Matterings

Bright tongues of surf lapped enthusiastically shoreward, driven into the sand by a merciless breeze.

Cold, dripping rocks. A steep slope rolling up towards the unfamiliar skyline. Wisps of fast white cloud, racing the star-peppered blueness. It seemed a bitter scenario in which to end my voyage of discovery - but then I always was a singularly inappropriate son of a twig.

As my strange, sea-sodden, salt-swollen limbs bounced and rolled across the beach, a wave of chaotic panic tingled up through my timber flesh. The tidal heartbeat had been my home for longer than I dared consider, and I was not prepared for the suddenness with which it would shatter into sea spray.

There was no such metronome here on the land.

Back in the intimate ripple-weave of open sea, there had always been some beacon upon which I could anchor my course in the ocean fabric - always some guidance written into the current. But not here. This was the sharp edge of the Universe, at least as far as the marine spirits were concerned, where lost fish would cut themselves on blades of sand before falling forever into dry limbo.

Here, only hope could keep a soul going.

Like a grounded fish, I lay gasping on the damp borderland, half choked with swirling foam, terrified by the distant fire of window lights. There were houses nearby - houses, where the people lived.

I could neither move nor cry, but the fear was overwhelming. I had been a swimming thing for far too long. I belonged in the great oceanic valleys, among the floating plankton and the dancing jellyfish, not here. My waterlogged, ebony-finned limbs were now useless to me, twisted and misshapen on the sand, and I knew there was little chance of my taking root in such a landscape. Those days were gone.

I figured I had lived too many lives already - lost in the company of people, lonesome in the presence of trees, and redeemed by the company of fish. To ask for more would be churlish, I told myself.

But like it or not, I had more to do here. I had a love to make peace with.

Like all too many heroes, I had taken my initial inspiration from love. And I guess it was a pretty special kind of love, too - even if it did die regularly on the promenade railings.

I believed in Coral-Anne the way a seed believes in raindrops. I believed the world could change when she walked into a room, and I felt that very few of her friends appreciated this subtle shift of climate as deeply as I did. In a town overflowing with dry voices, she remained my one true blessing - the magic ingredient from which big ideas grew out of small-talk.

We never officially qualified as an item, of course. It would have been foolish of me to expect that, given my timber-soul status - but Coral-Anne was as enlightened as any non-timber person I had ever known, and a great deal more interesting than most. She didn’t mind my being one of the timber people, a sap-blooded marionette, a fake man whittled from tree bough.

She actually enjoyed hearing all the latest gossip from the woodland, and she laughed a lot at my dry but perceptive tree humour.

When her friends poked fun at me, presuming my woody torso impervious to hurt and heartache, she would leap to my defence. She would remind them what a sacred gift it was, to have such magic on their doorstep. In a world cursed with so much misery and hunger, she would remind them, how could they fail to feel quietly astonished by the bizarre miracle that had visited their doorstep?

Nobody really knew where the timber people came from. Nobody had any idea what manner of unseen magician might have carved our strange and unfeasible bodies from the trees - and some resented us for our very otherness. In general, though, our presence was tolerated as a kind of quaint local impossibility. We provided a good source of cheap labour for the local farms, and an enduring source of entertainment for the tourists. If there was any deeper reason for our existence, most of the locals gave it little thought.

As generally happens with trees - the standard, rooted variety as well as the eerie marionette variety - Coral-Anne saw me as something to lean on. I was the sympathetic shoulder, something sturdy and deep enough to soak up the tears when her relationships were not really working out, and she was my salvation when the weight of strange insights became unbearable.

Affectionate though our friendship was, however, it still cut me to pieces.

Coral-Anne’s friends all assumed my interest was purely physical, an understandable assumption in a town where, if you could believe the gossip, everybody wanted to get up close and personal with everybody else. Timber-soul or no timber-soul, I appeared to be no less bewitched by Coral-Anne’s luminescent beauty than the young flesh men were. If I had known my place, I would have kept to the woodland where I belonged, but clearly I was a victim of rampant woody hormones. Small town wisdom had spoken. Case closed.

