They say a picture is worth a thousand words, we'll give you 500. Half a Picture.

Scrooge had changed, there is no doubting that.

He was kinder and more considerate. No longer the miser he was known to be, he increased Cratchit’s pay and visited with his nephew once or twice a year.

He died all the same, several years later. Scrooge was buried in a small plot on a hill overlooking the city. His nephew’s family and the Cratchit’s all wept at the funeral, mourning the loss of a man who, while not perfect, had made amends in the last years of his life. Life carries on. Bob Cratchit had difficulties finding employ upon Scrooge’s passing. Two winters after Scrooge’s death he was walking home from the docks and was caught in a storm. It was a short illness, mercifully. Tiny Tim soon followed, the sickly boy never being strong of fortitude.

Years passed and the city carried on. As more of Scrooge’s old acquaintances left their lives behind, his name faded. His grave remained, still watching over the city. The cemetery, however, was abandoned and, eventually, forgotten. The flesh and bones beneath the earth long rotted, the stone slabs remained, markers of forgotten names and long-gone faces. Decades later, nature had retaken Scrooge’s headstone. Wild grass grew over the soil and the elements had worn away at the stone.

One mid-winter night, the wind picked up and two figures appeared before the weathered stone. One was an old man, his face contorted in horror. The other seemed more than human. He was cloaked and draped in a billowing cape. It seemed as if the cape was his body, as no corporeal form could be discerned but for a skeletal hand pointed at the grave. He spoke in howls and gusts. The whistling wind carrying what message he had to the ears of the man. After several minutes, they vanished as they had appeared. The man shaking, the figure unchanged.

Was I wrong in bringing Scrooge to that point in time? An inevitable point that will one day occur to all living beings? Perhaps. Scrooge would be forgotten at one point. Sooner or later, it matters not. Time stretches forward and takes no heed of the names and deeds of such short lived creatures. In that brief period it had allotted Scrooge, the man lived a good life and helped his fellows. That alone is enough. He had lived for those in his time, not for those in future times. Had he donated all his gold to charity, or died clutching it to his breast – he would be forgotten all the same. Everyone is forgotten. Such is the shape of things yet to come.

It is a story known.

The girl, at the loom, who pricks her finger and falls into a deep slumber. Variations exist, as always. Sometimes the girl is performing needlework. In some she’s dark-haired, in others it is a golden haired child. In all, the girl sleeps. One hundred years, sometimes less, sometimes more. Until her prince came, gallant and shining. Often he battles some dark beast for her, not always. The end remains the same. Always. His kiss awakens her, and she is saved.

There is, however, another story. Unknown. Whether it came before or after is unclear. Some say it was a test, an attempt to ascertain whether the sleeping curse works. Others claim the two are unrelated. No one knows why one story gained popularity while the other faded into obscurity. There are theories, but no facts. Perhaps there was no moral to be gleaned from it.

There was a boy, or a man, and he was in the forest. His actions are uncertain, hunting or gathering wood. It is known that he was caring for an elderly parent or a child. He was a good man, that much can be gathered. It was a fate unearned. He pricks his finger on an arrow, or the edge of his axe and draws blood. As the drop fall to the ground, so does he. He falls to the ground, and he sleeps. No one finds him, he is deep in the forest and cannot be tracked. He sleep for years, decades, centuries. He is unprotected by castles of stone and steel. The forest creatures come. At first the fear him, then less so. The predators come first, enjoying the easy meal. Then the scavengers, chewing and ripping at the remains. Finally, the insects lay their eggs in the blood and gore. The forest, too, takes its share. The roots in the ground below feed on the minerals that have seeped into the ground. The man sleeps. He is now of the forest. His body will not be found, but he is in the forest, spread throughout it. He is in the animals, in the plants. The man sleeps and thus, the forest sleeps. In time, the forest itself will be killed. By time, by the elements, by machines. The man sleeps and the forest sleeps. As the trees burn, the ManForest sleeps. As concrete is poured and vast metal structures are erected – he sleeps.

One day, he will awake. The curse will be broken. Then… then things will change. The man will wake and the forest will take back its lost ground. It will rise up, grow, expand. It will wash the grey and black with a green, fresh and resplendent.

