Grace fights the terror and retreats outward to the canopy of silence

The monster, looking down at his cracked and dried hands, crusted with pigment and pig shit, imagined. He breathed deeply, and as the air filled his lungs it buoyed his vision as he rolled his head back.
Straight ahead he saw the mists on the moor, rolling in like a lunar tidal wave trapped in time. He saw men and horses and demon dogs leaping, in mid stride across the grassy field from the sullen bogs in the distance.
His head lolled up, ignoring the girl in his periphery, and his eyes scanned the heavens.
A miasma of white milky stars exploded in his field of vision. They moved with the same urgency of the specters on the moor, a difference in degree but not in kind.
The monster blinked and the bells of Downton Abbey rang out across the field.
It was two o'clock and the black carriage had arrived.

The watchers from the cloistered parapet of privilege

The dowager countess exhaled a noise like gas releasing into an autumn morning from deep beneath a primordial swamp; covering a millennia worth of sunlight and life. She pulled the curtain shut on her carriage with a snap of her wrist and settled into the carriage seat, resting like a toad.

"I abhor the future" she said. "Every day I awaken to the morning and I feel the degree to which my body has wound down over night.  Then, after I reconcile my mind to my corporeal fate, I must face the day and THIS nonsense."  She waved a hand, indicating the field through which the carriage trundled. On the horizon there were mounds of tents, around which which naked "aristocrats" were clustered. Closer to the road a man was scratching something into a yew tree, but darted under cover as the carriage came into view.

"It's disgusting Vosanya. It's reprehensible.  I do not even know  the nature of the things I see. Sometimes I see  men, sometimes they seem ants. No doubt they think themselves gods.  When I was a child, I went to balls. I attended court. There was a regality to our lives. Now look at me. Reduced to a token appearance at that damnable stone athletic abomination to rubber stamp a shipment.  It is a tragedy."

Vosanya, the Russian witch looked across at the dowager countess serenely.

"Time will roll through our lives, intersecting an punctuating, enunciating and shining a light on our own decisions and automations. To age is to grow is to be elucidated my lady."
The witch slid down into her seat, against the window.  Languid and lithe, with eyes like a cat, she brushed the curtain aside with the back of her hand.

"Those ones outside in the mud are merely seeking a thing which they do not know. They spend their lives waiting and waiting. They wait for you my lady. They wait for age of light. The future is not to be feared or met with disdain my countess. It is to be controlled and to be embraced" purred the witch.

The countess turned her head to look squarely at the ageless Russian, who had come to her family from the icy steppes so long ago. The countess remembered her arrival when the countess herself was but a girl, yet Vosanya appeared not to have aged a day.

"It is a simple thing to say 'Do not fight the future' when there is no cost to the passage of time, Vosanya. When your own existence takes no toll on your experience, what comes next must be a small thing indeed." The countess hissed the gas sound again as she spoke.   "I do not know, and I do not ask what drives your aid to my family, but I put my trust in you to see us through these troubled times."

The witch smiled and purred "All will be well, lady."
She glanced out the window. "We have arrived. Your niece and the monster are there, waiting with the pigs and their painting."

The Passing Black Carriage

                Ive often cried

     inside

                            the warm mule barrel

of a

           tin drum

Cecil was begining to carve it into the tree it had taken a bit to find a good rock for a chisel and then attending to the bark scraping his fingernails to produce an opening of nakedness on the massive tree.
-What kind of tree is this?  I wish I knew the names of more trees.
-thought Cecil

He forgot what the whole phrase was went to write mule drum started stopped when it felt empty started on a too big D laughed as it wouldn't fit the scrapped off tree.  The D was pretty cool it was all but one or two places that a consistent lightning bolt effect was around the letter it was well he couldn't remember what it was he intended to write, it wouldve taken forever to write out the thing any way.  He quickly chipped out a tiny om under the D and then smeared the tree with some left over syrup from breakfast.

Cecil reasoned this would help the tree heal.  He still had no idea what the plant was called.

