Mist by Kim Farleigh
7.37: Apartment-block tops lost in mist; golden streetlights glowing; trees reshaped by vapour; stop sign blurred in shark-grey; distances cut by cold.
7.38: Woman emerges from mist: wool, fur, denim, everything covered except her alert irises — those allusions to passion amid metronomic routine.
7.39: Her perfect shape vaporises in vaporous obscurity; he goes in the opposite direction. Such is life.
The “Muslim”: beautiful. Reliably on time.
Engines rush; serious faces on mist-shortened footpaths. Mondays unleash dread by maximizing mundaneness after weekend pleasures, sharp, unwanted changes our punishment for existing.
7.40: Usual woman of shaking follicles sweeps at same time and place. Smooth, olive skin. Sexy Street Sweeper, sweeping in her green and yellow uniform.
7.43: Metro platform: Usual bright-eyed man at the same place, hair, as usual, wet from the morning shower, hands, as usual, in tracksuit pockets, and, as always, he's sprightly, curious, observing, enthusiastic amid metronome turgidity, unperturbed by repeated customs: The Sprightly One.
7.45: Train arrives; people before opening doors charge, ruthlessly chasing comfort, fanged eyes pursuing spare seats, other pleasures pursued more warily.
7.56: Destination: Same face above same escalator — the shortest adult not considered to be a dwarf. “Face-to-face” with six-foot men, her mouth faces waists: reddish hair; triangular face: Shorty McGowan.
7.58: Air outside Metro cold, treetops in grey. Apartment-block tops obscured.
8.00: She of gait frenetic is, as usual, approaching, hair bouncing, tight skirt causing short, rapid steps, desired apparel clashing with desirable punctuality, result: restricted, fast, stress-ridden steps, preparations prejudicing punctuality; she struggles down this street in high heels five days a week in the worst possible attire for speed, stressed out: Fractious Beauty Queen.
8.05: Same black dog, wearing its usual red scarf, waddles like a fluffy log, legs like inflexible stumps, graceless as if operated by remote control, swaying, straight-legged, clip-clopping paws loudening, fur-covered eyes: Giant Dog Spider. Only difference, he contemplates, between it and a spider is that it’s got four legs.
8.07: She, he thinks, with black tracksuit bottoms will soon reach that road just before I reached it in five minutes, another cog in responsibility’s clock.
8.12: She emerges from mist, fresh-faced, hair tied back, shapely hips in same tight pants. As usual, she passes oblivious. Had she seen a picture of him, she would have been unable to identify him, too lost in self: Oblivious Curvy One.
8.13: Jean Claude: frizzy, reddish hair; intense eyes, pale skin, round chin, brooding, disillusioned, as usual, he looks away, distaining scum. If Jean Claude and I were introduced he’d know who I was. He’d think: He’s that prick I see at 8.13 every workday at the same place with the same stupid look on his dumb face — every, single time — the same thick look — wearing the same bland clothes on the same days of the week — the arsehole!
8.16: Fluffy Radar Ears is as usual at the park’s gate beside the office: Enormous, pointy ears, long snout, eager eyes, always facing from where his best friend, a German shepherd, comes with a woman who wears the same lurid clothing that matches her curly, purple-white hair. Foreboding disenchantment, induced by ruminating about impending, undesirable tasks, distorts perspective: seeing an enthusiastic FRE, he concludes that spoilt dogs are sufficiently unintelligent to be unaffected by imagination’s distractions and sufficiently emotionally complex to receive an emotional fulfilment disproportionate to their limited intellects. And they don’t have to work! Our intellects are just sufficiently developed to ensure consistent, subliminal misery — a rational response to pointlessness — something embodied by Jean Claude, who acknowledges absurdity with the same intensity that a religious fanatic imagines paradise. Dissatisfaction streams from JC's French demeanour like a polluted stream.
8.18: Office lift. Third floor: same three guys as always enter. As usual, they say: “Hello.” As usual, they stand in the same positions with the same body language, and as usual, they say “Bye” on leaving. They always enter in the same order. Opera Singer, the biggest, goes first: OS’s stomach curves from pelvis to chin. He always backs up against the lift’s buttons and folds his arms; his friends always stand at right angles to him; always, football, accompanied by schoolboy cackling, dominates conversation.
8.19: Office: Same people in same partitioned compartments staring at same computer screens with same deadpan expressions, difficult deciding what has more imagination — the computers or the people.
8.20: Sits, but can’t remain seated for long. Insanity induced by mental torture prevents this; job: repeating the same actions — over and over — in ten-minute periods. At clock-out time relief matches demotivation, hazed world denuded of inspiration.