Out of respect for Coral-Anne’s social status, her friends allowed me to skirt the fringes of their social scene. There would be plenty of time to teach this uppity timber fraud a lesson - or so they believed.

The fact was, however, I had no particular desire to sleep with Coral-Anne. I just wanted to be able to hug her the way I could hug my friends in the woodland. I wanted to be able to share myself with her in a way that sucked the breath from my body and made the air taste special. I wanted to feel all the magic that made life beautiful and wild and terrifying while still holding her attention.

Put quite simply, it was lonely in the magic places, and the trees just didn’t seem to have a word for my kind of isolation.

I was in no doubt that Coral-Anne held my arboreal sensitivity in high regard. She told me she looked to me for understanding, a rare commodity among the non-timber people, and that she valued my occasional whispered insights. Perhaps, had I been stronger at the time, this fragile relationship should have been enough for me. But my blue-blossomed eyes said otherwise, and Coral-Anne knew it.

“Are you judging the quality of our friendship?” she would ask.

“I’m not judging anything,” I would reply, somewhat facetiously. “That’s why you like me, isn’t it?”

“You’re too deep for your own good, you are!” she would say at such times.

We would circle each other’s affections in fights like these, then laugh about it afterwards - usually over a few too many drinks. But however hard we tried to dissolve the barrier between us, we never hugged as deeply as I wanted.

It was hard to know which was worse - the nights I spent alone, because she had more human things to do, or the nights when she opened up to me. To have her share a little of her troubled soul seemed at the time like the most precious thing in the world, which only made it all the more heartbreaking when her human friends crowded back around her, leaving me to walk home alone.

Worst of all were the nights she caught me in a moment of uncontrolled sadness, and I found myself crying on her shoulder for a change. I should have revelled in the intimacy, but there was something uncomfortable about the feel of her sympathetic arms around my shivering fibres. My tears only ever told half the story - and I was never sure which half.

In the end, I dealt with every bad night the same way. Out on the cliff, I would stand against the incoming breeze, my hands clasped tight over the old wooden fence, staring out at the sea-bound waters. I would watch the underwater demons burrow their phosphorescent passage to the shore and bathe my ears in the crash of surf as they melted into the rocks beneath me.

Perhaps they sympathised with my sense of isolation, or perhaps they wanted some share of my delicate human yearnings after their long exile in the ocean. Whatever their motives, those spirits never failed to dissolve my tears - and I never failed to bless them for it.

It was while weeping over such moonlit tides that I first began to realise there was a deeper love at work here. The crisp sharpness of the spray was alive with hints and insinuations, unfolding like moon-peppered flowers against the night sky, and with each visit I grew more determined to know their scent.

Then, one night, when sobbing away the bitterness of a particularly frustrating encounter, I tore off a piece of the fence and threw it angrily into the incoming surf. It was a good feeling, watching my jagged missile spear the waterline, a gesture in driftwood. One splash and it was gone, washing my fury out into the noisy darkness.

I had hoped it might pop back up to the surface so that I could watch it sail off into the rolling romantic abyss. But the moment had been swallowed, just as I had. Suddenly bereft, I began to sob again - not with loneliness but with a kind of strange abandon, as if some hidden reservoir of exhilaration had found its way into the lonely space beneath my ribs. For the first time in my life, the unspoken magic had risen above the loneliness, leaving me free and clear on the outgoing tide.

I leapt out into the waiting ripples. My body splashed awkwardly into the turbulent water, crackling and bubbling as a shoal of strange moon-pepper flowers instantly swirled around my timber.

A couple of months went by, and the moon-pepper flowers stayed with me day and night. Their dark petals were woven into the current like the soft dusting of colours in the wing of a butterfly, translating all manner of sea spells. But what truly astounded me was the generosity with which they shared their wonders. I was used to writing my own magic, using the few precious words which trees and people had grudgingly revealed to my hybrid soul, but I had never before felt the unconditional trust of sorcerers.

I learned how to use the tidal rhythms, to draw strength from them, to work with their bubbling pistons and harvest their glistening treasures, just as countless legions of fin-suited industrialists had done before me. Here was a railway where the trains ran without wheels, a commerce where each new tide wiped clear all debts.

