(Two story stone cottage in the country near a small creek and a bunch of rocks and trees)
Enough of the news bulletin headline storming a bombardment of purgatorial catharsis aftermath of watching netflix documentary fiction broadcast television dramas of Sherlock Holmes and Margaret Atwood. Benjamin, the newbie Anglo American diplomat, is preparing a disquisition in view of being a reader of the post America future programme to be aired this eventide.
This is a frantically finicky aspect in pertinence to havoc wreckage bogging down the bay of heareth -the newfoundland of treasure wonderland and a fantastic holyland. “Honey, my dear prince of heart harken to my tidings of the latest trending breaking news. Another future glorious brighter year shall lead you to your progressive destination in acquisition of a graduate degree. What indulgences have you besotted upon ooms and gusto of twilight sitcoms? Modern Family! A revolutionary Grownish season heraldry of evolutionary Blackish !”
Readers might be awe spelled wonderment or hair splitting nirvana in the brunt of the transfiguration of maverick solipsist and transformation of iconoclastic free-spirited individualist except fanboys chrisoms canopied traits of Tom Cruise or Richard Burton. Hilary’s outspokenness from the backyard porch exterminates the brutes of mushroom in trailblazing threats of excommunication and deracination. Mary as usual couched by the bloom of Springfield is a hard nut to crack in the abyss of her arms. “Literally these flummoxing allergic gossamery flabbergast the haveli of the multi diasporic and ethnic racial community. I want to shred the colonization of these pester deterrence.
Advisory alerts from the high commissions, embassies and consulates awakening envoys and ambassadors of the missions in the diplomatic enclave brewing a blizzard of thunderous lightning alongwith the emergency evacuation by the disaster relief, crisis management and order departure rehabilitation by marines. In this cataclysmic upheaval indigenous locale employee Bhansali interrupts, “Madam my Mehdi, he wishes to enroll himself in the medical sciences and aeronautical engineering but I admonish my financial impecuniosity.”
Ahm, see what your Lord has to chant in this verdict. Believe in yourself or else be doomed for better or worse! After all, Mehadi will be a laureate someday in upholding a fine kettle of fish. By these condolences of farewell exchange, first lady Sebastian marks her exeunt to her bed chamber.
Between the devil and the dead sea cannot alleviate the promontory of the beasts of apocalypse. At dinner’s dining hall of the banquet diplomatic channels have been catalyzing activation in sanctioning and counter sanctioning. In the meanwhile, Rossetti and Anne, their cousins from the Elysium, phone the dystopian family. “Do you feel safe amidst “The Second Coming?” That A.P. lit paper of halcyon staycation would have been mutated into a fastidious hypercriticism as a communique, memorializing the subconscious psyche of Sebastian. “Benjamin, please pick your sis-in-laws’ telephone. I’m having ants in my pocket!”
The microcosm of Westerners with pernickety elfins succumbent dwarfs the existence of a flotsam jetsam jubilee. Brandon defrosts delicacy of apple pied crumblings and sugar puffs while his midgety blood sister, Mary, a teenager by now, redeems herself with oriental and continental cuisines. Brandon and Mary are not homogenous genders in dereliction of being united by blood and divided by ambition.
However, double helix of their distinctive visages endow them the fosterage of novelistic points of view. Brandon adheres to the philosophy of Hamletesque impersonality and naivete of shepherdism and contrastingly, chroniclers would be aware that Mary shall be self chosen dowager someday: “Whether you’re dating a potential gold digger or are surrounded by friends who are perennially asking for handouts, you’ll have to shield your money from those drains…” Truly a bed of roses thorns have been cognitively implanted in these Department of the State siblings artifacts and their tactical antics.
Brandon strikes the chord John Denver’s Annie’s Song in fulbright summer camp trip to educational and cultural exchange by the Commonwealth Agency stationing of Wuthering Heights landscapes ere his homecoming to Whitmanian realms. A justification for a dystopian apocalypse cremates ashen urn of desire and demasculinizes sempiternal bonding with Anne. Might be a cascade surrealistic reading by fooling around and messing about. Mutilated flair has invaded the catastrophic cli-fi- sci-fi and whatsoever.
