The City

The city is the mirror of the maze of the self.

The White Butterflies

The orbiter had left its scar decades before, soon after the lid came down.  He sat in the broad clearing surrounded by a halo of the white butterflies that seemed to thrive for no reason at that particular spot, along with the dragonflies.  They were like white leaves or a snowy autumn; off to one side two children were playing on a fallen tree.   Two South African ridge backs barked at his stony demeanour.

Kho 1

He was sitting facing the rear.  He was staring into the panel of the rearward Plexiglas window.  In the black of the evening outside people were reflected behind him.  Two old women sitting side by side, and - about seven feet - three seats - back - a young girl staring vacantly at the ceiling.  On a side seat sat a student-type with a rucksack.  Beyond the glass there was an identical vehicle following close on, shadowing, as if it were a kind of memory of the first in which he sat, collected with the luggage of his journey and on his way to his new home.  The driver was visible through the screen’s oblate facade, moustached, carefully turning the wheel to and fro.  He had his lower lip pressed against his upper; reminding the passenger of a photo of himself taken some years before,  his expression disconsolate, the cheeks beetroot red, the lips down-turned.  He watched the driver, wondering if he were being ignored deliberately out of nerves, or if he couldn’t in fact be seen.  The window behind which the driver performed his fixed manoeuvres was itself a reflection of the vehicle in front of it, where he was sitting, and there too was the unreeling passage of the road and trees passing shown as on a river; the tarmac turned into a liquid, the white and yellow lines of its surface like logs, artificial, abstract; miraculously swept into an upwards stream.

Col 13

[CENSORED]

Kohl 12

On the wall hung a picture.  It was a photo of Mars, a planet in the Solar system.  It was taken about a foot above the ground and showed apparently an undulating plain of sand encircling the rim of a crater.  He took that on trust.  You couldn’t really tell what you were looking at just by looking at the picture but the colours were still pleasing.  A living desert.

Khol 17

Turning to the keyboard again he resumed typing.  I should explain, I mean ‘typing’ not typing because he preferred that (as a lot of people still do secretly) to the mere act of telepathy which in his experience was inexplicably tiring; the process of staring into space for long periods and ‘thinking’ the words perhaps taking up a form of nervous energy that evolution had ill prepared the body for; where even just moving the fingers over imaginary keys provided a measure of somatic relief.

Khol-71 Notes

Looking across the sparse forest on the long sloping rise to the horizon, to the east, he realised there must be a road that topped a hill, because periodically, in the red and grey twilight, a single sustained gleam would appear and then disappear: the headlights of a car or lorry.  He wondered why he had never noticed it before in the smallness of that vast extent.