A Coward Reflects

Ossian Bone gazed at the map. His eyes, drawn to Africa, were having trouble ascertaining where in the great expanse she lay. Perhaps, for her, the borders no longer held any significance and it was just another shortcoming of his that meant he was constrained by, and obsessed with, the imposition of lines. Maybe it was out in landscapes that he couldn't conceive that she had found her place, found herself happy. He saw her in a shallow trench, kneeling, in desert boots, brushing at a fragment – skull? Pottery? Perhaps at night she would sit outside her tent gazing over the calm absence, the sun setting, the stars bolder in the absence of streetlights. Perhaps it would be there that her sadness would ebb away – its borders dissolve and the volume which had been contained within spill out, in a great wave and seep into the ground, to percolate through the earth and into the sea. Why did he imagine that nameless grief to be a liquid?

Lines and borders continued to govern him. One drew him, daily, to work - its more literal iterations allowing the trains to roll onward, the others engendering him with a vague sensation that this had to be done. This work-line ran concurrent to the line of time, wavering – an analogue signal. Certainly, his life – his subjective interaction with time – was not a binary. It had not been switched on at birth, operated at the level of life until being switched off at death. It flirted with these extremes, at times finding him a little closer to death, before some unseen momentum dragged him higher. Why did he consider life to be the high and death the low? Was it some proximity to the ground? Maybe in these low moments it was because he felt closer to the surface of, or perhaps deeper within the liquid grief. He imagined it to be a pool into which one strode slowly, acclimatising all the time until one day knowing what it was to be submerged.

He remembered the night on which she had walked into the sea. Ophelia, gowns and all, wading into the frothing channel. It had been a night when their erratic, teenage lines had almost intersected, but, at the crucial moment had missed, knocked askance by something cruel, something human, something innately within him. She had come out again, but perhaps left something beneath the freezing water, for the pale moon to keep watch over. Either way, this visualisation required the conception of a third dimension, for the Ossian signal to no longer be a flat analogue, but to spiral around the constant of time – a drab dragon pursuing unknown quarry in the distance. The quarry, surely, was her signal: a beautiful, melancholy note, at a similar frequency, but just a little removed. A tonal way of thinking would suggest that together they would form a discord, so Ossian abandoned this thought, realising only later its relevance.

When she speaks again, over the phone-line, it becomes clear that the line to which he had fixed his hopes was not, in fact, strictly speaking hers at all. It was a crude copy of which he was the sole author. Sure, once, they were similar enough that when he looked upon her he saw sufficient of his own version, but gradually as she and Ossian had diverged, the copy he has held in place had become abstracted fantasy. Qualities were exaggerated, others diminished. His own relevance and meaning  relative to his construction heightened beyond belief until he lay at its core, cocooned in its innate need for him. 

It lives outside, away from him, yes, but it is only truly alive when in Ossian is in the presence of its inspiration, and even then the disparity has become clear to see. His copy is flat, borne of a desire for stasis. She has grown, known others. Laughed, drunk. Played tennis.

Other lines have come and gone, leering in from a rogue orbit to cross Ossian's path, just once. His model has reduced them to mere freak appearances. Comets to be observed at an emotional distance and he has been unwilling to lend them the gravity to keep them close, holding near to him instead, his ridiculous construction.

As she holds up the exhumed bone in an imagined wilderness, time bends back on itself and touches the points at which she and Ossian had converged. His model dissolves. He looks at a wall, blank but for a smudge here and there. He looks at a towel, he looks at a bag, he looks at his arms. He looks at his watch and what it means. It means a million things.

Duncan McAllister

At 11.24 a.m. Duncan McAllister, on his walk from his desk to the office toilet, ascended. His physical atoms dispersed and his essential consciousness manifested itself in a parallel existential plane as a faint aura. At 11.24 a.m. Duncan McAllister got up from his desk and walked to the office toilet, banging his shin on a box of copier paper. Once in the toilet he disintegrated – mentally; sinking to his knees, allowing his face to sag and exhaling in a wheeze. The metaphysics of this new realm meant that it did not register on the visual spectrum, inhabitants instead identifying one another by auras and parascents – anosmic smells calling to mind temporal and emotional fixed points, much like how freshly cut grass or the musty scent of a favoured toy, when returned to years later, can act as a gateway to a very specific moment in time and sentimental space. Close to the floor, the acrid stench of errant urine was stronger but mixed in places with cleaning fluids and other smells which it was harder for the ever lessening Duncan to place. The gusts under the door as oblivious workers bustled past created overwhelming olfactory fluctuations in the toilet’s microclimate which Duncan was entirely unable to process. The essence of Duncan McAllister discovered that it hadn’t the faintest knowledge of its own psychogeography and stumbled, figuratively, from one long lost emotion to the next.

Around 11.53 a.m., Duncan composed himself, brushed the dust and urine residue from his trouser knees. He looked at his reflection in this mirror, and then in the tap, and then formed a composite picture of himself from these two versions – neither of which seemed entirely familiar. Around 11.53 a.m. Duncan’s atoms reconstituted themselves, and his faltering consciousness was gently imprisoned back within them.

The 12.00 p.m. admin team meeting was typically unedifying.

STOCK PHOTOGRAPH - ABUSE AFTERMATH

‘You don’t look quite disconsolate enough.’ Muses the photographer, fag in mouth, rising from his crouched position and stretching out his back, scrunching his face as he does so.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Asks the woman on the bed in the bare room. She sits up straight and flexes her wrists. She aches from resting her elbows on her knees, arching her back and cradling her head in her hands.

He runs his hand through his hair, unconsciously prompting her to mirror and brush hers from her forehead.

‘I just think you need to look more…’ searching for a word, ‘bereft.’

The sun has rounded the wall of the adjacent building and filters through the blind to her left, his right. Now, the crisp spring light should juxtapose nicely with her affected despair. She intuits that this is the moment to try again, stretches and returns to her pose.

His gaze, via the lens, is a funhouse mirror image of what she is used to: desire is warped into pity which carries with it its own eroticism. The shutter clicks and she is incarcerated – ready to have the fantasies of the viewer, the writer, the editor layered over her, complicit in her own manifold abuse. Rather than a demonstration of power, this is its post-coital calm, it reclines, relaxes and admires. This is the tropical lagoon after the hurricane and she has become the island – still, essentially, the same shape but somehow irrevocably different.

And now a template, a byword, a symbol – a graphic replacement for understanding.

He packs up his equipment. She hops off the bed, stretches again and considers where to have coffee – she has to remain in town as later she is excitedly presenting a graph to the board, then relaxing in the park with a girlfriend and then teaching maths.