by Hughes, Rhys
“He’s dying but obsessed with studying his complexion in that looking glass. How vain can you get?”
The yeti stroked his Himalayan chin. “That’s incorrect. He’s checking to see if his breath makes mist on the reflective surface. A reliable way of knowing if he’s alive or not.”
“Now it’s sliding out of his fingers…”
There was a dull thud rather than a tinkling crash. This mirror wasn’t a glass model but a circle of polished obsidian. MeMeMeMeMe walked to the couch and kneeled next to the sick priest, feeling his wrist to take his pulse and clucking his tongue.
Now I had an opportunity to slip quietly away, but I dithered too long while I tried to work out why the doomed priest was familiar to me. Then he turned his dim gaze in my direction and wheezed a greeting. Abruptly I knew exactly who he was.
“The owner of the wig emporium!”
He displayed long black teeth, not rotten but stained with psychotropic juice from some divine plant.
“Yep, it’s me, right enough. Toupée Amaru is my name. Bet you want to know how I got here before you? The Underground Hiking Society are responsible for that, having mapped the entire network of tunnels that run under the gargantuan expanse of grotesque gardens. I was never in danger of getting lost. There’s a passage that directly connects my shop with this pyramid and it’s fairly easy to traverse, with none of the hazards of upper world travel, no dogs, walls or thorns. Truth is, I’ve always been an Aztec priest, the wigs are just a front for my real concerns, all of which involve the worship of Huehuecoyotl, god of mischief and trickery, a shapeshifter whose hobbies include creating strife between living mortals. I adore him and do bad stuff in his name.”
“That sounds lovely and constructive,” I lied.
“Let me declare,” he continued, “my hatred of non-sequiturs. I simply can’t stand them. I like things to directly follow from other things. Cause and effect. Logical progression’s the only responsible kind! That’s why I located my wig shop next to the non-sequitur store. Gave me a chance to sabotage the despicable business, to misdirect potential clients away from their portals, reduce the number of non-sequiturs in circulation. A bitter struggle for me, but I had a secret weapon. Wigs. What mightier tool can one imagine against the tyranny of randomness? So many meanings, so many separate branches of progression! For example, wig is an old word for ‘holy’. And the whigs were strong political fellows. Another meaning of WIG relates to aviation.”
“A round of applause for that!” I cried.
“No really, it does. Stands for Wing In Ground, which is a specialised effect that allows suitably designed vehicles to ride over a cushion of air between two short wings and the surface. Aircraft that utilise this system are still at the experimental stage but an influential cartel of engineers has invested faith and money in their ultimate success, not least because of the vastly increased fuel efficiency. So much for that! Every day I pray to Huehuecoyotl for fresh hairpiece-themed notions to thwart those pesky non-sequiturs! My existence has been directed to that single purpose, but I’m dying now and don’t have a successor. The other Aztecs who dwelled here emigrated to find jobs in catering, retail and surveying. They forsook the gods and abandoned me.”
“That’s all very nice but really we must be getting along now. We only popped up here for the view.”
“In that case I’m sorry for wasting…”
At this point the yeti interrupted. “Don’t listen to Mr Heckoid, he’s not really in a rush and neither am I. On the contrary, if we can aid you in any capacity before you expire, let us know. Having said that, I’m unclear on one detail. The name Toupée Amaru sounds more Inca to me than Aztec. You’re not a fake, are you?”
“I’ll check. One moment. No, I’m not.”
“Good. That’s settled then. My offer’s sincere and stands for as long as breath remains in your body.”
“As a matter of fact,” gasped Toupée Amaru, “there is one small thing you can do. I need an heir.”
“Well you’re a major wig merchant…”
“I didn’t say hair, I said ‘heir’. A successor. Will you become the next high priest of Huehuecoyotl for my sake? I can initiate you with just one word. The duties aren’t onerous, apart from the sacrificing. There’s lots of that, of course, which is further evidence that I am who I claim to be, for the Incas don’t sacrifice as many victims as the Aztecs do. It’s a question of quality versus quantity.”
