spielraum prophet

Today is a perfect day. About to become a partner, about to spend five weeks in Italy, about to sort out my finances. When I get back, I will get healthy and fit for summer. This is a perfect day.

Gold has been considered universal but it did lie upon the ground, unregarded for forty thousand years. Right now it is a distant third to fresh water and meat in the Spring of the new world. Important but no substitute for the stuff of survival. Skins and bones and furs, ploughshares beaten into spears, communal justice dealt here weekly, and just now word of the eating of human flesh in the outlands. This is what becomes of our hunger. May the God of the Starving Dog have mercy on our souls.

He was always a success, and it seemed reasonable to assume that he would be successful in this new endeavour as well. As it happened he had underestimated the particularities of politics and the specifics of the craft, assuming, one supposes, that they did not take time to master. In Malcolm’s world success had always bred success. In retrospect this view was not confident so much as arrogant.

Surprisingly, arrogance was not enough. It may have been enough for successful banking, where the framework for the exchange is established by mutual consent, generally because everyone at the table will win one way or another. Malcolm has discovered that politics is a different affair, one that admits neither rule nor consent, mutual or otherwise.

The best thing he could do in light of all this is to take a stand, returning to the backbench on the basis of a personal principle. Strategic withdrawal as a precursor to a renewed forward thrust.

It came back. No waiting.

A third time coming and the wave might have dragged him out but he was quick on his feet. He wouldn’t be swept away that easily. I’m talking about waves here, not fucking cancer. The cancer came and went. The waves would continue to break, long after we are all dead and gone.

Another reason, that’s what he said he wanted. Another reason to forget that afternoon. It was a red enamel brooch with emeralds set into the border, which was lacy with a silver filigree.
She had found the brooch in the dust just after lunch, and she knew immediately it was part of the Knights Band livery.

She had been wrong, though, he wasn’t dead in oh-seven. He was still on the oyster beds back then, I remember seeing him there myself.

What? No, not right then. But it was soon after that he saw her go.

She had been away but now she was back. Thirteen cent shoes from the happy shop, Maud still smiling away down there at the Bluff. Summer was gone, though, and the salt wind was already cutting through her scarf in the mornings. Time for Jim’s breakfast, she supposed.

In fact it had no moving parts at all. The original team had hit it with different types of radiation, just to see what would happen. They put in a vault for this. The answer, of course, was not a lot happened.
Nothing, that is, apart from the phenomenon that had drawn attention to the artefact in the first place: it made chairs move. Unlikely as it seemed, when placed in a room with a chair of any description, the artefact appeared to cause that chair to move. The motion of the chair would be slow, but consistent in every case – with any variation attributable to air density, pressure, humidity and the localised gravitational variation commensurate with altitude above sea level.
Perhaps you don’t quite understand what I mean: only chairs would move. Single seat chairs of any description.

Her answer was no: simply that. Ann was a tart, she said. The cactus wasn’t appropriate, in that it was, perhaps, too apt; she wasn’t an educated woman, but she would see that immediately. And seeing it, her reaction would be immediate and the fallout enduring. She would narrow her eyes, thinly blowing smoke at the ceiling – and he knew it would not be forgotten.