Invention of Dying, The. Brooke Biaz
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Invention of Dying, The - Brooke Biaz страница 5

Название: Invention of Dying, The

Автор: Brooke Biaz

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Контркультура

Серия:

isbn: 9781602355415

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ along the thin winding road that links Haymon and Casemont and Toobay, until they come to rest in silvery sheds and a striped buntinged stall on the outskirts of Panapoon.

      “Mam,” the girl attempted again, apple of her cheeks now so brightly polished as to reflect the visitor.

      At that moment, as if somehow Apple ancestors were watching and chose to step in before tall, thin Penny (carved something like the stick on which a candied red delicious might sit; bleached of color and teetering there in full white mane) grew so indistinct that no one could tell her from a badly taken photograph of an opossum. At that moment, the clerk, who was no more knowledgeable then about Death than I was, no more accustomed to dying than a fence post is accustomed to the warmth and community of a kitchen, arrived.

      Voila!

      Sometimes you have to admire humanity for its sheer and abundant repetition of impossibility.

      Figure 3.

      6.

      For those with a keen interest, and wandering ways, the history of living and life on The Communions Islands runs roughly like this:

      Firstly, the islands themselves were founded in the Mycean period. By which I mean, when Communion rocks flowed over other Communion rocks in orange lit expedition, spewing from the funnel of a mountain which, mere minutes before, had been no more than a spray of something’s bright intention, and nothing remotely resembling life (as we and several other planets know it, at least) existed.

      This far back? Is that too far? Arguably (what does this word mean? The word is pure provocation!).

      Arguably (anyway), in essence, if not for the hollow that had been created then, along an emerging gorge (aflame still, as it was), so that where, later, water began to flow in rains that came—and for some decades would not stop, incidentally—if not for that gorge then no channel would have been formed. And if not for the channel then, as the coast shifted (as shifted it did; one minute a spit of sand in the shape of a knife, and the next minute a rocky escarpment resembling the future faces of our Founding Fathers) and redefined itself, then no hummock of rich earth would have formed. And, if not for that hummock of rich earth which, as hummocks go about their business, formed and extended itself and grew and extended itself further until what was a hummock became a coastal plain, if not for this then no alluvial tale could be told. Alluviality! Richness growing on richness. Hummock upon hummock. So that by the time the Mycean period had passed to the Ferotrophic and the Ferotrophic into the Anthrohalycon—or maybe this is my invention and this particular period is largely made up.

      But what the hoot! If the period fits enter it! So the first microbic flicker of our future had begun to appear, raising its microscopic head, flicking its microscopic tail, announcing its first Annual Communion Summer Fair maybe (Old Alyce Willeman’s Vanilla Sponge Surprise sure seems to come from this period. However, perhaps I digress!). By this time, thousands of years previous evolutionarily speaking, the basics were there. The rest we can skip over. Thus:

      Founding fathers, after whom future wings and wards and strolls would be named—the future Sir Alfred Compton Smythe, an “adventurer” (read: “mere boy, barely out of short pants”, soon to be “alcoholic”, sometime “swashbuckler”, frequent “insomniac”), often called merely Smythe, in light of his impersonal nature; Master (of cabinetmaking, something conferred by an ancient guild) Ernst Loobenthal (known, irresponsibly, as Looby, by the locally initiated, on account of his historically irreverent nature—this being a young man who later named his sorry children Pitt, Fitt and Fortune, to exemplify some innate understanding he had of his present and his future; a man who, indeed, followed his own pioneering footsteps by making a Fortune from the Pitts he Fitted into the surrounding hills, from which he (and latterly his underlings, miners, managers, train monkeys and, not to put too fine a point on it, slaves, extracted rare minerals and malekites: rutile, ancoroar, malisinite [used in the making of typewriter keys, the controls of cookers and, in later years, the triggers of certain pistols). And, finally, Walter Winifred Breezer Esq., on which more (or definitely not more) later.

      But enough! Distant relatives bear the substance of personal madness (I say this having no idea of what it means, but knowing exactly how it feels). Suffice it: Walt Breezer was our first town mayor, at eighteen years old he had been as bold and as firm as an iron bar—and my great great grandfather, so called. A young lively islander of infinite, unwieldy gall.

      Anyway, yes, young (men, mostly), Founding island boy Fathers. A remote settlement of high living juveniles, carefree islanders of mixed race and the like. An infant settlement, as many imperial settler communities are, of course. One hundred and fifty new souls stumbling in the rich alluvial soil of the Welsonians (the far mountain to the South: South Welson; the closest mountain: Middle Welson, the far mountain to the North . . . You get the mountainous drift!). This was a period of uncertainty which lasted, by all estimates, several lifetimes.

      Everyone, and I mean everyone here in those early days, lived life before they even knew it! Of course, there followed the great plague years which scarred but did not ultimately kill our population. You can see that on Water Street which runs (no pun intended) alongside the main beach and looks not unlike a puzzle, one (now worn) brick angularly placed against another, one line lined up against another, like a series of coded possibilities without a code, so that as you look along Water it does indeed appear as unfathomable as water, points where the lines of its bricks seem to flow fast together and other points where they seem tangled and stagnant, points of clear bright colour and other points of dark cold, and all with the intrusions of the remnant bleached posts of jetties from which the ill were transported in ships to countries way beyond the Communions, and never seen again.

      All this is recorded in the most well-known local history books The Communions Islands: the First 150 Years [1962], by T. K. Algebrine, Our Beloved Communions [1964], by the Rev. Horace C. Precious and, though often ignored, the long and complicated history entitled The Trouble with The Communion Islands [1973] by Walt W. Breezer. Yes, him) because it seemed that those who did not leave, who survived all things in their homes, their half-build shacks, their half-built fishing boats, survived, survived and, subsequently, survived some more. Alternatively, those who were taken away never came back. The ships returned empty. So it is from there, from those beginnings, where youth persisted, and from that The Communion Islands were made. We were a population still learning the alphabet of life. We had no place in it for Death.

      “An Island of Children!” disingenuous headlines from other, close-by islands declared.

      “Child’s Play on the Communion Islands” went others, which a hint of envy, I thought.

      “Paedi At Tricks!”

      But those envious declarations were beside the point because, once inaugurated as a nation, The Communion Islands entirely made its own way in life.

      Until, that is, the arrival of Death.

      You can see that early period in the island fishing families, young but with an ocean heritage of “near-Death” experiences (near-Death is a strange term, because they were nowhere near her at all, actually; but, so they assumed when one of their fishing boats sank or a black shark took a hunk from a tuna as they hauled it in); the youthful timber-getting families whose members fell under a falling cocoplum tree but rose again soon after, like saplings; the adolescent orchardists struck by lightning but only singed; the half-grown miners, dusty in search of precious stones, communities and opals and the like, and suddenly clasped by the earth in stones, only to have them crawl out from their collapsed tunnels into the sunlight.

      The Communion Islands were raw and СКАЧАТЬ