(b)
I reached for the magicator and pressed the blue stud. The ringing coughed to a halt and immediately a small square to the side of my visuals screen came alive with a rush of grey and black lines across it, accompanied by the kind of hissing one would have associated years ago with a container of enraged snakes. This erratically cleared to a face peering quizzically into a camera. Indistinct as the image was, I knew the face had a familiarity about it, but in my sunken state I could not find name or place to fit the face to. Until, in response to my identifying my agency, the face spoke - and then too much came back in too great a rush. Hagisia Ratchet, one of the unfortunate women in my life and whose mere presence in this city would account for the foul moods that have squatted on me for the past month. The last I'd heard of Hagisia Ratchet, she'd been at least a thousand miles clear of here, and in such a dire way it seemed inconceivable that she could have somehow recovered to turn up now more or less on my doorstep.

She had been my last client in my gall-bladder days. It was she who blew my reputation out of the water. She had come to me after at least six other agencies had locked their doors on her. She'd travelled through the organs in her search for a sympathetic ear. She was expecting to be murdered any day, by any one or more of a host of would-be assailants, none of whom she could put any bodily description to. She was paranoid beyond belief, convinced utterly at different times that she was being got at through her hair, her brain, her neck, her heart, her liver, her sexual organs. She was so into the specialisations of the Investigation Agencies of the day that she could outquote any of the high-flying experts. Nobody could do anything for her. Her faith in each particular organ in the brief time she averred it brought shame to the detectives themselves, whose level of self-belief gave way at a remarkably shallow level to the usual cynicisms of their trade.

Hagisia Ratchet, known colloquially of course as The Hag or The Haggis, was victim to a deep, deep disturbance. Well, her name for a start.....but it wasn't really like that. Her real name was something else. What I'd never found out. Hagisia Ratchet was her own choice of a name, adopted when she was in her forties. The only name, she said, that actually spoke to the outside what she spiritually felt herself to be within. So the name was not the cause but the result of her disorder. She was, exactly, a storm in a teacup. A porous teacup. Her diarrhoea was not simply verbal - it was her feelings that abused their container. I had no doubt, when she crossed my path in her sixties. that her soul was of good quality. In its constant outpouring though it was like the princess's beautiful yellow hair that would not stop growing, so that eventually it became the world's greatest curse.

I took Hagisia on because all the others had abysmally failed. I was riding a gall-bladder high. Spectacularly so. My previous case had rescued a fine young blonde from the lascivious clutches of her gall-bladderless guardian. That case brought me multiple rewards and, I must confess, a certain degree of guilt. However...... A few days after the sensational completion of the case, where I was able to demonstrate knowledge of the symbolism of the gall-bladder reaching back into Babylonian times - did you know for example that the first recorded removal of the organ was carried out in the Tower of Babel? - I received a hastily-scrawled letter of the old fashioned variety (more or less unknown since the collapse world-wide of the ancient postal services) shoved under the door of my office. It was during a period of heavy rain and the writing was smudged to such a degree that I could read nothing but the name of the writer (clearly) and fragments of an address. In this way I met the name of Hagisia Ratchet, but with no inclination to waste hours (days, weeks maybe) searching for the body that went with it.

I was not to escape from her that easily. Within two hours she was back inside my office, trying the door, walking straight in and leaping to sit on my desk that was of sufficient height for her to have to dangle her legs, she was that short. She introduced herself with some such doggerel rhyme:

"Private papers of the ancient Keats - or was it Yeats?", she continued, "Hullo my dear Donald Cherryman, I'm Ratchet, Hagisia Ratchet. You'll be hearing from me." And she walked out. She was so short her ears barely came up to the door-pull. The next time I met her she turned up in my home.

