Pink Kolmteist
On slowly sloping hills where mägi house themselves, the grass grows in arbitrary blotches.
Shambal clutches the blanket around his shoulders with one hand. The other holds an old, wilted journal open between his legs. The stained blanket falls all about him. It’s his only protection from the chill. His proper clothing has long since rotted in the closet without a door. The resulting nest is a home for a mouse named Murida. She is saved for another story, however.
The entry in the journal he keeps rereading reminds him of those blotches. A hill with twin cemeteries rises above a town in his mind. The town is like a village, even if over one hundred thousand occupants might say otherwise. To Shambal, village is a spirit that inhabits a place and not a measurement of area or population.
He wants to trasform his putrescent blanket into new and shiny threads so he can board the train round the corner. He’d order a glass of white wine. He’d order another. He’d smoke a cigarette in the dining car. Later on a bit, he’d vomit into the rattling toilet. These thoughts are happiness to him.
He clutches the cloth tighter to his body. It is a new skin plastered to his old one.
If a blue flag (fluttering) means safety and a green flag (furled) signifies capitulation, then which flag (and which state) denotes synergy?
On each grave in the muslim cemetery is a green flag. Death is a sort of capitulation, after all. He squats in front of one and speaks in a low voice in a language the stone knows. The flag shivers. The grave denies him entrance.
He’d be buried there. That, rather than dissolving into a salty sea, he muses. He wants to turn the page of the journal, but is unable. He wants to board the train. It may be too late.
If this is his elongation, then he partially understands why the page cannot be turned. He is left to scrutinize the words and creep down the page more and more slowly. Surely there is a haiku at the end. They are his curse, those wretched poems. The lower half of his face cracks into a smirk when he realizes that he’ll never have to finish it. Lastly, he’ll be floating between the particles of penmanship of the final syllables.
Perhaps a fusion of consciousness is the summation of these eternities.
Shambal gets up to make a sandwich.
