haven’t noticed those great blooming optic lobes. Eh? You’re trying to palm
off a visual creature on me. What’s there to see when the damned things come down?”
“The glow.”
“Eh?”
“A fiery red ball. Falling like a meteor.”
“Rot.”
“Gwenhidwy saw one the other night, over Deptford.”
“What I want,” Pointsman leaning now into the central radiance of the lamp, his white
face more vulnerable than his voice, whispering across the burning spire of a hypodermic
set upright on the desk, “what I really need, is not a dog, not an octopus, but one
of your fine Foxes.
Damn it.
One, little,
Fox!
”
• • • • • • •
Something’s stalking through the city of Smoke—gathering up slender girls, fair and
smooth as dolls, by the handful.
Their piteous cries . . . their dollful and piteous cries
. . . the face of one is suddenly very close, and
down!
over the staring eyes come cream lids with stiff lashes, slamming loudly shut, the
long reverberating of lead counterweights tumble inside her head as Jessica’s own
lids now come flying open. She surfaces in time to hear the last echoes blowing away
on the heels of the blast, austere and keen, a winter sound. . . . Roger wakes up
briefly too, mutters something like “Fucking madness,” and nods back to sleep.
She reaches out, blind little hand grazing the ticking clock, the worn-plush stomach
of her panda Michael, an empty milk bottle holding scarlet blossoms from a spurge
in a garden a mile down the road: reaches to where her cigarettes ought to be but
aren’t. Halfway out now from under the covers, she hangs, between the two worlds,
a white, athletic tension in this cold room. Oh, well . . . she leaves him in their
warm burrow, moves shivering vuhvuhvuh in grainy darkness over winter-tight floorboards,
slick as ice to her bare soles.
Her cigarettes are on the parlor floor, left among pillows in front of the fire. Roger’s
clothing is scattered all about. Puffing on a cigarette, squinting with one eye for
the smoke, she tidies up, folding his trousers, hanging up his shirt. Then wanders
to the window, lifts the blackout curtain, tries to see out through frost gathering
on the panes, out into the snow tracked over by foxes, rabbits, long-lost dogs, and
winter birds but no humans. Empty canals of snow thread away into trees and town whose
name they still don’t know. She cups the cigarettes in her palm, leery of showing
a light though blackout was lifted weeks and weeks ago, already part of another time
and world. Late lorry motors rush north and south in the night, and airplanes fill
the sky then drain away east to some kind of quiet.
Could they have settled for hotels, AR-E forms, being frisked for cameras and binoculars?
This house, town, crossed arcs of Roger and Jessica are so vulnerable, to German weapons
and to British bylaws . . . it doesn’t
feel
like danger here, but she does wish there were others about, and that it could really
be a village, her village. The searchlights could stay, to light the night, and barrage
balloons to populate fat and friendly the daybreak—everything, even the explosions
in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose . . . as long as no
one had to die . . . couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a
storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where
that
would be the day’s excitement . . .), only kind thunder?
Jessica has floated out of herself, up to watch herself watching the night, to hover
in widelegged, shoulderpadded white, satin-polished on her nightward surfaces. Until
something falls here, close enough to matter, they do have their safety: their thickets
of silverblue stalks reaching after dark to touch or sweep clouds, the green-brown
masses in uniform, at the ends of afternoons, stone, eyes on the distances, bound
in convoy for fronts, for high
off a visual creature on me. What’s there to see when the damned things come down?”
“The glow.”
“Eh?”
“A fiery red ball. Falling like a meteor.”
“Rot.”
“Gwenhidwy saw one the other night, over Deptford.”
“What I want,” Pointsman leaning now into the central radiance of the lamp, his white
face more vulnerable than his voice, whispering across the burning spire of a hypodermic
set upright on the desk, “what I really need, is not a dog, not an octopus, but one
of your fine Foxes.
Damn it.
One, little,
Fox!
”
• • • • • • •
Something’s stalking through the city of Smoke—gathering up slender girls, fair and
smooth as dolls, by the handful.
Their piteous cries . . . their dollful and piteous cries
. . . the face of one is suddenly very close, and
down!
over the staring eyes come cream lids with stiff lashes, slamming loudly shut, the
long reverberating of lead counterweights tumble inside her head as Jessica’s own
lids now come flying open. She surfaces in time to hear the last echoes blowing away
on the heels of the blast, austere and keen, a winter sound. . . . Roger wakes up
briefly too, mutters something like “Fucking madness,” and nods back to sleep.
She reaches out, blind little hand grazing the ticking clock, the worn-plush stomach
of her panda Michael, an empty milk bottle holding scarlet blossoms from a spurge
in a garden a mile down the road: reaches to where her cigarettes ought to be but
aren’t. Halfway out now from under the covers, she hangs, between the two worlds,
a white, athletic tension in this cold room. Oh, well . . . she leaves him in their
warm burrow, moves shivering vuhvuhvuh in grainy darkness over winter-tight floorboards,
slick as ice to her bare soles.
Her cigarettes are on the parlor floor, left among pillows in front of the fire. Roger’s
clothing is scattered all about. Puffing on a cigarette, squinting with one eye for
the smoke, she tidies up, folding his trousers, hanging up his shirt. Then wanders
to the window, lifts the blackout curtain, tries to see out through frost gathering
on the panes, out into the snow tracked over by foxes, rabbits, long-lost dogs, and
winter birds but no humans. Empty canals of snow thread away into trees and town whose
name they still don’t know. She cups the cigarettes in her palm, leery of showing
a light though blackout was lifted weeks and weeks ago, already part of another time
and world. Late lorry motors rush north and south in the night, and airplanes fill
the sky then drain away east to some kind of quiet.
Could they have settled for hotels, AR-E forms, being frisked for cameras and binoculars?
This house, town, crossed arcs of Roger and Jessica are so vulnerable, to German weapons
and to British bylaws . . . it doesn’t
feel
like danger here, but she does wish there were others about, and that it could really
be a village, her village. The searchlights could stay, to light the night, and barrage
balloons to populate fat and friendly the daybreak—everything, even the explosions
in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose . . . as long as no
one had to die . . . couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a
storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where
that
would be the day’s excitement . . .), only kind thunder?
Jessica has floated out of herself, up to watch herself watching the night, to hover
in widelegged, shoulderpadded white, satin-polished on her nightward surfaces. Until
something falls here, close enough to matter, they do have their safety: their thickets
of silverblue stalks reaching after dark to touch or sweep clouds, the green-brown
masses in uniform, at the ends of afternoons, stone, eyes on the distances, bound
in convoy for fronts, for high
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