Categories: uncategorized
Tags: created things
Date: 28 January 2006 21:57:00
There is a time in the middle of the morning when houses lie empty. Those who live there have upped themselves, scrubbed and readied and hotbellied out of the door. They've many of them had to do this in a strange kind of deliberate trance, because they all have certain parts of their minds which they don't look at. Memories of lost loved ones, mainly. A few months after a bereavement one has trained oneself not to think of the lost. Usually, anyway. Humans are naturally adapted to loss, having always had plenty of blindspots: we grow up never looking straight at the sun, an odd patch of sky forbidden to our gaze. How early we cease to consider it unusual that there are whole patches of sky nobody ever looks at. Similarly we don't consciously avoid thinking of the dead. We just develop odd little blindspots. Where once a particular moment of the day would have meant little warm bodies running and jumping into bed with their parents, now it's passed over without comment. There is no sign, no locked door, no large unavailable area - the instant simply passes superhurried, the day immediately goes from sleep to waking, never again to suffer the daily realisation that welcomed those first few screaming, mouthless mornings. So we do not lie in bed any more, letting our thoughts drift. We are up and on with the day. Once the hurriedmen are off for the day, the houses fall quiet. Some do not, of course, but those are different cases as we shall see presently. For the most part an unquiet silence settles on still living rooms. The house is not desolate, the evidence of life is all around - but the heat has left. The central heating turns off at 8.30am, just as the last of us leave for work. And across the houses, across the city, the pervasive cold that is their rightful condition falls. Cold. COLD. This is where the ghosts are.