ann marie plubell

The little Mouse's back and ears hurt & she couldn't stop shaking. It was difficult to walk, there was something wrong with her foot. The night was scathe-fire, red as hell. Her home, an empty can of Foul Mudammas, was gone. What she saw, what she heard, were ragged swords, fragments so terrible, so wicked, they would not be pieced together in a thousand years. A violent, acrid tempest, untethered screams, shouting, desperate shouting like a sea in storm. One man howling, my beloved, my beloved, my moon, my beloved. There are piles of smouldered fragments. They would not be pieced together in a thousand years. Burnt melted bomb soldered tents, fragments, fragments, fragments of the loved, a rose-pink blanket, soot charring deep in soft knitted folds; coloured pencils, burnt to charcoal, a football sticker book, child-lorn, a sooted rabbit, child-lorn, child-lorn. Where do I go now, whispered the little Mouse, where do I go now. There is no safe home for me, there is no safe home for me, there is no safe home for me.

Wolf had found the evening paper in Old Fox's desk. He took it to his room & slowly read the names aloud, into the silence. Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Victor Manuel Díaz, Heber Sánchez Domínguez, Renee Nicole Good, Parady La, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. He thought of each soul, earthy & loved as roses, high & holy as falcons, fire stars raken into the breath of night. He imagined each name as a child, their first steps, moving towards smiling faces, outstretched arms of love and care, playing in the street on endless summer afternoons, the sidewalk burning hot, laughing until their bellies hurt, blowing out birthday candles, wishing for the future, the rich unlived life beyond. And then he thought of their murderers, and the dark sky seemed to shatter, falling into cold irretrievable fragments.

It was a very cold evening & the East wind was as thin as glass. Look, Wolf, look at the sky over the Downs, said Pine Marten, the clouds look so strange. They're called Lamenters, said Wolf, torn clouds, strife-tellers, come a long way they have to bring their warnings.

The Snowshoe Hare had received a telegram from Dorset in England. He read it inside the warmth of a coffee shop, before joining the crowds again, he read it with tears stinging his eyes, he read it listening to shouts and distant gun shots, he read it with a fierce anger rising inside, he read it whilst his heart ached inside his chest, and then he folded the thin paper into a talisman to keep it safe. And he spoke the words aloud: "We are with you. England is with you. Europe is with you. History is with you. We are all Minnesotans until every last one of you is safe, until goodness and kindness prevails. – Old Fox."

It was a bright and frosty Plough Monday and the air was sweet with birdsong. The farmers, old and bark-worn, young and bright-eyed, from every farm and gainery around the village and the hamlet had paid their visits to Old Fox's cottage. They bade Old Fox a solemn good morning & winked at Wolf, and left pouches of coins, cleaned in vinegar and polished to a dull shine, and generous withy baskets of green winter cheese and floury loaves and fruit cakes and marmalade and cider, so that Old Fox might open up the church that morning & keep the thin gold plough-lights burning to bless their ploughs and their horses and the furrows and the ridges of the long year ahead.

That dusk, in the dark drawing room, Old Fox lit the beeswax candles on the spruce tree for the last time & the ghosts of the past & of those yet to come stepped forward, held in their spun-gold for a brief weighted moment, for the end of Yuletide is leaden with time, with the fugacity of all things

New Year, a whisker in, and Wolf was watching the storm from the calm comfort of the Drawing Room. Pine Marten had retired to bed, and Babcia and Old Fox were drinking brandy and talking about the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall. Old Fox thought Ermine might have gone - "She helped to paint some of the scenery for the New Year party once, with Frank Brangwyn, I think." But Wolf wasn't listening, the outside was too exciting. For there, in the star-furrowed darkness, in the rural depths of Dorsetshire, the pass of years was a battle raging in the very air. Racing, harrowed clouds, the wind whewling in the trees, a low boom of muffled fireworks in the distance and the months and days and hours gathering ahead, like actors nervous and excited in a green room, as their stage is heaved into being.

In the bitter gloom, he stood, the Newcomer. He watched the ghosts bolden through & listened to their clumsy armour, to their scattered cries, thorn red in the darkness. Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to king & country….Here, I am…no traitor…but a priest of god…Ferez! Ferez!

Wolf was lying under the kitchen table, whimpering in a painful way. I'm never eating anything again, I'm never eating anything again, not one morsel. It really is your own fault, said Old Fox sternly, finishing off the Huntley and Palmers like that, and that entire round of cheddar. But he went to make him a mint tisane and found him a hot water bottle for his tummy, and by midday, Wolf was bounding down the village lanes again, in the mud and the cold Yule air.

