ISSN 1758-6488
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Last Fiction |
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Inside the train the woman waved her hands to get their attention. She tossed the cigarette up at her mouth and caught it wrong way round, like a minor circus trick. The three boys shouted their admiration. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, put it the right way round, then got herself ready to catch the lighter, which she did, with one hand. She lit her cigarette. The tallest, the shyest of the three, tapped on the sealed window with the stick he was carrying and pointed it at the No Smoking logo.
He blushed at the way his friends laughed, the way the woman laughed behind the window, the way I was laughing too.
I stood directly under the open window and shouted up through it that I was off to find someone to unlock the train and let her out.
The smallest boy snorted a laugh.
Don't need to go nowhere, he said. We'll get your friend out.
All three boys stood back from the train carriage. The smallest scouted about for a pebble. The other two bent down and picked up large stones. The dog started to bark. It was almost immediately after they started to throw the stones at the side of the train that the men in the luminous waistcoats came running towards us.
Shortly after this the afternoon came to an end. We said our goodbyes. We went our different ways. I myself went back to the station and bought a ticket home. What was it you were telling me down there? the woman asked me when she'd finally got off the train, after they'd backed it to a platform, opened its doors, brought the sloping ramp they use to help people in wheelchairs to get on and off and allowed her to wheel herself out. There were many apologies from people in suits and uniform. Well, that's the last time I take the train! is what she said, with some campness and a great deal of panache, when the doors finally automatically hissed open on her, centre stage, like the curtains of a strange tiny theatre. The people on the platform laughed politely. She didn't mean it, of course she didn't.
In Shakespeare, the word stone can also mean a mirror.
The word pebble has, in its time, also meant a lens made of rock crystal and a sizeable amount of gunpowder.
The word mundane comes from mundus, the Latin word for the world.
At one time the word cheer seems to have meant the human face.
The word last is a very versatile word. Among other more unexpected things - like the piece of metal shaped like a foot which a cobbler uses to make shoes - it can mean both finality and continuance, it can mean the last time and something a lot more lasting than that.
To conclude once held the meaning to enclose.
To tell has at different times meant the following: to express in words, to narrate, to explain, to calculate, to count, to order, to give away secrets, to say goodbye.
To live in clover means to live luxuriously, in abundance.
