Ullapool

He read her goodbye note twice. His mouth was munching some stuffs as he marched along. O what yet what were the wild waves singing voices of solemn warnings. All the awful smells in him bursting to rush out. Late Pre-palatial-Early Proto-palatial Period, about 2000 B.C. appeared a kind of writing. He looked back until he saw the weapon. "A man with no presence. A picture of ordinary, advanced in decay," he read again. "You of the limp spine!"

A dreary highroad led to a town. In the ample curves of air, a born wind about to weave gold cloth around the closes paved with shit and ashes. With a gargoyle face, none too pretty, he had no small bank balance somewhere. His naked pockets that swallowed his very soul. Inch thick skin groped for his clothing. Cases of hallucination, somnambulism, and shipwrack in his family.

He perceived a votive animal from the tomb of Mesara linger along sides of the road, terrified of something. A tiny sun, freezing like a demon and brandishing a sword. He thought gloomily of the way ahead. Near were lakes. Ravens were screaming at dawn's break. They both came from villages in the Lake District reached only on foot. She was prepared to let daylight through him. She imagined being able to aim her best thoughts to him. Her whitewashed face, more pale than moonglow. Stonehenge Era hovel huts with space for livestock. Walls decorated with cinnabar rhomboids. A roaring kettle boiled all the water away. He had dropped her gently over the threshold. Secrets known only between them, the she and the he. She placed the insignificant fact next to the fact that counted. She wanted him to take her home even before the dance began.

Like language, she drew attention to herself. "Wales, Walls, Whales," he read on. "It was when you said to me - Once a peasant was drivin off, the land be full o crops.- " Their hearts were already ticking time bombs. Like the acute spider web that snares each particle in its slimy mouth, he couldn't pass a pub without pulling out some pounds for pints. There she was playing piano with her only hand in mainly cold keys on the Isle of Mull, in the Grampion Mountains, and there in Ullapool. "You longed for a wrinkled witch on a soggy toadstool. You will not pay life's dues in a lifetime," she told him that final Sunday morning. They both read the Wallace Stevens poem. The curse of five thousand years of culture.

Through the storms in his mind her mouth and kissing. She blended the chief Britania tongues. "I am burning, the candle cried," she wrote to him. "I was all wet for you until you deleted the Minoan material."

He…periods between each word. Life in an outhouse they slept on a hammock. Their rotten guts somehow smelling somewhat sweetly. Doubled up in convulsions. The sight of reading the signs. Two cats lapped up love like milk.

"How often the figure of BREAKUP stood in a shadow surrounding us." He put away barrels of the cheapest Scotch whiskey and perhaps a few versions of her. He got the cherry and she the cherry stone. Their lust was brief. A few weeks later she would not be able to remember his name. He doubted whether his lifeboat would float. He disrobed revealing a few metal teeth and little else. Carefully taking breath she had the other hand nailed to a pub table by his knife. He ate everything thick with salt, celery sauce, struck dumb with beer. Waves of nausea broke over her drowning both of them.

His word was not winning her. He was no longer anything, but not yet anything else. They always thought they would be the next item on the menue. They did away with all the facts of the matter. Too many nights trying to walk straight with one or more eyes put shut. The foghorn sounded almost silently in good cheer. Was his scalp stitched together? Her green hair streaming like an armed Goddess at Knossos, facing the Aegean Sea…