The Heavens Opened

As I got onto the bus the heavens opened. That’s the expression isn’t it, ‘the heavens opened”? I’d say I’ve said that a hundred times, you probably have too. It was just a figure of speech until then. The walk home wasn’t appealing with the dark clouds hanging over the city, so I waited for a bus that would at least keep me warm and dry until I was a little bit closer to home.

As the bus groaned up the hill and the passenger on the back seat sniffed away every breath. Every breath I tell you, is that even possible? I thought he should be dead by now, drowned in his own snot. That thought was shunted from my mind when I noticed the heavens literally opening. The skirts of the sky lifted and we saw the heavens and all of the drama that was going on in them. The light shone brightly through the cracks in the cloud but it somehow only managed to illuminate what was going on up there. Down here it was still as glum and bleak as it had been all afternoon.

All of the passengers, even our friend the sniffer, stared out at the windows at the battle going on above us. The Gods were battling in the sky and every time a blow was struck it seemed to knock more rain loose. The bus kept on rolling and listing in and out of traffic, stopping and starting like the battle above. Powerful hammer swings and blocks with giant shields let off sparks and thunder, a thrown body sent down a gust of wind that blew umbrellas inside out on the street. All the time as the bus weaved its way through the rush hour city, the battle made its way across the sky. Sometimes obscured buy the clouds, other times a full view would open up, just as more action unfolded.

By the time the bus got to my stop the action in the sky was leaving. There was still rain, a light drizzle. And over towards the east I could see the last of the flashes and the glimpses through the clouds slowly closed up from my vantage point. My commute was almost over but the Gods looked as if their battle would never end.

World Famous in Three Lamps

I’m not entirely sure if he’s homeless, if he isn’t he must be pretty close to being homeless. Dishevelled and a little bit dirty, but he does have a few possessions. He has his guitar and he has a little stool. I don’t imagine he makes a lot of money at his spot, it’s a busy piece of the street but not a crowded piece.

His guitar seems like it could be out of tune, it’s hard to tell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he only knew one chord. The guitar is just a prop really, something to strum along in the background of his song. Because it’s not the music he’s selling it’s his voice. What change he does manage to collect he earns with his voice, it’s a voice opposite to his outward appearance. His voice is crisp and clear, it’s a voice that cuts, it’s powerful and unforced.

I wonder if he’s ever been a musician, a professional musician I mean. Maybe he used to be famous, or as famous as you can be in this city. I drop a coin at his feet and give him a smile, at least he’s famous on this little corner.

The Post

It’s magic, the way it works is just magic. I can’t tell you how I know but I’ve come across this knowledge one way or another. It’s very complicated and I don’t know all of the intricacies of how things happen but I’ve got a rough overview of the process.

Firstly, someone has something they need to post, sure, we all know what that’s like. It’s happening less and less often but it’s still going on every day isn’t it? Well, then they need an envelope and a stamp. Now I know that you think you know what the stamps are all about but I’m here to tell you that part is actually false, all the stamps are for is the licking. It’s the saliva that they’re after. You take your newly stamped letter and you drop it in the post box on the corner, it goes through the slot and falls into the dark box. You forget about it then, assume it will arrive at its destination and you go on with your day.

What happens will probably surprise you. First it’s the scrapers who jump into action. They pull off the stamp and scrape off the saliva, weigh it, glue your stamp back on and then stamp your envelope with what you think is a postmark. The quality of this stamp, the darkness and alignment is a way of noting the amount of saliva the scrapers where able to get from you. You see saliva is the most important part of this whole process. Human saliva is what fairies live on, it’s their sustenance and their treat. You may think that the scrapers have a terrible job but in fact they are at the very top of the fairy hierarchy, they are the most trusted, dealing with all of that valuable spittle.

After your stamp is placed back onto the envelope with a light glue. Your letter is then past on to the logistical team. This is where things get a bit more complicated. How your particular letter is treated now depends on the postmark that was put on it by the scrapers (not at some “post office” or similar fable you might have heard). The letters that came in with the most saliva are treated with the highest priority. These posters are rewarded with quick reliable and unfaltering treatment, the very best logistical fairies are given these cases, these are the fairies that will one day be scrapers if they keep working hard.

The letters are sorted into a series of magical tubes and chutes, they’re intertwined and knotted and they run all through the town and across the countryside, underground and through building basements and attached to the bottom of bridges. They’re like a giant twisted pipe organ. You might be thinking that you’ve seen the post office people emptying the post boxes. Well of course you think you have, there are humans in on the system and they work very hard to keep up the façade and make people think that the mail is an orderly system controlled by people.

