Magic Meat
Extract
The magic night conjures up the enchanted morning. Eggs hatch. Flightless birds fly in a blue sky. Brittle bones, fragile feathers and a little meat miraculously flutter. I walk, whistling, immersed in bird-song. Above the soaring wings white clouds gently drift, they look like doors and windows; one looks like a daisy. Everything matters; everything cares.
A deep hum with blurred edges slowly grows towards me as I walk. It increases in volume and sharpens into focus to become an overlapping collection of conflicting, clanking and whirring rhythms. The noise emanates from a white building with a small, square public face but which stretches back from the street further than the eye can see. Protruding from the building’s façade, above a metal door, is a steel rod from which hangs a chain. The end of the chain is screwed into the dome of an iron bowler-hat. I stand in its shadow. The metal door reflects my image. I look at its blue denim overalls; its black combed hair; its shaven face and sunken eyes. I lift one hand and it lifts one hand too. We look so similar and yet everything is missing from the reflection. I see flightless birds flying in a blue sky; it sees nothing. I look up into the dark hollow of the iron bowler-hat whilst turning the door handle and enter the building.
I stand within a long metal corridor. Infinite reflections walk beneath, above and either side of me past many numbered metal doors until I come to a door numbered thirty-three. The two black digits hover between my reflection and I. My hand touches the image of my hand and opens the door. I step into a small white room and face a wall with a surveillance camera attached to it. The camera is pointing at me. The walls at my sides are both punctured by a bowler-hat shaped hole through which passes a motionless conveyor-belt.
I wait, staring at the camera.
A red light lights up on the camera. A bell rings. The conveyor-belt begins to move. A bowler-hat emerges from the hole in the wall on my left and glides towards me.
My arms dance a strange movement, an ugly dance; they draw an obscene and secret sign amongst the air, a terrifying shape. As I stand behind the conveyor-belt, which passes by me on and on, speeding round and round like a whip at my back, one hand reaches for a bowler-hat and snatches it from the conveyor-belt. The other hand wraps a circle of black ribbon around the base of the bowler-hat’s dome and with a silver needle as long as an arm sews a single stitch to hold the ribbon in place. The hat is replaced and another hat is snatched. A hand wraps a circle of black ribbon around the base of the bowler-hat’s dome and with a silver needle as long as an arm sews a single stitch to hold the ribbon in place. The hat is replaced and another hat is snatched… Unlike the machinery my arms tire but they repeat their dance despite the growing pain, again and again, never slowing, on and on and on.
The day's repeated motions stack themselves into one, beneath which my hopes cycle, involuted, unable to influence my actions. Flightless birds flying in a blue sky chase their own tails, blocked.
I see the man working in the bowler-hat factory. His name is Benjamin Sole. I see his arms dance their strange dance and I see the flightless birds chasing their own tails in a blue sky. I am The Magician. I am impossible. I live in an ethereal gloom.
TO BE CONTINUED...