Tuesday, January the 18th, 2005

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Bogodan

Bogodan, Bogodan, who will speak for Bogodan? I will speak for Bogodan. I will be Bogodan's mouthpiece. I will say what I think Bogodan wants me to say. Something like: “There are cows in the field and trees at its edge, I think they are larches, and that is a hedge.” When I say “that” I will point, decisively, or, no, not decisively, but with a trembling finger, as if I am the terrified protagonist of a piece of spooky fiction encountering the ghost of one long dead. Then I will look back at Bogodan to make sure I have said what he would say in the circumstances, if he but had a voice to speak with.

Bogodan has been called my familiar. He is tiny and grey and flits. The air around him is chill, but not unpleasantly so. He wears a little cap, like a cadet in a small Mittel-European army. He smokes Disque Bleu to give himself, I surmise, a sophisticated sheen, but the linings of his lungs are paper thin and I fear for his health.

What will become of me without Bogodan? Did you know that there is a special place for people who have been abandoned by their familiars? It is not a pretty place, despite the fact that mirrored there are the cows, larch trees and hedges of our own world, almost identical but that they are all covered in ectoplasm. Would I, too, if deserted by Bogodan, experience the world through a refulgent film of white goo? Now there's a thought.