Excerpt Thirty-Eight
Una, Raasay
The postman had delivered a box addressed simply to ‘Una, Raasay’.
Her mother opened the biodegradable faux-plastic box and inside was another box; a cube, made of soft organic material that was creepy to the touch and made everyone, except Una, feel nauseous.
The postman returned the next day to check if he’d delivered the box to the right address. He knew he had, it was an excuse; he needed to find out what was in the box because he’d been dreaming about it, and in the dream the box contained a perfectly healthy, living, severed head. He was spooked by the images his head threw up, but not as spooked as he was when Una lifted up the cube towards him.
When Una showed him the cube it made sense, nothing that could be described, just a knowingness that the cube transmitted to a buried part of his psyche. He was glad he came, but wished he hadn’t come… and his revulsion and confusion remained until he was halfway through a pint at the Royal Hotel in Portree; wondering who he could tell: no one. So he told his mother; went to her grave and whispered the story of the delivery of the cube with doom-slanted, half-baked prophecy. In a moment of clarity he then drove to MacAllens distillery and took his cousin up on the long standing offer of a job. In those early days no medical professional would have had the resources to know that such a device as Una’s cube could induce PTSD in innocent parties for no apparent reason.
From the moment Una saw the cube she fell in love with it. No one knew where it had come from or what it was, but Una gave it an identity and looked after it with more care and respect that she would have afforded another human.
She guarded it constantly and when she couldn’t guarantee its safety she lodged it in her father’s locked gun cupboard, in a position where it could see the hallway in between the kitchen and the living room. Her parents willingly helped her use the cupboard as long as they didn’t have to touch the cube.
In a perfect re-run of life they would have tried to dispose of the cube (and failed), but they collected and saved reasons not to, and it seemed, as crazy as it felt, that the cube was helping raise Una for some greater good; some higher purpose. The cube had relegated them to second in command and there was nothing they could do about it.
As the days passed the relationship evolved with stealth, Mouse, (short for anonyMOUSE) and Una shut the rest of the family out, disguising isolationism as the growing pains of an almost normal girl with a slightly imaginary friend.
They were nothing without each other as far as plans for the future were concerned; everything they did added to the plot pot; play at first, gearing up, amassing the impetus they needed for escape velocity; their calling was to orbit the planet and police all wrongdoings perpetrated against the controlling species Homo Sapiens. Aim high!
The kitchen table was the operations room; Una was a teacup and Mouse a jar of mixed pickles no one wanted to eat. They aired scenarios and enacted future histories with the information they had so that when the day came they would be ready.
The facts, as they saw them, had already been laid out: Màiri had been abducted. The locals were either, aware and lying, or unaware; either way all humans were unfriendly incoming fire and mountainous seas of untrustworthiness.
As time went by the cube shrank, at such a slow rate no one noticed. And one day it gave Una the feeling that it was going to leave forever once it had shrunk to a certain size. She waited for news that her panic was unnecessary drama… and kicked her flat tyres by the side of the rocky road, waiting. Waiting!
Her parents assumed she had grown out of her childish weirdness and come to accept that Mr. Mouse was just a cube. What they missed were the final exacting days of the Shrinking when Una felt constantly as though she were turning into an American Werewolf in London werewolf. Her instructions were clear enough, but she was unsure whether she’d made them up herself and she could access no certainty either way…
Una buried the cube for three weeks and on returning found a tiny cube small enough to swallow. Then Una granted the cube its last earthly wish and swallowed it.
It was an end…
It was a beginning…
And, like most people who have one internal presence, over the course of the next few weeks she developed a second internal presence and between them they inaugurated Una’s next move: a quest… to find Màiri.
They had a lot to catch up on. Incommunicado in cube form her second consciousness, wishing to remain anonymous, adopting the name Colonel Klutz, or, the Colonel, revealed to Una’s first consciousness, also sitting in the shade of the anonymity tree, the extent of a movement that was dedicated to the survival of Humanity in the face of suicidal species-wide apathy.
Una’s parents had been exasperated by Una’s gloomy insistence that Màiri had been kidnapped. Now they had to listen to her commentary on a world being wrestled to the ground by conspiracy; a world in which Màri’s abduction was a terrible inevitability.
The day dawned… unspoken she upped and danced out the door with a small bag… down the road… up the ridge and over the rise…dancing all the way; fate dancing with her, a flirty jig…
Una was already lost to her parents and they saw her going further into the void to enable her to return to them via the other side—they knew her to be brave and honest and an active peer of Justice. They hoped, imagining her heading for the ferry; they prayed, imagining her crossing the short stretch of water and landing on Skye; they grieved, not imagining anything good coming of their loss.
Una was collected by private boat that took her to a vast nuclear bunker on a private island several miles away, where Una’s, and The Colonel’s, Godstrandian education would commence.
A week later her parents received a postcard from Stirling with a picture of the Kelpies, in Una’s handwriting, scantily informing them that she was doing okay and was industriously engaged. So they allowed their minds to back off and accept the idea that she was going to be okay, that the situation was a normal thing that every parent had to endure; that she wasn’t just another unfortunate Màiri.
