SRF Heavy Industries

Words like beads of dew on a curved flat blade of tall grass, each holographically containing a fisheyed inversion of the scenery behind — cloud-fluffed blue sky below, downward-pointed green spikes above — every word the same and meaningless and yet forming a picture, though distorted and infuriatingly linear and traveling in the direction the blade takes regardless of where you want it to go. Fortunately, here is another dewed blade. And another. Another. Another. The blades, like the strung droplets, gruelingly the same, but just enough different that the whole of the sopping meadow contains the whole of sky, rotated upside down.

Here is a sentence of strung words. Here is another. And another. Another. Descending toward meaninglessness.

So here is another. And another. Don’t worry. There are tens of thousands more.

Remember, these words are upside down.

* * * * *

My puppet lays on its back on the dewed grass, eyes sewn shut — one emptied socket half full of petulant pointy-legged skritching and the other always quiet unless my puppet is in motion — and cold enough to collect dew itself. Its brown weather-leathered chest is bare, as is its head (except for a shock of sunbleached hair), and arms, and legs, and feet. From waist to mid-thigh it wears beach-appropriate flower-printed shorts, too heavy to be trunks for swimming but of a sort that is often used as such regardless. Perhaps because it is sometimes convenient to have a number of pockets to fill with the trifles one finds below the waves.

Pockets are useful things. One of the reasons I maintain a puppet is so that it can wear pockets and carry useful trifles. It is a crutch, but a familiar one, and comfortable.

The puppet is inert, having been dead (and taxidermied) for years and years. I am waiting for the sun to burn off the dew. I confine my awareness to the beach-adjacent meadow that contains it, embedding my self in linear time as an exercise for the string of connected moments that must follow, one after another, slow and awkward like a flying bird, head bobbing, walking the migration routes on foot. I spread myself thin over the expanse of the meadow and watch ten million tiny air-sullied drops of water encourage the outermost surfaces to hand molecules of water to the larger molecules of diatomic nitrogen and oxygen for them to carry it away, reversing the process that deposited it last night. The water molecules are even shaped like birds, winging away to join the flocks in the sky.

I feel the ripples of time like the grass feels the microcurrents of wind that buffer it from the onshore breeze. I cannot resist. I peek above the time-ripples and roll a portion of my awareness back to a ruddy sunrise, the nearest one to the arbitrary here/now of the meadow containing my warming puppet, not much more than an hour distant. I drop back into the grass with the rest of me before I lose my will to follow linearity. Or worse, shear into multiples.

It is tedious. I feel an enormous temptation to shout the entire meadow dry, startling the water into the air like a gunshot sends a flock of starlings aloft. But the sudden fog might draw attention. And the entire point of this exercise is to relearn patience.

A quarter of an hour is an unendurable eternity. Twenty minutes. Another five or ten. I sit my puppet upright. Draw its feet under it, or him, as it used to be many years ago, and compel it to stand.

Its mouth was sewn shut around a cloth bag of various odds and ends ages ago as well, so the pantomimed yawn (covering its mouth with the back of the left hand) and skyward stretch of the right is comedy gold. But there might be spectators watching, morning joggers and others for whom this distant verisimilitude would be useful for not setting off otherness alarms. It looks natural. It feels natural. After all, once upon a time, embedded in time, I used to steer this puppet from the inside. Call it sentimentality, but I have a small preference for not having my handiwork, and my one-time home, shredded by a panicked mob.

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