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Continued from: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_apocryfan_13.htm
NOTE: It is currently considered that Adrian’s so-called monologues whenever they occur are apocryphal and will not appear in any final edition of this work.
As the new season picked up its early stride, steamer jaunts were initiated for the first time in the history of Bonnyville. A huge vessel called the ‘Glittenburier’ was moored at the end of the pier each Sunday and took sight-seers through the Humps as far towards the known horizon as it was possible to go without it becoming a different horizon.
This was a hopping trip, whereby passengers could disembark from time to time at a select few of the newly inhabited Humps, where scientific experiments were now being conducted or observatories set up to examine the night sky without light pollution or landmass interference.
Claura watched the ‘Glittenburier’ churn along the coast towards the pier’s end one particular Sunday morning, its huge funnel belching ‘warm-free’ fumes like a sick old man smoking a pipe on his back, his flailing arms being paddlewheels transporting him across the sea’s upper seabed in slow procession of motion’s thought-patterns. She watched it without thinking. There was no need to note its passage with any attention as she was otherwise intent on reaching one of the beach huts for quite a different context.
Her husband had managed to contact her the night before – having evidently escaped from prison. He had stowed himself away in one of the shoreside chalets, but which one was unclear. Her heart was in her mouth, as she had only seen him during formal visiting hours, and even those occasions had grown, in recent years, fewer and fewer. She retained a loyalty to him, despite the way he had behaved to her during their marriage ... whilst also never forgiving (nor understanding) the crime for which he was being punished with a life term. She had not questioned how such a prisoner could have managed to escape. The drive to run towards the beach huts was simply the gut nature of a once pretty now gone-to-seed woman following an unstoppable instinct that was not even her own instinct. And here she was trying to open an ill-painted and evidently locked plank door (to the consternation of nearby day-trippers legitimately opening their own commissioned hut nearby) as the ‘Glittenburier’ finally moored at the far end of the pier with an audible sky-echoing hoot and hiss. Even the blue ‘train’ had stopped to watch. But not Claura.
Mr Socrates watched, too. He watched Claura. No longer a teacher, he had taken to mooning about the sea front thinking of new careers he could take. But no new careers would ever come ... certainly in Bonnyville. Except that of unpaid watcher. A watcher of the waves. Having given up any hope of interest in the sight of Claura’s skirmishing from hut to hut (although this was a strange occurrence), he walked to the end of the pier to watch the embarkation of the ‘Glittenburier’.
Many of the children he had taught – now grown up and attending college a commuting distance away from the town – Palisers and Dumonds alike – were mingling with the day-trippers. Evidently, something they had planned as a Sunday treat preferable to church. Old enough to decide for themselves.
He missed them. He had failed to rescue them from life.
He saw that, since the previous voyage, the steamer had acquired a human-sized figurehead of rich but dull marble in imprecise conjoinment with seasoned timber: an embedment at the prow under the bowsprit. A figurehead with feathers ruffled by the wind. An ultramarine effigy.
CONTINUED HERE: http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/121
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