Golden Current 3: Richards House / Rain

Before leaving for Romamor, Rune, Ishcah and Benou all lived in the attic room of Richard's house. It was a narrow house with three floors joined together by steep staircases, not a lighthouse or even a plant pot with three aster daisies. Ishcah and Benou shared a bed and Rune slept in a little hovel of belongings; beneath the eave beside the bed. It was a small room, all the rooms were small and crowded. It had a skylight window which opened out into the sky, above a vista of roofs and chimneys. 

The room was a junk yard. The floor and shelves were littered with ‘you name it’ and it was littered there. To name a few primary litters, they had many kebab wrappers and therefore the worst type of litter; slicks of old tomatoes, chip crumbs that left a blot of oil on any porous thing and perhaps even nibblets of chicken which fortunately had been cooked with care so only curled up and went dry like a leaf rather than become a deadly spore creature. There was a lot of fast fashion that had been worn a handful of times and then became irrelevant, these forgotten fabrics made up the bulk of the waves in this ocean of things. Cigarettes butts and ash piled up in designated areas. Everything cast shadows. 

In a constant flux of order and chaos were years of dust and dander that came off the household of beings. In between the messes was their romance, little things kept remembered, perhaps up high or in a mess pile that was regulated, little things like flocked rabbits, indian ink markers, turkish cake wrappers, hand drawn maps (that attempted to mark the shifting boundaries of Greygrass) and paper whales that swallowed the whole sea of it. 

Richard was likewise cluttered. He too cleared a space each night inside piles of junk and crawled into a hovel of old clothes and papers to sleep, supported like a gerbil in a cave of newspaper shreds and plastic imaginings he'd printed on his homemade 3D printer.

An ash coloured cat named Madame lived there with them. When she arrived, she was a noticeably petit cat but not unusually petit. One night she was heard meowing in the alleyway outside. The gang bribed her in with slithers of warm chicken, then, after a few failed attempts to leave she ended up staying. They didn't ask Richard if they could

keep her, he hummed ‘yes’ wherever he went. 

Madame was pregnant when she came and after she gave birth to the litter she got smaller. She birthed a litter of black kittens: Sad-Eye, Ham and Egg. She fornicated with a rather ladsome, white cat named Chester and gave birth again four months later to a white litter: Fish, Madeline and Curtains, and likewise, Madame got smaller after that. By then she was getting difficult to spot among the mess, she was extra, extraordinarily small and her kittens likewise. A third litter arrived four months later, but nobody knew it because Madame got impossibly small after that, and her kittens too and they were all often mistaken for dustmites and told off regularly for living in the bed. 

The mess was no longer a mess to  Madame and the litter of unseen kittens, because they were so small, the landscape of clutter was like an expansive mountain range for them. The white kitten Sad-Eye and the black kitten Madeline had a litter, wisp coloured kittens if you can imagine that, vague, changing, smokey things. All the visible felines: the white litter, the black litter and the vague litter, became invisible by choice, they slipped out the skylight window one night, and like fog, snow, and smoke, they drifted off among the chimneys and beyond.

Rune, Benou and Ishcah all had blood relatives, alive and aloft somewhere in Grey Grass where they were all ‘birthed’ (although if you adhere to the play of the paradox, surely when you are born you die and when you die you are born). It felt sad, living without them, together in Richard’s small attic, forgetting them to survive, in time they'd have to forget everything in order to be with them again. At this time though they were in the play of hiding from their parents, from their shadows. Their shadows clung to the boats of their bodies, a retelling of those souls in the underworld, in the river Styx strangling the boat of Hades. A sadness was felt by all, these broken families could no longer pretend and they pounded out of brilliance becoming the strangers in the mist in the eerie suburbs. 

They played out blaming themselves for the play hiding. They played out sailing with Hades whilst their parents played out writhing. And shortly Ishcah is going to find herself alone, playing out Persephone returning from the Underworld, ordained by Zeus, heralded by Hades, with the seeds of a pomegranate. 

Let's find out what their dissociation with their relatives revealed about their unconscious selves, the ones that caused unchecked confusion, the ones that created a mess about the bedroom. That confusion was the dawn of Ishcahs understanding, it was a paper whale swallowing the whole sea of it. 

Rain is confusing when it falls. It splashes when it touches, makes puddles where there are holes, it makes people wet until they are conscious of their intolerance of life, when will they ‘make the sky their hat’ (Terry Pratchett’s disc world: A hat full of sky). Maybe people can forgo the hat and get back to the basics of weeping themselves. 

People like to say ‘it is raining cats and dogs’ when it rains. Imagine the shadows cats and dogs would cast if they were to tumble through the clouds, down to the ground with the great light above them like a spotlight. Rain has made its mess, now it will settle on something. Provided that something is porous, that something will absorb it and… hydrate - plush, plump, booming. Once something is full, any surplus water will be drawn up, up, up into a rain cloud, or join a larger body of water, from spring to stream, stream to river, river to sea. Are we plump with water? Either way, after rainfall, a journey back to the beginning ensues. 

That which we don’t understand, that which rushes in the stream and makes a most marvellous mist, is at once on the trajectory to making itself clear, don't fear and let's give thanks for our lazy eye.

And it is.