Writing class exercise Wycombe Arts Centre 21 - Sept

NECESSITY-WORM-BELIEF-CLARITY-THINGS-GLASS 

Title: Worm 

 

The ancient tome lay opened on the student scarred desktop, carved with time-worn initials, indecipherable save for a fragment of a year, someone’s missing surname , a faint hieroglyphic of an astral body; musings of idle scholars minds long since gone to their celestial graduation. 

The candlestick, its surface dull, silver-scarred with wax’s paleontological drip, held the suffocating flicker of a faint light, waving, dancing in a slight breeze from further down the cavernous tunnel’s exit. 

Worm mused, adjusted his pince-nez, the optical frame taped together to hold the lens of the right eye as he coaxed out the words. 

“N-E-C-E-S-S-I-T-Y, necessity” 

“Necessity, R-E-Q-U-I-R-E-S, necessity requires” 

“C-L-A-R-I-T-Z ..“ the candle light flickered a moment, “ ..I-T-Y, necessity requires clarity” 

“ O-F-  B-E-L-I-E-F, necessity requires clarity of belief.” 

He paused, pulled the candlestick holder closer, adjusting his pince nez and peered at the dry parchment page, thin veined like a skeletal hand. 

“ Necessity requires clarity of belief “. 

Musing, he removed his glasses, and watched as the renegade light bent double, flicked back castings shadows on the magnifying glass, trapping obscenely large letters.  A faint air from the advancing night deep in his lair touched his face. 

“ Strange things, “ he mused, “ strange things write the ancients.” 

He reached over to a freshly bound tome, it’s newly baptised spine, embossed in golden letters neatly stacked in red:  “WORM’s treatise on the theory of evolution, Vol 1, MDCXXXIX”. 

He picked up his feathered quill parked in a pot, dipped it into a stubborn blackness of ink and started to write. 

©Mervyn Cooke September 2019  Image copyright @ (marketplace.secondlife.com)