STORYSPACE: Grimmer and Breath – I Mean, Brimmer and Death
Just realized that little play on words as I typed the title. Neat, eh?
Steve’s got some nice imagery here, but hidden within it are some symbols in the setting:
RoomsHand in hand, they walked through rooms, some cluttered with books and furniture, others punched through with holes that opened onto instances of life. He watched stars explode, a multitude of births, mountains crumble on worlds other than Earth, masses wander alien streets gasping for disease-less air, small forms fall from windows until he had to turn away and follow her out onto a checkerboard surface that coiled out into blackness. She led him over the edge and onto the opposite side where they found themselves hemmed by a crowd of blue sheep. He followed her over a hill and she offered him coffee from a black cup in a kitchen with a green stove and fridge."Have you decided where you’ll, what did you say, bunk up?"
What I pick up on here is a mini-movie of life in the first two sentences. One is the familiar, rooms with books and furniture. The other is a mishmash of the real with the possibilities, all thrown onto a screen of enormous expanse bringing individual to the whole, the whole to the individual.
The ‘checkerboard surface’ mimics the duality of the experience, black and white. Life and Death. Large and small. There’s the Mobius Strip–a favorite–as she leads him "over the edge and onto the opposite side." A crowd of blue sheep? Well, as I visualize them upside-down(remember, Mobius mobility), the grounded sky may be embodied in blue sheep. Or it may simply mean nothing more than a vivid imagination (betcha authors just hate it when others explain ‘meaning.’)
And here, what I love best of all, a vision of a past that Steve Ersinghaus may not even remember or have seen in his lifetime, the 60s Avocado Green (or its counterpart, Harvest Gold) kitchen appliance.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
January 14th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
I hadn’t even thought of the Mobius here. Makes sense too.