PREMATURITY
There’s more to life than a Stoker. Stiff keys, for example.
Charles – a sad case of someone who believed the past actually existed as portrayed by History – saw fit to employ several time-serving servants: some of whom were actually men and women crawling along Charles’ back passages; stoking the coal fires from the rear of such seats of combustible power.
Clank! As a chimney-wall slid aside and a tentative poker prodded forth to stick air pockets into the back-doubles of black cobbled mounds for fire to breathe easily … and crisp and crackle in the heart-warming warmth of Charles’ living spaces. Clank was more a creak or croak of rust-corroded metal than clank – as light was pushed into slots of age-old, mould-kissed sidearms of the house’s dilapidations.
“Hey, I can’t open the back entrance,” suddenly announced – in entrancing vowels of speakeasy back-scratching – a servant of some standing called Clive. Clive was a servant who was not expected to stoke or poke, but actually oil the tumblers of life’s strange reality. He was respected as a house-mover. The clock-maker that started time ticking. The First Mover, in fact. Clive was nothing, though, without Charles to serve. Charles was Clive’s Creation. Every Creator needed a Creation to boast of.
“Have you tried every bunch?” asked another servant of more downward tendencies. A bog-borer, of hirsute face and threadable torso. Charles, however – with fellow servants at every quarter – needed not even to speak in answer. Charles employed servants to talk among themselves, debating unissued orders and extrapolated duties.
A bunch of keys was a bunch of keys. They were identical. The downward servant – of nameless mien – knew this fact at the deepest unstokeable parts of his soul. If there were more than one bunch, any loss would be worse than misunderstanding. And the worst fate of any community – be it the servile or masterful area of jurisdiction – was misunderstanding. A loss for words is like not being able to unlock truth itself. Negatives cancelled each other out rather than preen and roost upon false beams of logic.
Clive shrugged, so that Charles did not need to.
Even verbs were servants’ business. Stoking the story till it goes out – prematurely? The key to its mystery missing.
