Skip to main content

Quadrangle #2

Side 2

I wake at 6am
Waiting for the engines of healing to begin.

Engines are on at 6:30am
Short men in dirty overalls struggle with them in caverns of polished steel

Meals are at 7am, 11:30 am and 4:30pm

At 7am the engines are running at full speed
Cylinders the size of buses reciprocate obscenely. The short men are stressed. They watch dials, worry about grease steaming away.

Classes are at 7am, 11:30am 1:30pm and 3:30pm

Recreation time is 11am to 11:30am.
Walking the quadrangle is tough on the nerves. Who knows what side 4 will contain this time?

Ward meetings could be anytime. Advanced hypnotic techniques are used. A soothing yet authoritative voice. Spiralling patterns like spinning seashells on he TV. We are told of possible engine malfunctions in the near future.

Meds are at 7:30pm
For some of us the time when sunlight though a dirty window resolves into images of the short men, filled with joy and wisdom. At 7:35pm the light is sour yellow, illuminating dust.

The cold lights come on at sunset, sucking away at the dark as though it were a rotten tooth.

I sleep at 10pm
The engines stop with a grinding noise as loud as mountains crashing. The short men relax as the brass cylinders slow to a halt

I lie in bed, bereft at the loss of the engines of healing.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Depression

your thoughts – clemmed, treacle slow, laden with seams of pit shaft dark – tread an endless groove, blinkered as a pit prop pony moithered by light your mind – dimmed, dunnock shy, cradled with songs of wind swept moors – dreams a fearless path clinkered as a wind squall diamond mantled with night your self – numbed, fossil still, layered with seals of sun starved gold – furls a nubless cloth crinkled as a sun coaxed rock rose ambered in time. by Helen Overell
6 comments
Read more

Ley Lines #1

The concept of "ley lines" is generally thought of in relation to Alfred Watkins, but the stimulus and background for the concept is attributed to the English astronomer Norman Lockyer . [3] [4] [5] On 30 June 1921, Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire , and went riding a horse near some hills in the vicinity of Bredwardine , when he noted that many of the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line. [6] He was studying a map when he noticed places in alignment. "The whole thing came to me in a flash", he later told his son. [7] It has been suggested that Watkin's experience stemmed from faint memories of an account in September 1870 by William Henry Black given to the British Archaeological Association in Hereford titled Boundaries and Landmarks , in which he speculated that "Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe". [8] Watkins believed that, in ancie
Post a Comment
Read more

Extinct Promotion

My story "Connect" was published last year in the anthology "Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever," edited by the formidable Phoenix Sullivan. On Tuesday, January 31, you can download the entire anthology Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever free from the Kindle store.  On both Tuesday and Wednesday, you can download each of the 18 single stories for free, including my story, Connect . By any reasonable measure we are dead. Unity -- slow, cold and broken -- is leaving me behind. It’s a slowly boiling mass of speckled gray now. I’m walking away from it, building, understanding, memorizing as I go. And to do these things, to tie them together, I use my memories. Of being alive, of dying, of being dead. Other authors in the anthology are participating in this promotion: Chrystalla Thoma: "The Angel Genome"  Peter Dudley: "Distractions" Shona Snowden: "Blood Fruit"  Scott Thomas Smith: "In Ring" Jo Antareau: "My Own
Post a Comment
Read more