The Carnival King
It’s the 1930s, and Quillon Street is suffering, not from physical pain, but from the strain of time displacement. The residents are trapped inside a bubble, akin to a snow globe, where the world outside looks in from a curious angle. Meanwhile, those inside, vaguely aware of life beyond, retreat further into themselves. The street, once integrated with the rest of the universe, is now divorced from that reality. On many levels. Why? No one knows except for one person. And he doesn’t speak. At least, not with words as we understand them. An exotic man of indeterminate age and race, clad in raiment incongruous to his surroundings, is Mary Smith’s mysterious lodger an anachronism everyone has seen but none could describe.
Children are heard but unseen their ghostly voices of merriment floating along the street. Apparitions frequent this place, unable to fully materialize in this dimension, save for imprints made by proverbial footprints, rudimentary manifestations of the ghosts that haunt this environment. Seniors do not die here, and the infirm are nonexistent. Quillon Street is neither purgatory, heaven, nor hell: it is grey. An insipid color that seemingly reflects the hustle and bustle of city life present, yet unrealized physically.
"How satisfying that abnormality is normalcy here," the lodger murmurs.
Psychically observing Mary, he watches with engaged fascination as she casually blows into a pea shooter aimed at a bedroom window. She is a stout woman, a matriarch. Her hair is tied up, and she bravely wears a cardigan in the damp weather, with a long skirt that masks her boots. She is a knocker-upper, ensuring her clients don’t oversleep, aren’t late for work, or worse, don’t lose their jobs. A photographer captures her on film a Time Thief, catching perfect moments and preserving them in arcane books that hold frozen memories.
On her way home, she passes a woman who has been watching her from a discreet distance. Mary perfunctorily greets her with a nod. She doesn’t consciously register that the lady isn’t as she seems. Arriving home, she finds herself gravitating towards the stairs, as if pulled by an unseen force. Her lodger descends majestically. Revealing his true nature: An incomprehensible equation. A poem springs, unsolicited, into her mind. Enacting it, she recites:
"As I was walking up the stairs, I saw a man who wasn’t there."
His face.
"He wasn’t there again today."
His. Face!
"I wish he’d go away!"
Feeling nauseous as as the veil lifts. Realization dawns. Everyone she had encountered appeared featureless. Unable to resist his magnetic pull, transfixed, horrified. His impossibly rippling, fractured visage, that's wearing every resident face of Quillon Street including her own. jostles for dominance. Kaleidoscopically smiling, radiantly, the God telepathically conveys to her:
Mayhem is the only true reality.
The Carnival King welcomes her to a beautifully corrupted universe. Delighting in her petrified state, showing her what he has wrought: a new world remade in his own image.