I'd had a miserable day, not unconnected with the fine young blonde, and had got home late. I went straight for the dry shower, spilling the medicated sweat-powder I was so exhausted; then, pulling on my dressing gown of many colours, staggered into the bedroom. Hagisia Ratchet was sitting like a naughty schoolgirl on the foot of the bed. I stared, she grinned - wrinkles rearranging themselves on her facial skin like iron filings. "I get what I want", she said. I had nothing to say, thinking all the wrong things. She was wearing worn out greenish footwear that could have been slippers on anyone else, puce half-slacks, a lemony jumper crying out to be unravelled and her hair was so thin she could have passed as bald with a few strings attached. She was already a monster.

"I am about to become an avid gall-bladder enthusiast", she asserted in a deep voice that could not be hers, but unbelievably was. I stayed stunned. I was desperate for sleep, but I had become rooted into the bedroom floor, my eyes propped open by her outrageous behaviour.

"Do you mind if I get a drink?" she boomed, bouncing off the bed and going to the drinks-tray, where she poured herself a major Serpico.

I have been scared to my marrow very few times in my life. That was one of them. She seemed not to notice. "Many people are trying to murder me and I haven't a clue what they look like. I want you to track them down and" (this with a grand actoressy gesture of the worst school) "e-ra-di-cate them!" And she did a prolonged dance on my best Laplandian carpet. "And I shall reward you in every way your dreams and vanities demand!"

I guessed then it had to be a set-up; she had to have been listening to the whisperings of some fine young blonde birdie, out for revenge. I was wrong about that too. Hagisia Ratchet had her own language and she lived in her own enclosed darkly innocent world. She was incapable of listening to gossip. She had no incoming communicative skills. Everything with her went outwards. She hopped from spur to spur of each moment. Her ideas of dreams and vanities included neither money nor sex. Money by then was becoming difficult for everyone: it was more trouble than it was worth. And sex with Hagisia Ratchet would be like twiddling a little stick inside a paper bag the size of an ocean. I came to think of her as a papier-mache creation, thinly stuck over an inner windtorn space. Her voice boomed out from a bottomless cavern, forced between the craggy jaws and teeth of her mouth.

At no time, in the months I spent working on her senseless case, did she do one thing that was not outrageous, even by the standards of the mid twenty-first century; even in the light of the great Detective Boom, of which I was one of the greatest charlatans. She could not render one piece of clear evidence for her paranoic assertions. All was gusty, uncatchable. She woke at night and there were men under the bed, whispering in a threatening way. In the street she was pursued by reflections, shifting curtains at windows; octogenarian joy-riders on electric machines intent on squashing her into the potholed ground. Not one professional in the whole Investigatory circuit found a mite of credibility in her stories; and she, gifted only with a phenomenal airy memory, went the rounds of those whose reputations hit the big city billboards and filled the leaky internet, devouring their professed organic obsessions and regurgitating them in her own manic tongue. She was desperate to be believed; to have the ghosts swept clean from her frightening midnights' innards - and not one of the geniuses she looked up to saw her as anything but the windy space she was. She was a chatterhag of the worst degree, incapable of listening or taking anyone's advice.

It was not for her sake that I agreed to act on her behalf; rather as pap to my own arrogance. She knew, long before I did, that my whole thesis of the gall-bladder played into her hands. I had a pathological leaning towards the painful, self-destructive underdog. Fat, forty, farty - and feminine: a long-time lore defined sufferers of gallstones with the four f's. Hagisia knew herself to be all-wind. By time she reached the gall-bladder in her quest for absolution from her nightmares, she was convinced she had come home. She was one big gall-bladder. Long before I managed to get her out of my house that night, I had agreed to try to put flesh to her figmentary murderous pursuers, and to bring them to solid justice. She was such a pathetic, but compelling old woman. The pale blue gash of her mouth horribly enchanted me. I knew from the start the impossibility of what I was undertaking; but I became convinced it was possible, even necessary, to trap the impossible. If her proposed murderers were real then they were fiendish. They were the equivalent of the excruciating green stones that were swirled cosmically into existence within the worst torture chamber in the human frame. Excruciating - the crux of that word is the cross. The crucible of human wrongdoing. The very implausibility of Hagisia Ratchet, her absurdity, her wanton nonsensicality: they responded to the lightheadedness of my recent successes, and gave back a sweet miasma that utterly confounded my judgment. I had the wit and the will to convert her tenth-class joke into a brilliant triumph. What a shithead I was.

