VIOLENCE & JOSEPHINE

by Neil Ayres

1.

There is nothing lost

in springtime but the glazed glare

 of summer sorrow.

Violence burnt his top lip on the soup but still he continued spooning it into his mouth, until the broth scalded the back of his throat. It tasted of vegetables and the rust of old cutlery. Some of the broth slipped from his ladle and fell back through fresh midday air and into the prosaic brew of his chipped china bowl. As he neared the end of the soup, little juice remained. All that was left was pulpy mulch, almost sweet to taste. As he was alone, Violence held up his dish and pressed his tongue to the red and white checked design, licking away the last of the soup.That done, Violence got up from the dusty beanbag before crossing the studio to the kitchen area. A seductive breeze sashayed in through the open window to caress his bare neck as he rinsed the soup bowl, the saucepan and his spoon. Still such lovely weather outside, so he pulled on his trainers and tied a jumper about his waist, leaving behind his studio in favour of the whisperings of the canal.

The canal was such an elemental place. The Earth gave rise to lush flora, nurtured by dampened soil, irrigated by water from the artificial river, and the warmth of the sun, so gentle in these months in England. The vegetation flanked the paths by the banks of the canal, where once dutiful shire horses had hauled the barges of the river-rats.

The water flowed under the careful supervision of the locks, constructions of wood and steel that had been forged in fuming furnaces, suppliant to the skilled hands of steelworkers and birthed in the minds of men of vision.

And all the while, the untameable irrepressible wanderer that was the wind flitted gypsy-like, up and down the grassy edges of the steady waterways, never settling, never still. Visible in the ripples on the bleak liquid surface and the waving of the lazy limbs of secretive willows that stood as sentries before the lock, guarding the pathways in unassuming postures of rest.

2.

Whispering voice of the fall,

now winter is here

devoid of autumn’s last touch

It was a time before I had met Violence Schmoe. I was fifteen and, though mature for my age, was by no means an adult.

He was a Briton and had come to our land after we had invaded his. He came geared up as if stepping out from the annals of time, back then I simply assumed that this was how all Britons’ would dress, being savages as they were. He came to our land as if the wolves of Rome had never ravaged their way across our world.

He arrived on the shore, daubed in blue woad, bare-chested and proud against the chill autumn air. I stoked a fire, high up on those Danish dunes that were almost as white and clear as snow, to guide in the sailing raiders upon their return.

Violence spoke our tongue well. He told me that he held no grudge against our people, save that they had bested the northern lands, something that his own tribe had failed to do.

His face was clean, excepting his drooping blonde moustache. It was odd for me back then to see a man not sporting a beard. Had it not been for the rope of hair across his lips he may have been mistaken for a Christian. Fortunate then that he was not.

Though he stood as if ready for battle, he carried no weapons but for the short-hafted battle axe, the blade ornately decorated, but sharp edged and glinting in the light of the setting sun.

The smoke from my fire crawled idly out from the flames, as if to beckon the lone Briton to me. And so he came, loaded me into his strange coracle and took me off to the north and to the west, away from war, away from conflict and away from my home.

3.

All is co-joined:

a homogenous collective;

the death of the seasons

Violence turned on the radio for a time and sat and thought back on the time when he had first encountered Josephine. Her struggle had been hearty and full of defiance, but of course, physically, she was no match for him.

He had passed her the idol just as they entered the Arctic Circle, and there it was that they had stayed, in Greenland, for the next millennia.

Eventually that isolation had been broken by the arrival of the Conquistadors in South America. Word had reached them via the Mahlmuts.

And so Violence and Josephine had constructed a second coracle and travelled the frozen seas until they reached Siberia, settling finally among the Chukchi in the far-eastern tundra. And as that ice desert was slowly civilised, first by the Cossacks, then by the Communists, so Violence and Josephine were re-educated and re-civilised. And of course, Josephine was scared, moreso then than ever, because one day the idol would be gone.

With the coming of the Great War the pair chose to part ways. Violence returned to Albion and he fought in France, in the trenches. People laughed at him nervously, or looked on disapproving, unbelieving, when he told them his name. But he went because finally he had seen an end to the wars that had ravaged his homeland since his departure. There would always be war in the world, but Violence Schmoe was not of the world, he was of Albion.

Even after his return, there was still war there, and the death-stench of battle. And like a madman, a berserker from pre-Viking times, Violence came to roam the debris-littered streets of northern France, ancient battleaxe in one hand, crusted with gooey blood, blonde moustache twitching at the faintest suggestion of death on the air.

Josephine did not return home to Denmark, she travelled east instead. From Siberia she came to Canada and lived once more amongst the indigenous folk. This time with the Inuit, a people who made her a family when she had so desperately needed one.

4.

A miracle birth

on this day bearing clear skies

and temperate life

Violence walked along the bank of the canal and came to stand before the lock. Lost in thoughts for Josephine, oblivious to the sound of the city overhead, he was protected by the sanctity of the canal-side.

THE END