Unsettled Places – After the Meal

King Charles is somewhere nearby, though you never see him.

The men arrive at the hut as if they have been walking for centuries. Bearded, weathered, unwashed. They carry vegetables and fruit, the remains of another world. One has salmon fillets bound around his torso, pale flesh against his clothing, an oddness that nobody seems to notice.

Inside, they begin to prepare the meal.

There is something almost ceremonial in the movement of their hands. Food emerges, is cut, opened, passed between them. For a while the hut holds only this: bodies gathered around food, the dark interior, the old intimacy of eating.

Then everything is gone.

The plates are empty. The baskets are empty. The men sit among the remnants.

And somewhere outside the scene, a thought appears:

What will they eat next?

It is not spoken by anyone.

Perhaps this is where the dream becomes strange.

The men do not seem anxious. They have eaten. The hut remains. Outside, whatever landscape belongs to them continues in its own time. Yet the question has entered, and with it a small opening into something without provision.

King Charles is still somewhere in the dream.

A king, a hut, men carrying their food on their bodies. The distance between them seems enormous, yet suddenly it feels less certain. History has collapsed into the same hunger, the same brief satisfaction, the same empty space afterwards.

You are not one of the men.

You are not the king.

You are watching.

Perhaps that is the only place the dream permits you to stand: just beyond the meal, where the food has disappeared and nothing has yet replaced it.

Notitia

Unsettled Places is an inquiry into the places where psyche, body and world become difficult to distinguish — where the familiar acquires a strange light, and what cannot be explained is allowed to remain.