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Snapshot 1: The Procession
Sixteen of us shuffling towards the gate of the Field, carrying our weighty sticks. Silently, brooding about what is to come. A flickering sense of fear, although Three of Diamonds (who does not have a stick), Three of Spades and Four of Diamonds try lightening the atmosphere with a number of moral jokes, which fall flat.
Snapshot 2: Through the Gate
A new, two dimensional grain-cutting machine stands at the gate which is open. It looks like a very modern painting. All behind is blurred. Three of Diamonds is about to climb up into the grain-cutter's seat. The rest of us are raising our flat, stout sticks in some kind of deferential cheer.
Snapshot 3: The Field of Three Corns
The Field itself. Small, bordered by trees that look as though they've been cut from a coloured magazine. The ground is covered with three kinds of ripened grain. In a broad swathe, around the edges, stiff stalks holding up orange-coloured heads of wheat. A middle swathe, again going right round the field, of a paler, heavier, softer oats. In the centre, a rectangle of the prickly heads of barley, intermingled with its still greenish leaves. Not a weed to be seen despoiling this perfect picture of an English (Lincolnshire) late summer.
Snapshot 4: Explanations and Intimations
Three of Diamonds in the seat of the grain-cutter, looking down at the rest of us, explaining that the stiff wheat stands for the male or the father; the buxom oats for the female or mother; the prickly barley, more windblown and indisciplined, for the child. As the corn is cut, the rest of us, laying aside our sticks for the while, are to follow, binding the fallen stalks into bundles and then arranging them in stooks so that they can dry out. Newcomers will learn the simple natural techniques for this process from the more experienced ones. The beauty of the field, and the allocation of tasks, cause a great wave of cheerfulness to rattle through the Cards. If it were not dead against the code, some hanky-panky may have broken out. I think I distinctly see Eight of Hearts (a mature woman) rub fronts with Seven of Spades (a younger man, whose tongue I've noticed before has a habit of flickering over his slightly sensual lips). I find myself illegitimately wondering what he has been flattened from. This snap makes me feel a little guilty. I sense my intimations are rather non-conformist, and a little out of control. I must learn to be more rigorous with myself. Three of Diamonds has that quizzical look in her eyes. Is she surreptitiously watching me, as I watch others?
Snapshot 5: Cutting the Wheat
The grain-cutter slicing through the proud wheat. The deep ripe orange of the heads sends a thrill through me that seems to touch upon some past emotional experience. What is wrong with me? Three of Diamonds concentrating on her task. The rest following the cutter, intent and silent. Each Card though has an alert stiffness about it. Reflecting the wheat? Or waiting for something to happen that goes beyond what has so far been explained? This snapshot has an atmosphere about it that sends riffles of apprehension across my carded shoulders. I am meant to be eradicating my sensibilities of all previous male relationship. Am I being too careless in thinking I've done that already? There is a betraying flicker in my eyes, as if I'm trying to guess from what direction the intuited threat is likely to come.
Snapshot 6: Making Stooks
The binding of the wheatsheaves, a technique I prove to be a moron at. You gather an armful of wheat stalks, select a handful as a binding agent and tie the rest together in a stiff spray. I try desperately to do this two-dimensionally, and fall flat on my flat face. The others snicker and continue without me, expertly binding the sheaves, and stacking them together, in a leaning formation, to form a row of wheat houses or stooks. The process is called stooking. The stalks are too stiff to be used easily as binding material. I have several goes. Think I have succeeded at last, place my bunch against a completed stook and the whole thing falls apart.
Snapshot 7: Nine of Diamonds
I am left behind. Nine of Diamonds, a middle-aged man with a haunted look about him, has taken pity on me and clicked himself back to help me. He shows me the simple knack of it, and stays to help me with further sheaves. I reward him by clumsily tripping over the rough wheat shoots still in the ground, falling into a completed stook and causing it to collapse. His haunted eyes sink briefly into a deep alarm, then resume their normal grade of ghostliness. He carries out his Samaritan duties in complete silence, except for when the last disturbed sheaf has been lifted and put back into place on the stook. At that moment, his eyes go a deep purple and his lips move as imperceptibly as he can manage. Take care, I think he mutters, before he shuffles forward towards the next batch of cut wheat stalks.
