The land is half as dry as his imagination. It cracks beneath the relentless pound of the sun and there is nary a drop of water to be found atop its hissing surface.
Delirious, he presses the warmed tumbler to his forehead, willing the scotch, paled by long-melted ice, into his mind. He is mumbling to himself again.
Lying on a lounger that has become his stretcher, he attempts to assemble his fleeting thoughts into a cohesive narrative. They are like frightened rabbits, their backs bristling against his grasping fingers, always one moment ahead of him. It moves him to terrible anger, which only serves to scare away the blots of memory and creation that he so craves.
He pitches the glass into the air. There’s a long silence before it shatters on the cracked bed of earth far below. In its travel, the glass saw the full, awing scale of his home. A sequence of simple shapes stacked on top of one another, sculpted from dust-grazed walls of glass and white struts stained by the tides of sand. An attempt at minimalism that, to the glass about to be recast into a hundred pieces, appears bare and loveless.
He rubs his temple. He was an artist once. Or rather, he has spent the former part of his life accruing a vast sum of wealth, started by his late father, by supplying the world with its energy needs. The last few years have been focused on perfecting one craft or another. Whatever takes his fancy.
Painting. Cinema. Music. In just two short years he has passed through every major medium of art and left little to be remembered by in his wake. He could not tell you this. It would break him. But nonetheless, he has failed to acquire any recognition for his efforts beyond the immediate ring of sycophants that used to surround him.
He is largely alone now. That vast sum of wealth has become the vast reservoir of water that sits below his home and keeps him in a vague state of animation. The land could probably use some of it. But more urgently, it needs his legend, he thinks.
His contributions to this barrenness never cross his mind, despite their consequences surrounding him on all sides of the horizon. His thoughts are too heavily obscured by self-pity for any kind of reflection.
He splashes some water from the pool and the dust almost jumps up to grab it. Then he skulks indoors, looking for another tumbler that will eventually join the glass graveyard outside his front door.
Paddy Dobson
29th July 2020