The imagination of Elizabeth Bowen
The bungalow-house contained a pet parrot as well as a pet owner by the name of Marjorie Smith who wore a hat and coat indoors as well as out. Both these pets chatted to each other the day long, while the bungalow-house itself stayed quite quiet, its two dormer windows in the renovated roof staring out balefully towards the grey skies of December.
From a nearby bungalow-house - that no doubt had its own (different) pets - could be heard the quiet tinkle of Debussy on the piano. Further down the road, were two children playing up a tree, pretending to be parrots themselves, escaped parrots, squawking not in words, like Marjorie Smith's parrot did, but in tranches of meaninglessness that they imagined parrots to speak when not taught (parrot-fashion) real English words by real old ladies like Marjorie Smith.
Marjorie walked across the carpet towards the back window of her bungalow-house and heard the apples on the apple tree in the garden dropping its pet apples one by one, with a relentless rhythmic thump thump thump, as if betokening Marjorie's own death with the ominous imagination of plodding ghostly funeral-workers from an otherwise impossible future.
As on most other days, she expected several visitors today - but none of them ever came. She had a statue in the garden (near the apple tree) dedicated to all false expectations, a stone image of Eva Trout with a shotgun, sculpted by a famous artist she once knew in better days when she lived in a large house on the outskirts of Highgate. He was a visitor like those she expected today in downtown Seaside where she lived now disguised under a pseudonym...
...but this was not really an effective pseudonym because the name that the pseudonym was intended to conceal had been forgotten and was no longer important to avoid being called. Her novels and stories were these days the possession of a mere coterie and even the films that had been based on her fiction mouldered away in rusty round tins. Fame was no longer even a danger. She could live here anonymously with her parrot and apple tree ... except she had decided to send off a new story to a publisher she once knew in the good old days ... but first she had to write it.
The front door bell went. It must be those damned children from down the road, she thought, running away even as their finger had barely left the bell-push rather than the visitors (old friends from the past) whom she expected to come. But she went to the door, hoping against hope that it was not Halloween. They had called her dead old dried apple-core last time. She opened the door tentatively...
"It's a Witch, It's a Witch," squawked the parrot from its distant perch in the parlour.
Standing on the newly donkey-stoned step, was a man with a rusty round tin of what looked to be hardened half-used red polish that housewives used to spread on their prized dining-tables to make them shine like the best of memories. His cupped palm was extended towards her...
She wondered how it all would end. With a thump thump thump as each fashioned word fell off the page like a parrot's?
Above written today and first published here
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Late Arrival (2): http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=145421249&blogID=456357014&Mytoken=DB487886-C403-4C01-93E5EF2BD48AB8F9124446134