Rooms Extract 7: SETS AND SETTINGS III

FRANCIS GLESSNER LEE’S NUTSHELL STUDIES OF UNEXPLAINED DEATH

Attic. The sad fact of your attic fraying, your windows gave up on their views to look inside. This inticate grey lady —brown shawled because of course it was cold. (There was the ruptured heating pipe, and anyway, she on to her last wad.) She wasted her moment checking for last chances, and what with a whole laundry load undone.

Barn. How had the sun come up indoors with the black sky still swelling?

How did your loud sleeping not disturb the animals? Questions line up, forming part of the regular.

Blue Bedroom. This angle makes a hard day of it. Let him rest for goodness sake. A neat finish with a fact: he was just that tired. The carpet just too rough for walking. That’s why he left his clothes on the floor — can’t you let it rest?

Burned Cabin. This room really cares for shape, so it’s a pity that monster came. We (of course) locked the door, but it entered by fire.

Nobody saw it coming.

Dark Bathroom. Is that Armitage Shanks? I ask, consumed by the world of bathroom furniture. Quite sensational, this architecture — why — this ceiling is shaped by the stairs! (I avert my eyes from the event, and, without looking, close the bath’s water tap to prevent exacerbating disaster.)

Garage. Oh this incessant angling of things — the barrow, the rake, the curve of that chair — of course something must slump against the tension.

He could hardly be expected to live there.

Kitchen. Not a detective, not that sort of work at all. Rather — reconstruction of the scene, her scene: the kitchen. That inherited rolling pin had flattened out her future. Instead of reaching a great, perhaps even plaited distance, all that gusto proofed a curt loaf rising, rising and then — just silly.

No, not a detective. But she’d always kept up with Agatha, all those years spent reading.

Her life was a mystery to her, and she would get to the bottom of it. Yes! She staged her end so that hindsight could occur, sparing the epilogue for another.

Living Room. She knew the doorway would frame her, and it had always bothered her, that painting —it didn’t contain any real body. She’d show them how it was done. Velvet ropes and other stately artefacts couldn’t hold her back.

Log Cabin. Not a holiday. Not a hy-da-way, not a blue sky, or sky at all.

Not without splinters in that real or realistic wood. Not a mystery at all.

Parsonage Parlour. Well you must protect the lampshapes, otherwise how will light get out? Brashly, I think. And you must protect the sofas, for it may be time for dust. But floors and carpets are for gathering stains, so leave them uncovered, come blood or rain.

Pink Bathroom. Open and shut, he said that the window was a case of poor memory, the striations in the pink marble indicated cartoon stink lines.

The weight of the scale model dropped twenty-one grams from its scale weight to account for death. It diminishes further the longer the caretaker takes to find her.

Red Bedroom. Digging a hole in a box with a bottom for the fat roses that used to billow on the curtain. Hands, perhaps bound like that, as if memory matters. Like stuffing used pages of a calendar in the bin.

Saloon & Jail. A perfect outfit of function, a perfect lunch box snaping shut on space. Cut paper bottles to reflect real cut paper bottles, and here is my perfect dolly stropping on the floor. The banana, I feel, is just too much.

Striped Bedroom. Frills are stiff when their fibres are enlarged, it’s just the way it has to be. I’m not facing my day. That’s my brown-paper package, my torn up manuscript. I left it for you to find but please don’t touch it. I want my situation to remain to be seen.

Three-Room Dwelling. I can’t look, but it’s too late in the game for morals. There’s just too much sensation already. It needs no further investigation.

Two-Story Porch. It’s not so far to have fallen, but she’s refusing to rise for the shame of being taken gravity.

Unpapered Bedroom. She feels me looking at her naked walls, at the pattern of her feet showing mostly just coming and going, and washing.

Why end there? Why not.

W oodman's Shack. Whether clear and mild, or tired with this solution, all the convenience of being off the grid (like food cans in boxes, and being inebriated) meant weather was unaffecting.

ON SHOP WINDOWS

Shopping the library book sale, I bought: On The Absolute Fantasy Of The Shop Window. It was really quite enchanting and spurred all sorts of pleasant ideas, and so I got a little job, just a few days a week, as a window dresser. Here I am now, behind pane of glass, making room for a little fiction.

The role is to keep my creation bright, with its own light and lively. I must also keep it spotlessly clean. All this provides contrast to the desperate scene outside, and helps my worlds grow stronger. The more it faces itself, the less it gets polluted. Realism? — I mean — the outside makes its own unreality. The peculiar horror reflected in shop after shop, slickly repeating the appetite of culture. Who wouldn’t want to run away? People are growing violent on the street, acting out aggressions to feel just something real.

Well, my worlds are for going elsewhere. I invite my shoppers to press close their greasy little noses, and then take charge of their processes. I cast thoughts away from their thinkers, up to the stars and their infinite metaphors. From somewhere off, people see themselves peering in from the street, soft and small. Yes, I’ve seen you moving in. Why don’t you come closer?

With all its static-ness, a shop window requires constant sprucing. Spiders and dust make claims on my little republic, but a can of compressed air does the trick. My spaces are very material and are dependent on their contents. Scale is important. A few cubic meters might contain the whole universe, or perhaps just a little domestic scene, something for your mind

to move around (all the while being reminded you’re out of kitchen towel, or whatever). I find a thing to say about your setting, and my boss finds a way to sell it to you. All the products a simple story can produce — generating gaps for the shop’s merchandise to barge in. You get the sense of your void dropping away, telling a fantasy that, at some point, you could be full.

But I don’t care a jot about sales, and really, I’m awfully sorry about the business of it. My boss is a person with no taste (whatever that means). She asks me to highlight the shop’s promotions, special offers, and latest products, bending them to the tune of a culture seeding itself with all pretty notions of care. I stand behind her on a chair, watching that can of air spray dead flies away, worrying that, for all my earnest building, my glass edge can’t stave off this fraternising. I am making the shop stronger, making need for slipping away greater. I must work against it.

I try making a shop in my shop window. I make all the products little parodies of themselves, I make signs for them housed in the shop’s vernacular, and would you believe — people come in to buy them! This town trusts in my little world. The manager reprimands me, but like I said, she has no taste.

I love sneaking in after my shift, love becoming a part of the display, acting out the strangeness of shops and hiding from home time. Quiet performances have passers-by look in and laugh. I glow with the shame of conspicuousness as my window dobs me in; the fabric from one world lets itself known to the other. I need to do better.

I get the idea from an artist who makes paper replicas of real-life scenes — famous places and such, and sometimes, even death scenes. Now there’s the

ticket, I think. But further: I start to wonder about the first act, that others might look to for replication. Perhaps something as subtle as spilt tomato juice. A dribble down the chin, onto the coat, pooling on the floor. How to really paint this bad picture.

For participants, I have my lure (all those noses on my glass). Why — I’d let some lucky person in! Let them be real in one of my scenes. They’ll appreciate it, believe me sweet in my directing. Nobody would protest, not from the outside, anyway. I can just see my audience now, peering in, seeing how small everything seems in the grand scale of my themes.