FLAT NOTES

Donnah's sure that tiny people were involved. How can big ones have threaded through the cat flap? Yet the trail of crumbs which she discovers along their erstwhile route almost indicates fairy story characters, if not actual fairies. Whatever the case, the perpetrators are definitely not animals. Whilst animals are tiny enough and, at a push, may be capable of creating random music, they do not have the aesthetic nous of us real folk. Indeed, although the music Donnah heard admittedly possessed an atonal quality, it was underlaid with a nagging harmony which, surely, excluded full-blooded haphazardness. Yes, she thinks, only people can wield the refinement of soul sufficient to strum the air so hauntingly. By the widest stretch of the imagination, crude animal instinct fails even as a spare spear-carrier. On the other hand, the truth stares Donnah in the top of her head, if not the face. Angels, as is commonly the case, disguise themselves as ceilings, albeit, in Donnah's flat, crumbly ones.

Published 'Psychopoetica' 1994