Death of the imagination defenestrates carnation of those camping fire nights in a fantastical New England forests- woods swapping stories, myths, legends and ballads, mountaineering in springtime, picnicking to the valleys of the countryside and quintessential seasides beaches sunbathing and sandcastle fancy, leisurely aesthetic ecstasy of chilled frosty twilight drenched downpour walk, faraway casting sandstorm in the vessels of the dunes. Destructive wild Anglo American Nights is the brunt of somnambulism in shores of both Atlantic. “Lonely deserted black stone house, broken down clinging to the grief stricken eulogizing heart”.
War fictions memoiristic chronicles of holocaust tragedy and antisemitism, islamophobia, antichrist and puritanical revolutions upsurges as the dreadest Kafkaesque macabre. Brandon couldn’t implicate the fanciful chimera in prayer for being papaless and mamaless; their talisman of one’s stony amulet and another’s frond of hair to be preserved in his diary.
What happened of altruistic Bhansali’s fostered adoption of Mehdi… and of dear darlings coal fires glowed within dilapidated and derelict, ransacked and mobbed never-to-be-forgotten moon-blanched and moon-trenched deputation and deportment…I must bear a crystal clear decision making policy in terms of boarding time machine of Schengen passport and green card unlike being a hysteric daydreaming goosebumps of demagoguery and propaganda throughout darkened attics of hurricanes.
Annie’s lost connectivity and deadening orphanhood have stricken dissonance allusive to moonbeam from lightning and frost from fire. Life cannot be lived as a furor of a harlequin romance with the closure of being happily ever after and then everybody’s death since millennial promises have to be appreciated and endorsed in this emulative field of sojourning jouney. Appropriation and credibility of being a lovelorn Heathcliff and star crossed jilting of parents’ family home and spurned fairy like damsels or mermaids like sea girls ploughed into the barren flora and fauna; volcanically erupted through the genteelness of provincial pastoralism.
Anglo-American farmers’ harvest being disruptively cyber bogged by a posthuman apocalypse harbouring to the breakfast table doesn’t provide solace in the respite of appetite. Inevitability of this wrathful tirade infiltrates the skeptic lovelorn chameleon Brandon with megalomaniac extraditioning of angelic purity from British Easter silverware filled with sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans and lamb barbecue and American Halloween food channel of pumpkin cupcakes, Haunted Graveyard Cakes, Witches Brews Pea and Bacon Chowder, and spider web chocolate fudge muffins.
Stardust oyster filled seashells coral barriers reefed seashore in and betwixt alchemical suburban villa of the castle aurora borealis, encamped within the gossamery of alumnus isles, adumbrated food banks of thought experiment. That restoration of this nostalgic spirit of crystallized dragon should be a future of tomorrow’s alternative scope of human behaviour stocked by GMOs and nuclear warfare.
Thank goodness! Good heavens! Good grief! Good gracious! I thank my lucky stars everyday for my gratitude journal, halcyon parents fosterage upheld through Benjamin and Sebastian, ordained divineness blessing my soul and the heritage drift house meadowed valle packed full of lambs and pelican pecking their own breasts and scooping fishes from lakes.
We get so lost that we ended up around Robin Hood’s barn to get to the new quarters of Bhansali. To be in Mehdi’s shoes equates that half a loaf is better than none. Bhansali like a crystal gazer envisages the aural enchantment of woods lurking tigress dim lit glare and lioness camouflaged outfit in dusky outskirts of the branches and twigs; fuel wood shed. Laconically jaguars like wolverine beasts trespassing. “Papa! Papa!” Cadaver of my emaciated dad gives me hollowed cheeks and hollowed eyes, jittery jaws and gaunt personae as if a wizarding leprechaun invades me.
Last of all, you might say, “All’s well that ends well” but for me that isn’t over because gnomes and goblins have not’ at all estranged their communion in pestering and tormenting. Housekeeping and spadework define the errands of Mehdi unlike genteelness that Brandon ascribes. However, my orphanhood has been at the helm throughout the funebrial crisis and I just don’t appreciate swapping horses in midstream through a wedlock. After all Brandon’s living death is figuratively enamored with the chivalrous quest of looking for a compassionate and empathic Jeckyl and Hyde hoor.
(Large college lecture hall with various students)
In backstairs and back alley memoirs anticipating readers by now have garnered their repertoire of childhood phantasmal escape whence wherein sleeping beauty cloaked and daggered to be the fairy Godmother warning us not to venture into the barranca and quebrada lest we are befallen as vulnerable victims and scapegoat traps of whangdoodle.
