The Apocryfan (23)

As Smee dragged the early broken morning to his dinghy via the edge where the sea’s edge used to be, he spotted Adrian coming towards him from the promenade, complete with sensible sou’wester and water-resistant galoshes. Upon arrival, the newcomer, wordless in face of wordlessness, stooped to help pull the dinghy further towards where the sea used to be. Pulled and dragged across the many runnels and sand-ribs that final sad tides as sculptors of geography had left. Through more significant puddles that would have been too shallow for any self-respecting lavatory-bowl or soup tureen. Ever-pulling. Ever-dragging. Between the humps as well as across them in desperate search for at least a smidgen of sea to fish. Until the two men and the dinghy reached the site of the twin totems – now flattened mud-flats, at least shaped like sea, if not constituted of it.

Both men, in dour mood, returned their gazes towards the coast whence they’d pulled and dragged the dinghy … and they forthwith traced Bonnyville’s skyline with careless pencils of memory. There the spinnakered ‘Augusthog’ – a new artistic challenge as if from Mr Socrates’ ancient art class in Bonnyville’s late lamented schoolhouse – became a mighty bloated blood-vessel sailing with ease across the land toward them. Frictionless as fiction. A vision of a painting. A motion-filled painting of an aviational ‘porco rosso’ turned marine with the ease if not slowness of Darwinian evolution: scaled beyond the scale of even the wildest artistic imagination. Reality made art, art made reality, in a symbiosis or synergy of both.

PART III - The Apotheosis Of The Augusthog

Charlie Bubbles stared through the studio cockpit of the makeshift radio station installed upon the cruise paddle-steamer 'Glittenburier'. As a record spun to a close, he leant towards the microphone...

"Hiya, Gals and Guys, things are remarkably rock steady on the North Sea today. Just looking at my Bulova Watch, I see it is indeed time here on Radio Teacutter to give you the weather forecast for your neck of the woods..."

His mock drawl came to a sudden halt. Across the brown-sludge bay he spotted approaching the imposing sight of a huge grounded air-ship, pink cannons spiking the portholes like they meant business.

CONTINUED: HERE.

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