Glittermouse Visual Arts

A Nearly True Story About Something That Nearly Happened
By The Person it Almost Nearly Happened To

Part One Continued...
A couple of hours later the rain had started hammering down in sheets, making irritating, pseudo-rhythmic crashing noises on the windows of the café. It served to compound her irritation towards the whole situation. She gazed out across the grey sea, the kind of sea, which if it had been a blanket would have been an itchy woollen one, slightly damp and musty that your grandmother had made you wrap in when she was cold. The swan had eaten all the cake. It hadn't even left her a piece of the egg sandwich and the café lady, who had been very tolerant, was beginning to get annoyed, she could tell. She felt a certain kinship with the old woman. Not because of her ridiculously dyed orange hair or because of her chipped red talons, or even because of her stained gingham apron, but because they were, after all, in the same profession. She knew what it was like to spend all day in cappuccino-table-cleaning purgatory. The swan relieved itself on the white plastic chair. She winced and hope the lady hadn't noticed. She quite clearly had and began to slowly drum her claws on the Formica counter whilst furnishing them with the kind of look recognisable as a "you do realise that I'm well within my rights to ask you to leave and the only reason I'm allowing you to stay is you are the only customer I've had all afternoon, but you're pushing your luck and if your bird shits again you're out?" sort of look. She pushed her guilt to the back of her mind and carried on with the topic currently under discussion. "I don't care" she said, "if it is a mistake caused by bad planning and over-corporate bureaucracy on the part of your superiors, I still want to know." She poked sulkily at the dregs of chocolaty milk froth in the bottom of her mug. "And," she poked a bit harder to punctuate the word, "It's my whistle, I found it, and I'm not giving it back." There was a cold silence. The swan was doing it's best to give her a dirty look, but it's not easy to look demanding when you have a beak.

"What does it do anyway?"
"Something bad" evaded the swan.
"Oh, really, coz I blew it already and nothing happened."
"Yet" added the swan, who was clearly enjoying the sense of suspense it had just discovered it could create. The sense would probably have been even more suspenseful if it had not had a piece of boiled egg stuck on the end of its beak.
"So? What's about to happen?" There was an almost imperceptible stumble from the swan.
"The, err, it unleashes The Seven Lords of Destruction from their prison in The Underworld." She sighed, got up slowly, and ordered another cappuccino (being sure to make it a large one in an attempt to stay on the right financial side of the café lady) and a slice of carrot cake. She carefully returned to her seat, purposefully placing the plate very obviously in her half of the table. Then she sneezed on it for good measure. She wasn't sure if swans were particularly hygiene conscious, in fact she rather suspected that they weren't, but it was normally a good tactic in securing the last piece of confectionary for personal consumption, so it didn't seem likely do any harm. She glared at the swan.
"What happens when the Seven Lords of Destruction reach this dimension?" she asked in the most patronising and scathing faux-polite tone of voice she could manage.
"The, err, sky falls, the sea boils and they break open The Chest of, um, Very Bad Things." The swan shuffled uncomfortably.
"Really." It was a statement, not a question. She bit into the carrot cake. "I realise that compared to some of the people you deal with on a daily basis, I'm probably very unimportant. But, see, in my job, I'm used to being un-important. I still expect the people above me to treat me with enough respect to tell me the truth, because." She took another bite, "Being on the lower levels, I can still cause chaos for those above me by making some very silly mistakes. If that happens to be chaos derived from another dimension then so be it. But I doubt it is. It seems to me you won't get anywhere by making up stories bad enough to make even the poorest of sci-fi writers blush. If you tell me what's really going on you can have the whistle back. And the rest of the carrot cake."
"Don't 'ike carrot cake." Mumbled the swan sheepishly. It was clearly still lying. She pushed the plate towards it.
"So? What's going on?" The swan sniffed. She had never heard a swan sniff before. It almost made her lose concentration.
"Can't say."
"Why? I won't tell anyone, if that's what you're worried about, not that I'd get anyone to take me seriously if I said I'd been talking to swans, and I'm not giving it back until you tell me."
"Just can't."
"Is it a real throne of blood? And what's going to happen now I've blown the whistle?"
"Oh for heaven’s sake! I don't know. All I know is that I had to somehow give you the message and make sure you got the whistle. I did. Then suddenly there'd been a mistake and I had to get the whistle back again."
"So you don't even know?!"
The swan shook its head. For the first time it actually appeared to be telling the truth. Which was even more frustrating.
"And I suppose you're going to get into terrible trouble if you don't get it back to them aren't you?" The swan shrugged. This was an interesting physical development on the swan's part. One normally requires ownership of a pair of shoulders first.
"I don't know – I doubt it'll be particularly enjoyable though, whatever." The swan looked around, as though it expected it was being watched but didn't know by whom.
"You're just a swan aren't you?" She felt a bit stupid as soon as she'd asked.
"No," said the swan, "I'm a very rare kind of ancient Chinese teapot."
"Are you a pathological liar, or have you received special training for your line of work?"
"Ask a silly question…"
"Look, I thought I was coming here to meet my Dream Swan, who was going to tell me all about important magical things and it turns out you're just any old swan who doesn't know anything." The swan winked and leaned suggestively over the table.
"How do you know I'm not your dream swan?" There were some things, for example, sniffing and shrugging, in which in all fairness it had proved remarkably proficient. Being seductive was now with out any doubt not one of them.
"Ummm…" There was an awkward moment. "Oh, look, it has stopped raining,” she observed, thankfully. "Shall we go outside?" They went for a walk along the beach.
The shells suddenly felt heavy in her pocket; it seemed like such a very long time ago that she had picked them up. She thought about collecting some more, but ended up tipping the others out. She reasoned that this action was a metaphor for life. You wandered along, picking up as much lovely stuff as you could, but eventually it just became stuff, losing the lovely, and you just couldn't bear to hold on to it anymore because of what it had once meant to you. If only it was as easy to put down the life stuff she thought.
The sun started to set. It wasn't that you could tell, what with it being lost in all the clouds but it was rapidly getting dark. They hadn't spoken for a while.
"I'm going home now." She commented abruptly. "Sorry I can't help you any. Let me know if anything comes up, death threat wise, you know, or if you find out about what the whistle actually does. Good luck." She turned and walked away with out waiting for a reply or looking back. Feeling terribly bad about doing it, she began to wonder if she wasn't very good at Handling Situations. "I could probably have had" she began to tell herself "an adventure if I'd tried to help the swan find out about stuff. But I'm just not sure I'm brave enough. On the other hand, I could have just given the whistle back and never heard anymore about it, so maybe I am a bit brave after all. It's all very strange."

She expected to have a dream that night, or wake in the morning to find a big black shape perched on the end of her bed, but neither happened. She went back to the big city the next day with no signs of swans. She didn't have any important feeling daydreams at work. She didn't remember any of her night dreams that week. She went to the park and tried self-consciously to talk to the ducks, but they didn't seem to want to know. "Perhaps," she thought with mixed emotions, "that's it. Maybe it's all over." Then she forgot about it.

The End (Of Part One)