Dowry - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

Dowry

Published by Nemonymous
06-12-2022

Dowry

DOWRY

I thought they said the title was to be LOWRY.
L. S. Lowry.
So that’s how I started these words off. All those matchstick people in…where? Up in north England somewhere, I guess. In the days when toilets were perhaps grimmer, grimier, less efficient, perhaps not even water closets by then, in fact most of them still being ‘earth closets’. Lowry was born in 1887, I just found out. Other days, other ways. The past is a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley said.

I spend most of my life in recent years peeing. Or perhaps too much knowledge is bad knowledge. But now I’ve started off with this embarrassing non-sequitur, I say it is probably because a bodily complaint causes it, and I do indeed complain about it a lot!

I pee in the night many times voluminously as well as in short spirts, with a suspect continence, I fear, and in the daytime, too, where some of the repercussions need to have a veil drawn over them. I wonder where it all comes from, as I pee far more than I drink. Peeing as if dousing the earth itself with the juice of my goodness, as I would like to call it.

And this is where the DOWRY comes in, with my hoped-for legacy being the treasure of a dowsed dowry of wetness from this planet that we call a dying Earth to a new inhabitable planet, as an inducement for the new planet to marry our planet — an endowment to outweigh the increasingly dry shrivelling of our own planet. Our reward being a fruitful galactic matrimony, if not a perfect match made in some Science Fiction Heaven!

The future diaspora’s ceremonial passing over of such a dowry from planet to planet as a flow of humanity — spirts and spirits wedded within a mass of bodily thin matchsticks — and speedily flickering with potential fires that somehow stem from the wetness that was originally mined from mine! A wetness that I shall sadly not witness working to create new and continued life. The paradox of earth, fire and water. And the past is a foreign future.

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Gnosticangel (06-12-2022), Ironrose (06-12-2022), miguel1984 (06-12-2022), schlieu (06-12-2022), Schopenhauer (06-17-2022), yellowish haze (06-12-2022), Zaharoff (06-12-2022)

By Nemonymous on 06-12-2022

Re: Dowry

Written today.

By Nemonymous on 06-20-2022

Re: Dowry

DOWRY II

“What is a dowry?” Ben asked.
“What was one?” replied Sarah. “They don’t have dowries any more. It was when a woman wanted to marry a man and she asked her dad to bribe him with money.”
I noted Sarah did not seem to be thinking about what she said.
Ben replied: “No wonder they don’t have dowries any more. Sounds dreadful. Not at all politically correct.”
A man sitting at the next restaurant table did not question why this couple were talking about the meaning of ‘dowry’ as I might have done when writing about such matters. I am interested in words, their meaning, their sound. People like Ben and Sarah are likely to talk about things that don’t interest me. And I noted that the intrusive man leant across the social distancing between the two tables and said:
“What your dear lady said about bribe is not correct at all, let alone anything else political or woke.”
“Oh, yes,” said Ben, rather taken aback by the socially incorrect interruption from another restaurant table that should have had its own territory. “So what is a dowry?”
I noted that the man hesitated and then meaningfully defined the word, its social history and the customs that prevailed when dowries were common.
Sarah, meanwhile, I noticed, was twisting her spaghetti mindlessly with a fork, not even attempting to raise it to her mouth. She stared into emptiness.
“What is social distancing?” she suddenly asked in a monotone.
And then I noticed that the man at the next table turned his attention from Ben to Sarah, saying:
“It is a historical term from the Age of Covid.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, as if she had already mind-read the answer.
Ben, who had a pizza in front of him, frowned deeply and moved as if to throw a punch — but, no, even worse, he seemed about to transgress the present strict rules of social engagement in the manners of today’s age in some other way as yet unclear. Whatever the case, it seemed likely to be worse than anything the man had already done to Ben.
And I smartly decided to finish noting such things down at this point before matters became even more out of hand. But not before adding more words to those I had already written — to the effect that I hoped what was now written on the empty pages whereon I am writing would become an investment in the otherwise empty future when these words might be read with a new understanding. Wedding truth and fiction as one. But who knows what potential rules of engagement would prevail in such a future? And how did I even know the couple’s names? My diary doesn’t say.