Old Fox and the King all of Gold were resting, up on the snow-deep head of the barrow, looking down across Dorsetshire, across the good brown fields & the villages & the ancient roads & streams. It was Saint Stephen's day, a day of those who are brave, who keep going despite all.

Someone stole from me once, said Wolf, stole a whole article I wrote about the Revolution in Russia. Mine was in the Globe, and this so-called journalist, pickpocket more like, published theirs in the Evening News next day. Nicked all my quotes from my pal in Saint Petersburg, the one who knew Lenin's brother, Sasha. That's awful, said Old Fox, what did you do Wolf? Well, I didn't want cause me bother with the Evening News, and scandal it all up, so I wrote a long piece about it, instead, veiled of course, for the TLS, but put it all across. All my hurt. How rotten it was. I called my essay "The Plagiarist", started with that quote from Hazlitt, "The poorest of all plagiarists, the plagiarists of words." Seemed to do the trick, I don't remember them doing that again in a hurry. Bravo, said Old Fox, bravo, Wolf, subtle will is always better than brute force, so they say.

The Nineteenth Window. Wolf was sitting in his warm bedroom surrounded by his Christmas shopping - bath salts and talcs and soaps and books and sheet music and diaries and boxes of chocolates. He sat there and looked at them and apart from Pine Marten's new Leica camera, which he'd been guarding with his life since he'd bought it with the Doctor in Dorchester earlier that week, he simply couldn't remember who each one was for. He began to feel the familiar quick-sand undertow of panic, of searching for something in a dark foggy field at night, when he noticed that each gift had a paper luggage label attached with the name of the recipient in the Doctor's handwriting, printed to make it less medical and more legible to Wolf. He'd also written why Wolf had bought each present - "Babcia's favourite bath salts", "Old Fox has wanted this new music by Moszkowski for ages," "Miss Rabbit needed some new woollen mittens." And the panic ebbed, a sudden beam of golden winter light brightened the untidy room, and he was Wolf again and he was safe once more from the swirling, usurping darkness.

The Eighteenth Window. Before catching the Dorchester train at Waterloo, Old Fox had gone down to the East India Dock to meet a pal of his, a Custom-house officer, whom he'd helped many years ago, when he was still living in London. The Officer had lost his wife and child and sister and best auntie to influenza in three brutal months & had decided that life held little meaning for him anymore. He drank and drank and drank to numb his pain and lost his job as a Barrister's clerk in the Temple. But a chance encounter with Old Fox on Christmas Eve on Waterloo Bridge had pulled him from that hard, dark edge, and he had kept going, somehow, by the skin of his teeth, helped by weekly letters and a "little something" from Old Fox, and had eventually found a new job, a safe job and new clean, warm rooms, which looked out across St Paul's. As Old Fox approached the river, he felt the familiar thrill of a port - thickets of oaken masts and whip-wind flags and thick grey smoke and cranes rattling and creaking in the cold December wind.  Great green resinous piles of Christmas Trees straight from the Scottish steamers. Everywhere there was bustle - stories folding and knotting into other stories, other journeys - muffled sailors shouting in Russian and a dozen birds in cages and stevedores chewing tobacco and worried émigrés looking for their luggage and dash-a-lash pickpockets and thick-moustached gentleman shaking hands with wrinkled bright-eyed captains. The Custom-house Officer, a great bear of a man, brass buttons straining, was leaning on a crate, smoking his pipe, when he saw Old Fox & his face lit up. After a rush of news and good wishes, he invited the fox into a vast warehouse, the floor sticky from spilt sugar and the rafters some hundred feet up. I have a few presents for you and your family, Sir, he said. And he went inside his office and brought out a pile of roughly wrapped brown paper packages. All the good stuff, straight off the water - some over-proof rum and the best ginger and cloves and cinnamon, and coffee so strong it'll make your whiskers curl. Old Fox looked at the Custom-house Officer eagerly offering his parcels, shouting for some string to tie them, and for a boy to fetch a taxi-cab, and was momentarily unable to speak. Then he simply said, Merry Christmas, my dear, dear friend, Merry Christmas.

The Sixteenth Window. Fog in the English Channel, but somewhere high above, somewhere just below the stars, the Very Old Gentleman can see all, can see the little boat rocking too hard in the swell of the night ferry. He can see a little boy holding his teddy bear as hard as he can, he can see his father, resolute, doctoral certificate safe inside an envelope in his coat, he can see his mother, sea-sick and terrified. Look, said the Newcomer, fur as white as snow, eyes the colour of Baltic amber. Can you help? On this night, yes, said the Very Old Gentleman, on this night, yes.