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Addict
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: England
Gender: Female
Posts: 126
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Holiday - Part One
Here's part one of a short story inspired by a house at the end of my road... Comments and critiques always welcome, thanks for reading.
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With the measured pace of a man in no hurry, skirting the boundary fence once, twice, three times beneath the moon, Alfie relishes the chill of the night. This house is silhouetted like a haunted mansion, a turreted relic of Victoriana amid the claws of trees. This sloping garden, like a meadow, barely tended, grows wild with daisies and dandelions. In this light they look like white stars bobbing on a grey swirling ocean, or waving arms, or silver hair. Round the back there’s a gravel yard where the washing hangs like ghosts on a line, nailed to the wall of a shed they’re not allowed to go into. Next to that, the Mast.
Twice, maybe even three times taller than the house. The Mast looks like an alien craft, rocket-shaped, all steel girders, built in a triangular shape with satellite dishes stuck on here and there. It belongs to Orange.
A tall hedge encloses this – the house, the meadow, the yard, the shed, and the Mast – breaking only twice: once at the front for a garden gate that opens onto a busy main junction; and again for the barbed-wire-topped no-access security gate at the back through which the Orange maintenance guys occasionally drive their vans.
When asked, “Isn’t it awful, living with that thing in your back garden?” Alfie shakes his head. He won’t speak for some time, until the moment you begin to think he won’t respond at all, then says, very softly, “No. No,” he’ll say, shaking his head again, “no, I think it’s beautiful.”
Everyone thinks it’s beautiful; everyone in the house. Maybe not for those passing by, who look at it and say, “monstrosity”, “ugly”, “eyesore”. But when something means HOME, something that stands out so defiantly, so that there’s no arguing and you are definitely HOME, then that thing, no matter what it is or how it looks, becomes beautiful.
Alfie stops in his circuit of the grounds to stare at it now. It is a modern obelisk, looking forward into the future of man; just like the pyramids and the sphinx in their day. He isn’t worried about what it might see.
It’s a piece of art – a sculpture. He’s seen things just like it in public parks and city squares. But it’s more than that – it has a function, it lets people talk to one another. Maybe others don’t like it because it makes so many things redundant. But Alfie doesn’t care about that. He knows about redundancy, and it’s no big deal.
The wind gets up, carries a siren wailing from the city. Other people, elsewhere, existing at the same time as him – he finds it funny to think. Here, atop the lofty hill, the house asleep, the Mast presiding over a future decided, it feels as if he ought to be the only man, the lone man: the first man.
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Ice is forming on the tips of my wings.
Last edited by sierra alpha : 04-09-2007 at 02:19 PM.
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