Snapshot 8: Drinking to the Cutting of the Wheat
Celebration at the Completion of the Cutting of the Wheat. A wheaten drink has been produced. All the wheat stalks have been sheaved and stooked in pleasing straight lines (except for one I was left to do on my own, which is glaringly out of place). Two Cards have shuffled off to redress the mistake. No complaint against me is voiced. Instead we stand in a pack, raising our glasses, brimming with deep golden liquid, but dry in character, and intone Death to all the past males in our lives. Deep smiles, to reflect the nature of the wheat, and the Cards' triumph over its maleness, suffuse this snapshot, in keeping with the glorious timelessness of the day.
Snapshot 9: Carded Relaxation
Halfway through the Cutting and Stooking of the Oats. The grain cutter has paused, to allow the followers to catch up with the binding and stooking. Oats are heavier, softer, to handle. Oats are female. Female bodies are easier to play with. Wheat's stiffness has a forboding about it. There is nothing playful in the handling of it. It has the feel of taking liberties with gods. Oats encourage fondling. Wheat is singular. Oats offer double delights, inviting hands to roam within its buxom properties. Wheat conforms easily to the needs of two-dimensionality. Oats defy it. For a Flat society, Oats are a conundrum. They provoke sensual longings and wayward thoughts. For a bit of hanky-panky, a bed of oats is ideal. So, in relief from the stern puritanism invoked by handling the wheat, the Cards, in contact with the oats, have become skittish, even giggly. Jokes, with a hint of raffishness, a sly effusion of desire, have become permissible. The men-that-were have longed a little, and the women-that-were have felt faintly longed for. If you sneak a glimpse at Three of Diamonds, pertly sitting at the wheel of the grain-cutter, do you sense that her flat-chested beauty has thrust itself forward a little? No, of course not - but the shot has caught a brief flicker of the thought in her eye, and the lips of others have slightly dropped a little. A rare and surprising phenomenon, I am already sufficiently Carded to know. I feel a little bit more of a Card myself, and you can see from my flat face, and somewhat gleaming eyes, that earlier apprehensions have dropped away from me. I put it down to the wheaten drink, perhaps, with its dash of insobriety, and the lascivious invitation of the oats, which I certainly have found easier to hold in my arms and bend for binding, despite the problems they arouse for the two-dimensionally bound.
Snapshot 10: Two Hands Touching
I am so stirred, by the comradeliness that has set in, that when a Card I cannot identify shuffles close to me and touches me with both hands on my two lowest rear club pips, I can only murmur in appreciation, though I do edge away, not daring even the flicker of a glimpse to spot who my temporary admirer might be. I am caught in the pose of hoping no one else has noticed.
Snapshot 11: Drinking to the Cutting of the Oats
Taken in late afternoon. The oats have been cut, bound and stooked. I have been praised for the quality of my work. Flickers of smiles have smothered me like kisses. An oaten drink has been produced out of nowhere. It is a paler gold in colour than the wheaten liquid was, but, as it soaks its way in through the card-interiors, it is impossible not to yield to a pleasing peasant sensation that this is where true paganism begins. There is much giggling and card-wiggling, and jokes become syrupy and permissibly suggestive. Loosened tongues spill out a colourful chatter. The toast, even smilingly proposed by Three of Diamonds, Death to all the past females in our lives, is lightly accepted and lip-smackingly followed by the downing of the sweet drink. This is the moment in the year, I sense, when the Pack of Cards feels most at one with itself, and properly yearns towards the completion of its numbers. The arrival of the Joker is flat-heartedly wished for.
Snapshot 12: The Secret