He walked out into a clearing to wash his hands in the stream. 
The grass was green the sun was warm the stream twinkling just as bucolic as a the decoded dreams of bleats dissolving in a damp sun.

The carriage passed the lady dowager looked out and saw the naked man she must have seen him, at least that was what Cecil imagined surely she mustve noticed the growing camps of naked homosexual aristocrats assembling on her yard.  Or was it that she really could not see all these men.  And if she couldn't see them, would that work out to their advantage
or hers?

Interlude from the Godhead

By his logic, we are probably ALREADY in a digital reality, having apotheosized an infinity ago, and having created an endless cycle of virtual existence, beating like the now primordial memory of a human heart. Early on in this infinity it was discovered that infinite possibility makes man insane, so existence is cut into life sized chunks, replicating another faint memory of nature. 

Once more death makes redundant the mastery of their lives in its ultimate endgame

Days passed as monster sat there, amidst the pig carcasses rotting away, looking at young vivienne. The sun raced through the sky overhead and cracks appeared in her milky complexion, around her eyes and around her lips, as she stared back at him expectantly. Her skin began to moulder and slough off as age and time wrecked havoc upon her countenance. Her body shrank inside her dress as the meat shriveled and dried on her bones. Dust blew through the sleeves of her dress and her hair disappeared in the wind. Her neck broke and her skull cracked on the hard pavement. The dress collapsed and blew away, like a ghost. Bart monster looked away, towards the sunset and breathed deeply. He looked down at his unfinished painting. 

"Barty?" Vivienne asked. "Barty what ever is the matter?"

He calmly looked up, shaken from his reverie, and found himself staring into the reformed deep blue eyes of Vivienne once again. The world had turned back

The merry path to the place where time becomes abstract and the flies consume the pigs.

As she walked down the gravel path to the shore of the basketball court, the bulkhead of the omnibus loomed over head, in the sky, peering through the clouds. It looked like a black smiling god, head in hands, amused by the mechanic intricacy of the lives below. 

She hiked up her skirt to step over the radiation markers and she walked toward Bart monster who was sitting at the far end of the court. 

The copper smell of death hung in the air, and the silence had an oppressive humidity. Bart monster was playing a game on his view screen while he waited for the butcher crew to pick up the weekly pig shipment. 

"Isn't it beautiful? Everything is coming together now. Interlocking in a fractal. Perspectives pieced together like a bugs eye. The multitude of it moves my heart."

He looked up at her, not knowing what to say. 

Lord Clarence Blunderbuss was a hard man who, due to his parents’ inflexible nature, filled the lake with cement and allocated 20% of the manor budget to eliminating the geese who lived around the edge of the shore.

Downton Abbey was built in 984 by Clovis Blunderbuss, the barbarian king who pacified the region of Sureshirecire by chopping off heads and hanging things from spikes.  Clovis’ third wife decided that her husband should get good with the Lord, and build a nice and godly summer home on the shore of Blood Lake.  Downton Abbey was constructed in just under 77 years, and although that was a good pace, Clovis never saw the manor in it’s wonder and glory, having been chopped into pieces by Viking raiders and fed to chickens. 

The Abbey anchored the quaint English town of Little Englandtown for 1000 years.  900 years in however, the geese at Loch Bloomers ruined the annual Summer Solstice Festival and Lord Clarence destroyed the lake to save face for his wife Jemima.  It’s a complicated story involving a May pole, a thunderstorm,  a baker’s dozen of lady fingers, and a standard dozen of lady’s underpants, but the resulting spectacle involved a flock of geese dressed in lace and defecating into the Solstice Feast.  Also, Jemima became barren as a result, and the proud blunderbuss line was eliminated.

In the 100 years since, the concrete lake became home to England’s first basketball court.  It is also a favorite spot of local artists to paint still life, and capture the majestic image of the courts standing tall, outlined in shadow against the setting English sun, much like that scene in Joe vs. The Volcano.  Here he find Sir Barty Monster painting, and Vivienne St. Loopy who has undertaken a constitutional along the shores of the basketball court and encountered young Mister Monster.