Wendell had almost fallen asleep at his desk. The crumpled up pieces of notebook paper were just beginning to look like white roses, the droning of the headmaster's voice just turning into the raucous cry of a swooping hawk, and the laughter of the classroom was the collective cry of the birds in the verdant meadow as they started to flee. The ruler electrified Wendell's knuckles, much like a guillotine with a reverse effect. (Rather than being instantly dead, he was very much instantly alive, and regretting it.)
"Again!" the headmaster barked, his knotted nose like a broken branch in some awful storm wrought by time, and his wisps of gray hair like the meager leavings of Autumn.
"Page 342, first paragraph, read aloud, if you'd be so kind, Mr. Colt!" Kindness was far from what drove Wendell's shaking fingers to fish out the page number bound up with his personal safety. His eyes found the page. The paragraph in question. It was a page from a history book, which quenched a thirsty young brain as well as a glass of sand. He read evenly with no great change in pace or tone, like a man reading a legal document, the sound of his own voice constructing no thoughts in his mind as his thoughts were on his throbbing knuckles.
The headmaster was obviously still displeased, but nonetheless mollified with no lawful basis for another flogging.
And so it was the turn of Wendell's neighbor to walk across the coals, signalling the passage of danger. For now. The gentle spectre of sleep returned. Wendell's last glimpse of a crumbling fortress in the history book, poorly rendered with black and white film, stole into his dream, where he stood at the center of two hallways that ran North and South and East and West. The walls were plainer than concrete and hideously gray.
Each end of each hallway bore a feminine statue that blocked a view through a narrow, barred window. That anyone would have built this place to prevent escape must not have considered that there was no apparent way in.
A wind picked up beyond one of the windows that just barely reached Wendell's ears, and a paranoid mind could suppose there were syllables of speech in that hollow howling:
Four muses of dust, vine, coal, and slime
In a space vacant of heartbeat and time
No skin to feel to the cold
Nor music heard by any ears
For the music here is sung in silent thought
With stone minds that cannot think
Four poles of the Symmetrical Citadel
That flesh and bone has not seen
And should not have been…
And the wind tapered off. And a quiet fell like a massive sheet of cobweb. And Wendell wondered if he would be the first to die in a place where nothing could have ever lived.
YOU ARE READING
Grayspace
PoetryThis project is the author's exercise of methods using automatism as either the finished product or the basis for stories and poems. Nonsense, jarring images, and peculiar journeys woven from the stuff of dreams await. You might laugh. You might cr...