A short click forward into this one, but what a draining of one atmosphere and the imposition of another. We have been told to pick up our flat, stout sticks. You can see we are not about to follow the grain cutter; we have spread out all round the central flat rectangle of the barley, waiting. In every eye you can pick out there is a hint of terror; in every carded back a tension of shoulders. Somehow, I have become an odd one out again. To my right and left, my neighbouring cards have pulled slightly, but noticeably, away from me. The test is about to begin. There is no humour in the air. The flat sun has begun its descent into the flat trees. If you look at the barley, you can see its whiskery stalks caught in the act of rustling against each other, shifted into different directions by the coming of a breeze wanting to get to all places at the same time. So the barley has a scared look. Whichever way it leans, the breeze is about to blow it contrariwise. Three of Diamonds is about to let the grain-cutter's blades slice into the whimpering stalks.
Snapshot 13: Fear
Again, a mere click of time on. Shorn barley stalks are lying on the ground behind the grain-cutter. No one has moved to create sheaves. Cards are tensed up to snapping point. Some are bent as forward as flatness allows, gripping their flat, stout sticks with both taut hands. Others show a touch of hysteria in their eyes. You can see from their lips that sound is emitting from them. Clearly I have been caught out. I have no idea what is now in process. My eyes show some fear of attack, though no other Card seems to acknowledge my presence, or in any way is offering threatening gestures towards me. There is something in the barley that is writing FEAR large across the surfaces of every shivering Card. Three of Diamonds is the only imperturbable one.
Snapshot 14: Bastard! Bastard!
Oh horror! The grain-cutter has almost completed one round of the stricken barley. The cut stalks still lay unhandled on the darkening ground. Torches have been lit around the field, throwing startling streaks of light and encouraging responding shadows in and around the watching Cards, the slowly shifting grain cutter and across the remains of the barley. A form has just broken cover from the terrified centre. It is a young rabbit! It tries to head for the edge of the field, but not quickly enough. A Card, Jack of Spades, is in its path. A yell of curdled delight hacks into the tension. Jack of Spades smashes into the rabbit with her flat, stout stick. This is the moment the snapshot has caught. A spout of blood, impossibly large, rises into the savagely lit air, and stays there fixed in every flat memory around. The rabbit shrieks and stops, dead. Jack of Spades though goes on with her striking. Again again again. Crying You bastard! Bastard! Bastard!
Snapshot 15: The Blood-Lust
A wide angled shot, taking in the whole field. The flickering lights and shadows of the torches. The spout of blood from the dead, still-being-savaged rabbit. And all Cards, myself included, who must have been programmed in the Induction for this moment, are chanting:
Father brother husband lover
Mother sister mistress wife
We dare you bastards to break cover
To pay in full for our dead life
What we have been now we're not
Kill kill kill till the past's forgot
Ecstasy is not far away.
Shapshot 16: The Blood-Soaking
The sun is almost down. The torch light has become more lurid. The grain-cutter has paused. Three of Diamonds is lost in shadow. Her invisibility is ominous to me, who am in this shot but out of focus. I have shared the incredible but compelling drive towards the slaughter of flesh and blood, but am so full of an unfathomable sense of menace that I have hunted towards it, but have not yet joined in. This snapshot is soaked in blood. There has been an upsurge of panic from the diminished barley. Rabbits of differing sizes and ages, very old trundling ones, young babies, sprightly bobbing males and cautious females, have broken cover, chancing the alternation of flaring light and growling shadow, to get to the far hedges and away to safety. I have seen none that succeeded. Rabbit after rabbit is spotted by the prowling incensed Cards as their special victim, their recognised villain, and thrashed into, until the scurrying of each stops and bones are crunched and fountains of blood leap garishly upwards and spray out to fall on the whiskering, murmuring, mutely protesting, trampled and scuffed-up stalks of barley. Every participating Card is splashed with triumphant blood. And the seething searching for more victims is captured here, and the silent snapshot presence of the demonish chanting,
Father brother husband lover
Mother sister mistress wife
We dare you bastards to break cover
To pay in full for our dead life
What we have been now we're not
Kill kill kill till the past's forgot