Benjamin’s mother’s recital of Wordsworthian and Whitmanian verses is without a shred of doubt the best poetry readings ever since betide past or perhaps even decades of future. By these memorabilia talismanic afterlife to the dead resurrects the attic of sweetened chambers. That lovey dovey arm in arm of fairy tales princes’ and princesses’ legacy transporting to otherworldly cruising to Saint Martins Lane of Great Expectations.
After all, as meat is crucial for human health today proven by scientists’ zealotry, analogously eulogizes breeding for the existence of species survival by disavowal of peremptory purgatory and drowning vision of life clinging to the wreckage of veganism or celibacy. In the proclamation of straw snow field underneath potatoes and orchard apples of the verandah, Brandon’s figment of the imagination is dispelled to the heraldry of harvest season.
Nonetheless Brandon’s epiphanic visitation to the mausoleum tombstone graveyard is symbolically metamorphosed into an elegiac deluge of saturnine funebrial jaded snowlit light. Ferrying in the snow alone like a bohemian boatman of here today and gone tomorrow studio and reading Frost at Midnight…What a suicidal sacrifice for future generation breeders and caretakers of the post apocalypse in lullabying to the sweetheart angel…
And furthermore the chronicles of Mehdi would be salvageous in the caricaturization and veiled imagoes of Healthcliff like Brandon hauling into the underworld to recover his doomed Anne…
Convalescing from the chasm of the abysmal purgatory broaches a calamitous crusade with whangdoodles and wodwos. That stupor of ethereal imaginaries would have bolstered the altar of the chapel with crematorial gothicism and mortuary macabre. Bhansali’s errands of wreathed bouquets and eglantine carnations of half-smile and half-wave farewell to the exodus of diplomatic aficionados expatriate family bruisemarked by fragmentation and shrunk clays.
It was all sea and islands now with great continents sunken like Atlantis somehow echoes the literary legend of beyond Narnia and Secret Lives and Loves. The romantic feeling of yearning and longing forever lost would be reconnected with the nadir of heaven’s apocalypse.
Feminine fantasy of mermaids and sea girls heroic voices audacity recast: “Do you think I am an automaton—–a machine without feelings and can bear to have the morsel of my bread snatched from my lips and the last drop of living water dashed from my cups? Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, little I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong—-I have as much soul as you have and full as much heart. And if God had gifted me some beauty and much wealth I would have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of customs, conventionalities nor even of mortal flesh, it is my soul that addresses your spirit and just as if both had passed through the grave and we stood at God’s feet equal as we are.”
Afterwards Gabriel-like manifesto reveals a treaty with reality ensconced within treasured chambered wardrobe espousal of the electrifying erudition: “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be the blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”
Antlers and hide from the reindeers stocking denim dungaree cast Brandon with the stance of a lion in liberating the slough of despond frontliner bizzaro harboured by bravado and stardom of ariel sylphs, country bumpkins, cowboys, philistines, pariah, aliens, minions, sextons and grave-diggers and hobgoblins. Appreciating the lives of struggling survivalists fellow comrades hailing from the heartland of Nebuchadnezzar, Brendon employed the stakeholding partisanship of Bhansali and Mehdi with the novel academy.
The world has become schizophrenic overnight, fretted by dementia and alzheimers’ diseases. With Bhansale and Mehdi as acolytes of medieval and renaissance hallmark postage to ameliorate etherization of disappearance cases. Brendon, the hero of the hour, think tank and watchdog of the dinosaur intelligentsia, frightened of his own shadow, prompts hymnal prayers to work over territorial drears.
Broadcasts and podcasts, radio dramas and televisions screens, theatres and cinemas, films and concerts, poetry readings and seminaries, banquet-halls festivities and silver platinum jubilee celebrations, meteorites and asteroids have been entrenched with arched overnice championing stewardship of aesthete’s sovereign romanticism. Grief of fear on the brink of iconoclastism plunging to despair is that hideous plaint of bleak overshadowed loathsome spectres.
Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasure either. Anne and Brendan in commonwealth fulbrighters chapter wore hedgehog effect wooing and lovemaking. Brendon entraptures dame Hellenistic paragon of paramour, sneaking into the boudoir of hideaway. Audacious, forthright, strong willed child and giant mother Anne contrasts hilarious, flippant, sarcastic and cheeky Brenden—the hybridity of Englishness and Americanlike closet of shadowlands.