Using the stories I had learned, I followed the trail of blood fish through the vast arterial trenches. I watched them scatter like lost capillaries and then magically regroup at the call of the heart that drove them.

Then, just as it seemed the sea might explode with anguish, I saw the object of their desire, undulating across their dreamscape with gentle, leviathan ease.

“Are you the great whale heart?” I asked. “Are you what drives the blood fish? Are you what fuels their scaly engines and drives their star-finned turbines?”

“That’s me,” replied the whale heart. “Are you the magician who summoned me?”

It took a while for this to sink in.

“I summoned you? I thought you summoned me!”

“I’m only here because of you,” replied the whale heart. “Without you, I was just blubber and hunger, grazing the plankton fields. But I have a story now.”

That was when the world finally made sense to me - the little timber fish-man with a pen on each finger. All this time, while I thought the moon pepper flowers and the blood fish had been teaching me, I had been giving them something equally precious in return. I had summoned them a history and woven them a soul.

* * *

I woke up on the beach, shocked to find myself whole again after the morning ebb. My old body had been restored to its full marionette mobility, allowing me to walk back towards town and restart the life I thought I had lost forever.

As I wiped the sand from my legs, I realised that the tide had beached me for a reason. After all I had learned, it was only fitting that my journey should end here in the land of hugs and difficult relationships, where lives could be broken or baptised by the touch of a storyteller, and even the smallest of souls could yield a whale heart.

Since my return from the ocean, I have not been drinking nearly as much as I did with Coral-Anne. I have not visited the old shoreline fence as much either. I still enjoy watching the waves come crashing over the rocks, and I still like the taste of fresh sea spray on my cheeks, but I can cast my own spells now, without flinching from the pain of conjuring them.

Hugs are as hard to come by as they ever were, of course - the special ones, anyway. I think maybe that’s the whole point of my being here, in the land of chainsaws and oil spills and treacherous shifting tides, where fish and trees should all be swallowed by the mess… but people somehow flourish in spite of themselves.

That’s why some of us seem to find our origins in the wood of trees, or the eerie midnight ripples of a pond. Because what makes us most human does not spring from our physiology, it ignites in other, less defined places, which haunt us and isolate us even as they fire our souls.

I have bathed in these secret worlds where our souls play, and I have seen them in the people I hug. We may not always be able to nurture such worlds as fully as we might wish - for there are always other, more selfish worlds demanding our attention - but they continue to call us nonetheless.

I weave my best stories from such worlds.

Don’t look for me on paper, because I am a different breed of writer, with a different language to share. Look for me in the other place, the one that tingles with recognition when its presence is acknowledged, the one to which you sometimes think you have the only key.

Look for me there, and together we shall chase away the monsters in a land only true love and driftwood can recognise for sure.

This is Spangley Girl.

She wants to be a good superheroine, really she does.
She monitors the super gizmos and everything:

Dedicated though she is, however,
Spangley also has a bit of a talent for tantrums.

Will she keep her mouth shut long enough to get the
job done?

Or will her friends pick up the slack?

A new comic, brought to you by the sweeping pen of
Rebecca Whitaker:

This is a really difficult time right now, for lots of reasons. As some of my online friends will know, I’ve been considering launching a new project of some kind, and I haven’t entirely ruled that out…

But right now, I’m not totally sure what the future holds here at Matterings.

I just wanted to say another thank you to those who have made me feel that who I am, and what I do, is of some genuine value. As I have occasionally tried to stress, that really is no small thing.

So thank you (you know who you are).

As a tribute to the tracks we have ridden together (and perhaps to those we are yet to discover in the future), here’s one I prepared earlier:

Englebert’s Train

by John Hulme

Englebert Smirk was used to coping with small annoyances. When your name sounds like a rather tacky joke from a popular song, it can teach you a lot about relative priorities.

So the prospect of another delay did not cause him too much grief.

Yes, the platform was dank, cold and poorly lit for a main-line station. Yes, he could have been home an hour ago had he not made the wrong connection on the Underground. Yes, the three young men squabbling on the bench behind him did reek of trouble.

But so what? These were occupational hazards on the Outbound Line. His life would probably feel incomplete without them.

