Pollution's arrival.
Time: March 17, 2003
Place: Near Lower Tadfield; Lower Tadfield
Status: Public
Summary: Pollution wanders into Lower Tadfield.
Motorists driving the highway that passes nearest to the tiny town of Lower Tadfield are bemused to see that where only yesterday there was nothing but dry, sour soil and oiled mud by the roadside, now are long, luxuriant fields of blowing flowers.
All of the flowers are white. Most of them are poisonous, and upon close examination one might suspect that they were far more poisonous than the rest of their species.
The occasional songbird, swinging perilously low on a warm down-draft across the road, sinks dreamily above a field of opium poppies, folds its wings, and falls. Tiny corpses fertilise the flowers, feathered ones and furred, spiders, too, and paper-like dead butterflies whose many-coloured wings sparkle in the rising sun. Snowy roses brandish long black thorns that weep with yellow venom. Here and there are little white mushrooms, amanitas...pale, soft, and deadly...here a Death's Cap, there a Destroying Angel. Every field is fringed in hedges of oleander.
A boy walking barefoot on the asphalt is picking the flowers as he passes them, humming faintly to himself in off-key to the tune of Mozart's Dies Irae. He is weaving the flowers into a crown; his long fragile fingers are sticky with toxic nectar and inflammable floral resins. His thin cotton clothes are the colour of the flowers, a shade or two paler than his fair skin, which is just a little paler than his tangled curls. He is the colour of a ghost but his flesh is nearly solid, nearly real. The beds of his dirty fingernails are dead white as a corpse's. His eyes are dove-grey with glowstick green trefoils around dilated pupils. The bottoms of his feet are black from the hot tar on the road.
When he finishes the crown and arranges it on his head, petals begin at once to scatter from it, though each blossom at his brow remains flawless and complete. The petals which fall flutter only for a moment before curling and shrivelling in the air, bursting into tiny flames. They leave greasy, black, smouldering stains on the ground, like melted plastic.
The closer Pollution comes to Lower Tadfield, the more the air around him trembles, wavers like a heat mirage. His cruel white flowers are growing sweeter at his side against his will, their thorns softening, their venom drying. Soon they will be only as poisonous as their garden-variety kin. He turns at last from the highway and begins down a narrow road that winds through verdant, lush forest and meadow, all as green and growing as Eden imagined by the pastoral painters. He pauses to look warily about himself, squirming a little as if his skin is sore.
He does not remember exactly how he came to be on the highway before the road. He has not seen his most frequent companions since the four of them failed to end the world one Saturday a month or a year or centuries ago. He is walking in this direction because he senses, somehow, that he may find them here, and because he has nothing more interesting to do. Because he is, as much as the personification of an abstract may be, just a little lonely, too.
Lower Tadfield is almost as he had remembered: horribly healthy; revoltingly clean; unnaturally natural; held under a snowglobe dome of flawless blue.
A heavy old building stands atop a hill in the town; it has a bright, vivid aura, something of a spiritual undertow. There are powerful beings here, some intriguing, some repulsive. Their comingled energies are iridescent and multicoloured, like spectra in a spill of oil. He cannot be sure, yet, but he thinks he sees a ribbon of incarnadine scarlet, woven through the aura like a bare artery. Could she have come here, too?
Smiling wryly, he walks up the path to the doors.
Place: Near Lower Tadfield; Lower Tadfield
Status: Public
Summary: Pollution wanders into Lower Tadfield.
Motorists driving the highway that passes nearest to the tiny town of Lower Tadfield are bemused to see that where only yesterday there was nothing but dry, sour soil and oiled mud by the roadside, now are long, luxuriant fields of blowing flowers.
All of the flowers are white. Most of them are poisonous, and upon close examination one might suspect that they were far more poisonous than the rest of their species.
The occasional songbird, swinging perilously low on a warm down-draft across the road, sinks dreamily above a field of opium poppies, folds its wings, and falls. Tiny corpses fertilise the flowers, feathered ones and furred, spiders, too, and paper-like dead butterflies whose many-coloured wings sparkle in the rising sun. Snowy roses brandish long black thorns that weep with yellow venom. Here and there are little white mushrooms, amanitas...pale, soft, and deadly...here a Death's Cap, there a Destroying Angel. Every field is fringed in hedges of oleander.
A boy walking barefoot on the asphalt is picking the flowers as he passes them, humming faintly to himself in off-key to the tune of Mozart's Dies Irae. He is weaving the flowers into a crown; his long fragile fingers are sticky with toxic nectar and inflammable floral resins. His thin cotton clothes are the colour of the flowers, a shade or two paler than his fair skin, which is just a little paler than his tangled curls. He is the colour of a ghost but his flesh is nearly solid, nearly real. The beds of his dirty fingernails are dead white as a corpse's. His eyes are dove-grey with glowstick green trefoils around dilated pupils. The bottoms of his feet are black from the hot tar on the road.
When he finishes the crown and arranges it on his head, petals begin at once to scatter from it, though each blossom at his brow remains flawless and complete. The petals which fall flutter only for a moment before curling and shrivelling in the air, bursting into tiny flames. They leave greasy, black, smouldering stains on the ground, like melted plastic.
The closer Pollution comes to Lower Tadfield, the more the air around him trembles, wavers like a heat mirage. His cruel white flowers are growing sweeter at his side against his will, their thorns softening, their venom drying. Soon they will be only as poisonous as their garden-variety kin. He turns at last from the highway and begins down a narrow road that winds through verdant, lush forest and meadow, all as green and growing as Eden imagined by the pastoral painters. He pauses to look warily about himself, squirming a little as if his skin is sore.
He does not remember exactly how he came to be on the highway before the road. He has not seen his most frequent companions since the four of them failed to end the world one Saturday a month or a year or centuries ago. He is walking in this direction because he senses, somehow, that he may find them here, and because he has nothing more interesting to do. Because he is, as much as the personification of an abstract may be, just a little lonely, too.
Lower Tadfield is almost as he had remembered: horribly healthy; revoltingly clean; unnaturally natural; held under a snowglobe dome of flawless blue.
A heavy old building stands atop a hill in the town; it has a bright, vivid aura, something of a spiritual undertow. There are powerful beings here, some intriguing, some repulsive. Their comingled energies are iridescent and multicoloured, like spectra in a spill of oil. He cannot be sure, yet, but he thinks he sees a ribbon of incarnadine scarlet, woven through the aura like a bare artery. Could she have come here, too?
Smiling wryly, he walks up the path to the doors.