Going home: Same wistful yawns amid banality-induced dourness. Whistling train high-pitched drills through earth, occasional interesting glances crushed by normality's repressing weight.
Accepting disappointment and failure separates mood from despair, creating dry acceptance of life’s monotonous, eccentric nature.
Time for more failure; he had been out once with a woman who called him too didactic. He rang her to hear her excuse for avoiding him. Her “sister” was “arriving in town. A lot of time” would have “to be spent with her,” meeting hence impossible “now.”
After listening to distracting music, he sets the alarm clock and sleeps. Interior worlds differ daily, their unpredictability free of restricting judiciaries.
Alarm clock halts dreams. Morose disbelief abounds.
The Muslim’s beauty remains remarkable. Sexy Street Cleaner’s bottom curves her overalls with delicious salaciousness. Sprightly One’s eyes glint with mysterious contentment. FBQ’s mouth epitomises her character: a puffed-up triangle of pouting flesh. Giant Dog Spider lumbers upon a footpath cord in a concrete web, the only dog, he thinks, that doesn’t move his head. Owner: Lurid Spiderwoman.
Shock! Oblivious Curvy One not in usual black tracksuit bottoms, but tight jeans! Frond decorates forehead for first time! In love? Hence even more oblivious?
Jean Claude’s disdainfully slanting nose and withering glance increases respect for JC’s inspirational dissatisfaction.
Jean de Belligerent Bergerac.
Fluffy-Radar-Ears coat shines gilded in morning light; electric lustre encases that black fluffiness. As usual, FRE exudes flopping-pink-tongued, expectant eagerness. Tongue shoots out when seeing German shepherd.
Opera Singer is unshaven. Tie half undone. Backing up against lift buttons and folding his arms, OS jokes about the incompetence of a footballer who had once played for a team that one of his workmates supports. Then usual bonding cackles.
Office: way in: “Bill, Stan, Reg, Norma, Karen, Tony, Julia, Fred.” Then, ten forgettable hours later: “Fred, Julia, Tony, Karen, Norma, Reg, Stan, Bill.”
Next day: Amusement flickers Muslim’s eyes when acknowledging the silliness of two people passing each other at the same time on the same footpath slab each workday with nobody else around.
Sexy Street Cleaner sweeps near Metro entrance. Curves curve her overalls, like boomerangs in gloves, magnifying frustration. Sprightly One’s sprightliness possesses a certain ruggedness — a bit unshaven, hair a little longer than it needs to be, a positive indifference to fashion; his gaze never fixes on anything, happy to be in the ordered regularity that enrages Jean Claude.
Shorty McGowan on the escalators smiles, unconcerned by her midget height. He thinks: Probably uncomfortable having your feet off the floor when sitting on the toilet, but doubts this bothers redoubtable Shorty. Maybe she’s installed a special midget toilet after Jean Claude-like frustration became overwhelming?
FBQ scurries, glancing at her watch, no philosophical distance between her consciousness and world’s physical reality: non-Jean Claude. Physical reality, for her, is reality. She would call me crazy and Jean Claude boring; dripping with Material Age accoutrements, she gives the impression her holidays — her deliberate displacements — are intricately planned to avoid the Horror of the Unexpected.
Observation, he surmises, is creation, distracting me from being a prisoner of pointless pragmatism.
Jean Claude’s wistful, pained glance, like a tormented poet’s, suggests overburdening by life’s featureless landscape. Hunch-shouldered, his face accuses everyone of promoting schemes insensitive to his delicate considerations.
Fluffy Radar Ear fluffy bottom covers its usual spot.
If only, he thinks, I had FRE’s eagerness for life.
Opera Singer has straightened his tie.
Our protagonist thinks: If Shorty McGowan was confronted by The Giant Dog Spider, she’d think: It’s a baby mammoth!
Then: “Bill, Stan, Reg, Norma, Karen, Tony, Julia, Fred.” Then ten forgettable hours later: “Fred, Julia, Tony, Karen, Norma, Reg, Stan, Bill.”
Muslim avoids eye contact. Sexy Street Cleaner sweeps with her usual gusto. Sprightly One observes with pleasant curiosity. Shorty McGowan chortles with a friend. Fractious Beauty Queen stomps, glancing at her watch. Giant Dog Spider plods robotically. Spiderwoman stares zombie-like. Oblivious Curvy One looks into the distance. Sees nothing. Jean Claude grimaces, stabbed by shards of metaphysical anguish. FRE’s eyes gleam with laser intensity above a floppy, pink tongue. Opera Singer sidles into the lift and says: “Hello.” Then: “Bill, Stan, Reg, Norma, Karen, Tony, Julia, Fred.” Then: “Fred, Julia, Tony, Karen, Norma, Reg, Stan, Bill.”
