Partner

None fare well in the Queue who queue alone. One must have a partner, to hold one’s place if one steps out for a moment, and you will do the same for them, allies in the Great Wait. And when you grow old and infirm in the Queue, to support each other, and if it comes to it, drop out of the Queue a while for their sake, supporting them even if you must lose a hundred places, or a thousand.

For greater love hath no man than this, that he lose his place in the Queue for a friend.

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Chain

I was in a taxi the other day, and the driver told me that he had had that David Attenborough in his car last week, who told him of a book in which Marco Polo recounted a story he had from an old Chinese nobleman, whose grandfather told him he had once known a sailor who had journeyed to the Western edge of the world, to the Land of Anger, or as they call it, Ire-Land, where he had seen the grave of St. Elvis who, the monks told him, would return at the hour of the world's greatest need.

So it must be true.

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Image: The church of St. Ailbe of Emly.

Rain

God, what was I supposed to do with the giant lizards? No way would they fit on board. And about the unicorns, sorry, but after forty days and forty nights we’d run out of food. Tasted of horse, if you want to know. You ask me, we’re better off without. Wicked temper and a big dagger on their heads.

If you want them, why don’t you just make some more? You can’t, can you? Well, well, how are the mighty fallen. Created all of this in six days and now you can’t do any more than piss on us all.

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Image credit: Phabolais, a build by Squonk Levenque in Second life, June 2016.

27%

After global warming, the oxygen crisis. We learned in school that the atmosphere’s 21% oxygen, right? Twenty years ago it was. It’s 22 now. So old folks get to breathe a little easier, nothing wrong with that? At 24%, you can’t fight city fires. At 26, you see long-term health damage: blindness, strokes.

No-one knows why it’s happening. Humanity’s grown so big, everything we do bumps up against something, like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, but we still know almost nothing about how the world works.

At 27%, it’s the end. All the vegetation will burn until it’s gone.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, including the imaginary science.
Any resemblance to actual facts is coincidental.

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Image credit: Cameron Strandberg, 2009

Adult

I love adult entertainment. Intellectual conversation over a dinner of impeccable good taste, with incidental music from a baroque chamber ensemble. Philosophical lectures delivered to enquiring minds. Performances of the latest improvised conceptions of an up and coming young pianist. A private opening at an art gallery, for a select group of connoisseurs. A stroll through one of the great museums of the world, accompanied by a fellow expert on some singular piece of history.

But judging by the garish flashing neon sign, and the ladies standing alluringly within the red-lit doorway, I don’t think that’s what this establishment offers.

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This piece also appeared in Crap Mariner's 100 Word Challenge, January 2019.

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Concert for flute with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci

Adolph von Menzel  (1815–1905)

Source: Wikipedia

Social Media

If on a hot summer evening in Japan, you lean out of the window of your stifling apartment, often you will hear a whistle-humming like that of high-voltage electricity pylons. But it is actually millions of insects, all calling to each other.

And if on that hot summer evening in Japan, you lean out and hear only the distant silence of the city, and you jingle a bunch of keys, the insects will call back to the ultrasonic rustle, and then call back to each other, and they will keep going all night, calling to each other because they are calling to each other.

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May 1998. A street in the old merchants' quarter, Nara.

A fragment

On a Sunday, by the sea
My last girlfriend said to me...

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