There was, of course, one other cause for concern. They still had nothing for him at the agency. Just the usual excuses and a couple of new put-downs they’d been working on in their spare time. Had he been in a better mood, he might at least have taken some heart from the fact that they still recognised him, but this was one of those days when invisibility might even have been a blessing.

He zipped up his jacket as the chill set in. The Winter Spirits had come early to the city, and had wasted no time selecting their nesting sites.

A faint hum caught Englebert’s ear, rising above the sound of nearby traffic. It couldn’t be his train, surely. The last announcement had said there would be another twenty minute delay.

But there it was, wheels sparking bright orange showers against the darkness, rattling over the switching points where the Metro-South and Outbound lines diverged. Twin window panels glistened across its oblong metal face like oversized sunglasses, hiding the driver behind a swirl of odd reflections as the bulk rolled into the station with the usual whine of protest from its undercarriage.

And nestled into its forehead, a gently flickering sign glowed out its destination:

Outbound

Hearing the three lads behind him stir themselves out of inertia, Englebert started to stroll down the platform, following the motion of the train in an attempt to put some distance between his boarding point and theirs.

Please don’t let those dipsticks get in the same carriage, he prayed, to whatever benevolent spirits might be listening. But the only audible reply was the clink of beer cans and the twisted screech of overworked brakes as the train slid to a grudging halt.

Doors with handles. Funny, thought Englebert. I thought they were all automatic on this line.

He pulled open the nearest and stepped inside. It was a bright, nicely-furnished compartment, not at all like the kind of ambience he was used to. Either the local transport authority had acquired some new rolling stock or they had employed some interior designers with the money they’d saved from all the cancelled services.

He looked over the high seats to see if the tops of any heads were showing. Apparently not. He had the carriage to himself, always assuming the dipsticks weren’t due to emerge from the connecting door. One thing he had learned about the dispsticks of the Outbound line was their passion for strutting through trains.

As the train started its jerky roll forwards, he sat down and tried to make himself comfortable for the forty-minute journey ahead, his eyes fixing on the empty seat facing him. It had a pleasing, almost organic shape, its back curving elegantly up towards the padded headrest at the top.

Outside, the platform tailed off into darkness, background returning to moonlit cloud and distant streetlights.

And inside, the lights dimmed in sympathy, throwing shadows over the seating fabric. This gave the eerily drooping headrests an extra level of definition - perhaps even a sense of character.

The headrest opposite opened its eyes and stared back.

A bolt of pure fear shot up through Englebert’s chest and pushed him out of his seat. But the vision, of course, had vanished as suddenly as he had summoned it, leaving nothing but blind railway fabric in its wake.

Obviously, the pressure of his daily routine was getting to him worse than he thought. Now even the seating on public transport was giving him filthy looks. Next he’d be seeing monsters peering down from the luggage racks.

A dark, scaly tentacle flopped down from the luggage rack above him, studying him through the bulbous eyeball at its tip.

“Tickets and fingers, please!” it said, cheerfully ignoring the look of sheer frozen panic which reflected from its slime-shined pupil.

Englebert slid his body away from the creature and edged slowly toward the central aisle, trying to remain as nonchalant as possible in the circumstances. It was, after all, only a tentacle.

“Scared you, didn’t I?” it trilled, pores gaping in triumph. “The monster in the luggage rack routine always gets a good result. The face at the window’s quite effective, too - especially with a face as creepy as mine - but not nearly so much fun.”

Not quite sure what else to do, Englebert fumbled for his ticket.

“Oh, that’s alright,” said the tentacle. “You don’t need a ticket for this ride. Tonight, Engie-baby, the train came looking for you!”

“I beg your… er… say what, now?” stuttered Englebert. Despite the obvious affability of the tentacle’s manner, it was difficult to miss the sinister overtones of that last comment.

“We’re what you might call a special service.”

“Of what? One-eyed tentacles?”

“Lost souls, mainly,” replied the tentacle. “Well, not lost so much as anchorless. Restless, nomadic spirits looking for new places to flow. Railway souls, if you like.”

“Oh, right.” Englebert took a deep breath, in the hope that some of it might reach his lungs before his windpipe closed in again. “What do you want with me?”

