monks

The monks were sat in the monkery, each one settled comfortably upon their egg. It was almost hatching time and the monkery was filled with an air of tense excitement and the pungent stench of outright fear. This could be it, at any moment. This could be the end.

The end of the egg.

And the beginning of what came after.

But what came after none of the monks knew, for it was not in the teachings and it was not in the books and it wasn’t even in the stained glass windows that bathed them all in a pallid rainbow of dead light.

It was a mystery.

And monks hated mysteries.

“Same time next week, hey lads?” one of the monks shouted, but none of the others laughed. The chief monk would have issued a stern rebuke to the monk with his cane but it was too late for that because even the chief monk was perched on his egg and not even he dared move and so he sat there in silence with all the other monks rather than striding across the monkery’s floor and striking that impudent monk’s head down onto the cobbles with a single swish of his staff and then further striking the head and occasionally the cobbles in his pitiless fury as he really wanted to do and as the situation surely demanded.

The silence stretched out

and out

seeming to fill the great hatching hall with its immensity

or with its void

if a void could ever be said to fill anything

which it couldn’t

the monks knew

for that was in the teachings and in the books

but not in the stained glass windows

for how could you represent a void in the medium of painted glass

You couldn’t, that’s how

You couldn’t at all

Not without just painting it black

and negating the art itself

and the form

and the very meaning of the term itself.

The bell tolled. The monks all craned their heads in unison towards the clocktower, and then turned them back again. Stared straight ahead. Stared into nothing and at no-one. Beneath them sat the eggs. Beneath them sat an unknown world.

The monks waited. Shivered. Waited, waited.

The eggs stirred. Pulsed. Began to hatch.

The monks, having waited so long, discovered they had no time to understand what was happening. And then it was too late and there was nothing left for them to do and nothing left for them to be and the new monks feasted on their bodies from below and slivered into their forebears habits and donned their cowls and made their way, bloodied and beautiful, into the chancel, where they would be granted their absolution and with it eggs of their own.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on July 26th, 2016

Egg trick

My granddad used to do this egg trick when he came round on the weekend. He’d line three eggs up on the table, in these brown plastic egg cups we had, and then he’d say, which one of these eggs is the chicken in, and we’d point to one of the eggs, and he’d slam his hand down onto the egg, causing it to explode, and he’d say, no, it wasn’t that one, pick another, and we’d pick another, and he’d smash that one too, and there’d be yolk all over the table now, and bits of shell hanging off his hand, and egg white covering everything like slime, and then he’d point to the last egg and say, do you think it’s in this one then, and we’d say yes, it has to be, and he’d slam down his hand, and blood would spurt out everywhere, and feathers, and bones, and he’d slowly lift his hand up, and you could see a beak embedded in his palm, with blood in a circle round it, egg trick stigmata, and then he’d look down in exaggerated horror at all the blood and bones and sickening mess and say, see, no, it wasn’t in that one either, you don’t get chicks in eggs, not these eggs anyway, eggs from the shop are unfertilised, and none of us could tell if it was a trick or not but he’d do it every week and it was always the last egg and now he’s dead from un egg related causes and we’ll never find out the truth of the egg trick

__________

Notes:

1. Written on September 3rd, 2018

Elon Musk

Elon Musk was on the telly, his dead face glistening under the studio lights.

“Rrrrrrrrr” he said, as the motors that powered his jaws slowly powered up. “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

A single drop of blood welled at the edge of his final human eye, seeming to defy gravity at first until you realised it was a fake, made of resin or wax or plasticine or from carbon nanotubes or jam or something, created to evoke a sympathetic response in the viewer. “See,” your brain went, “he’s human just like you.”

You hated your brain but it was the only one you could afford.

His other eye pulsed through sixty trillion colours a second, each one newer and more expensive than the one before.

“If we’d kept the old tv, we’d never have been able to see them all,” your brain said.

“I like that one,” your mother said, freezing the image and then cycling back through the frames until his eye was teslorange (a sort of purple). “I wonder if I could get some antimaccassars that colour.”

You pressed his eye and the catalogue opened up directly into your brain and crowded out most of your other sensory inputs until it had loaded the page.

“They cost $87348732.21,” you said, glumly.

“Oh, that’s quite a bit,” your mother said, but by the end of the week you knew she’d have one over the arm of every chair in the pod.

You wondered sometimes where the old antimaccassars went, but you never quite dared ask.

The image on the tv unfroze. “Hsssssk,” Elon Musk concluded, as his hour came to an end. “Hsssssssssssssssk.”

It was Mark Zuckerberg next, the camera centred on his jumper, the top half of his head protruding out of the shell of the telly and half way up your living room wall.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaater,” he began. “Proooteeeeeeien.”

Your mother was entranced. You feigned disinterest. Later you bought four decilitres of water and several unsorted proteins.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on September 3rd, 2018

pounds

I remember reading a story on teletext once in, presumably, 2003 or something, that in the 20 years since the pound coin had been released, 800 million of them had gone missing.

So I decided then that I would collect all the missing ones, and that would be how I made my fortune, and ever since I have dedicated my entire life to finding them.

So far I have found 4 pound coins.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on August 13th, 2016
2. Unfortunately now my quest has been ruined by the introduction of a new pound coin
3. I shall never forgive them