Afterlude
AFTERLUDE CHAIN OF OFFICE With a splash of sunlight to the cheeks Spring Boroughs basked, enjoying one of its more glamourous and less hungover mornings. Saturday dusted dilapidated balconies with cautious optimism, the persisting sense of a respite from school or work even in those attending neither. May brewed in the scruffy verges. Chalk Lane’s elderly stone wall bounding the former paupers’ cemetery was an abattoir of poppies, while just up the way a jumble sale assembly clotted on the daycare center’s slope. The district preened; no oil painting but from the right angle still as pretty as a picture. Scuffing down across the balding mound from Castle Hill, Mick Warren trickled as an off-white bead to merge into the human pigment pooled about the nursery door, quickly surrounded by a turquoise swirl of sister and the largely neutral spatter of her friends. Alarming Mic... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 11 : Go See Now This Cursed Woman
GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN Viewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday, May the 26th, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts with their dreams. Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters, flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the worl... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 10 : The Jolly Smokers
THE JOLLY SMOKERS Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent, Ground to which he feels no entitlement Nor any purchase on the sullen street; Unpeels his chill gray cheek from chill gray stone Then orients himself in time and space. The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor With on one wall some obsolete decree Meant for the Cypriot community And at the near end an iron-studded door, A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face, Or that of some more academic tome. He struggles up onto one threadba... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 9 : The Rood in the Wall
THE ROOD IN THE WALL It’s what you’d call a first-draft face, after the angry and frustrated crumpling. It’s a private eye face, it’s Studs Goodman’s thug-and-bourbon-battered figurehead cresting the dirty suds and breakers of another dead-end town, a burned-out world as fallen as his arches. This is how it plays, the gumshoe life, the endless waiting between cases sitting by a blinded window in the slatted light. These empty stretches with no homicides, they’re murder. Studs takes a deep, satisfying drag upon his biro. Puckering those cruel and crooked lips into a sphincter he exhales a writhing genie of imaginary smoke into the hyphenated sunrays, and considers how the bone-dry periods of his chosen trade must be like those endured by people of a thespian persuasion. Studs, a seriously addicted heterosexual trying to cut down upon a forty-dames-a-day vagina habit, has no time for... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 8 : Cornered
CORNERED to judge, that’s what keeps going round and round with me well I suppose you could say I believe that everyone should have the benefit of what’s the phrase, I worry sometimes when I can’t remember things, benefit of the doubt, there, everyone should have it well not everybody obviously not some of them round here, with them what they should have it’s more doubt of the benefit in my opinion you take her, the one with stripy hair Bath Street St. Peter’s House I think she lives you see her on Crane Hill up from the Super Sausage black girl well not black mixed race, from what I hear she’s on the lot the benefits the crack the game part of the pond-life the Monk’s Pond-life I should say I mean it’s not her fault up to a point and if you’re from a disadvantaged background then statistically it’s like predestination how you end up but I still think and perhaps I’m... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Mental Fights
MENTAL FIGHTS Scrambling up out of the crook-door after Phyllis Painter, all the ringing uproar of the Works – its scale and color and especially the niff of Phyllis’s putrescent scarf – hit Michael Warren squarely in the mush. The factory floor that the Dead Dead Gang had emerged onto, big as an airdrome and flooded with a pearly light from its improbably high windows, hummed with purposeful activity. Builders were everywhere, on ladders and on gantries, striding back and forth with scrolls and sheaves of documents, calling instructions to each other in a language where each syllable flowered to an intricate and lyric garden. Clad in wooden sandals, wearing plain robes of soft pigeon-gray that had a hint of green or purpl... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Flatland
FLATLAND Reginald James Fowler was the beautifully-written name upon the only two certificates he’d ever been awarded, which were the same two that everyone got, just for turning up. He’d been called Reggie Bowler ever since Miss Tibbs had got his name wrong, reading out the register on his first day at school. The actual hat had come much later, and he’d only started wearing it to fit in with the name. He’d found it, with his much-too-big, perpetually-damp overcoat, among the rubbish on the burial ground near Doddridge Church, when he’d been sleeping there just after his twelfth birthday. He’d already had the dream by then, of Miss Tibbs holding up a book called The Dead Dead Gang with an overcoat-and-bo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Blind, but Now I See
BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE The mark of a great man, way Henry figured it, was in the way he’d gone about things while he was still living, and the reputation that he left behind when he was gone. That’s why he weren’t surprised to find out that Bill Cody would be represented to Eternity as a roof-ornament made out of grubby stone that birds had done their business on. When he’d glanced up and seen the face raised from the orange brickwork on the last house in the row, carved on some sort of plaque up near its roof, at first he’d took it for the Lord. There was the long hair and the beard and what he’d thought to be a halo, then he’d seen it was a cowboy hat if you was looking up from underneath the brim, ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A Cold and Frosty Morning
A COLD AND FROSTY MORNING Alma Warren, barely out of bed and naked in the monstrous bathroom mirror, staring bleary at her sagging fifty-three-year-old flesh and still fancying herself something rotten. She finds her enduring vanity almost heroic in the scale of its delusion. She’s prepared to face the facts, safe in the knowledge that the facts will only scream and run away. All things considered, she’s a funny piece of work. The big square bathroom with its plaster-rounded corners is a blunted cube of gray steam rising from the eight-foot chasm of the filling tub, an ostentatious lifeboat made from tide-lined fiberglass. Subjected to this sweltering rain-forest climate every morning for at least ten years the chamber’s b... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Round the Bend
ROUND THE BEND Awake, Lucia gets up wi’ the wry sing of de light. She is a puzzle, shore enearth, as all the Nurzis and the D’actors would afform, but nibber a cross word these days, deepindig on her mendication and on every workin’ grimpill’s progress. Her arouse from drowse is like a Spring, a babboling book that gorgles up amist the soils o’ sleep, flishing and glattering, to mate the mournin’ son. Canfind in this loquation now she gushes and runs chinkling from her silt and softy bed, pooring her harp out down an illside and aweigh cross the old manscape to a modhouse brookfast. Ah, what a performance, practiced and applausible. She claps her hands, over her ears, to drone out all the deadful wile-ing... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)