INTEREST

There was a bare and solitary light socket hanging off a piece of chip-board which was itself suspended from a piece of crumbling plaster. The building was vacant and the air was heavy with dust that found its own passage undisturbed by moving forms. The atmosphere was one of lifelessness. Time did not change in this stillness. Then in walked Mop and accompanied on his right arm was Morley. They might easily have been over looked by you and me as unimportant. As lifeless even as the dust particles which here and there scattered around. And all this on account of their size and their hard uninteresting beetle-like exteriors that to our eyes looked dismal. And yet to one another each swam in the radiant colours of each other’s existence as if looking into a multi-coloured oil pool shot through with patterns and formations truly enticing. Such is the intensity of a beetle’s gaze. They were unhindered by distractions for their size did not persuade them to follow all the directions that for a human seem to be part and parcel of a rich and varied life and yet actually seem to have the affect now and again of confusing the issue.


So Mop and Morley approached the loose hanging light-socket. On touching it a crack resounded and joined the two together in a brisk cantor of a dance within the sure embrace of one another’s affections. All was radiant like the ripple found on a fruit tree about to be eaten. But not so. Time seemed to speed on almost as if it were making up for lost time and within seconds they were shrunken back down to their dark beetle forms as if only the pips of these fantastic fruits now remained. They fell down on to their backs and spun around a while like the cogs of some inter-locking mechanism. Then they came to rest, their legs still entwined, their eye locked.