Metro: People, staring blindly, unleash jaw-wrenching yawns. Polite-greedy battles for seats provide pleasing glimpses of the repressed wildness underpinning this staidness whose purpose is to eliminate mishaps.
Something covers The Muslim’s shoulders: a man! — The Opera Singer. She hurls him onto the footpath. He sprawls spreadeagled, his stomach a small hill rising from pavement. She stands above him, screaming: “You should be ashamed of your dissolution!”
Shorty McGowan bounces on a bench, heaving with hilarity, yelling: “Floored Fatty Flipped on Footpath by Flipping Fundamentalist.”
Jean Claude's dry cackling emerges from a dark doorway; he says: “Sweet move, baby.” Smoke from a cigarette in the corner of his mouth curls into invisibility. He plucks the cigarette from his lips and adds: “Principles, baby, you’ve got ‘em, character before wealth and fame, unusual these days; yar boyfriend must be a hell of a guy.”
Shorty McGowan grows wings, flies over Giant Dog Spider who shows no reaction.
“It’s a fairy-tale,” Shorty says, landing on the dog’s back. “Look, the fairy princess is riding her noble mammoth; life, life, life, a fantastic joke.”
Oblivious Curvy One, walking by, doesn’t realise she has passed a tiny, happy-go-lucky woman riding a blind dog that wobbles upon fluffy tree stumps.
“Hey, kid,” Jean Claude says, addressing Oblivious Curvy One, “get your old man to look up the word ‘eyesight.’”
Muslim places a foot on Opera Singer’s chest.
“Try getting up,” she says, “and I’ll use your fat carcass to turn this pavement into gravel.”
Jean Claude slaps a wall with thrilled fascination.
“World class, baby,” he says. “With you in town, who needs to go to a war zone?”
Fluffy Radar Ears licks Muslim’s face, demanding orders: “Order me, order me. Why should Caruso have all the fun? Why? Why? Why?”
“Hey, mutt,” Jean Claude says, “back off. What d’ya think she is? A German shepherd?”
Fractious Beauty Queen spears “Caruso’s” stomach with her high heels, too self-absorbed to notice stepping on a prostrate man; her broken eyes gaze despairingly, mouth twisted, screaming: “My mascara’s running!”
“Hey, baby,” Jean Claude says, “if you think that’s a disaster, try seeing what happens when a mortar round cleans up a schoolyard.”
Sexy Street Cleaner tries to remove “Caruso” off the street.
“Shift your arse!” she says.
“But,” Caruso protests, “I’ve been told if I get up my body’ll be used to turn this pavement into gravel.”
“Oh,” Sexy Street Cleaner sighs, “you opera singers! Always thinking life’s dramatic. Get up. I’m a woman in uniform, so now you’re taking orders from me.”
“The Council,” Jean Claude says, “has spoken.”
Then: sound mallet. Skies in the real world bluer than their internal counterparts, a hard, indifferent, impenetrable, impartial azure of sapphire distance. He hammers the alarm clock. Physical objects throb. Hard edges slowly appear. All this trouble, he thinks, for what?
Not so bad outside — only repressed, uninspiring, predictable, no Shorty McGowans bouncing on benches, no athletic women flattening obese men, no amused metaphysicians commenting on exotic contingencies, no winged creatures riding docile dogs, no fractious women tormented by damaged make-up, no surreal re-enactments of movie scenes. No real life, only abundant commonality.
Metro's escalator's metallic, military rhythm accompanies clomping, marching heels, expressionless, single-file people plodding, army-like, towards tedium.
Office: people, facing computers, resemble auxiliary units to lifeless entities. He laughs at this, units bemused by his mirth.
He enters the office kitchen, laughing. Units smirk at each other, confused by his hilarity, before reconnecting with machines.
On TV, after winning the lottery, he says: “If daily life was exciting winning this would be meaningless. Lottery winners who keep working should have the money taken away from them for insulting life.”
Politicians demand the station never airs that speech again.
Kim Farleigh has worked for NGO's in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine and Macedonia. He takes risks to get the experience necessary for writing. He also likes painting, art, bullfighting, photography and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. He has received 216 acceptances from over 100 different literary magazines.