The yeti shrugged. “Fair enough. I accept.”
“Thanks. Nice scalp you’ve got on you, by the way. Now I can die in peace, or if not in peace then at least in a slightly more bearable state of horrendous agony. Before I forget, here’s the word of initiation. Ready? I’ll say it only once. Pate.”
“Pâté?” echoed the yeti with a frown.
“No, that’s a kind of spread,” corrected the priest. “I said pate, which is another name for a bald head.”
“You ended up saying it twice,” I pointed out.
“Does that stop it being right?” he challenged.
“No, but it’s a feeble word!”
“But prudent,” he sniffed, “and prudence is wise.”
“Already know that, the yeti and me. MeMeMeMeMe U and I, I mean, to be grammatically correct.”
I was smugly pleased with that wordplay.
But Toupée Amaru was dead…
He went like a tortilla. Bubbled and blackened.
I was aghast at this development and had to linger in the most extreme trepidation to learn what the yeti would do now. Not a good place to wait, but I wasn’t there very long.
“Better sacrifice you, I suppose,” he sighed.
“Are you sure?” I gulped.
“Yes I am. Why, aren’t you? Come on!” And he snatched me up by the scruff and forced me down on the altar on my back, keeping me in place with one paw on my chest while he groped with the other for the obsidian knife resting on the floor nearby.
I was too compressed to protest. Up went the blade, flashing in the sun like a rotten cruel smile. I didn’t shut my eyes though I barked an internal order for them to do so immediately. My lids were probably too scared to obey my terror. Can’t blame them.
Down came the knife. Did blood spurt like a clotting salsa? No. I still don’t know what saved me from death, whether it was MeMeMeMeMe’s ignorance of correct Aztec sacrificial procedure or his natural dislike of butchery. Yetis are vegetarians.
At any rate, the tip of the knife penetrated my shirt but left untouched the skin below. Threads parted like model sinews. Then the yeti plunged his fist into my shredded top pocket and plucked out the artichoke heart secreted there the previous day.
It was still unbeating as he lifted it to the sun!
Because vegetables don’t beat!
Then he threw the pale green object onto a smouldering brazier next to the altar where it hissed and broiled like a nice supper. I wondered for an instant if he planned to establish a new dynasty of Vegetarian Aztecs that might one day conquer Spain, but I didn’t dare ask him. I pretended to be dead instead. He should have flung my body down the pyramid steps but he forgot that part of his job.
I remained unmoving and safe.
But what becomes of the broken shirted?
*
The sun sank into the suburban jungles of the west, staining the few intact greenhouses a crimson that clashed with the feral tomatoes that ballooned within. Even from this elevation there was no sign of a non-sequitur store anywhere in the panorama. But I could see a rusty communist tractor on its side with an oak growing out of it, and in the topmost branches of that tree a dozen frisbees were stuck. Lower down sagged a washing line once used to dry wine-soaked socks.
Everything was contriving to be relevant to what had occurred before. How pathetic! I even heard the yeti murmuring a Cassius Befuddle poem before he went to sleep on the couch. He could relax in comfort now, for the body of Toupée Amaru had gone. One hour after the priest died, owls unexpectedl
y descended to snag talons in his rotting flesh and carry him off. I watched them flap to the horizon and drop him over that imaginary line with a thud. What a hoot!
Is that where all dead people go? Are uncountable corpses piled up on the far side of the horizon? It would mean that when we stumble across a massacre it’s because we’re standing just beyond someone else’s horizon. I’d like to find that someone and teach them a lesson! Probably geography with some statistical analysis. But I’m not a real teacher and when the sun sets it must burn all the cadavers in its path. Very economical that, except on foggy days without horizons.
My captor was snoring loudly, but yetis have sensitive hearing and if I tried to sneak down the pyramid steps to freedom he would awake and reprimand me with another sacrifice, perhaps a more effective one. I had to find an alternative escape route. Somehow one of the stilts had become lodged under the yeti’s sleeping form and the far end of the pole extended into thin air over the edge of the pyramid. I licked my sore lips and came to a sudden reckless decision.