“What do you think we want with you?” snapped the tentacle. “You’re part of the membership drive.”

“Membership drive?” Englebert nearly choked at the thought. “Now, wait a minute! I don’t want to be a Railway thingy! I just want to be… er…”

The tentacle shook its eye.

“Sorry, Engie - you don’t mind if I call you that, do you? - I’m afraid this is a collection service only. You looked into the Fast Darkness once too often, and it’s decided to invite you to the party.”

It winked at him, then shot back up to the luggage rack. When Englebert looked up, it was gone.
Outside the window, he could see nothing but the usual flypast of city lights, streaking through the darkness as the train gained speed.

It suddenly dawned on Englebert why he never went to parties.

He stepped out into the central aisle and stared into the gloom. There was still no sign of life in the rest of the compartment. Not even the odd monster.

So why did he feel all those eyes watching him? And why was the train still accelerating? They should have been coming to the first stop by now, not trying to break the land speed record.
His skin was beginning to tingle, a sense of the darkness moving around him. And as he looked around, he could see why. The seats were starting to breathe.

Organic fabric rose and fell, rose and fell to the rhythm of wheels on track. Headrests twisted and cracked as phantom eyes pulled apart the stitching of their lids. No wonder the compartment had looked empty - most of the passengers had merged with the upholstery.

One of the armrests shot out to grab him, wooden clawlike talons flexing thin air as he darted away - straight into the clutches of another seat creature on the opposite side of the aisle.

“Got you now, new boy!” it hissed. The cushioned head stretched upwards as the beast strained to free itself from the floor of the carriage.

Englebert took a good swing with his one free hand and socked it as hard as he could. His fist cracked against its wooden spine with a sharp, knuckle-shattering report. The ensuing scream echoed out around its head in a stream of angry red mist, splashing a messy condensation of scarlet invective onto the window.

Colourful language.

When the mist cleared, he could see the monster’s eyes blazing down on him. Human or not, it clearly knew a punch when it felt one.

Luckily for Englebert, it had released its grip on him long enough to allow an escape. He ran off down the aisle, dodging the flailing arms of emergent seat creatures as he did so.

Instinctively, he was following the motion of the train, heading forwards, perhaps in the forlorn hope that the driver - if there was one - might provide some answers. Still, the prospect of finding a “complaints department” seemed highly unlikely.

This was just as well, because several other seat monsters had emerged at the rear of the compartment and were steadily clunking their way up the aisle towards him. Shorn of its attractive fabric disguise, their gruesome skeletal carpentry looked more dangerous than ever.

Before Englebert could reach the connecting door, however, another of the creatures rose up in front of him.

“Not fair!” it growled, in a flurry of disappointed orange. “You should at least stay for a dance!”

Englebert looked around desperately for a way out, and was briefly relieved to see that the other monsters had stopped their squeaky crawl up the aisle. As their heads swivelled round to look behind them, he could see why - the dipsticks had just made their entrance through the rear connecting door.

For a moment, he watched the dipsticks and seat creatures start to circle each other, two rival train gangs testing each other in the wordless language of strutting bravado. Then, suddenly remembering the orange-voiced creature behind him, he swung back towards the front of the compartment.

“Let’s have some Music!” it snapped, clicking its bone timber fingers as a steady drumbeat started to pound through the passageway.

The other seat creatures began to follow suit, clicking the rhythm of the music at their dipstick opponents, sending sharp darts of yellow glitter into the air. To Englebert’s astonishment, the dipsticks stood firm, letting the yellow darts ricochet harmlessly off their jackets, staring out their wood-limbed adversaries.

Clearly they were street-smart to the ways of seat creatures. For the first time in several years of timid rail travel, Englebert found himself seeing some hint of poetry beyond the dipstick.

Perhaps this was a regular ballet, played out in the twilight world of the night trains, where strange wanderers from opposite sides of the tracks met to let off steam… only to forget each other the following morning.

“Let’s have some Lights!” barked the orange-voiced creature, as the ceiling illumination changed to deep, tacky pink, then blue, then red: a vibrant spectrum of overstated colours swirling and shifting to the beat.

