an escape
by uzwi
It looks like a Bruegel but features only burning bridges & it’s empty of people except here & there in the distance, doing panic repairs to a fence. There used to be a pub in the bottom left hand corner but its windows are boarded up & muddy now as if from decades of passing traffic; & the sign, when you finally decipher it, says: Never Where You Thought It Was. It’s coming on dark & you’re going to wake up in the morning to find the gate’s open again & that damn goat is on the hill. It’s all yours, the goat, the pub, the sound of hammers. The picture frame is yours. The man leaning in through the frame says he always knew the bridges were down, he could smell the smoke before he arrived. “Ten mile back,” he says he could smell the smoke: “Ten mile back,” & you ask him how did he get here then if the bridges were down, because you have a real interest in that.
Meanwhile, Quentin Lewis goes to the heart of You Should Come With Me Now –that is, the actual subject matter of its stories–with the kind of clear, thoughtful, non-parochial assessment you hope to get from inside the genre but so rarely do.
Another one of the paintings in your gallery (so to speak) that provide an ambiguous sense of escape, or that barely raise that possibility before cutting it off at the knees — from the painting that China and Choe see in a pub, to the one that the narrator of “The Course of the Heart” sees in a seaside café, to maybe the tapestry in “Viriconium Knights.” I’m fascinated by the relationship between this theme and your critique of worldbuilding and the escapism it facilitates.