Journal Extract No. 1 (From the Quill of A Youthful Poet Who Would Later Become A Mage.)

Salamandadism.

Salamander upon a beach decides to empty his head out on a rock and as the nut giblets flow, so do his worries. A salamander is a useless snake. It is a limbless, floundering tonsil. Together we’re a marriage. A pair of tonsils. Tonsils are also useless. The salamander is an appendix on the reptile gut, a footnote in the reptile chronicles. When I was younger I wished a salamander was stripy, yellow and black. I saw one, it wasn’t, and wished I hadn’t seen it. I’d rather have my danger-pocked salamander exist in my head, where he was perfect. The model salamander, replicated badly on earth by God’s vulgar claws. That’s not what a salamander looks like you clueless old fisherman. Get back to the netherworld. Charlatan. If anybody saw God, I imagine they too would be disappointed. Wouldn’t live up to the hype. Bastardo. At least a salamander can be proven to exist. Even if it is substandard. Man. Regarding salad sees a caterpillar. I once saw a yellow and black stripy caterpillar on some grass at the beach. My father explained its name to me, which eleven seconds later I had forgotten. I keep forgetting it, and maybe this is deliberate. A name can deaden a thing. If the caterpillar’s name could be recalled, it would fade to matte finish liver and dark grey, and would be shaved. Like an extant appendix. And that would look very silly. My salamander’s woes just pour out onto the rocks, and now the rocks are anxious, like the water cycle, a pool of defined capacity is subsumed, expelled and left suspended. So I ask my dad to take me to the beach where I pick up a stone and throw it awkwardly into the sea, not admitting to my father that it was a failed skim attempt. The stone gashes the ocean, and now the sea gets very violent, having been penetrated by the rock’s bad humours, but we have gotten back into the car.

As we pull out of the gravelled car park I see over my shoulder that the angsty sea has engulfed the beach, the rocks, the calm broken body of the salamander, and as my father tells me the name of the caterpillar we didn’t see, the banks, the maram encampment, and all of the caterpillars are washed away, named, maimed and shamed. My dad asks why I’m smiling like the Mona Lisa. I carry on, and he starts smiling because I’m still smiling. He thinks he’s done right by taking me to the beach. That one stone tied up my whole world tight in a smug self-satisfied ribbon, and that’s why I’m smiling. It’s like I’ve fixed the crack in my snow-globe and everything, for a fragment of time, is okay. I can never tell anyone about this. Just because I’ve recounted the incident here, doesn’t mean it was accurate. But the way I interpreted it all made it magical.