“Now LET’S BOOGIE!” the monsters chorused.

As the orange-speaker lunged towards him, Englebert dived onto the floor of the aisle, sliding neatly beneath its click-jointed hips on the carpet of musical mist that was now drifting towards the front of the compartment. Timber arms slashed wildly at the air, a line of sharp talons scratching his shoulder as he crashed noisily into the connecting door.

The monster swooped again, forcing a breathless Englebert to yank open the door and throw himself headlong into the small passage between compartments. He heard the door swing shut behind him, followed by the crash as his orange-voiced tormentor rammed its head through the gap.

“Don’t you want to play?” it squealed, as Englebert opened a second door and hurled himself into the next carriage.

Wheezing from shock and exertion, he fell back into one of the seats.

“You alright?”

Englebert swung round to see the tentacle, swinging nonchalantly from the opposite luggage rack. It was tilting its eye from side to side, as if trying to gain some insight into Englebert’s mood.

“Guess you weren’t prepared for our woodier residents,” it said. “They can be a little hyperactive on a first encounter. But they do have their gentler side, once you get to know them.”

“I’m sure they do,” replied Englebert, standing up to face the inquisitive eye blob, “but you’ll have to excuse me if I’m feeling a little aggrieved. Just because you’re a bunch of shape-shifting monsters, that’s no excuse for being rude.”

Slowly, the tentacle stretched itself across the centre aisle, its skin popping with the birth of fresh tendrils. Spreading out like some kind of featherstar fringe, they began to dance in the slow ripples of air which bubbled up from the floor. Blue-green luminescence from the ceiling lights added to the watery illusion, summoning strange apparitions from the compartment fittings.

Delicate wheels of light floated across the tassel-stirred currents, steering over headrests and skimming the windows with soft strokes of their bodies. Englebert watched the patterns of thread slowly unravel from the seat covers as woven spirals slipped away from the fabric which had defined them and flexed their new found solidity like flower-finned fish.

One of them began to rotate against the window glass, its sharp petals slicing a steady stream of circular ripples into the night. As they floated upwards, the sky peeled around them like a new country emerging from the mist. Chisel-cut valleys rumbled in the hard night cloud, burning deep at their core as if the setting sun had triggered old volcanoes in the atmosphere. Suddenly overwhelmed by the odd potency of surreal imagery, Englebert lost his balance and staggered onto one of the seats.

Outside, flocks of cotton-bud cloud swooped down across the eerie rail pastures. He watched them circle nightlit buildings and suck the last embers of daylight from silhouetted tree branches. Backlit by moon glow, their billowy ballet made an enchanting spectacle, and he began to feel some semblance of his true self… a self he had long-since been forced to put on the back burner.

“You see?” said the tentacle. “There’s magic here, once you get the hang of it.”

The rush of dancing wonders was only adding to Englebert’s disorientation, however. Something about the air in the compartment was making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe, and his guts were starting to turn, just like the wheels beneath him.

“I have to get off,” he gasped, trying to fight back the nausea.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” replied the tentacle, watching the panic rise in his face, sensing his urge to struggle against the changes that would soon engulf him… just as others had done before him.

The girl! Of course! Swinging down to regain eye contact with Englebert, the tentacle summoned a small, shivering spirit from her deep, safe burrow in its heart.

“It’s alright,” she whispered, reaching out to embrace the huddled figure with her gentle, wispy arms.

Hearing the new voice, Englebert looked up at the tentacle, and was shocked to find he recognised the girl’s face which now shone behind its eyeball. It was a face he had seen many times before - shuddering on street corners, crying in the corner of a cafe, melting uneasily into a crowd of commuters as the morning shuttle arrived…

a lost soul he had never quite spoken to, reaching out to him through a train of spirits.

“I know it hurts,” she told him, “to have nowhere to go and then, suddenly, to find yourself in the middle of all that coldness. I’m still shivering from it, even now.”

“From what?” stuttered Englebert. “What’s happening to me?”

“Think back to a feeling,” explained the girl spirit, “that feeling you get on a train at night - as if you’re never going to get home - as if only the journey really matters.”

Englebert knew the feeling well. In fact, the more he considered it, the more his nausea began to recede, as though the realisation was somehow curing him.

