Of the Realm
As soon as John had retired, he bought a sword, a stone, a metal detector and a small mountain. He had savings.
He would walk around with all of them should conditions allow it. If you hadn’t noticed he had the sword, he could turn on the metal detector. If you hadn’t noticed he had the stone, he could calmly gesture towards the mountain.
Often he was not calm. Retirement doesn’t work like that.
It’s the sword-stone connection he was looking for folk to make, in spite of the lack of current public interest in Arthurian legend. If you didn’t make the connection and at least subtly acknowledge him as a latter-day hero of the realm, things could get ugly.
John had worked in the accounts department for a well-known if not particularly respected chain of bakeries all his adult life. He had seen the survivalist ambitions of mediocre old men fall short. He had not acknowledged any possibility of his own mediocrity.
John wrote letters to newspapers and mastered the internet just enough to repeat the key messages of the letters that didn’t get published (all but three) on those platforms where there was no editorial judgement, so long as you kept it clean and didn’t incite hatred in any direct way. John stood alongside the earn $5000 a day from home-hawkers in his disregard for the narrative context of an open forum.
John said that he could kill dragons with his assembled kit, and my god, he would as well, unlike the shirkers these days. People say things – this is undoubtedly one of the primary down-sides of life.
Not much happens amidst the real, polluted public air in the second decade of the twenty first century, so it’s a lot easier to get known as a Local Character than it was in such Characters’ heyday, often suggested as the late 1980s. Back then you needed transgression, scent and a tousled world view, not just items and self-regard. Now, a bit of prop-work and key messaging gets you a reputation and plenty pavement space – on or offline.
They’ll cross the street in some variety of awe, but this semi-interested audience built by today’s Character like to see you typecast, predictable and understood. Mountain, sword, device and slight variations on a single viewpoint, good, got it.
Contained and typecast, he nonetheless showed stamina, dragged the whole thing out only vaguely noticed among all the other draggers.
It was almost a side-note when our man was one of the first scorched to rapid death that day when the bevy of dragons (a little-known collective noun) sloped down a nearby mountain (not his own), more out of boredom than anything else. You know the day. Yes, those dragons.
This swift demise came as most of a surprise to him, in as much as he had the chance to register surprise before the outright scorching. As he was not the first to take the ashes to ashes fast-track, more like sixth or seventh, he was listed somewhere midway down the full souvenir edition pictorial guide to the casualties. His name was read by few and mourned by less. It cannot be a sob story without actual sobs. There are rules for this sort of thing.
If you look hard enough, you can still see traces of his barbecued skin just down from the bus station. At the auction, the metal detector fetched most. The mountain remained unsold, being not a simple matter of polite conversation and not scenic enough for picnic tables. It stands there today, just to the left of town. You’ve just never noticed it.