THE EGG-TAMER OF JULLIPBAR
Jullipbar wasn’t an alien planet as such, because it was where we lived. We called it home. Everywhere else was alien to us. All the sparkling specks or unidinentified flying pods were potentially where you or your kind lived – or possibly lived, because you couldn’t live everywhere.
Jullipbar could almost be called a terrain of unrelieved sameness, interspersed with lakes and sea. An archipelago with blueness silting into every corner. A beautiful feathery light shafting at all angles from a single source above. An outdoor cathedral of some quite stunning picture postcard over-the-top lack of distinction. Except, of course, when the weather was bad. But we tend to forget about those things. We enjoy sameness. And, thankfully, our memories are short. We live for the moment.
Today I’m an egg-tamer. Just to fill in a brief background, I am of an untidy gender. I go without being seen. I come with as little fuss as possible. I enjoy picking fights with challenges, because that gives contours to the day. You, being a visitor, are one such challenge: a visitor who, although merely arrived in spirit instead of in a bodily state, surely represents a circumstance which, of course, stems from your chicken-livered soul being reluctant to embark upon the risk of vehicular travel, bearing in mind the troubled times that beset us all, alien or otherwise.
My story, sadly, is briefer even than that background. Well, we have no time for stories in Jullipbar. Real life takes us so much time, all of it in fact. We don’t really know what stories are, their concept or their wherewithal: we fail to find fiction anywhere; or drama; or spectacle; or even sound adventures masquerading as music. So let’s finish there. Hope you enjoyed your trip. You can go back now along the psychic funnel you smoked out with your mind power; back home to that alien home that you call normality.
Hope you enjoyed a glimpse of my current occupation. Egg-taming. Here is a chicken with all its breasty members complete, tousled feathers ripe for the plucking, in a state that you would call dead; dead still; blind poultry; eyelids scaled over with yellow scum; wrinkled skin slowly … ever so slowly … hardening, crystallisng as you watch … even more slowly curving out into surfaces its previous nodular form could not possibly have predisposed; limbs cracking back into the smooth mounds of grit; the wishbone sinking into a mucus centre where the yellow scum has setled; and at this stage the new form begins to move, ever so slightly at first, each twitch of the crisp sheen becoming more and more violent…
And, yes, I take my top whip and lay into its blantantly aggressive manoeuvres towards me … as if it seeks to smash me in the eye; my eye being the nearest state to its now own chickenless state… making me an egg-tamer … an egg-tamer of Jullipbar.
But you’d gone before you saw all this, if you were ever here at all. Even mind travel can be dangerous. Hope you made it back, without too much synaptic wastage. Home sweet home for at least someone. The blue archipelago of Jullipbar as ever threatened with alien pods, worse than any weather. Hatching plots forever. Breakfast seems too far away to matter…
