Signs
It was the obvious signs that he noticed first: Twenty-four tiny, regular bubbles forming a letter J floating amongst the semi-submerged pans, plates and cutlery in the kitchen sink.
That evening he was presented with a whorl of tissue in the toilet bowl bearing an uncanny resemblance to his mother-in-law’s bad tempered terrier.
Once he’d seen a couple he began to see them everywhere.
Following a week of overheard telephone conversations, billboards glanced through the steamed up windows of the train to work and the improbable wandering of a favourite pen (a gift from his eldest) the man contemplated his own sanity. An active sceptic he’d always sneered at his mother’s superstitions, or clucked disinterestedly along to his wife’s weekly horoscope predictions. Fears of the unknown stilled by tales of the intangible. Well, that’s what he thought.
But these things were there, solid and real. The spilt sugar he’d pushed around with a deliberate index finger, feeling the coarse grains against his skin. The newspaper he’d been able to pick up and smooth out, transforming it’s abstract instruction into an innocuous (if typically doom-laden) headline. The signs were real, but his sensible mind couldn’t shake the improbability of what was happening.
It never really felt like a supernatural thing, these weren’t spirits whispering from the other side, the signs were far bigger than that. Whether they were creation’s cogs, muttered calculations for what would be, or whether they were echoes from a future universe he was never sure but clearly there was some truth in them. Admittedly it was a sideways, half glanced kind of truth, and more often not, even as he became more adept at recognising the signs themselves, their actual meaning remained frustratingly opaque.
None the less, as time ambled onward and the signs showed no intention of abating the man began to slowly string together a web of relations, contexts and meaning. The structure was loose and unpredictable, but like a shoal’s silver flutters there was an apparent collective intent. Though occasionally signs spoke independently, typically they were part of a sequence or combination. Often sets of signs would overlap and it was only after they’d passed he would be able to see how they meshed together and what they meant.
Not that they said anything directly. Certainly there were no insights he would bet on. Not the he was a betting man and certainly not the type to bet on evidence gleaned from pooled coffee in a cupless saucer left outside the office canteen. He never told a soul, though often those around him were affected by his interpretations and actions. The signs were there, he could show them, collect them, save them up but there was one element they needed to to give them meaning, an essential and irreplacable part of the mechanism the thought of which kept awake at night.
Lucky for me, he thought, that haven’t yet chosen to tell of anything more important than a delayed train or an unexpected phone call.
That evening he was presented with a whorl of tissue in the toilet bowl bearing an uncanny resemblance to his mother-in-law’s bad tempered terrier.
Once he’d seen a couple he began to see them everywhere.
Following a week of overheard telephone conversations, billboards glanced through the steamed up windows of the train to work and the improbable wandering of a favourite pen (a gift from his eldest) the man contemplated his own sanity. An active sceptic he’d always sneered at his mother’s superstitions, or clucked disinterestedly along to his wife’s weekly horoscope predictions. Fears of the unknown stilled by tales of the intangible. Well, that’s what he thought.
But these things were there, solid and real. The spilt sugar he’d pushed around with a deliberate index finger, feeling the coarse grains against his skin. The newspaper he’d been able to pick up and smooth out, transforming it’s abstract instruction into an innocuous (if typically doom-laden) headline. The signs were real, but his sensible mind couldn’t shake the improbability of what was happening.
It never really felt like a supernatural thing, these weren’t spirits whispering from the other side, the signs were far bigger than that. Whether they were creation’s cogs, muttered calculations for what would be, or whether they were echoes from a future universe he was never sure but clearly there was some truth in them. Admittedly it was a sideways, half glanced kind of truth, and more often not, even as he became more adept at recognising the signs themselves, their actual meaning remained frustratingly opaque.
None the less, as time ambled onward and the signs showed no intention of abating the man began to slowly string together a web of relations, contexts and meaning. The structure was loose and unpredictable, but like a shoal’s silver flutters there was an apparent collective intent. Though occasionally signs spoke independently, typically they were part of a sequence or combination. Often sets of signs would overlap and it was only after they’d passed he would be able to see how they meshed together and what they meant.
Not that they said anything directly. Certainly there were no insights he would bet on. Not the he was a betting man and certainly not the type to bet on evidence gleaned from pooled coffee in a cupless saucer left outside the office canteen. He never told a soul, though often those around him were affected by his interpretations and actions. The signs were there, he could show them, collect them, save them up but there was one element they needed to to give them meaning, an essential and irreplacable part of the mechanism the thought of which kept awake at night.
posted by Sookraj at 1:50 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home