#50

narrow, your world. right like a dowager, pincer-pauper. comprehensible. Father-bother on his paedestal w jawing-tacks. always, 2+2 four. normativity. "Yes, place a note in feet and sight me." St. Eulalia of the lingua franca. sunny time in texts while mother's sleeping. always history. where the duece to go? couvade in cufflinks, leary-eyed. bare it, a scriven water-wolf. buggered if I know. errs, the flabby he-haws thin as fingers.

or live, like ringman do, on hills. tempterary stuttering. the Gospel stand. And speechify the tract of toilets. contraire. no Form can taint but Twos. then takes the heart on grace. these bane of little boys. Confess, Propend. handsome hold, that pose. remember.

#49

All that immortal tendering, where one stands as if on file. Footmen with books that line stairwells. "Or a game of ball" - and that's my brother. The orange cone a conscripted pedastle for the popular theories mentioned. It's the rainy season, only no longer, and the worms are buried deep in their craven crawlways. People ring, letters are delivered. The scent of last year's picnics scattered with the leaves. Everyone has a bone to pick, and best choose carefully.

I spend my evening times laundering the paperwork. Reassembling, in cardboard boxes, the collations of my temper. You would say, and then listen, how the coming and goings of accidents congregate in parlours. And the white kitchen table, obscured and protected by the piles of answers to be had. It's sad, numbering meetings this way. When the sky is dreary, and the hearth bright but distant like a sailor's flare. "Or a football," shouts my brother from the door. And the pack, like those of hunters, gathered in the yard. He is, like the rain, my example.

#48 (Subscription)

She did not suspect the author of her misfortune was Maurice. But she knew, from the heavy sun of an august September, that someone had planned to the minutest particular an accident involving her virtue. She was, in the parlance of the times, fearfully riding the hatch. Each page of correspondence she penned was vexed by the same terrible fear, that the effects of her former labor would have her as their victim.

It was a reasonable worry, for which the gradual change in temperature and the modish stylings of a new wardrobe offered little distraction. What she needed, now most of all during the season's regular influx of teachers and students, was some spiritual confirmation, a link-boy sent by the muses to illuminate the path before her. She ate and drank without notice of nutrition, read for a change what pleased her, and sat up at night singing tunes her mother had been taught by her mother, and so forth.

By what route she finally reached her decision, I cannot say nor hazard an hypothesis. Everything depends on the progression's exact obscurity, like the random but ever-precise skipping of a phonograph needle across the grooves of the disc beneath it. Her heart had been from the first committed to resistance; and the rhythm, bereft of formula, by which it eventually persisted can be but partly understood as the despearte measure needed to once and for all escape her pursuers. She was, it can be said for certain, a young woman of twenty-seven, slender figured, with eyes of the utmost passivity. Her final letter was no less than the length of a library.