The wood rotted, the clay was too porous and when on a day's rain come to lumpy gloppy messes. And so The Wholesaler's third attempt was with that of cement but even as they were coming to be, he felt a supreme melancholy for them. Hardy as they were, they would forever mostly be at odds with the nature surrounding them--bleeding the energy from the ground underneath, and with only snails for friends at best.
The idiots sang. They sang with no-mind-ness; mushin. 'Well ov gotta red jacket, ov gotta red jacket/ o got sum yella pants, o got sum yella pants/ liddle blue hat, a bell on top/ but most fun of all, wot's in me hands/ a book a book a book!'. The last line was noise. The gnomes' voices sang their differences. One had a spade and sung, 'a spade a spade a spade' et cetera.
There in the high wayside nursery, among the rarr of cars and honk of tankers the song came to its end and was rebegun. It was only interrupted some time later by the purchase of reading gnome. The new home was a backyard. He sat facing east eternally hunched over on the tiny stool adjoining his arse. With their benevolent trowels the garden's keepers flitted by under the light of many a consecutive Sun. He saw these folk from just under the lid of his vision. But most in scope was the book. The book in front of him he now read.
He skipped over it quickly, eager to know its end. And because there was nothing to do, read it over again and got a little more out.
The moon was gorgeous and the lawn grasses came up a jewel green. He missed his compadres but thought, 'surely I must be one of the more lucky ones'.
One boy and one girl were the garden's keepers and they erected a compost bin at the other end of the yard. They laughed and celebrated its glorious being. The boy climbed into it and danced and wriggled like a worm in effort to encourage worms to gravitate toward the new construction. They pledged loudly to each other that, should they come across a worm in the garden, they would not cut it in two. For it was crap that to cut one worm in half made two worms. Truer it was that to severe a worm would bring great misfortune upon the backyard, and the workings of the compost bin most of all.
Life was such that gnome did not even grow lonesome. The girl would sometimes sit by him and talk to him. He yearned to talk back but was fully well fixed with his book. He cursed the book and the cement he was made of.
One Sun-morning great commotion came about. The trowels were removed from the shed. The boy carried his possessions from the back shed, up the yard and along the side path. The girl carried her things from the house down the yard to a wagon. They did not dance. All got quiet.
And it stayed so from when the moon looked like this 
until it again looked like that and then until it looked like this 
. And the little plants around gnome got floppy, and dried. His eyes saw how weeds were running amok on the lawn and how the grasses stiffly bent down, picked up their seed and left.
From somewhere way off behind, by the fence, gnome heard a hssh and a hsss. Something crept from near the fence--the neighbour's yard.
A pulpy, tuberous mass of nodes and nodules lay under the fence among the dirt. It had been there for almost as much time as there is. Sometimes it grew fast and sometimes slow--it had the fossils of snails cased in its mass¾it felt opportunity.
It reached lower and it sucked. It sucked things out of the dirt where another would think there nothing to suck. It used that which Sun sent but it hated Sun. It reached higher, grabbed and spread a little. It sensed the absence of the keepers because the parts of it above did not get cut. Perhaps they were here but were tricking it. The keepers had not liked it...and it hated them.
It quickly reached and coiled on the fence above and waited. Nothing happened. It cackled and filled with dark excitement. It jumped on a nearby fuchsia and began climbing and wrapping itself around the branches and over the leaves. The fuchsia moaned and mourned for it thought the long night had descended. From on top of the fuchsia there was more of Sun to be got and the reaching parts of it reached further quick. The days grew greyer. Gnome read and re-read and listened to the sounds the words made in his mind's ear. He tried to ignore what he saw happening in his eye's corner. 'Had never took much to make fuchsia moan', he thought. But as he examined what he saw, gnome got trembly and wished for a friend. He spied a blind arm of creep reaching through the air for the geranium plant. (Look at it--it's still, look away then look again--it's moved.) The clench of his hands on the book tightened. The geranium disappeared.
The things gnome felt and thought moved from one to the next faster and faster. The only thing he had to make them still was the book. He read non-stop. The words followed each other over and over and he began to know what words would come before his eyes got to them (like mantra).
A terror-full green and rhubarb-red flowerless tentacle licked around his feet and stool. Gnome looked up, the words still running through his crammed head without having to be looked at. Sun had come on all shy-eyed and hung 'round less now. More than a friend to talk to, new book or happy, bold Sun, gnome just wished he could move¾get up and run over to the other side of the yard, 'This is madness!' he thought.
Gangerels slapped and wrapped over his nosebridge and eyelids. With it, came snails and strange pale spiders that crawled all over. This was so different to the story in his book and head--he knew how that ended--but he did not know how what was happening to him would.
Gnome cried and cried a puddle; for the plants with whom he now aligned his sympathy and for Sun whom he missed, Sun who was good, but unwittingly had helped this fate. And mostly of all he cried for himself, because even though knew the story, he could not see the beautiful shapes of the letters on the page in the book right there in front of him. Now it was dark--dark dark dark, always dark.
'But then', gnome got to thinking, 'it's never really been about the flat book in my lap, it's about the story. Hhhmmm'. After a long time one day, gnome felt that everything was moving and he wondered if the world was okay.
Then, there in his dark, the story he knew as being words like 'the', 'and', and 'spear' formed into shapes. There were action scenes with people and things and they happened in a line of frozen moments. The elements of each scene stood separately, in the foreground and background were celluloid cut-outs superimposed, like a kiddie's viewfinder. The moving feeling happened again and he went floating around the story-things he saw. First above, and below and around and around. And gnome saw that the story was not really a line but instead a circle that looped at different angles and then came back to the start the way he had done in the times when he read its letters.
'This is a very strange thing that is happening here', he thought but then time had got so far that he wasn't really even sure where 'here' was.
It was not because of being numb (because cement gnomes did not get numb) but with eyes closed, he had lost knowing where he finished and the rest of the world started. He was as small as a pea and as big as the clear night sky, both at the same time.
Slowly, the images of the story changed. The outlines and colours swirled and whorled. He watched them gradually peak in a bright noisy unified mass. Then it faded.
From then on much less thought happened in gnome's head, and he did not mind. It went, 'mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm', 'mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm'. He came to forgetting who he was, why he was in darkness and that there was anything other than darkness. For gnome everything was all right.
Everything was.
Then one day, new folk moved into the house attached to the backyard where reading gnome sat. Eventually they got around to cleaning up the backyard and in one energetic swoop, ripped the gangerel-thing away from all that it covered. They found a couple of sickly Sun-starved plants and an old paint-chipped garden gnome.
The life force that was reading gnome was slowly fenced back into its cement shell. Sun blinded his eyes for a bit and other things happened around him. He felt warmth on his hands, the blow of airy fresh breezes in his beard and he heard the noises of the voices of the folk. He looked about, the red paint of his jacket had faded, as had the colours of his hat, pants and boots.
During the dark time, snails and the sap-filled limbs of the gangerel-thing had worked their way over every part of him, sucking and hoping to suck something great from him, but only getting paint. Gnome looked to the book resting on his knees, held in his hands. The page was blank. He did not think, he just sat, and was.
Team Sunny Breaks,
2000