Polarity

I realise I've really let this blog slide the past few months. Work's been ludicrously busy, as has stuff-outside-of-work, and I've been stupidly tired for most of the available time. (I have, however, also written a 5,000-word short story for an anthology, which I'll link to here once my involvement's been announced.)

Next year's likely to be busy as well, for a variety of reasons, but I'll be making a New Year's resolution to post here considerably more often. You're unlikely to be hearing any more from me until 2009, though. Until then, compliments of the festive season to one and all, and a happy New Year's celebrations.

Meanwhile, here's a Christmas story which I've also uploaded to the website.

As I did in 2006 with "Sol Invictus", I sent this story out in my Christmas cards last year, so if we're on Christmas-card terms you'll already have seen it. (Sorry about that, but on the plus side you should be getting a copy of "Blitzenkrieg" this year, which the ordinary blog-reading public will have to wait until December 2009 to see.)

POLARITY

Because everything in nature has an opposite...

* * *

Sualcatnas lives in the Antarctic, surrounded by an army of giants who do her bidding. A thin young woman, pale-faced and austere, she takes the work she does very seriously.

* * *

In early summer, the elderly or very ill will meet Sualcatnas. (Some say she travels the world in a raft pushed by leopard seals. Others believe that Sualcatnas has no need of such showy pomp, just as she takes no account of good or bad in those she deals with.)

* * *

They will not recognise her, however. She will be disguised as somebody they know, or as a normal working person going about their job.

* * *

She will ask them – the old, the infirm, the soon-to-die – which of their possessions they treasure most. She will listen attentively as they recount the story of the ring with which their long-dead love proposed to them; the silver cutlery their grandmother left them in her will; their memory of their son playing with his first dog in the garden.

* * *

Sualcatnas will nod, in sympathetic interest. ‘Oh,’ she will say, her attention captivated. ‘Oh. Oh.’

* * *

At midsummer or later – some time later, perhaps, for those who have been visited in past years – the old will be reminded of their ring, their family silver or their treasured memory, and search for it, in their house or their mind.

* * *

It will be gone. Sualcatnas has stolen it from them.

* * *

Sualcatnas is necessary, because the universe demands order. If we were to rid ourselves of Sualcatnas, we would be depriving ourselves of her opposite.

* * *

In the Antarctic, the giants toil to break down the spoils of Sualcatnas’s annual heist. They smelt them back to their component parts, the materials and emotions they contain.

* * *

A tunnel connects Sualcatnas’s realm with another, brighter land. Each year the raw components of her swag are shipped along this tunnel, through the centre of the Earth to the Arctic, where they are reconstituted into colourful new objects, bursting with the potential of new memories.


© Philip Purser-Hallard 2007