BOUND OVER

There was once a man who could not speak. Yet he was an intelligent man and he had an idea to make a mint or two. He went to the bank and wrote down his idea. But he needed more than financial help because for what he had in mind he needed to be able to speak; to put himself across as is the way when people are trying their best to win something over for some purpose or other.


The manager looked doubtful. In fact he scratched his chin for a long time. For so long in fact that the stubble actually grew up around his fingers making the scratching louder and louder by degrees.


“Well now” he said at last. “I might just be able to help you”. The man without speech looked hopeful which is a look that anyone can have with or without speech. Then away went the bank-manager and back again he trotted with a plan of action in between his extended hands which he was rubbing together.


“O.k. all fixed”


“Follow me if you will in this here vault. It is quite comfortable you will find. Here you may stay whilst the speaking hologram of yourself, MR Speakeasy will take your place, clinch the deal, return with the mint and present it to you. We will take a small cut to cover our expenses as is the custom in the banking world and the rest my good man will be yours for keeps. Is that a deal?”


The man with the idea with no voice to give vent to nodded enthusiastically for enthusiasm as was the case with hope is not the prerogative of the speakeasies alone.

So, to work went Mr Speakeasy shining and glimmering at every turn in the road, radiating confidence, suggesting countless directions all of which seemed to validate his excursions to the place where a right old heaped up mound of money could be sought and collected.


At last it seemed sufficient to call a halt to the exploits of the day.


Mr Speakeasy bound the money up in a suitcase and tottered off to the bank. Thereupon he opened the door of the vault. But no sooner did he do so, catching a glimmer in the eye of the man of little words, then once again he ceased to exist. The man got up from the floor where he had been sat motionless for all this time and without an inkling of a thought or a hope in his empty mind.


As for the suitcase, when it was finally prized apart, for it seemed to be made of some kind of stone, it was found that the suitcase was nothing but a large fossil. It was the fossil of a jaw-bone locked in an expression of… but who can say what it in fact meant.


The man got up from off of the floor of the old vault room. He brushed himself down and went out.