archives

 horoscopes

 accessories

 contacts

 theatre

 fables



 home

Add Sane Magazine to your My Netscape.

a continuation, believe it or not, of a previous episode
The stars spun overhead in the blackness; crisp, distant, silent.
Unless they were making the chirping noises. In which case, they were quite loud, occasionally.
However, he was reasonably sure the stars weren't making the chirping noises, and that they continued on; silent, majestic, and distant.
He'd spent the last few hours between a few trees in the orchard employing the latest scientific methods in measuring the distance between himself and the stars so that he could pronounce, with relative certainty, that they were, indeed, distant. Of course, the latest methods stipulated that he lay back on the grass and pick a number that seemed to sufficiently represent the distance of the first fixed sphere of stars were he to tell a friend how far away he thought the stars were (He always had to mind his estimate around Bill the Astronomer, the local aged astronomer, as Bill's sole pleasure in Life, it seemed, was to make a "Hawkch-HA!" sort of noise and go on to explain to all and sundry what an idiot he was for calculating that number when any reasonably intelligent piece of moss or badger or sponge or ferret or something could tell you that was a ridiculous number.). After this calculation you were supposed to sit up and pick a number again from the new vantage point, probably a little smaller than the first number, if you were of the camp that believed that the stars were above the Earth as opposed to, say, below it. He usually skipped the second part of the scientific enquiry, as he liked just lying on the grass, looking up at the stars. And so his calculations tended to be more along the lines of 'distant', 'far', or 'not too far, really' instead of '35 miles', '8 metres' (his friend had been drunk the evening he made that pronouncement, and didn't like being reminded of it too often these days), or '180 stone's throws'.

He was an astronomer. Not to the King or anything, though he'd often wished he could hold such a lofty position, and, on days he spent toiling over parchment, recording his observations of the sky from the evening before he desperately craved to be working in the King's famed laboratories, poring over parchment there, or perhaps dicating his observations, if he attained a high enough position. But on other days, the days when he realised marking that the "very bright one seemed quite far this evening but I seemed to have completely forgotten what it looked like whilst sitting up, a possibly crucial measurement for it's true shineyness" weren't bound to endear him all that much to the King, who apparently demanded precision, especially if you were to get your own person to take dictation. As it was, telling the girls he was an astronomer (though not within earshot of Bill the Astronomer, who, had there been an order to the handful of astronomers in the area, would have been the Head Astronomer and likely a right pain in the neck boss to have) was good enough for him, as they all seemed to swoon and listened to him prattle on for hours about the stars and lying in the grass, and he had even managed to get a few of them to sit with him in the deepening twilight, despite all his prattling and despite his insecurities due to both his rather generously wide guesses at astronomical figures and his prattling on and the vicious circle that ensued and was quite luckily shut up occasionally by the pressing of another's mouth to his own. Not too frequently, but there was no use overdoing it, really.

The large, talking cat he'd seen earlier had him convinced he was heading for grand positions in the King's entourage, as he'd hardly heard of anyone mentioning talking cats in the heavens before.
Which he was calmly trying to assimilate when he saw a shining city in the sky, which appeared so suddenly it scared the talking cat out of the tree (shortly followed by a friend of his, to whose hand the cat was attached and, presumably, whose voice it was, and not the cat's, which was not much more than a sock with eyes and a nose smudged on with dirt), and he suddenly had yet something else to possibly run down to London with and show someone, hopefully someone important. If need be, he'd make up his own explanation on the way down.

disclaimer:
And Life goes clipping along at it's usual pace.
Strawberry jam for everyone!