apart

Life ticks on on Skiathos. The sun shines. Deserted beaches look like lost bits of Brazil, set adrift from their mother continent, negotiating the Straits of Gilbralatar, washing up short of Turkey. Restaurant owners fall with no sense of dignity at the feet of overweight tourists, begging custom from Teeside to Torquay. A snake lies dead in the road, like an omen of 'nothing in particular'. Slothrop trawls his way across the zone, Swann left behind for the time being to revel in his peculiar happiness. The chef uses one ring to concoct dishes made of olives and midget cucumbers. Sleep flirts like a mischievous she-wolf, all over you one minute, playing oh-so-hard-to-get the next. The sea's azure qualities survive the storm's ravages. A truck rolls across an unnamed land, full of some unspecified woe. Life ticks on on Skiathos. Subtle changes are genuflecting themselves in cranial corners, affirmations, reflections, mutations. The brighter the sun shines the paler glows albino skin. Somewhere on the body are written tanned flecks of how it used to glow, but like the snake's skin, most has been shed. Would need a soothsayer to put the pieces back together, reconstitute the image it once enclosed.