The moon and its reflected disciples

It appeared I was in the park. History does not reveal why. I glanced up, then turned the glance first into a look, then belatedly a stare. The moon peered back at me through the eye socket of a tattered and screaming cloud witch’s face.

This sight caused in me the activation of the reminiscinal gland, and I was drawn back to a happening from days long past. Four days past, or maybe even five. Time is strange here, in the parklands of Hull.

On that occasion I was walking upon the heath, or perhaps trapped between the hedges in a particularly narrow garden. As is well known, due to my well trained and supple lips, I can whistle two distinct notes at the same time, and I was caught here in an absentminded duel between the right note and the left note that threatened to arouse a number of unwanted passions in any nearby lingering cats.

It is at times like this (or more accurately that, as I am still recounting the past, and will be for some time) that I wish I had been able to master too the middle whistle – for here it could have helped provide a calming note that would have turned the loins of not only cats but all the warm fleshed creatures to ice – but unfortunately I had been so far incapable of sustaining it beyond the second bar, whereupon it would cause the collapse of the complex wave function of my lips, and all sound would be reduced to a flat and unmelodious abomination.

The hedges turned, and around the corner glowed a mysterious figure. The light emanated from a bulb planted in the right eye, powered seemingly by the brain direct. The shadows cast across his face gave him a gnarled and unseemingly look, and made the hunch of his back loom ominously and it could definitely be said hugely over us both. My whistling was startled to a halt.

“Good evening sir,” I offered. He grasped it with both claws.

“It is, it is.” He turned his head to the right and turned his good eye sideways upon me. “Although maybe by now it is the night. Who knows when one begins and the other dies?”

I started to tell him the very precise definitions of evening and night and the exact demarcation points but I noticed then that his eyebulb was of the old fashioned sort.

“Sir, sir,” I lamented. “Sir, the bulb upon your eye is the inefficient kind, 100 watts used when only 15 are needed, if the progress of the technology would just be accepted.”

“Yet the mercury within them is bad for the brain”, he replied. “And they protrude further than is polite.”

I nodded, ambiguously, and bid him good night. I scuttled backwards, revoked the turn I had made earlier, and the encounter was finished.