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¦Warning: Contains Adult Language And Severe Quantities Of Nonsense¦

7.

Why does it always turn out as 7?

He thought he worked it out once before, but he can’t remember how.

He scratched his shoulder, winced, elevated his piece slightly, and sent it forth on its journey.

“I set out from Vine Street, through packed city roads, a Tuesday morning rush hour commute. As I crawl my way through the car park of London, sights snailing their way behind me creating the preposterous yet highly influential idea that I am motionless and the buildings and road are slowly crawling away beneath and around me whilst I wait. West, I head, for now not staring at the piercing gaze of our rising sun. To the Strand, but not to stop, must continue on this round-a-bout journey. U-turn to Aldwych, the floor beckoning me to Euston road. Not yet, I resist, no jumping queues. Melbourne house, resplendent grey monolith, faux-Greek pillaring, faux-roman lettering, faux-interesting.

“Back on the Strand, little choice else for this journey. On to Fleet Street, joy, but this isn’t right. If I’m to do this, I’ll do it properly. Grapple onto the Protestant truth society and swing through 90 degrees on their paradox, vectoring me along Fetter Lane, diverted before the old turns to new. Through back streets and the cities’ underbelly, I emerge at the Little New street, disheartened to know I must continue.

“I track back my course, along the various veins of the strand. The clots are loosening up now, the cholesterol high-visibility artery repairers have cleared a path for me to travel along its length, until reaching, circumnavigating and being pumped back through the heart of Trafalgar square.

“Nearly there, now, back to where I started, or near as makes no difference. Back up the Strand, I begin to feel worried for its stability after this many unnecessary journeys across it’s spine. The car journey almost complete to change over transport, hand over to another whilst I metaphorically grab 5-minutes to breath. With significant difficulty, a couple of near-misses and a significant amount of morning-dew perspiration later, I arrive at Fenchurch St Station. I open the car door, slam it shut, leaving saline fingerprints of the silvery pewter handles, and ask; could this be mine?”


‘It’s restricted’.

Flip was dumbstruck. This is the 3rd set they had found this year, and still Fenchurch St was restricted. There must be something about the apocalypse that means it prefers to destroy in a peculiarly precise way. And as astounding as his commentary on his travels through London, a city almost thoroughly forgotten, were, he wasn’t always one for such articulation.

‘Why,’ he started calmly, not knowing he couldn’t finish so, ‘the fuck is it restricted?’ he flailed wildly. Griff didn’t flinch. He stared with a stare that would only be familiar one who had met somebody with a shattered soul, a life cracked beyond repair as they stood on the edge of the void, the last glimmer of humanity snuffed beneath their feet. He retorted, in a sombre burbling voice.

‘I don’t know, we just can’t find the card.’

‘Well can’t we just make one or something? This has driven me crazy.’ Tenses weren’t much use to them anymore.

‘No we can’t, we’re in play. October’s already moved.’ The silent man in the top-hat and frowned expression moved his knight along 7 places, incurred a £200 fine for a non-existent income, which he duly paid, folded his arms, and gazed knowingly into the middle distance, his favourite sort of distance.

‘Oh, thanks Toby, thanks a fucking bunch.’ Flip leapt to his feet, missing the ground by a centimetre or two, cracked back down with a thud one would normally associate with falling masonry, and sulked in his corner. It wasn’t particularly his corner, the room was theirs to share, but he had built up his defences with the studwork rubble previously strewn throughout into a small mound he could hide behind in times of stress.

‘Don’t worry Toby,’ Griff consoled, fully aware it wasn’t necessary, ‘he’ll be alright.’ With this, he was right. This particular event had occurred 3 times during play, after which Flip would forget, return and repeat.

It was Griff’s turn. He elevated the dice to a significant level, and allowed gravity and the reactionary force of the board to do the rest.

7.

He engaged his plectrum; Old Kent, Community chest, the burnt square, Income Tax, King’s Cross Station, The Angel, Chance. He reached into the centre of the board, and picked up a card from the chance pile. He held it to his face, as if wishing the other’s not to see until his announcement.

‘Hah,’ he lied, ‘typical,’ he opined, ‘the Jack of Diamonds again.’

‘Of course it’s the fucking Jack of Diamonds,’ the voice from the rubble cried, ‘we only have 8 cards, and only 2 of them are different.’

‘True, but we’re bound to come across some more eventually.’ Griff lied again, there were no certainties here.

‘I fucking well hope so. We’ve used those so much I can tell what they’ll be by the burn marks on the back.’

October exhaled, and with all the facial expression of plasterboard, stood up and left. He knew how long it would take Flip to forget his tantrums, and so he would be back within that time. In the meanwhile, he perused the garden.