I ran as fast as I could along that narrow beam of wood and at the very end I jumped high, using the stilt like a springboard. There was a mighty twang! I heard the yeti wake up behind me, but I was already soaring into the sky. Stars high above, but no moon, just an oblong of black where the moon should be, a flying shadow. What did that mean? The yeti ordered me to come back. I shrugged my shoulders in response. Then I was above the shadow and falling onto it.
Now I was creamed in full moonlight and saw that I was about to land on a magic carpet piloted by a girl with bare thighs. Prudence Mooncup! That’s precisely the sort of coincidence I can’t bring myself to write letters of complaint to newspapers about. Ah well! She welcomed me with open arms despite her astonishment. Maybe her aerial rug utilised the Wing in Ground Effect to stay aloft. Didn’t know then and I still don’t. The science of aeronautics is over my head.
I emptied my pockets. She was dismissive of my potatoes, but hugely impressed with my parsnips and carrots. An affair was inevitable. Before we started canoodling there was a conversation to be had. So she asked me what I was looking for and I described my adventures with very few embellishments. She chuckled.
“You’ll never find the non-sequitur store in these gardens. It can’t exist inside any coherent narrative! No, it’s located out there, in the real world, in the cosmos of the reader, beyond the last paragraph of this story where what happens next certainly won’t follow what has taken place here! You looked in the wrong direction!”
I digested this by covering my fingers with regurgitated stomach acids and poking them into my ears.
Not really. I’d never do something like that.
I used my thumbs instead.
“You mean to tell me,” I gasped, “that when this story comes to an end the reader will probably do something that has absolutely no relevance to our fictional lives, that takes no account of the weird plot that has allowed us to reach this point? Does that somehow make the reader the proprietor of the non-sequitur store?”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. We’ll find out soon enough. That’s right, we’re nearly there!”
“I’ll see you on the other side, won’t I?”
She tilted her head and laughed. It was a wild laugh and didn’t fill me with confidence. At the same time she urged the carpet to greater speed, so that these sentences flashed by like an audible rant and I was knocked flat by the acceleration. Prudence and caution must be different keywords after all! And now I’m here.
Before I shoot off the edge of this paragraph, I achingly wonder what the reader will do when it’s all over. Go for a walk, brew coffee, dance? No way for me to know. But for you, there’s no way of not knowing. Out there, confined by the invisible and intangible walls of your non-sequitur store, you are logically condemned to know. By the way, are you going bald yet? Because if you are…
(2009)
Inside the Outline
She was an actress and she worked for the most highly respected shadow theatre in the city of Eclipseville.
Prudence Clearwater was her name and nobody in the history of that rather shady kind of drama has ever performed the classic tragedies with half the exuberance of her umbra.
It was the toast of the town, her shadow; a burned piece of toast to be sure, if you like foolish wordplay.
An artform respected in many cultures, shadow theatre has attained an outstanding elegance in a few of them. In Java and Burma, Morocco and Malta, we may easily discover this.
But in Eclipseville long ago it became much more than an amusement or an intense aesthetic indulgence. It evolved into a pseudo-religion with a fundamentally fanatical fanbase.
On one side the Literalists considered every performed gesture, every undulation, to be the unsullied truth. On the other, the Symbolists argued that nothing was quite what it seemed, that each play was a metaphor for something else, a hidden wisdom.
And Prudence was trapped in the middle.
But she remained undaunted by her predicament and continued to act with a verisimilitude so exact that even her portrayals of indifference and apathy were totally convincing.
Her shadow was clearly fated to be fêted.
The streets of Eclipseville are chock with gliding profiles and to stand out from the anonymous spludge of moving outlines, especially when one considers the unremitting flatness of shadows, is no mean feat, nor a kind one, but the professional silhouette of Prudence Clearwater managed on a daily basis to do precisely that.