rising to crescendo as further prey is spotted and then dying down as the bloody, murderous act is leapt into, with such gusto and cries of bastard bastard bastard, or some such other disgusted contempt for family origin, or suffered child, spat out towards the battered twitching mangled heaps of flesh and bone. And I in the shadows, out of focus, sucked up into the thrill of the gruesome hunt, paying out my own disgusts to the past, yet shaking already uncontrollably with the certain awareness, so slow to dawn, that all this, on this occasion, has been set up for me, yet still not seeing why this should have to be, or what form my demonic punishment would have to take. Meanwhile I am taking part in the lusting, the rabid chanting, the ecstatic gasping at the giant splashes of cheap red blood, and the unbridled crunching of small bones.
Snapshot 17: Time to Get Blooded
Three of Diamonds has stood up on the grain-cutter. Some other Card has thrust a torch in her right hand, which she is holding high above her head. All the frantic activity of the blood-letting and mangling of broken rabbits has suddenly stopped. There is a desire for silence that undercuts the deepest instincts of the human race, down to a Flatness that justifies all death-dealing. A desire thwarted by the heaving shattering energies doled out in the previous snapshot. Every Card, except Three of Diamonds and me, are smirched with grime from the beaten earth and blood from the massacred rabbits; our furry friends - as one Card now mockingly calls them, as stillness and dead quiet are struggled towards. Three of Diamonds waits though. The others now seem sheepish towards her, and soon comply with the need to defer even the right to whisper to her equal superiority. This snapshot catches that deference, but also the moment when Three of Diamonds turns her flat attention on to me, and every other Card shuffles, in obeisance, to glare intently, bringing me into sharp focus for the first time since the final Ceremony started. Coolly, but touching on a deeper ice, Three of Diamonds now says, Six of Clubs, your rabbit is waiting. How can I convey my complete willingness to acquiesce at this point? I have much to settle with my past. Killing it has been my great desire. I now find myself dismissing all my feeling of coming martyrdom as mere flickers of an old being. I realise the Cards are not glaring at me so much as willing me, with all their carded hearts, to do as they have done. The test is simply one to prove whether I am of them or not. Nothing special, or personal meant. Every novitiate has to go through the proper stages to complete acceptance in the Community of Cards. I have been brought out of the shadows (of the valley of death, a caught thread of me utters) and now I must perform on this field of flat battle. I grip my flat, stout stick with a strength I have never before been able to accredit to myself. I acknowledge Three of Diamond's compelling invitation, and the other Cards' emotional desire towards me and look to the remaining breeze-wracked clump of barley at the field's centre, flickering in torchlight and shadow with ineffable menace. Time to get blooded, I keen, wiping out at a stroke every pro-fox gene from my wet past. The flatness in me longs for such slaughter. And, from a light whisper, to a crowning shout, my accomplices drip intoxication into my courage, with their seductive, affirming chanting, seeping through my Card-exterior into the very bowels of my flat new self.
What we have been now we're not
Kill kill kill till the past's forgot
I have been whipped up into readiness.
Snapshot 18: Fever Pitch
All Card-eyes fixed on the barley strip. Three of Diamonds starts up her grain-cutter again, managing the impossible task of driving the vehicle, yet sitting full square on to me. Her eyes never leave me, as the torches flare and the shadows cut deeper across the field, with its slaughtered bloody corpses, its knocked over stooks of wheat and oats, so carefully stacked before, and the trampled-on whiskers of barley. And its tense, inwardly-seething, frightened, obsessed Community murderers, yet elated in their butchery, wanting more more more. You can see my own eyes, narrowed to slits, concentrated wantonly on the diminishing patch of upright barley, my flat, stout stick grasped across the front of my top two club-pips. I will hungrily for some movement from within, a shift of sleek, grey fur, the white bob of a desperate tail. The chant rises to fever pitch. I feel the great boost of its energy, the triumphant surge of its absolute conviction.
