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Blue Caravan by Christina St. Clair

All over London, instead of the happy future everyone had expected, the broken bricks and shards of glass piled in heaps seemed a metaphor for the wounded hearts of those making the best of things: stiff upper lip and all that bunk.  The more bleak life seemed, though, the more Emily’s thirst for meaning increased.  

She wanted to understand Kierkegaard, Bergson, Descartes, Hume, Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato.  She wanted to make sense out of this crazy existence, to come to terms with death, with life, with war, with her missing brother, with the concept of God.

She painted a thick black line around the penis-steeple, squaring the top into something more akin to a tall chimney.  She was tempted to try her hand at adding a weather vane or perhaps something playful like a fat red balloon with green eyes.  Such an image made her shudder momentarily, reminding her of that awful holiday in Tintagel.

How strange it all now seemed to remember how strongly she’d believed a witch had actually possessed her brother Byron.  There had to be a rational explanation.  Surely she’d transferred her own weird emotions and imaginings onto her brother.  Perhaps it was simply a matter of her deeply buried grief emerging during that crazy time at the end of the war.  After all, their mother had been killed and being in a place like Tintagel in Cornwall must have stirred up the Merlin myths.  What rubbish!  Thank God that phase of her life had ended.

But of course it hadn’t ended…

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