“Like the whole world is running on rails,” he said, “all passing each other, taking turnoffs to other stations. And suddenly the most important thing is to keep moving, to keep on the rails with the night rushing past.”

“That’s it!” beamed the girl spirit, instinctively tightening her embrace in the exhilaration of having discovered a kindred spirit. “That’s the Fast Darkness.”

As the magic settled into his system, Englebert felt her melt into his shoulders, then disappear.
He looked around, watching the echoes of her soft, shiver-coated words spill and frolic in the blue ripple currents of the compartment.

“the Fast, Fast Darkness…”

“She’ll be back,” smiled the tentacle. “You’re part of the same journey now.”

Englebert thought back to his confrontation with the seat creatures, to the aisle of musical mist which he had instinctively known would carry him to safety. Without realising it, he had already begun to develop new skills.

Outside, an awesome, glowing wing began to take shape across the sky, unravelling atmospheric fabric from the attendant clouds to build its eerie plumage.

Gliding through the slipstream with slow, careful strokes, it swooped over the train, and the ceiling boomed excitedly at its touch. Odd threads of moonlit rope mist stitched themselves into its wake, scattering bright showers of starlight over the embankments and tower blocks.

“A Swimweave Spirit,” said the tentacle. “Invisible to many, but not to us. Part of an idea that never really settled, or a dream that nobody quite captured… Look out on a really good night and you can see whole squadrons of them, all chasing the same breeze.”

The Swimweave turned away from the train and vanished into another avenue of Fast Darkness, leaving the buildings a little brighter than it had found them. The train began to click like a yellow dart machine, and more lights rolled past the window.

They weren’t just city lights anymore, thought Englebert. They were the passing of all manner of things - things he had once been afraid of, things he had almost lost for fear of the losing. All those journeys he’d made, all those journeys wasted on their destinations.

For the first time in his life, nowhere really seemed like a good place to go.

“The greatest heroes of the world are gone and a new generation must rise to discover their full potential. Will they change the world, or will they self-destruct?”

I bought the first three issues of The Uniques from Comfort Love, who I met at the Wizard World convention in Chicago. She writes and draws it with her husband, Adam Withers, and they are clearly a highly accomplished team.

Put simply, it’s very, very good.

It has all the elements you’d expect of a superhero comic - action sequences, spandex outfits, stunning backdrops. In fact, the artwork is very impressive throughout. It’s crisp, meticulous and very professionally put together. The print quality is excellent.

But what really grabs me is the dialogue.

I knew I was hooked after a beautifully written scene where two sisters meet for the first time since the death of their parents. I enjoyed the pacing, the way the reunion was built up, the subtle hints at unresolved conflicts, but most of all I liked the way the sequence played out. There was no forced confrontation, no awkward, clunky argument - instead, both sisters reaced in a way that felt genuinely moving.

This pattern was repeated in the following two issues. Whenever the characters appeared to be heading down a well-worn conversational pathway, some unexpected nuance would lift the dialogue, so that even the smallest moments of understanding became a joy to watch.

Although the basic set-up has many familiar elements, right down to a strong post-911 vibe, these are all incidentals. This is very much a story about relationships, and the fragile, precious things that build up to make them work. It is the attention to this kind of detail, the thoughtfulness of the writing, that makes it so exciting.

Even characters who might, in less skilled hands, have become quite limited and annoying are permitted to surprise us.

In a climate where it has become fashionable to deconstruct characters, to demolish their mystique, it is refreshing to read a story that tries to do the opposite.

* * * * * * *

You can find out more about Adam and Comfort’s creations (artwork, comics, T-shirts and much more) by clicking here.

Throughout recorded history, people have searched for the big idea - the one that’ll change the world.

Of course, when you read between the lines, it’s not difficult to see the frequency with which these great ideas become corrupted. Launched in a blaze of glory, a parade of flag-waving and cannonfire, they all too quickly find themselves twisted out of shape as more pragmatic or greedy concerns crowd in.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing to reach for the big idea - it just means you’ve got to be careful with it when you find it. I wonder how often the famous singer Paul Robeson thought he’d found the big idea. More than once, I’d imagine…

and if the world let him down, it did nothing to diminish the spirit of the man.