Snapshot 19: Go Go Go!
Now! Instantaneously, a small grey face appears at my side of the windy strip, Three of Diamonds stops the cutting, all other Cards break their chant and scream Go go go, go go go, go go go; and I, my searing moment upon me, my flat, stout stick clicking clicking before me into thwacking action, in best two dimensional fashion, pin-point the grey streaking flash of the rabbit as it heads for the hedge, stupidly, right within range of its machine-like assassin and his snarling stick.
Snapshot 20: Kill Kill Kill!
Smash! The blow, too hasty, misses its target, but crashes into the bloody oats-stubble just a space before the fleeing creature's nose. It stops on a pinhead, turns, and is about to race back into the barley cover. Bastard bastard! I grate. There is a mocking oh!, uttered as one voice from the flat onlookers. The chant changes to kill kill kill, kill kill kill, kill kill kill. The torches blaze in fierce disappointment. The shadows are so black now I fear they are on the side of the rabbit.
Snapshot 21: Thrashing the Barley
I am at the patch of barley's edge. A fervent wind is forcing the whiskered heads to quiver. I catch Three of Diamond's stance. She is standing up on the grain cutter. Her face leers with a heavy flicker of triumph, which smacks at me like a cudgel. It throws me into confusion. I am flaying the barley with my stick, losing grip on my murdering intention. The torches, seized by other Cards, are being waved in a frenzied motion. The chanting increases its intensity and volume. KILL KILL KILL, KILL KILL KILL, KILL KILL KILL. My eyes are hammered by a sick migraine. The rabbit is escaping, into the barley, into a secret hole at its heart. I am a failure beyond failures. I am the rabbit, waiting tremulous and hated for the slaughter to begin. I am attacked by a violent shudder. I feel my old body's urge to become a marble column, soaring stonily above this coming carnage of myself. As a Card though, flattened to destroy all roundness, I can't become a column any more. Not even a paving stone, I weep inwardly, distraught for a past I am forever on the run from. No! Not even a paving stone. Here I am thrashing the barley, wanting to howl, to sink to my knees and to open myself to the first sneering blow.
Snapshot 22: Smashing the Rabbit
A torch flares, foreshortening itself to the barley's plane. I catch a glimpse of a large scared eye locking into mine from the centre of the hissing stalks, which my frantic stick has knocked askew. The white eye pleads with me. This sight alone destroys the cowardice in me, switches me back from victim to triumphant killer. I swing my weapon and smash it down on the inert, trusting, grey body of the rabbit. Bastard bastard bastard mixes with the shrill kill kill kill, ringing at me from the whole flat field. My blows are wild. Some miss, even at this close distance. But the rabbit does not move. It has nowhere left to go. Bones crunch; its blood spurts. The white eye vanishes, becomes a scarlet pulp. Strands of barley, badgered by the stick, come to cover over the top half of the destroyed form. My blows rain down blindly, frantically. Bastard bastard bastard, still being stirred by kill kill kill. All of me, flat face, staring eyes, carded torso, black robe down to my feet, are stained and reek with rabbit's blood; but still the body, the lower half of the grey body, twitches. My blows beat into the barley, but can't land straight.
Snapshot 23: Not A Rabbit
In this snapshot my vision has gone into a tunnel. The field, with its wrecked corn stooks, its flaring torches, its sable shadows, its Three of Diamonds leering down from her flat grain-cutter, the shrill chants of my fellow Cards, even my own bloody rampant figure, is sucked away well out of focus. The lens is fixed severely into one frame. On the four edges, smashed, blood-soaked barley. Across the top of the picture, wayward clumps of barley, dragged in the beating over the upper torso and smashed face of the young victim. Nothing is recognisable beneath that matted whiskery curtain. In the centre, in the clearing, where the barley has been snapped away by the savagery of the onslaught of my flat, stout stick - two feet, in black shoes, with grey socks pulled up to just below the knees. The knees are smashed, the ankles broken, grey and black mottled with gore. It is not a rabbit any more. Hovering above the snapshot, behind the camera's black box, unprintably, a scream of such proportions the whole lurid field shudders, shakes and heaves, as if an earthquake is in progress.

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