Nerv Erf

A variant of the same short shonky shanty (see below) has recently turned up in a bottle, rescued by a local, on the golden sands of Buddha Beach in Thailand. It reads:

Don’t send me no postcard from above
I just lost the sense of irony
The clouds here would make El Greco cry
I would paint them if I were he
When Saturday comes & there’s nothing left to eat
You know where I’ll be

Sitting at the garden table, Kimbell wrote a note to himself on the top left of the newspaper, above the word puzzle…

Things to do today:

Vacuum
Mow lawns
Shopping
Clean bathroom
Arrest the NSA on suspicion of espionage

Luckily, a sea shanty which, in a remarkable way, appears to summarise the adventures of Kimbell so far has recently been recovered from a 114 Brook St, Toronto second storey bedroom drawer. Undoubtedly, the lost Chapters 3 & 4 contain all the musical annotations necessary for a possible rendition of this song, together with a link to a video set somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

And at that very moment
Pasha kissed the elbow
of the ‘Four Rivers’ console
and set off an enormous
explosion outside the world renowned
Valentin Research Facility

"I aint dead yet," mumbled
Kimbell as he slowly
got to his feet. The
control room was empty
the air a toxic haze so thick it's a
wonder any self respecting physicist could breathe

He reached for the Gasman
with his one good hand and as
consciousness faded he
swallowed the certain fact that
a chain reaction in the
air even then was
engulfing the planet at some
speed them robots wouldn’t believe

Looking to the north from a
broken down verandah
Belinda and her kids watched the
great dark churning mass of cloud
come rolling across the horizon
thinking all the time they’d soon be dead

And next thing they’re floating
in a six foot wide flying saucer
that was made of some undiscovered
metal and was open to the
air and heading down the gravel
road right past the old milking shed

She noticed right then that the
railings needed painting and the
poplar trees were ever so
delicately waving. Her young
children seemed accustomed to such
smoothness in the field that the
system switched to manual
and the light blinking orange turned to red

Kimbell opened his eyes looking
up at the face of some
woman he thought he might’ve known
a long time ago when he was just
a boy on some middle-of-nowhere
farm and she was just a little girl

And at this very moment there’s a
break in the transcript (we can
only surmise what may or
may not have happened
to the entities in question and
because of which a number of rumours swirled)

Abbie snatched a bug from the
limb of some shrub and she
put it between her teeth as she
haunched down over Kimbell and said
"You still alive mister
husband, looks like you been taken
over by some poisonous plant, or are
you just one less cicada in this world?”

The Van Dyke crystal had a
mind of its own. Abbie never
knew if it just thought of something
clever or all the time it had some
plan in the pipeline so
unlikely that it made sense

The air was properly twinkling as the
Gasman gave up thinking and
Pasha flapped her wings like a
parrot does when she’s got something to
say but what it is is better
said with some righteous show of clumsiness

The plot being so simple and yet so
self-referential with the
characters beguiling and the
dialogue chic-retro, Linda
knew she had a winner as she
saved the final version to a
folder whose title was “If
Only I Knew How The Story Ends”

These chapters will be posted as soon as they can be found.

The afternoon of Wednesday the 12th of December 2012, Pasha stalked every aisle of the St Petersburg Public Library before finally coming to rest on a seat beside the so-called Gasman. Gasman seemed like one totally mad kind of gismo, consisting of a transparent metallic sphere, as if she were looking at a droplet of water, from the bottom of which emanated an old WW1 gas mask. All this was supported by a rudimentary tripod. As she looked at Gasman, Gasman looked back, replicating her visual perpective exactly. That is, through her eyes, the Gasman was admiring himself. She read the paperised plaque stuck to an archaic music stand: "Invented by Gomenko and Solovief, two students at the St Petersburg State Polytechnical University in 2019, Gasman was originally intended as an aid to the analysis of psychotic conditions…"
Pasha stopped reading. Why go on? This machine needed stealing.

"Why are you sad, mommy?"
Neither parent answered.
"He talks to me on the computer."
"Are you sure?" Johannes patted Boo Boo on the head.
"But he's in France. He can't come back."
Johannes and Yani walked Boo Boo to her room. She turned on the computer.
"See. Laughing Cloud Records. Cowboy Surf music."

"My eyes hurt," insisted Captain Dimcho Pavlov puffing on a cigarette. "I'll be dead in two years. Or worse than dead."
"Some people just get better with age, boss." The Parrot kept her eye on the darkened sea ahead and a hand on the wheel. Rogue spume arched gracefully into the foredeck lights. In the rolling darkness, the Nitram Yar held a course The Parrot had calculated would pass by the island of Jersey and continue all the way to Nova Scotia. As Captain Pavlov held to the notion that nothing will ever go in a straight line, she had drawn a bowl-shaped line on the chart, which seemed to satisfy him.
The Parrot got her name from the crew of another day, but it was more a reflection on the Captain himself than the diminuative Parrot (whose short cropped hair could not hide the woman beneath) given that Pavlov was the kind of seafarer existing only in books, or, more likely, in comics, his greying, long frizzy hair and communist-era uniform an unlikely reflection in the half price sunglasses of life.

Hungry and cold, Kimbell huddled in the cargo hold between two wooden crates.

God, I'm sick of the first person. From now on I will refer to myself as Kimbell.

I walk out the gate. Some way down the road a snake disturbs the roadside grass. A brilliant thought strikes me. I stop, admiring the empty grass, reassuring myself of its emptiness. Then another thought appears. I begin walking in circles so as to keep these two thoughts in relation. I pace round and round in the middle of the road. A third even more brilliant idea occurs to me. I reach out with my foot. I put one foot after the other. I leave myself behind. I will not be ensnaked by even four brilliant ideas.