No Shouts, No Calls

In the dusk, I kept passing and repassing the small track to the left, where it entered the forest. In the end I managed to turn the bike around on the asphalt road, waiting for the other cars to pass. Little more than the slow blur of their headlamps, they seemed to hang in the greyness and the rain, somnolent and outdated, like small mechanical moons distilled from daffodils.

The track now was mostly mud, with furrows several inches deep. Twenty yards or so into the forest though it opened out into a small clearing, where, to the right, there was a book set up on a stand, like an artist’s easel. It was Steve Mitchelmore’s recent work “Hold On”, made up (according to the blurb) of “anagrams from Chekhov.” I saw there were various quotation marks on the front cover, but there were no actual words between them, only faint pictures, which appeared, anyway, to be part of something else, as though the quotes, like remaindered stickers, had just been superposed as an afterthought.