All this will come to pass once the man sleeps no longer.

We’re not such active participants, you and I. Although we do go to the gatherings. The rooms – for we gather in different halls, different places, we are always moving – the rooms are always set up like it is an AA meeting; maybe that is what we want them to think. It isn’t an AA meeting. There’s Kool-Aid in a jug, or a vase (depending on what room we’re in. Each room seems to be equipped with a different kind of pitcher), and bland store-bought cookies, which are usually vanilla-flavored. We sit down somewhere, choosing random chairs, sometimes together we sit, and sometimes apart. The chairs are always plastic, no matter what room we are in. Their colors differ; white and green and blue are the prominent ones, though of course, there are others. We usually get there first, because I am punctual, and because you like to look at “the lay of the place”. I understand that to mean that you like looking at the uncovered legs of the women who file in, sometimes alone, sometimes together, sometimes with men. You like to look at the back of their legs, how their skirts slowly rise up as they reach for a plastic cup for the Kool-Aid, because the table is wide, backed up against the white stark wall, and the white plastic cups are hard to reach. I look to see if the men’s legs are as promiscuous, following your example; but no. There is only a rustling of the creases of the pants, the different kinds of fabrics playing with the glaring fluorescent lights.
So, we have gathered. This is no AA, there are no confessions, only accusations. You listen to the words that are said, I listen to the tone, the inflections. I watch the spittle rise out of the speakers’ mouths, and descend quickly in an arch-shaped movement to the ground, or maybe onto one of the listeners (if they are listening. Maybe they are just sitting). When we get home we will exchange information, though it will not be a fair exchange. You will fill me in on what I have missed; you will know that I haven’t been listening. I listen to you, because I cannot only follow the musicality of your voice, its deceptive softness, because you will leave me, because I will be lost. So I listen. The words you use are grand, big, bold. I see, as I listen to you, the speaker, dressed in a general’s outfit, with eyes of red. The spittle is now draining from his lips, downwards, and he is speaking, in your voice, of what is right, and what is wrong. When you are done, a silence settles down between us, and we wait for it to pass. I turn on the heater, warming my hands in the glow of the red metallic coils. You want something of me; oh, the march; no, I will not go.
You will go (suddenly you are an active participant) and you will be comforted by the masses, the noise, the smells. Someone told me, once, that the hot-dog stands stay open as usual, even though you are marching through the streets, even though so many others have taken cover. And that every so often a marcher will suddenly stop chanting, and reach for his wallet, and pull out a dollar, and buy a hot-dog. Not you, though. You are still at the gathering, when you march. Not on the street, not in you, as your body screams slogans and your mouth chants words.

When you come home the house will be spotless. And when you start to cry, I’ll pour you a shot of whisky, and then put you to bed, and hold you until you sleep.

She is speaking on the telephone. Her voice, the man on the other end of the line thinks, is like granite: hard, toneless, expressionless. The man on the other end of the line is a policeman. He sits behind a tall desk, and he likes how people approaching the desk need to look up at him, as if he is a judge, or a king. He never gets too full of himself though. What with his wife constantly bitching at him from whatever room she’s in, in the house. The room the she is in when she is speaking at him effects the content of her words, though not their nasal whine which speeds up and down like a police siren. “The damn light’s dripping”, she’ll yell at him through the telephone. One of these days, he’ll open up an encyclopedia and find out how a telephone works, how his wife’s enraged voice, travels through the telephone lines. How is it, he wonders idly, doodling on a pad of police paper as she loudly makes up a something wrong in the living room, dining room, kitchen, garage even, how is it that only her voice can be ferried across on the telephone, and not her cigarette smoke, and not her own very self. “Jesus,” the thought of her materializing here, in his place of work, amongst the rapists and thieves and people whose dogs have gone missing, fills him with a very bizarre feeling. He feels that she should be here, packed behind bars with other women who yell at their husbands. He would go and watch her, in her cell, and she would yell at him, and his face would remain neutral, he would be ever so calm. It wouldn’t be hate or gloating staring out of his face at hers; it would be justice.