A while back, I went to an exhibition in North Wales about Robeson’s life and work - from the majesty of songs like Old Man River to the disappointments of film projects such as Sanders of the River… and the price he paid when his political views conflicted with the official policy of his country.

Robeson formed a particular bond with the people of Wales, and the song playing throughout the exhibition (”Let Robeson Sing” by the Manic Street Preachers) provided a fitting tribute to his enduring influence.

Can a torch be passed from one soul to another? Can we find the words and the voices to make ourselves shine?

As I pondered these questions, I came across an old shed by the side of the railway. There was a single word scrawled on the side of it - just enough to fire my imagination. I have no idea whether the spray-painter in question had been to the Robeson exhibition or was merely expressing admiration for a popular band, but the word gripped me nonetheless:

Manics

A crazy word
scrawled on old wood
like ocean spray

Like a torch passed
from a lost soul
singing over an ocean
on a bridge of telephones

to a country
trying to rediscover itself
in new lyrics

Manics

Aren’t we all?

Manics

Trying to find a voice
like the one we had in the movie

Manics

scrawled in the echo of old trains

waiting
for ghost beer from a demolished brewery

waiting
for a new industry to blossom over yesterday’s mine shafts

waiting
for the freedom train

Manics

waiting for the magic words
to preach with

Whenever I see you on the street,
I find myself searching for new reasons
to look at you funny,
give that little sneer with my eyes
(you know the one)
or smirk to myself with the quiet satisfaction of
somebody who knows a slice of car-wreck humanity when he sees one…

because I know you, of course.

Even though we’ve hardly spoken,
and I’ve never really listened,
I know you
the way a shoe knows a snail.

You’re just too damn vulnerable,
and I’m just too damn cool, baby -
I’m riding in to break the circle
and put you out of everybody’s misery
so the party can start.

Funny though,
I heard someone talk you up once,
like you were this massive cloud
hanging like a ripply curtain over the horizon.

She clearly read you all wrong.

You’re a very small and lonely cloud
in a big sky -
and I’m a billow-shredder.

Welcome to the real world,
where I don’t have to know a damn thing about you
to write you off

and nobody has to care.

Welcome to the real world,
where your kind of strength just makes you weak
and all the things
you hate so much about me
make me better than you.

You’re a smart little cloud,
I’ll give you that -
but smart gets you nowhere in a sky like this:

a very big
and lonely sky
full of billow-shredders and broken souls.

* * *

Just so you know: one day, I’m going back to Billow-shred Street with a fleet of bulldozers.

Thanks to a lucky fluke of timing, I managed to tie with the inestimable Samurai Frog (like that’s ever gonna happen again) in Becca’s latest movie quiz.

So I might as well celebrate:

Woohoo, etc…

Speaking of movies, Depoe Bay here is apparently the place where they filmed the boat sequence from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest…

I went whale-watching on that boat. I watched a grey whale spouting, the whale watched me back and a cute pelican flew overhead.

The pelican has emailed me since, but the whale has had server problems.

Becca has been bestowing stuff again. Among the stuff she has been bestowing about the place is the Arte Y Pico Award… which she has apparently bestowed upon me:

Like, cool!

As with all such bestowable items, it comes with its own list of rules:

1) Pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also for contributing to the blogging community, no matter what language.

2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.

3) Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.

4) Award-winner has to show the link of “Arte y Pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award: Arte y Pico.

So OK, I’m going to choose… hope I can do this through the persistent fog of jet lag (or maybe some Pacific fog came home with me in the hope I’d keep it as a pet. Well, if I don’t keep it, I’m sure it’ll be mist). Anyway, my choice:

Tracey for writing with elegant sensitivity, and for expressing the bits that often fall between the lines

Theo for writing so elegantly about his own spiritual and emotional journey, for trying to express both the beauty and the terrors of the human condition

Miss Meliss for promoting and contributing to a range of online publications, thereby helping to provide a vibrant platform for online writing and discussion

Dan for doing what he believes in, and still retaining a sense of humour about it

Karen for capturing such magnificent images and sharing them so freely with the world