Rain stops play

Gilbert sat in silence. It was raining outside -the first rains they had had for weeks now: since Kelly was with them and since then they'd had a veritable heat wave that had peaked on the weekend just past in the high 90s Fahrenheit. The rain was more than welcome. Last night he had heard it start about 12:30 and had woken Abby to tell her: not such a smart move it turned out for the cooler air that had preceded the burst had lulled her off to her first good sleep in a week and she seemed a little resentful at being woken.

They had both slept so well last night. It was 8:30 now and Gibert was letting Abby sleep on for as long as she would. He had the mandatory coffee before him and a cigarette in his left hand. The ashtray was slowly filling and he was deep in thought. The newly installed window and the bigger stable door let much more light into the cellar. So much, that even on an overcast day such as this it was lighter than ever before in there. He breathed deeply between drawing on his cancer stick and siping the hot Guatemalan coffee: it was novel to get lungsfull of cool moist air.

For once Gilbert wasn't thinking about himself, or the mysterious Laz, or Dick Detective or any of those phonies and shysters from the circus of freaks that Laz had recently peopled his world with. He was thinking of his old friend Hubert. He'd written to Hubert recently, hoping to pick up their correspondence of old, but had heard nothing back. He considered how many invitations to converse or correspond went unheeded, fell off of the radar: how many putative dialogues that ended as monologues or soliloquies? How many hands outstretched, for wasn't that what such a gesture signalled, that stayed empty? Offers ignored. Offers silently rejected. In a world where so many complained of loneliness how could so many dialogues be stillborn? So many cheerful, cheering texts go into the circular filing cabinet? Is there an ethereal bin for unreplied-to emails? Unread even. It must be a very big bin indeed. More words he supposed went winging across the ethernet each day than had been captured between boards and published in all literary history: and how any of them went unread? Most, he reasoned. Spam and the filtering thereof had become an industry unto itself: the myriad ways of throwing words and texts away, unopened, unread, and ultimately unnoticed. He imagined to himself one of those famously incontinent pipes that Thames Water used to deliver water wastefully to households throughout the south east of England but this imaginary pipe was sawn off and all of the bits of all of the orphaned digital texts simply dribbling out of the end and puddling sadly at the mouth of this monstrous pipe. Gilbert shuddered and shook off this uncomfortable idea. He would try again. And he must scribble out hose mental notes that he was making - the ones about defeating his nemesis.

Gilbert smiled to himself and intoned to himself, " - sometimes people have to die - sometimes murder has to be".


(to be continued ... )