Griff turned to K, she was drawing as usual.

‘That was a giraffe, wasn’t it?’ he enquired. She looked up, staring in several directions simultaneously, as if following the path of an electron. She smiled, or at least wore an expression that’s constituent parts made a smile. However, in a sepulchral envisioning, it seemed somehow to translate itself into a scar on the face of her soul. She, like Griff, was wounded, although this was hardly surprising, as it was half possible she was just an illusion created by Griff’s mind.

She nodded.

‘I liked them, they were blue weren’t they? With stripes.’

She nodded again. She, unlike October, was capable of speech, but chose not to indulge unless she wanted to inflict pain on the ears of those in range. If her smile represented a scar on her soul, her voice adequately analogised the gaping voids in the soul’s fabric, vibrating as the screams of her heart circulate her body. There wasn’t much of her left, besides the physical. Griff theorised that she was the manifestation of his madness, so he himself could remain sane by keeping her separate. He coughed and turned back to the game.

Flip and October had returned. Flip had rolled a 7, landed on The Hotel, Oxford Street and was currently hurling obscenities at the wall. October duly left again, to peruse the other half of their garden.

Griff stared at October’s piece. It was a mahogany knight from a chess set, though he didn’t know that. Gazing with a deep passion and unusual concoction of fear of the unknown and bravery against the face of physics, he willed the knight to levitate. It did.

Nobody was watching, as usual. K was much too intent inventing past animals to have existed, and Flip was currently playing his guitar, the only tune he knew, which he couldn’t finish without the top E string he’d never been able to find. He repeated the part of the song he could play, until he hit the barrier, stopping at a point almost precisely defined as that which jars your ears if stopped at. It has a pulsing quality, a lyrical symbioticism such that you follow it’s rhythms and melodies with such deep significance, that it’s sudden stop makes the listener halt in their existential tracks with the music, and gives no sign of outside recovery. This ground on Griff, but didn’t make him angry. Anger was in the past. Anger was the past. The past, he concluded, is not now.

He notes the knight hanging in the air. Is span erratically, preferring no direction to any other, but determined to try them all. It’s acceleration was similarly unrestrained and so it span, unpredictably and chaotic. Griff blinked, the knight fell, normality resumed.

Before time, October returned. He held a small torus of wound nickel in his hand, at arm’s length as if through fear it may combust. Griff looked up, and beckoned.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ He slinked up from his seat. His legs were weak, his feet, one booted, one exposed and mostly intact, gave him the impression they would give way any day now. This was merely an impression, and a good one at that, but it still caught Griff off guard. After adjusting to the new position, he wandered over to the gift horse.

‘Hey, Flip, look what October’s brought you.’

Flip belted out of his hiding place, and very nearly impaled his eyes on the sharper frayed ends of the metal implement. It was, to his elation, a wound guitar string. For a while he ran around their room screaming jollities and wonderments to any non-existent entity he couldn’t find and refused to believe in. He bounced off the walls, clung and swung on metal railings and very nearly shattered a few windows.

This excitement, however, soon changed polarity when he noticed October solemnly shaking his head, eyes closed toward the ground. A pause emerged. There was silence to all, besides Griff who heard K’s scratching on paper. He shivered, haptodysphorically. The silent consensus was this. It wasn’t the string he was looking for. Upon closer inspection, it would be revealed that it was a B string designed exclusively for the electric guitar.

Flip exploded.

Griff and October ignored him.

‘Where did you find it?’ Griff enquired, not wholly interested, but determined to maintain interest in as much as he could before his mind shut down forever. October, as ever, remained silent, but turned, slightly hunched in anticipation of his hat not fitting through the doorway, and inaudibly beckoned for Griff to follow. They left Flip to his rapidly dismantling rubble heap and the quasi-real K to her cryptozoology, and headed to the garden.

In the 5 or 6 feet of concrete that outlined their room, they could walk around, investigating the scene. The sky, as usual was empty. Not even black, black implies the absorption of light, of which there was none there. The mind doesn’t cope well with this, and so they left the building staring at the paving.

Once at a suitable distance from their entrance, October turned through, looked up at the building’s facade, and slowly lifted his rigid arm to the point of interest. Griff shuffled along and, head-aside-arm, saw where he was pointing.

‘Ah,’ he bleated, ‘there again. Must’ve got caught falling through the void.’
The two shuffled back in, thankful for the sharp lettering above their door which caught them so much as it plummeted along all directions in infinity. The E’s were the most handy, with 3 prongs to catch with, and although the one from Fenchurch was missing, the T’s in Station and Street made up for this.

Over the course of the day, Flip nearly finished his song 3 times, Griff won the game, October found and kept a mouse from their garden, and K quietly winked out of existence.