The main problem with the system, of course, is that not all fairies are created equally. There are some who are just about confused by this system as you and I might be, they put letters into chutes that go nowhere, or go in the wrong direction, or maybe just miss their intended destination narrowly. These letters mostly arrive eventually, not that many are lost. But this is why sometimes things seem to get lost in the post. It’s not a flaw in the postal system as such, the system works perfectly for those fairies who have managed to understand it fully, it’s only by the mistakes of the other fairies that things break down a little bit. They aren’t bad forever, you see a fairy doesn’t die, a fairy has a lot of time to perfect its job, eventually they manage to get their tiny little heads around the system. So if you look at it a different way, late mail is really only a learning process, it’s always improving. The only thing you can do to help is to play your part, the one part of the process that you’re in control of is how much postage you pay. So remember to lick your stamps generously, and maybe even leave a few drips coming out of the sticky part you close the envelope with, every little bit helps to get your letter delivered on time. 

Commuter

He waddles his way to the end of the platform, weaving around people and mostly going unnoticed. Once he’s at his quiet spot at the end he glances up to see the arrival time of the next train, two minutes. He stands patiently, looking at the advertising on the opposite side of the tunnel, his head cocked to one side as if he’s contemplating what it means and what it’s there for.

When the next train arrives he shuffles over towards the door, shying away slightly from the warm air pushed up from the tracks as the carriage squeezes along to a stop. One or two people come out through the door, then he hops over the gap (always mindful of it) and finds and empty spot in the corner. When the train shunts back into life he almost stumbles but manages to keep his balance.

The city goes on without him, some people chat, a lot of them read, most are listening to music on their headphones, and all of them are avoiding eye contact. So he goes undetected, standing in his uncrowded corner of the train, a curious look still on his face. When the train pulls into the next stop he’s almost thrown off balance again, then turns towards the door and hops out quickly before feet fall towards him from on the train and off.

He doesn’t head straight for the exit, instead just loiters near a bench for a few moments until most of the people have cleared out, heading to their offices or towards their errands for the day, or wherever else they might be going. When there’s a bit more space on the platform he decides it’s his window to leave, before another train and before the platform fills up with people waiting.

He flaps his wings and lifts himself towards the top of the tunnel that feeds the escalators up towards the surface of the city. He glides out of the station and into a square filled with other pigeons. Spotting his friends he lands and coos a few times, then gets stuck into the days pecking and scavenging, another day at the office for a timid commuter. 

Parking

My job is to take money from the people parking their scooters. It’s not a particularly exciting job, and I don’t think it’s ever going to make me rich. What it does allow me to do though is watch. I watch the people come and go, they’re on their way to business meetings, or to meet friends, or make deliveries. All of them have a story, all of them are going somewhere. Some have loaded up their scooter, others bounce lightly off and just take their selves to wherever it is they need to be.

Sitting on my little plastic stool, I like to lean back into the traffic whizzing past. I just imagine the lives of all of these people. Seemingly too many to all fit in one place. All of them going in a different direction, on a different time schedule. This isn’t the biggest city, I’ve been to the capital and yes, it’s bigger and the roads are wider and there are more people. But it doesn’t have the heartbeat that my city has. The pulse beats more strongly here.

The pulse of the city is what made me want to document it. I’m just the parking guy, so I don’t know what everyone is doing, I can’t document facts. What I can document is the aggregate of all of the little snapshots I see. Piece together the snippets from each passer by and stitch them together and make a story of the city. A story that isn’t about any single inhabitant of the city, but a story that is everyone in the city and no one in particular all at once. That’s how I started, it was a long way from the reason I had to stop.

This is a city with a history in squashing dissent. Those old political motivations are gone now though, it’s not about who is right, or about any ideology prevailing. Now it’s only about pride, it’s about image, and it’s about my story cutting a bit too close to the bone for the Prince.

Of course I didn’t start by telling my story to the Prince, that wouldn’t come for a long time. I started just telling my story to my friends. Over a bowl of noodle soup we’d sit and chat, entertain each other. It was in these convivial moods that my story telling started. In a city without radio or television it was just another way to keep our minds occupied. I’d put the pieces together that I’d seen, and I’d fill in the blanks as best I could. With a clean conscience, I wasn’t embellishing or trying to be scandalous. I wouldn’t shy away from scandal either; if I’d seen who was going off with an unmarried woman I’d mention it. In the abstract of course, we didn’t know these people, they were only characters in my mostly non-fictional narrative.

My friends loved it. They laughed at the funny things I’d seen, and they also felt sadness at some of the observations I made. There’s a lot of inequality in this city and often we ignore it if it isn’t pointed out to us again. My friends loved it so much that it became a regular feature of our gatherings. It wasn’t too long before they bought other friends, and then, as you can guess, friends of friends. And so on, until there were strangers coming to see me talk. I’d somehow become a storyteller in a city where there weren’t enough stories being told. More than enough stories were going on of course, I just happened to note them all down in my head and recount them for the pleasure of others.

