Weirdtongue (28)

The Weirdmonger perched on his wooden seat, gently touching the pulling-power for his medicine wagon with the end of his whip, as if the heat made them both lazy. The first time anyone had even considered what motivated his wagon and, equally, the first time we’ve been granted a glimpse of the scrawniest steed that could possibly exist and still be able to pull a wagon or absorb words enough to give any expression of its appearance in the shape of a living creature, as if all its meat had been given away to the poor and any spare words squirrelled away for describing it now surrendered to worthier narrative causes. It snorted as each weirdmonger-wheel toppled clumsily – with timbered creaks – from hillock to hillock in the dry hustling sounds of the insidiously hot sunless winds.

The continental shifts of history reterritorialised his route across the European seas, turning them into a burnt land-mass, one that had succumbed to the global wars of warming - thus providing a logistical ability to transport by wagon his wares of rudery from Wagger Market on the outskirts of far-off Glistenberry in Summerset towards the Middle European zones of heretofore ... all carpeted by a beige desert reflecting the tender twilit skies, skies that gave off an intense heat in contrast to the intrinisc cool look of pinkness that filled the air between the arch of their horizons. Yet this was not so. Words enough to maintain the fraud are not available. But humour him. Let him wander in his imagination in natural default. Sometimes not having the right words (or any words at all) makes things seem more real.

He saw a distant disturbed duststorm churning into a section of greyed-out pinkness. He spotted the blotchy ink of rorschach shapes within its moving weather-systems, betokening a racing stampede of cattle, a situation that often faced Rowdy Yates and Gil Favor in the once popular and prime-time black and white ‘Rawhide’.

“Get those dogies moving!”

The Weirdmonger laughed at his own sudden outburst of song. Then upon another horizon he discerned an indeterminate vehicle – even less focussed than his own medicine wagon – carrying what he imagined to be Gregory and Suzie towards Krakow. But why Suzie? She was not expected at the Clinic. She would likely not be allowed to enter it. Maybe her mother – with different narrative motives – had insisted that she should accompany Gregory, although Gregory’s mother (or even Gregory himself) had bigger motives since any motives concerning money were always big motives. In fact, Gregory and Suzie had both sensibly agreed that she would not accompany him. But against all the odds – buttressed by love – they had set off together, tears streaking their faces, intent on saying farewell, as if she had boarded a train to kiss the departing loved one as he set off on his journey but staying on the train when the whistle went for the train’s own departure. Or in denial that the train would ever leave.

Their eyes weltered as the couple crossed the arduous deserts of the Weirdmonger’s imagination. They kissed each other and pined. They were now fast coming to the conclusion (in their heart of hearts) that it was too late for Suzie to disembark separately from upon whatever they had both earlier embarked. Yet they knew (in an even deeper heart) that she must disembark.

The Weirdmonger returned to consideration of the weather-systems of his newly word-populated plains of continental shift. There were many freedom-fighters in the war - a war that had beset and would continue to beset this region - some of them still alive in fact, others simply alive in history books, a few even yet to be born but already decked out in their legendary paraphernalia at the point of impending birth. Most were called after weather-systems, as if such names were imbued with more than just humanity. It was that a single dust mote in a duststorm could be a hero. A telling maxim worthy of any cause. It was also that natural motion and alternating visibility / invisibility and elementary permeability and drenched dews and muggy evenings and the ballooning-air that came at unseen, unfelt moments of the night and conscious dusks that knew it was dusk or called dusk by others and mellow mists and drained skies and red-tinged dawns and yellowish hazes and purply twilights and the hidden monsters of fogs and many more such ambient textures of vexed climates came to personify (even anthropomorphise) those who had ambition to be freedom fighters and heroes. Those who felt steeped in destiny were rocked by its tides into a gentle waking to the cause.

The Weirdmonger sniffed. He farted. He had bad wind.

CONTINUED: HERE.

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