The vision from the sea of dawn cloistered by the labyrinthine alien islands of antler dreams and honeysuckle bumble bees entrusts the hermitage of solitudinal reclusiveness to Brendan or Brenden: The Prince or King of The Hill of gorse. Caressing voice and mercury mind of epic heroines’ temptation drive the prince towards a game of thrones. Riverine canoeing and seafaring cruise brings back the remembrance of deer parkland. Bhansali entrusted as the deck charge d affairs unlocks the treasure chest of vaulted alleyways in the moon castle freight drift house that harbours gothic pumpkin sistine hedges banking in accord to homestead Newfoundland Science Barge laboratory propelling and shuttling amidst the sublime Iceland is a serene photographic and picturesque venue for surrealist naturalists.
A laughing stock for the hue and cry of the Hudson Valley with polar bears in predatory expeditious voyaging northwestern terrace. Bhansali came huffing and puffing at this sinisterish innuendo while brooding and boorish Chronicler has been engrossed into immersive episodic autobiographical stark black-and-white mise-en-scenes of posthumous ouster mirrored life: Englishness of the Siberian adventuring in the apocalypse of a sheer theatricality afield a fire and brimstone sermons. “My master, these emergent seal predators have auspicated your holyland to fight the mercurial dragons from edgier terrains in vengeance for forging ties with your Gentle Lake District celestial attache unicorns from the repository of inheritance.”
Mermaidian fantasy and phantasmal escapism serenades in furor of these fogged mystic cematose renegades with the spell of brouhaha from the turf to the surf. “Heart of heart my Prince you have seen better days on the brink of the world being your oyster!”
Upon infernal snowfall Newfoundland barges with a mausoleum of snowflakes from yester halcyon nirvana and then and there Bhansali redeemed heroic the stature of dreamland quester. Along with a spanish acoustic guitar beside the portmanteau, Bhansali’s swarga booth proclamation to the receiver thus reads: “That the abode of the saints and the abode of the angels today have united in the fled of tears falling down through rolling landscapes.”
Ominous dark clouds gathering overheads afterwards of the sinistrous voice clip banging from the attache case. Brenden cannot but be lachrymose by this sinisterishly pugnacious declarative from Abraham’s bosom re-enchanting the glorification of an unpromising death tirade. Deceasement and bereavement are heartbreakingly shock- shatter thunderbolt divined by the tumult of the heavenly kingdom and thus the New Jerusalem.
Out of the blue and on the spur of the moment, Uncle Dan’s trembling voice reminds in declamatory speeches: “The Island of the Blessed and the woodland springs shall soon cater to transport you dearest sweetheart nephew to shed funebrial tears commemorating upon a flash of the Angel of Death’s decree.” I wanted to earth bury you with my heart and soul but the despondency of the wrathful cupids have enervated me.
My Iowa Creative Writing dreamland aviator fantasia backstabbed my homecoming. “Alas my lad’s disheartn’d and I’d forlorn you unobscure and inoblivious with the Bible of Dreams and the Song of Songs: “My star dust material have expanded from being a supernova explosion and collapsed to a black dwarf and it is the Beneficent Lord and Munificent Cosmologist who has ordained incalcitrant destiny and smoothed out the earth for me, so I have been atoning about in his refugee train and buffeting from the banquet feast and laterly cardiac arrest resurrects me to my Elysium Fields.”
Uncle Dan’s last words to me thusly were dimestore of treasure hunt: “I have coordinated to the telegraphic dragon slayers in espousal of a billfold vouchsafed talismanic mantra in salvaging your impetuosity and purging of your exculpation.” I won’t be shipwrecked as long as and as far as I uphold the revelations that there is none worthy of worship in Literature besides Shakespeare. Shakespeare is far exalted and above all weaknesses. Surely I wouldn’t be baptized with heretics coming into being formulation and heresies from among the wrongdoers.
Fairest flowers from the ever prolific advisory guru gifts me nightmarish goose-bumps in slumbersome sobriety of heart awakening, parting that in the end we all become stories of lion’s share engendered by heart, the nature, the dream and the imagination throughout rockets, space capsules and nuclear power stations.
P.S. Dedicating this dystopian speculative mystery science fiction to my late guardian angel and my father’s bosom friend alma mater of English Department University of Dhaka, Prof. Kamrul Hasan of Syed Abul Hossain College, Madaripur. Both my father and uncle have worked as local receptionist at the US Embassy in Dhaka.