that door but yourself. Rob entered his at a tender age, marked in memory by an excursion with his mother that would have lasting effect.

They had been shopping. He was no more than a child, and his LOBE -children of families that could afford it were routinely implanted with a Low Oscillation Bandwidth Emitter by the age of five- was tuned to the store's piped music as he followed Mom down through several departments, from clothing to handbags to jewelry. He happened to look up and caught sight of her pocketing a pair of earrings. Whatever question he had wished to ask died in his throat. To this day he could remember the Bob Dylan song playing in his ear, Simple Twist of Fate.

After his mother passed, Rob became conscious of society's ills and entered the priesthood, immediately upon ordination taking to the streets to agitate for the poor. Arrested more times than he could count, Rob was finally exiled by the parish to Luna, where he discovered the key out of his cage. It coincided with the arrival of a ghost.

Of anyone to haunt his waking, he would have expected his mother. His faith taught him of the membrane wrapping life in one of multifold divine aspects. Ghosts were not standard operating procedure, as it were, but they weren't cause for alarm. It was an apparition of the singer that invaded Rob's waking life, manifested out of the air without invitation and popping up at odd times since that dark hour on the moon first ushered him in.

He could see it now, the rumor of hat and beard behind the boy in the cell. I'll keep an eye on him, it intoned with a voice only Rob could hear.

One less thing to worry about, he thought.

On the way out, he asked the agent, "Ever heard of Dylan?"

"Dylan Thomas?"

"It's a singer from a long time ago," Rob said. "My ma really liked him."

The rain had stopped. Cold night air outside sharpened his senses with smells of fresh earth and oils pooled at the roadside. There under a streetlamp waited his wife.

TO BE CONCLUDED

Minute for What (continued)

"What," Rob said, "did I do, precisely?"

"Taking the gun from him?" The agent laughed. "You must have known we would find it."

"I didn't think we'd be caught."

"No deed unpunished, that's the law of the land, Father. I'd think you know that by now, in your line of work."

"I forget." Too much lately, he thought.

"I'll wrap up your file," she said, adding notes to his file with a ballpoint pen. Ink and paper were apparently the best available means of record-keeping at Saughton. Rob would have thought that improved relations would grant civil services an upgrade in basic, digital necessities, yet even at St Greg's they had to scrape by with the old forms.

"Did you know your mother would visit, in the old days when you were getting arrested it seemed like every other day? Rest her soul," said the agent, "she would bring us casserole, to thank us for treating her son so well."

He had other things on his mind. "Can I see the boy?"

Finished with paperwork, she added his file to a shelf stacked with them. "On your way out, why not. Another soul to save, right?"

"Something like that."

TO BE CONTINUED