Ripple Across The Pond

“The Atlantic is disarmingly called the Pond, where Tentacles born in America can often reach our shores in Britain, or if not Tentacles, at least a ripple or two carrying what many consider to be the infections of a planet’s soul that first find root on the other side of the so-called pond. Recently, the opposite happened when Tentacles rooted in Britain created their own ripples against the grain of the jetstream and sent infections the other way and, in a sense, outfaced even any higher card that was shuffled and dealt towards us. In fact our single most powerful British ripple across the pond created a foul entity in America that was later sent back to hold our hands and infect us with what might be considered its ‘dirty chicken’ deals of trade and exchange...”

Jermaine ceased rattling the keyboard with an echoing sense of subconscious frenzy. She thought better of sending her missive in case, by sending it, she became part and parcel of an insidious two-way stream of ripples that were competing at this very moment in time. A moment as symbolised by a smaller pond that she could see in the garden from her window. A phenomenon of ripples she put down to freakish gusts of wind or at least ghosts, not gusts, that left no mark on her sight other than those patterns of ripple shaped into tentacles of water that clashed in the middle of the pond.

But if she was not sending what she had typed, why bother completing it? Just leave it with those dirty chicken deals hanging in the air. Why bother even to delete what she had written already? What was written was written. Go on to more constructive projects, she thought, away from these recent obsessions of hers concerning tentacles and ripples. The psychogeography of her mind that had been instilled by the surprisingly dark politics of the moment. Every moment ends soon enough, when its spate is spent, she thought, but did not type what she thought.

The sun was setting, and the air silent. So not gusts after all. Still light enough to see the keyboard without using the room’s lamp.

“A penny for your thoughts, Jermaine,” said a smiling face from outside the open window, now blocking her view of the rippling pond. The residues of the sun as a corona around the human features of expression and identity.

Jermaine had already looked up startled, lifting her head away from the keyboard she was now intending to start rattling again.

“Is that you, Gilbert?”

“Who else? You would surely have got a shock if it had been anyone else.”

A ghost then, not a gust, Jermaine thought, thought without typing it down. Gilbert, her husband, had died two Christmases ago, and this was the third Christmas in a row she would spend thus alone. She typed the word ‘imagination’ slowly, letter by letter, as a sort of deliberate doodling of delay before she answered. This word did not fit the rest of her missive about the political world around her. But she would delete the delay later. She smiled to herself, a smile to match the smile on the face she had not seen on the face outside the window, this widow by the window, half-blinded by the rays of the low sun as she had been, always was, when Gilbert visited.

She turned to the side of the desk where her laptop sat and picked up the pack of cards sitting precariously there. She shuffled them, then picked one card at random from the other cards and handed it through the open window to whoever or whatever she knew as Gilbert.

“Try that one, Gilbert. Maybe that one will work. One day, the card will be the right card to outface any other card.”

The now darker shape of Gilbert by dint of the sun’s own demise managed to manhandle the card clumsily away from Jermaine’s fingers and then attenuated into a smaller shape, or was it growing more distant rather than smaller as a shape? She thought she could see the shape throw the card into the pond. But she was not sure if a gust had taken it instead.

With tears in her eyes, she returned to the keyboard and deleted the word ‘imagination’, leaving ‘dirty chicken’. A name of a card game to go with other card games like Old Maid or Happy Families or Patience or plain simple Snap? However simple, such games needed their own bespoke rules. Rules that could not break or be broken.

The rattling continued for a while even after Jermaine’s room and its outside grew completely dark. Then silent. Like Tentacles Across The Atlantic.