During his last speech Basil had hoped to remind the public that despite the dangers of these uncertain times it was important to continue to think of others and most of all remain calm, but, despite his best intentions, all Basil managed was to cause a localised outbreak of hysteria.
Mentioning the word calm roughly 34 times during a 2-minute speech, Basil had left the podium and deposited his lunch directly into a healthy looking pot plant–one thankfully obscured behind the stage curtin.
The assembled media would hear this fear induced regurgitation, due to a still connected lapel microphone, and then listen to a frustrated Basil loudly splutter ‘Ah bugger, not the Aspidistra!’–the ambiguity of these remarks had since caused a group of customers to panic-buy indoor succulents.
Staring above the horizon of middle distance, Basil walked to the stage and sunk deeply into his chair with a moment of profound calm.
‘The hardest part of action is knowing that action needs to be undertaken. Inaction is not a state of being “in” action, but it is the absence of it. Pretense defines us…’ Reading that section of his speech Basil felt the need to vomit again and decided to let the flurry of questions that followed become an atonal drone.
Staring into the faces of the crowd he noticed a young reporter inspecting a button on the cuff of her coat. Focusing intently on the little plastic disc, she wobbled it as if attempting to judge the strength of the twine and if it was still holding fast to the material; the single minded concentration of her furrowed brow seemed almost locked in a life and death struggle of indecision. Grappling with the button for seemingly an eternity, the woman gave it a final cautionary tug and then began to twidle her thumbs.
So calm, Basil thought to himself.
He saw a man, sitting by the front row, who seemed as corpulent as his face was red.
A pair of circular glasses sat on his nose and looked threatened to be fully consumed by the man’s rounded cheeks–that were puffing angrily, shouting something towards Basil in accusation. The man’s hair was a faded brown and seemed to be retreating from the sun’s glow almost by the minute. Everything about this man was round: his opal cufflinks, his circular waistline. Basil imagined that he even spoke that over-educated roundness some intellutials pick up from certain universities: the stalling in mock punctuation near the middle of a sentence to then expertly roll down into the gully of overly breathy pretentiousness.
Gods, what a walnut, Basil thought to himself as he looked up and noticed a ceiling light flickering near the back of the room. In a moment of levity he wondered if the light might stay alive longer than he would.
People were standing along the back wall. One of them, a gangly man with hunched shoulders, clutched an old binder to his chest and looked erratically about the room, he appeared concerned that violence may soon erupt in the room as the anger of confusion overtook the milling throng. Pressing himself against the wall, the man stared intently at the fire escape, some three meters to his left. Basil would give anything to be in this mans place, to be a man aware of, and able to reach, a discernible exit–what a lovely day it must be outside.
Coughing slightly into the microphone Basil’s confidence was sundered by a cacophony of flashing cameras and pens scrawling across notepads. The notes on his table were now a blur and seemed less useful than windings in a braille dictonary.
He wanted to loosen his tie, was that a sign of weakness? Would that give these vultures all the information they needed, a small opening becoming a swarm, becoming a picked clean skeleton.
Distracted by an unprovoked memory he felt old and then wondered when he had last climbed a tree.
Clarity returned with a clap and Basil realised that he had just stared at an assembled crowd for a full five minutes, Standing from behind the podium, Basil gave a slow nod to the crowd and muttered, ‘Thank you, no more questions at this time’, the din of yelling followed as he strode from the room.
Action, I am in action! He thought, remembering to exhale.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 