Tuesday 20 March 2012

1. Silver Nitrate

When I awoke this morning, sunlight was leaking through the blind with the sound of a tired diesel engine about to slip the clutch. Voices muttered in the tree outside my window and a dog barked. Once. Supine in my bed, wound in sheets and tired from a night of reverie and violence I felt closer to the tomb than the womb.

It had rained in the night. Milky splashes of water spattered on the metal rim of the skylight above me, tattooing a pointless pattern in my head, while images of the 1890’s flickered before me in hessian and grey felt. Two women of indeterminate age beckoned to me from a dark upholstered sofa, their silver nitrate faces twisting, floating in the dark as I drank from the glass in my hand.

The first, voluptuous as Venus, heavy as a butcher, ineffectually encased in a brocade corset, waved her painted nails and smiled the enigmatic smirk of the mistress in an Old Master. The second, grey as a mudflat and thinly wrapped in an army blanket watched me sullenly, her lips twitching something unspoken. The room was otherwise empty, save for the rain that now fell in torrents.


I turned and left and, running through a no-man’s land of grey-brown clay was engulfed in a hail of white blossom hurled from the regiments of stunted apple trees that stretched away beyond the horizon.


The image is a study by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, c.1885




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