The woman on the other end of the line waits patiently; she cannot know that the seargent on the other end of the line is daydreaming, his ears blissfully listening to the monotone voice that had been her. She is not ruffled by this, she merely waits, calmly. Her mind has been vacant for so many years, although occasionally her sense of humor will have dry remarks: this space for rent, it giggles to her. It seems to her, as her friends used to tell her, when she used to have friends, that something should be missing from her life. And then later, when her friends had despaired of her, of her silence and lips pressed firmly together and the spark that didn’t appear in her eyes, her brother had said: doesn’t it matter to you, that you exist? “Not really”, she hadn’t really looked at him when she’d answered, she’d looked out the window, to where a winter’s pale blue sky was waning, to where little white clouds frisked in and out of the window frame. Since then she hadn’t had a brother, except on holiday, bursting through her mailbox in the form of colorful greeting cards on recycled papers. Right now she is waiting for a police sergeant to get back to her, so she can tell him that someone is dangling a potato on string in front of her window, it must be someone from the roof. Her apartment is on the top floor, she will tell him, when he gets back from getting a coffee or wrestling a killer to the ground or whatever it is he is doing, and it wouldn’t bother her so much except for that someone had carved a face, a sad face, into the potato, and stuck a knife in one of the eyes. She will tell him, and she will mean it, that she isn’t scared; it’s just that the murdered potato is blocking her view of the sky; it’s just that she can’t go up on the roof, on her own.



He looks up at her, smiles, looks away. He can tell that she isn’t paying attention, his mother. She’s smoking her cigarette, watching the smoke patter out sporadically before her, as it disperses into the cool blue air. He wonders where the smoke goes; it’s whiteish gray, and the sky is blue. He looks up at the sky, his mother catches in the corner of his eye as he looks up. Briefly, there are faded white sneakers, with pink stripes and a shape which looks like two lines from far away getting closer and closer until they meet. Then legs with purplely lines running down them, then a skirt with more lines, red and blue and green, cutting across each other on a black background. He wants to ask his mother if she likes lines, if the straightness is calming or scary, but he goes past her white blouse and her white vacant face and her thinnish brownish hair to the sky. The sky is blue, so blue, bluer than the lines on his sneakers, or on his glasses, or the letters on his hospital bracelet, which are so faded by now that he can hardly see them. The letters are still there though, if he looks for them, hard enough. He can’t read yet, but he knows that his name is written there: Ernie Jones. Sometimes, suddenly, the fear grips him that when the letters on his white bracelet disappear he will disappear as well; but he doesn’t share this with his mother; and maybe, he thinks happily, when these scary thoughts of him and his letters going away suddenly materialize, maybe he will get to be the orange Ernie from the television. Ernie from television has a big smile, and is very silly, and most importantly he has stripes on his shirt.

But the sky. Ernie Jones, having looked past his mother to the blue dome overhead, looks for the lines in the sky, and cannot find them. This is slightly discomforting to him. Maybe the lines are so thick underneath the blue, so tightly packed, that he cannot see them? While Ernie thinks on the sky his feet play with the purple and brown and red leaves on the ground, his hands clench and unclench and squiggle – as he likes to call it – in his pockets. Although he is deeply puzzled by the linelessness of the sky, he also aware of his nose, which must be red in the crisp Autumn air, and his cold ears and the high whistling sound that erupts there, ever so suddenly, every so often; is the whistling coming from inside, or out? The pain that is beginning to trickle into his neck is present, he can see it almost as well as he sees the blueness of a sky; it is a dull red pain, it is that kind of pain. He knows that if he holds his head in the same position, the red will become a darkling blue, and then a grayish black, and then he won’t be able to see anything at all. His mother knows this too. She throws away her cigarette, and the movement is arrested by Ernie’s eye; he snaps his neck down, and understands that playtime is over. He looks, with longing, at the yellow slide and the red swings that are moving back and forth, playing with the wind. His mother has already starting walking, though, towards the big white building, with her head down; maybe she is looking at the pretty crunchy leaves? Ernie starts walking behind her – not too fast, he knows he can’t walk fast, he musn’t – and even as he tries only to walk on the cracks in the pavement, he looks up to see his mother’s cigarette smoke trailing lazily behind a small aero plane, sailing in the blue blue sky.