Stolen from MoT:
“Things Need Not Have Happened to be True” – Neil Gaiman
If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now (even if we don’t speak often or ever) please post a comment with a completely made up, fictional memory of you and me.
It can be anything you want – good or bad – but it has to be fake.
When you’re finished, post this little paragraph in your LJ and see what your friends come up with.
(and can I just reccomend Thursday’s listening…)
I remember Uluru, and the view from atop. I remember poker in its shadow trying to read the aborigine warden whose charge the mighty thing was. I remember the Sydney Opera and the contrast, and absinthe in the interval. I remember marching through the bush half a day’s drive from civilisation declaiming Eliot’s poems on Sweeney in alternating lines. I remember…
…we were drunk, weren’t we?
I think the whole of that trip we were drinking something.
It’s hard to beat that evening we sat on the shingle by the sailboat we’d just painted, watching the sun slip gracefully beneath the sea…
…though the water skiing trip to M
I remember the Empire State Building. I remember reading from some kind of old book, bound in… leather? Was it leather? Everything was a blur after the first few moments. I remember seeing strange things on the edge of my vision as I read on. I remember the wind, cold and biting. I remember at the end, as strange and terrible things lashed out in retribution for stopping their plans.
I remember you saving me.
Thankyou.
You’d have done the same for me.
Twas but when I was a young Goat and thou wert a young Mish when we employed those beautiful nonuplets to perform kabuki for us.
Ah the memories.
Once upon a lifetime, when I was mostly kitten, you gave me a sparkly purple collar with stars on.
Oh, how I did purr!
You remember when we were out walking that time and discovered that tiny kingdom, tucked away in some forgotten dip of the Trough of Bowland?
Well, they said it was a kingdom, and the locals we met there did seem to have their own peculiar ways, and a complete lack of knowledge of what lay just over the next rise. Do you remember the accent? Like a bent cross between French and Icelandic.
Sorry to say this, but I tried to go back there again last month. Yeah, I know we said neither of us should go back without the other, after we found about the prophesy, but I just wanted to make sure it was still there… Sorry. 🙁
have fought until the final blood is spilled,
upon their coming back unto the moors,
the Crown of Ages taken as their prize."
Haunting, wasn’t it?
I remember a time you knew a girl from Mars, I don’t know if you knew it at the time, but she definitely was.
The first time you introduced us it was strange, like some scene from a silent movie, the way she telepathically implanted thoughts into your head from mine.
But boy could she play a mean bongo.
Whatever happened when you and her went into that little tea shop? I never saw her again afterwards, and I don’t recall you telling me exactly, just in one last image of a rose transferred into my brain.
I remember the way your voice burned and your eyes sang and your hands tasted things, the way your ears touched the music as your tongue heard the silent whispers of thunder as we stood on the hill in the storm.
I remember you ramrod straight, spine reaching, crackling with lightning as I sat and muttered forgotten things, calling up the ghosts of might-have beens, in the Never-Was.
Never forget, We were *good*.
I was surprised in some ways, and not in others. We’d talked about it many times, but I don’t think either of us ever expected to be standing here staring at the results of our work, our planning.
I called you, I didn’t know if you’d come, loose your mind, call the police or simply replace the handset and pretend that it’d never happened. But here you were with your paper suit, plastic sheeting and collection of nasty chemicals.
So much blood. I’ve always found it amazing quite how far one fleshy meat bags worth of blood will spread. Looks like the frenzy got slightly carried away this time, there’s spatter everywhere. The CSI guys are going to have a field day if we’re not thorough.
Things are all in hand, but I can’t help wondering if I can trust you now….
It wasn’t that I thought you’d turn me in, it was more the fact that it looked very much like you’d done this before. The air of professionalism, the casual way that you hefted gibs into bags like slabs of beef.
You also seemed to have an awful lot more plastic sheeting than we needed, almost as if you were…
Oh no….
It’s the only way. No witnesses.
I remember that one time in Indiana where we got very drunk in that field by the US 51 I think. You told me about Gods and Goddesses, about thoughts and dreams. We sat there watching the stars wheel overhead as the balmy night was accompanied by a symphony of crickets.
I think it was there and then that we decided to go looking for them. Find each one, the real Gods of America. Too much mainlining Gaiman and too much cheap bourbon probably didn’t help. We decided that real American Gods wouldn’t be like Mr Wednesday, but concepts and images that Americans worshipped.
So we set out and found by talking to every businessman and redneck (and all in between) in every Eatem’up from the ol’ Ohio to the brightly painted shores of California.
Easy to find were JFK and Elvis. All we had to do was follow the Kerouac’s and bugs streaming from the West, till they dreamed, worshipped, prayed and cried.
But the day we caught Oprah with the corpse of Joe DiMaggio…
Yeah I try not to think about that…just too much…I couldn’t go back to the States afterwards – was surprised you stayed tbh.