Eviction
The noise was deafening from the machines, and the towers whipped, and fell.
Specks of dust choked us, also making our vision dull and unclear. Fear has made us thirsty and so we all take a drink. A thunderstorm occurred and lightning flashed, lighting up the miserable, terrifying scene. Rain laid the dust and we could see more clearly now. What has happened, what will we do, where will we go? Where are the tall gracious towers that once stood? Now there is just sky, and dead embers of what was once life, and that we all shared with so many others.
Sick at heart, we moved away, down the avenue through the arch. We have lost so much, our young lay dead or dying, they cry for help, but there is nothing we can do. It breaks our hearts as we can hear them begging us for help, and mercy.
We journey on, heading for the sundown that is bright and golden. Parasols of colour are arranged in spectacular fashion. We enter, but we are not made welcome by those already here. They spit upon us and chase us away.
Night is quickly approaching, we need food and shelter so we can sleep. We find a stable that is occupied by others, but they allow us to rest here. There is food and we can all eat, we settle for the night. Some of us have nightmares about yesterday and how quickly things changed. Sleeping and waking as alien noises disturb us. The scuttlings of new bodies, some of which are our enemies and could kill us easily, as we are vulnerable here in this place.
The stars become faint as the grey streaks of morning break across the fading night sky.
A shaft of light as the sun has risen. It’s a new day with new adventures, new worries, but we will face it together. Today we will eat our fill, and then go looking for a new place to live.
We travelled far, and then saw the snow-covered mountains. A group decision, we headed for these unknown regions. Here is where great people live, monarchs of all descriptions. We will have to be careful, as in the twinkling of an eye it could be all over for us.
We could become the food for this colossus. We have no choice but to set up home here. Maybe they will accept us and give us no trouble. Perhaps we Ravens will be happy here, as there won’t be the horror of our trees being felled by man. Men do climb mountains and there are trees here. If we change ourselves and build nests in the holes and crannies of these stone towers we might not be evicted again, and our young will be quite safe. We just need to watch out for the eagles and hawks and stand guard at all times.
Josie Smith
SPECTACLE
How they glinted! How they glittered! The bird was fascinated, tilting his head in a succession of jerks to follow the movements of the humans who were wearing them – and the humans, too, were tilting their heads this way and that, which made the pieces of glass glitter and glint all the more. It wasn’t light from the sky that made them flash and sparkle – clouds had gathered, it had grown dark, and now it was beginning to rain.
The rain, the bird had discovered, turned out to be a great help in accomplishing the task he had been trained to perform. Trained? Does that suggest force, pressure, punishment? Chair, revolver, whip? Hardly! He loved shiny things, would collect them on his own account. His training had consisted in being encouraged to do so, in being shown exactly what kind of shiny things he should collect, and, once he had collected them, where he should bring them, in order to be given a reward, which was partly food (who rejects food, after all?) and partly, later, more shiny things – different, brighter, smaller, easier to deal with and transport…
The bird watched the drops of rain gathering on the pieces of glass, each drop holding its own little fragment of light. The people began shaking their heads, to dislodge the drops from the glass – but they failed, and so they began to remove the pieces of glass from in front of their eyes, and immediately looked puzzled, and began staring around them, as if they did not know where they were.
This was the moment that the bird had been waiting for. If he had tried to grab the pieces of glass in his beak, they would have slipped and fallen and probably smashed. But when the people moved them away from in front of their eyes it was clear that they were held firmly in some pieces of wire which had gone over their ears, thin, easily grasped, as if they were twigs needed to build a nest. How simple it was for the bird to swoop, grab one of these pairs of glass ovals by the bridge between them or a projecting end and fly off with it, up to the nearby tree, and drop it into the nest that was there! It was not the bird’s own nest, he had not built it, but he had been shown it, and there was food there, little bits of food, for every pair of glass ovals he claimed a piece of food and flew off to get another pair.