I’d be overly modest if I told you that I didn’t enjoy those sessions. I got better and better at it, the telling came easier and I became more observant in my day to day life, soaking up more stories to entertain the crowds later that night. I still just told them as I’d seen them, maybe filling in the blanks in more detail than before, this was only because I was seeing more from my vantage point in the middle of the city. I was one man standing still amongst the hustle and the bustle, taking a mental note of the mundane drama that was unfolding unnoticed.

These nights became more successful over time. They were less impromptu and more planed. Instead of catching up with friends they became organised story telling nights. My friends would tell the people they knew when to come. The venue didn’t change, it was always the same old restaurant that I’d kept going back to. Now the old man sweating behind the soup pots would give me free soup before the stories now. I’d long been a good customer, but now, now I was bringing in more people that he could deal with. We’d let him know ahead of time when we were coming so he could organise for his brother-in-law to take the afternoon off from his job to help in the kitchen. There were more customers than he’d ever had. My story telling was more than keeping his business afloat. I’d brought a little bit of money to the chef in my favourite restaurant, that was one thing I have never regretted.

There was the occasional regret of course. From time to time I’d tell a story that offended someone. People would think I was talking about them, I almost never was. I’d scan the audience as I wolfed down my noodles and make sure I wasn’t preaching to the choir, so to speak. Not airing anyone’s dirty laundry in front of their friends. But people still thought I was talking about them. On more than one occasion I had two people shouting at me at the same time, telling me I’d been following them or had stolen their story or was setting out to shame them. They’d be in the same room, at the same time as someone else who thought I was talking about them, both shouting at me at the same time. Both unable to see that the stories are so universal that they aren’t anyone in particular, at the same time as they’re about all of us, about the whole city all at once.

That was the kind of situation that eventually led to the end. My “downfall” if I wanted to be dramatic. Honestly though, I don’t’ really want to be dramatic anymore, it’s got all too serious to be dramatic. Now, I just want to go back to the scooter parking and watch the world go gently by again.

These nights of mine became popular, more and more strangers would come, people from outside of my wider group of friends, and people who I hadn’t seen before. This made me a little bit nervous. Telling stories like I did, it wasn’t exactly forbidden, it’s just that there wasn’t any form of story telling that was expressly allowed. Back in the political times most forms of mass communication had been closed down or turned into channels of propaganda. As things settled down, nobody really challenged that. The city focussed more on the important things like food and shelter and life moved on without television, or radio, or theatre. Nobody missed it at first because they were too busy, and nobody missed it later on because they had been so long without it.

This situation suited the King at the time. While he is a good man at heart, he’s also a practical man. He wanted the city to settle back into life, he wanted his message to facilitate that. So he let things as they were.

These nights of mine, these performances, they weren’t illegal, but we all knew that they were unprecedented. That feeling of testing the waters is exciting, and that’s what kept me going I think. Looking back I do wonder if it might have been different if the Prince hadn’t have seen me when he parked his scooter one afternoon. If he hadn’t have seen me at the scooter park he wouldn’t have realised that I was the person telling the stories the night before. I wouldn’t have transformed from “a story teller” that he’s snuck off to see, into a servant – at least in his eyes I was a servant. I was the person who parked his bike, he recognised me and joined the dots. And like the others who’d mistaken my stories for theirs, he drew more lines than I’d intended.

The story itself wasn’t actually that scandalous. I didn’t mention royalty or rank or even come close to suggesting the Prince. The Prince was only one of the many important men who I’d see discreetly meeting women. Women who weren’t the princess, or the other men’s wives. It was a common theme in the city, and I’m sure in any city. But the guilty are paranoid and they see accusation in observation, even if the observation isn’t of them at all. I seriously wasn’t thinking of the Prince when I told that story. There’s a local law man who I see regularly, he’s famous enough in this town that people recognise him but not famous enough that he thinks he needs to be as discreet as the Prince is.

I tried to explain this to the Prince’s men on the night that they came and arrested me. They wouldn’t hear it, and why would they want to. Their boss is a man who isn’t known for his rationality or even-handedness. The second son who wants to be treated with the respect that his father has, but who is happy not to have any of the responsibility of his older brother. He’s essentially just a rich playboy with a chip on his shoulder and the job of these men is just to keep him happy. As far as they’re concerned justice has been done. I’ll just end up sitting here until they’re told by the Prince to let me go or, maybe worse. The biggest problem with that of course is that the Prince has probably already forgotten about me.

If I’m in here I’m not telling my stories and making perceived slights against the royal family, I’m a solved problem. In more political days I would’ve probably been some kind of martyr, built up to be more than I am and a cause to be fought for. I’m not though, I’m just a man sitting in a cell with no one to tell a story to, and no desire to even tell it anymore. The only story that I have now is my story. There isn’t a stream of stories running past me in here. I don’t see very many people at all now. So it’s only me, me and my story over and over again.