• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 527 0

Brooke said. What? her mother said. What’s a slave clock? Brooke said. Her mother sat up. Then she sank back into her chair. A slave clock, she said. The Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic clock is apparently a slave clock, Brooke said, but what I want to know is, what exactly is a slave clock? Oh, her mother said, a slave clock, well—. And what I also want to know is, if something is in the past, Brooke said, can it still in any way be happening now? Is the past present in the present, her father said, and is the past present in the future, good questions, Brooke. They’re philosophical questions, her mother said. Are they? Brooke said. Is a rose red in the dark? her father said. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear or see, does the bear excrete in the woods and is the Pope a National Socialist? Oh God, her mother said. Now, don’t go bringing God into it too, her father said, cause then we’re really into a whole other World Cup match.)

History Of Religion: Brooke waits at the lights and then crosses to St. Alfege’s, which is said out loud like St. Alfie’s, regardless of how it looks when it is written down. Philosophy is actually quite easy. She will perhaps study it when she is at university, if she does not become a person who sings in musicals like on Over the Rainbow on Saturdays on BBC1. She runs round to the front of the church. The door is open. The church is empty. Inside she looks up, like she always does, at the painted wooden unicorn rearing his front legs. Unicorns are imaginary. She looks at the picture of General Wolfe in the window. He was something in a war. Then she goes to the table with the historic photocopy on it of the Viking axe head which was once found in the Thames and is from the 11th century, and is now in the British Museum. That makes the British Museum kind of like a sort of river too, full of things that have been found like that in, say, real rivers. The axe head is supposed to be like the one—in fact it might even, it is actually possible, be the one—which a kind man who had been baptized by St. Alfege used to kill St. Alfege after a Viking brained him with the head of an ox and pretty much killed him, just not outright. So the kind man hit him in the head with his axe. Moved by piety to an impious deed is what it says on the bit of paper under the photo of the axe. The axe blade looks really blunt and rusty. What happened was: Alfege was a man who decided he didn’t want any wordly possessions so he went into a monastery in the 11th century. But the monastery was too full of wordly possessions so then he became an anchorite in a bath, or maybe in Bath. Whichever, so many people came to ask him things, because he was so religious, that he stopped being an anchorite and founded a monastery of his own, and once on his way to somewhere in Italy he was attacked by robbers but the robbers while they were attacking him heard that their village was burning to the ground, and it only stopped burning when they stopped attacking Alfege. Then he was Archbishop of Canterbury (like the author Samuel Beckett who was stabbed to death on the altar) and he converted a lot of Danes. Some of the Danes he didn’t convert took him to Greenwich as their prisoner and they put his feet in irons, the historic kind not the clothes kind, and locked him in a cell full of frogs which was apparently geographically right here where this church is now. The story goes that he conversed with the frogs and the frogs spoke back to him miraculously as if they were all old friends. And even though he could miraculously communicate with frogs and even though he could miraculously burn down places and also miraculously cure a lot of bad stomach problems the Danes had, the Danes still wouldn’t let him free unless someone paid them a lot of money, and no one, not even one of the people who had come to speak to him for advice when he was an anchorite or anything, would pay his ransom for him, so one night the Danes were having a feast and they started for entertainment just throwing the bones they were eating at him,