The piano plays a recurring theme, though it is not excatly recurring. It is an example of who were are right now. We are wandering. We do the same things over and over without question. We are stained by the purpose. The purpose is to stay the same. We can create, whilst we are here, but nothing we create will last outside of where we are. It is a box. Sealed. To break out of what we are is to be not what we are. For the splinters may ahnnihilate us.
Shambal appears more tired than he’d ever seen him. His friend is weary beyond years. We are beyond years, he thinks. The disconsolate darkness we just left behind was our death - or our passing.
A feeling of loss crosses his face. Shambal notices, and like a yawn, begins to share the same expression. He sits erect in a wooden chair. It is time to begin asking questions.
We seem to be the only ones in our chosen place of beverage seeking.
But they both hear a shuffle from behind a translucent wall. A shadow shuffles, magnifies and recedes. Perfume wafts through the room.
You are wrong, as usual, you leprous swine. A serving wench will soon arrive to bring us surely anything we desire. I smell her stench.
You have no idea how much money threw into the void on sweet scents for my ex-woman.
Your EX-WOMAN? You sure she’s not around here somewhere, that Karla? Hey! Perhaps it is here behind yonder bulkhead!
Look, shitface. Don’t fuck with me. It was a learning experience. I’ve moved on. I’m a better person because of it.
The shadow flickers and flits, glides and morphs. A tentacle extends towards the partition. The partition is translucent. The tentacle seems to be an arm. The arm grows appendages. One begins tracing curves on the partition. Shambal’s jaw quakes.
If it is Karla, then she is about to pronounce the fate of my existence on yonder blue-green glass.
I don’t think it is glass, scum-boy.
No? It’s frosted something.
I think it is simply mist. Her fingers will poke through and trace caustic symbols. They’ll assail you with their power. You’ll once again become her slave. Maybe there’s another rock around here for you to get absorbed into.
A lone clarinet begins to play. It is a recording. They recognize that. The source is hard to discern, though. The sound seems to come from everywhere. Or perhaps it eminates from them.
A piano stumbles into the room. He thinks of a man shuffling. Each chord is a step. They are erratic. Instead of a determined straight line, the course zig-zags and turns without warning. The man reaches a barrier and must turn either right or left. He chooses one. Shambal breaks this reverie.
Is there only right or left? What if we had chosen one of those instead of straight? Would we not be here at this café, but instead still lost in the shroud? Do you hear the music?
I know the music. It is the music of constriction. We are constricted to worlds we have conceived throughout our lives. As we grow older, they grow smaller. Do you hear the piano? The chords are footsteps. Do you hear the right angles?
Shambal ponders this:
The steps are more even. The rhythm seems to have purpose now. At first it was like they were of a child learning to walk. Now that child is older. But now I hear that he repeats his steps again and again with only minor variations.
Yes, he retraces his path because he is constrained to a single world. He is in the process of creating that world. The occasional deviations are a fleshing out. Like all of us, we eventually carve a niche and stay only in that niche because safety, or should I say, security, is what we are created to crave from birth.
A pudgy sausage of flesh pierces the bulkhead. Or, rather, it appears to them that it does because the transluscence becomes wholly trasparent at that one point. The pinkish flab moves slowly at first, picking up pace and confidence with each stroke.
Backwards, from either incompetence or scorn, it is writing a menu for them onto the partition.
