Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
The Janus Trick: Door #25
Friday, November 28th, 2008
Jason says: This is the first entry of an ongoing chronicle, as trusted to me by a nameless individual who has rediscovered the Janus Trick. As far as I can tell, these episodic narratives are the only record of his journeys through the Significant Doors…
Door #25
It’s the back door, the one made of chipboard with the bottom half covered in muddy puppy scratches. You reach up and twist the handle, an indoor fitting covered in paint and salvaged by Poppa. Very carefully, you step into the kitchen. Always with the right foot first. Those who use the left foot never end up where they mean to go.
Nanna only has a few grey hairs, not the silver patchy locks that you last saw her with. She’s made your favourite, scones with jam and cream. You sit at the grown-up table, now as then, even though your feet don’t touch the ground. You’re in sandals and shorts, scabby knees and a little knitted vest, but you’ve got the knowing of ages in your head, the wisdom of times yet to come.
But what good the knowing of computers, when the only ones about are the size of refrigerators? What good the understanding that two towers will fall, or what the market will do over the next twenty years or so? Some of the information is slipping, and it may be sometime till this brain grows and accepts these knowings.
You try to tell Nanna about the Janus Trick, and she humours you. She’s got the impression you’re talking about one of your cartoons, or maybe a comic book. When you mention the imminent passing of Roscoe the fox terrier, she gets a dark look. The scones are gone, and there is nothing but banishment to bed.
You sit on the edge of the overstuffed bed for ages, watching the sliver of afternoon light creep across the high-ceilings. You’re running your hands with wonder all over the stuffed frog she sewed for you, the one wearing the bull-fighter outfit. It’s still some years before the arthritis will take away all her little enjoyments; her knitting, sewing, flute-playing.
She comes in later, and makes you say the Our Father and Hail Mary before tucking you into bed. She says “Holy Ghost” which sounded funny at the time because at school they made you say “Holy Spirit”. With the added weight of years this makes you cry a little, because Nanna was the last person you ever heard saying it that way.
Our Lady Underground
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
The scuffed-linoleum halls of cabal central echo with one more set of approaching footfalls. One last set, at least for the time being. Another new author steps forward today. Susannah Mandel’s mark in the world of words has, so far, been largely nonfictional, but she’s also quite adept in the fictional mode, as we’re sure you’ll discover when she takes us beneath the surface of things in today’s story…
Our Lady Underground is a mystery of the earth. She lies in chthonic dignity under the hill at the center of the island, awaiting her oblations.
Obediently the inhabitants lay their offerings on her monument. Usually, they send the young people to do it. In winter, that means cold; in spring, they slog up muddy paths lugging the baskets. But one has not the right to pick and choose. Our Lady demands her rituals all the year round.
Everyone understands what Our Lady provides in return. In the shallows off the coast, she holds back the waves from surging and flattening the fishing villages. She keeps the cliffs from sliding down and burying the harbor. She grips the soil tight in her powerful arms, preventing it from bucking like a terrified lamb, overturning cradles and trapping young mothers under their tumbled roofs.
What does Our Lady look like? No one knows. There are no effigies on her monument, no pictures on the tiles sunk into earth at the tidelines. Rumors exist of secret cliff-side carvings; of an image cut in chalk on a hidden hill. By the fireside, the nannies tell stories about Our Lady in battle, rising, in vast and terrible beauty, to defend her faithful people against Our Lady of the Landslide, Our Lady of the Earthquake, Our Lady of the Tidal Wave.
(But the young people murmur mutinously, to each other: Has Our Lady ever stirred from under her hill? Does she even know how to stand up? To walk? Fight? Dance?)
Though they live by the sea, this island’s inhabitants bury their dead. The words of the traditional funeral homily, passed down through centuries, imply less a rapturous moment of reunion with Our Lady than a slow growing: a knitting together, as with the roots of trees. The nannies and old men sink into deep calmness, as they approach their eventual rendezvous. Children, whispering in the night, thrill each other with horror.
But the young people conduct their own investigations of Our Lady Underground, up on the hillside’s winding streets, in the basement nightclubs that bear her name. Among the shadows and pulsing music, they seek to answer each other’s questions: about what lies underneath; about where to find the secret hill; about what their elders have always thought to be so dangerous in the rising, shuddering and crashing of avalanches, earthquakes, tsunamis, waves.