Everybody recognised her shadow in public.
Even on cloudy days. Even when the diffusion of light made it faint or blurred into smokiness its edges.
For Prudence honed her abilities to the degree where she could convey one emotion with her umbra and a second emotion, perhaps even opposed to the first, with her penumbra.
She did this not only in the theatre but also while walking down streets in her own private hours, an act of generosity to her followers that had no precedence among shadow actors.
At this point, I deem it acceptable to point out that the word ‘spludge’ didn’t exist until the chief guardian of the city, Sacerdotal Bagge, lurking in his private box, coined it after an early memorable performance by her youthful outline. He desired a term to describe the shadows of her rivals, so smitten was he by her talent.
Neither Literalist nor Symbolist, the venerable Bagge was a synthesis of both, a Symbliterite, the only one in the world, with no notion of what he advocated or objected to.
Consequently he was much feared.
But not by Prudence…
She had entered the theatre after failing every exam at a school where her fellow pupils and even her teachers had consistently ignored her; and with a determination to be finally noticed by a world that seemed to want her to shrink to a singularity.
The theatre promised revenge and love.
But despite the fame that now surrounded her profile, she could never be truly happy in Eclipseville. The problem was that her corporeal form, her flesh and blood self, continued to be ignored. People were interested only in her shadow, not in her.
Nobody knew what her face looked like.
The actual woman might have been a shop window mannequin; or one of those huge clockwork puppets that distress the city of Chaud-Mellé, far from here, for all anyone cared.
They were interested only in her shadow.
Whenever she left her house to stroll in public places, her most ardent admirers soon clustered around her outline but they never looked directly at her, as if they regarded the source of the shadow as irrelevant. Roughly pushing past her to reach the side of the famed umbra, they acted as if her existence hadn’t been proven.
A state of affairs that finally became intolerable!
She had to remedy the situation…
The shadow theatres of Eclipseville are grander than those in realistic lands and each one resembles a giant seashell with a screen of pure silk stretched over its mout
h. Rows of seats face this smooth square and for the wealthy patrons there are a small number of wooden boxes balanced on poles thrust into the earth.
Carefully ground lenses and powerful lamps that are very reliable but cooler to the touch than glow-worms project the shadows of the actors. The variable clarity and size of an outline is used to convey astonishingly subtle degrees of sincerity, ambition, vivacity, charm and turpitude. Lute music accompanies the action.
The special language of shadow theatre in that city is complex indeed and books have been written on the subject so large and dense that coral atolls are frequently easier to store on a shelf, an exaggeration brought to you courtesy of Hyperbole Inc.
But Prudence had mastered every nuance.
She has never been bettered…
If you ever journey to Eclipseville for cultural purposes I’m afraid you will learn that to your cost. But it’s a low cost. The price of a single ticket for admission is just a few froats.
There was no such word as ‘froat’ until Sacerdotal Bagge misspelled the word groat. From such accidents neologisms are stillborn, smacked back into unnatural life by evil doctors, set free to wander the banter of simple filk, his misspelling of folk…
The most popular writers for the shadow theatre are still those ancient geniuses, Omar Sixual, Virgil Rydikolos, Nitrogen Parsley and Vibration Javelin, but more modern authors aren’t neglected. Cassius Befuddle and Jimjam Spreadwinkle have recently penned mighty epics that look likely to become classics of the future.
Sacerdotal Bagge unluckily also regards himself as a playwright and it won’t be long before he forces the performance of one of his works on the inhabitants of his metropolis…
But when Prudence was at the apotheosis of her popularity, an upstart by the name of Groopinfoorth Crikey was the most commonly performed author. Many young playwrights live in attics but Groopinfoorth dwelled, or rather pulsated, in a pantry.
His plays were half comedy, half tragedy, half impossible fraction, and his favourite subject matter concerned the tribulations of revivalists, those eccentric people in every epoch who work so hard to revive the styles of older epochs, including epochs containing people who want to revive the styles of even older epochs…
