Beyond land and sea, there was a space for matter to take which was neither.
Adrian, one day, awake in his father’s castle at the edge of the known world where clifftops beetled and skies funnelled downwards. The weather seemed amenable, as well as his mood. Indeed, the rest of the castle was up and about, taking advantage of their own moods. So, was this the optimum day for seeking that space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea? He asked himself the question, with nobody to answer but himself. Yes, it was simply ideal, being the answer in question.
And Adrian rose from his bed to check his alter ego’s instinct. For the first time in his living memory, the mists had dispersed, allowing a clear view of the way forward - except, of course, where the mists regained their landbound status because his eyesight, at that distant point, became too blurred to disperse them. You see, bodies had moods, as well as minds.
He’d’ve missed breakfast altogether, given a free choice. However, many servants of the castle had spent the whole night preparing it and he didn’t have the heart for hurt. So, he sniffed and snaffled through many of the various dishes, containing steaming rashers of back bacon, divine kidneys, cream eggs, cherry tomatoes, blood dumplings, all fried to the perfect hum. Such comestibles served to put indigestible fat on his muscles and a weight of force-fed pigs on his feet, which slowed his departure from the castle, as he set upon his quest to discover the space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea.
Naturally, in those days, nobody knew that there was a real space above the air where one could travel between worlds. For Adrian, it was already incredible to believe in a space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea, if it were, indeed, possible, in a sane universe, to believe in the incredible. He had forgotten the main reason he had not previously been so foolhardy as to venture from the castle on such a quest, the purpose of which quest bore so much repeating. The disincentive was presented by the legendary monster which guarded that space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea. Adrian customarily depended on his saner self to keep the dangers at the forefront of his mind, but, on that optimum day, his alter ego was entirely in charge: with not even a sniff of an id.
Adrian’s father was not in residence at the time (the cause of his absence being the subject of a different tale than this) and that absence my have been the presence that did not deter his son. He usually breakfasted with Adrian, when the servants needed no excuse for increasing the helpings available upon a ratio in excess of the increase in the number of stomachs. And, during such periods of chewing the fatted cud, father and son cancelled out each other’s moods, as well as split personalities. But, not today.
Thus, upon that optimum moment in a long-running saga of stranger things than this, Adrian, unshriven and unstarved, strode towards the cone’s end of perspective which had previously been at the far-sighted blind spot of his visionary powers. He soon discovered that the guardian monster was the space itself: an area of near nothingness which could neither shape a world we knew nor, even, concoct a tenable territory to house a world we didn’t know.
When Adrian looked back for the last time, the castle had vanished into a white hole. If it weren’t for the baggage of his own body and the bilious stench of its contents, he’d’ve been hard put to make belief from his own heady communion of thoughts - which, in the end, had no room for matter that mattered, because the monster swallowed its own tale as well as the space within which was neither self nor someone else.
(Published 'Ocular' 1993)
