Desk-top Animals| bedtime
two forms emerged from the depths of the wastepaper-dunes.
Little swallow, little swallow, why have you come?
Mother-bird ruffled her ink-feathers, and her chicks slid down from the bookcase and splashed onto the wood with small happy hops. She turned her head, slightly inquisitive. She puffed her chest a little, so that all her feathers expanded on the white page in blotches of oxford navy and glossy onyx.
I see. Why, the winter must’ve been especially cold?
Her chicks left little splotched footprints in their anxious search for their mother. Rather slippery, and very clingy: they left their dark down all over my fingers. Until finally, after a little shepherding from the nib of my pen, they settled down on the page beside their sleeping guardian, dissolving into puddles of inky bliss.
But hush, what is that at the edge of the table?
A clamour in the distance, and two forms emerged from the depths of the wastepaper-dunes. Lions: two brothers and their pride. I kept my hands dead-still, and made sure not to cast any wind onto this great savannah. I held in my breath; anticipating, moved, utterly bewildered and unreasonably curious.
Turtleneck(for his mane was rather…woollen) found a spot beside the inkwell, and stooped to take a long draft of ink. The dark stuff stained his mane blue, and made him seem just a little bigger than usual. Custard, his smaller kin, pattered up along with the rest of the pride. There, they stooped at the edges of that great navy expanse, till all was satisfied. Soon, the pride was at rest in the sun: their tissue bodies melting into the savannah backdrop. What camouflage! Turtleneck sat on his side, head drooping a little from his drink: a valiant, vigilant and (somewhat) sleepy overseer.
I lowered the lamp a little, and their sun shone a little brighter. Woosh woosh goes the wind: a warm, long gust that cast ripples all along the edges of the ink-lake. But where had Turtleneck gone? Where is custard? All that is left are the surreal figures of stained paper, dried in the desert wind. Lonesome did they seem: frozen along the expanses of a vast wasteland.
But no, not a wasteland. This was an ocean. Magnificent whales swam between those dark pillars, their rubbery bodies stiff and marked with lines and lines of stories erased. Ancient beings, who saw words disappear beneath their magnificent bellies. All along, the place was silent: not a single note echoed through those waters. For it is here that no surface-wave ever touched, no sunlight ever reached and no eye ever saw. The whales stopped to a distance rumble.
Then came the tumult which ripped the pillars from their foundations, which frothed the ocean so that the water was a mass of bubbles and cascading colours. Navy blue and black and red, all falling apart and together and apart and together The whales! Their great fins and tail were stiff from all the words they erased, but there they were: resisting the tidal strains with their heavy bodies. Up, up up they flew! The sky shook, and everything came to a halt again.
I drew another, deeper breath. The startled deer felt their meadow lifted: their trees and their flowers dusted away into the distance.
I stapled the documents: my work was done. Somewhere outside, the sun put the moon to bed. I flicked off the lamp. Somewhere below, the sky darkened into night.