It took him hardly any time at all before the people had all been stripped of their glass ovals and stood looking around in the rain, blinking sadly. Now they were of no more concern to the bird, any more than he was to them. They had been so absorbed in what they had been looking at before the rain came down and blinded them that they had hardly been aware of what was happening. They probably thought it was the wind that had snatched away their magic glasses, and if any of them had glimpsed the bird at all they had certainly not managed to follow his flight while their eyes were still searching vainly for the visions that had so enchanted them. The bird, for his part, knew that after he had put all the pairs of ovals into the nest a food hopper would open up beside it, where he could perch in concealment and gorge himself. His trainer never stinted on rewards. Sheltered by thick foliage from the rain, which was slackening anyway, he continued filling his crop.
The predictably regular daily thunderstorm had come to an end. The rumbling clouds had passed over. The sun had come out and the pavements were steaming. But the small crowd of people who had sought temporary shelter under the entrance awning of the subway station after their magic glasses had been stolen showed no signs of dispersing. Their high-pitched voices grated against one another as they discussed in an unceasing gabble exactly what they had been able to see through their glinting, glittering lenses. Clearly not the high-rise functional concrete world that surrounded them. Some spoke of carved wooden Chinese temples, with distant moon-gates and shimmering ponds. Others raised their heads and tilted them back as they described slender, needle-sharp minarets. A third group closed their eyes again as they tried to summon up unnaturally pointed, snow-topped mountains, and an almost mystical path that wound between them.
What startled them out of their corporate reverie was the appearance of a small, shabby man with a tray in front of him that hung around his neck. The crowd rushed up to him and began scrabbling in the tray – but their excitement turned to noisy dissatisfaction as they held up the glasses frames they had just grabbed and saw that they lacked lenses. They threw them back down into the tray with loud expressions of disappointment.
The small, shabby man merely shrugged his shoulders, and moved to his left, which put him in a corner beside the subway entrance that was just out of view of the surveillance camera mounted on the awning, which could be clearly seen endlessly repeating its dutiful but limited gyration. He flipped a lid over the rejected, glassless spectacle-frames, and set up on it a conical flask containing a dark blue liquid and three rows of plastic vials with stoppers attached, large, medium and small.
The members of the crowd reacted according to their means, though they all looked over their shoulders to make sure they were unobserved before doing so. The best-dressed already had wads of notes in their hands before they stepped up to the tray. Some of them went away with three large vials. The more respectable and more cautious confined themselves to a single medium vial, and even tried a little bit of haggling, but without any success. The small, shabby man simply shook his head without malice, as you would if you were telling someone that the sun had just gone down: there was nothing that could be done about it.
The last of the crowd, who took longest to go up to him, was a woman in clean but threadbare clothes who was going through all her pockets to find any money she could. Finally, she stood before him, with all her loose change spread in her cupped hands. The man looked at it and counted, his lips moving. When he had come to a sum, he shook his head slowly and regretfully. The woman’s head fell, but before she could turn away he put one hand on her wrists while he looked around to see if anyone was watching. Then he quickly filled one of the smallest vials from the flask, stoppered it and put it into her cupped hands, on top of the money. Then he closed her hands over all of it, slid the flask and the empty vials back into the haversack at his side, and swung the tray round so it hung at his side.
The woman, unable to believe her good fortune and the generosity that had been shown her, walked slowly away.
When she was out of sight, the man went to the tree in which the bird was perched. He loosened a cord, and what might have been a nest, with a small lidded box attached to its side, slid down the trunk. Keeping a look-out for interruptions, the man thrust the contents of the nest into his haversack, then opened the box, took a small paper-bag and poured what it contained into the box, whose lid he closed. Finally he scattered the crumbs at the bottom of the bag into the nest, returned the empty bag to his haversack and pulled the cord so that the whole assemblage disappeared back up the tree.
After yet another glance around, to make sure he still remained unobserved, he gave a whistle and turned away. The bird darted down, out of the tree, and perched on the man’s shoulder, just before he entered the subway… but where he went, and if it was into any of those worlds that people saw in their brief free sample of excitement before the daily thunderstorm came – who can say?
Mike Rogers
No comments:
Post a Comment