Prose inspired by one of our founders drawings, in which ordinary streets dissolve into grids, bars become sanctuaries, and the sky blooms with the scent of lilac tree flowers.
Credit: Edward Mclaren – Oxford based writer and friend of Lynrace
It did not happen all at once, yet there was a moment when he felt his hearing silenced, his sight cleansed, when he saw the facades of buildings dropping away in front of him like theatre curtains to reveal the back of a featureless stage. But the stage was the whole town. All windows sealed. Pressing together and then radically sealing, every building on one side of the street glued into every other. And then with a heavy cacophonous sucking noise, all within was drained. He knocked on the side of the now plain block to his left where a chemists, a grocers, a diner, a charity shop had been, and throughout the whole great structure heard the iron reverberation of his knock. Now there was nothing in there. There was just the outside. It decorated itself in square etchings on a planned grid.
The church was grid. The lane was grid. The people, those who were left, were homeless—partly molten, all with bottles—or crazies at the undrained bars. Bars were invulnerable? Looking over the occupants in one, he recognised these quacks, these weirdoes, these utterly undesirable alcoholics as his fellow sufferers. Perhaps, for them, the town had always looked like this, had always been a vacuous heap of featureless white oblongs and empty lanes. No one else present even registered. There were just the drinkers.
Yet seeing his own hand pierced by a block of white as it disintegrated and gridified his digits into squares up his left arm, suddenly, left him with all the pain of a limb thawed off in the Arctic. He decided that he too must drink. He entered the bar and the bartender, a cold fellow perhaps not of this world, poured him automatically a glass of red. There were two pumps, one simply saying RED. The other was written in a strange language—Avestan?
As he drank, he felt his head spin and as his head spun so, it appeared, did the sky.
When his hand unbuckled from the crust of white squares polluting it, he noticed that all the homeless drinkers, all the bar freaks, and old-timers he had once or twice scoffed at were gazing up, together gazing up, at the same spectacle. For against the grids, above the deserted megaliths and ziggurats, the squares, the endless squares, some fourteen thousand feet above everyone with a drink in hand was a sky of lilacs. Great flowers abounded, red flowers span. It was endless. They threw their wild reds against the town’s white.
He wondered if the entire thing had been a hallucination, if he too was little more than a confused drinker, mesmerised away from ordinary life.
He drank. He stared at the sky. He turned from the grids and returned to the bar.
He didn’t mind.
Image Credit: Lynrace 2020 ‘Blissful Oblivion’