The League of Berries and Laurels Ch.2 Pt.2 -- by Russell Block
You can read installments from The League of Berries and Laurels on the Song of the Broad-Axe Publications Substack, The Ha'Penny Papers.
Daylight is an imponderable abstraction at present. Death, destruction, lurking alike in the flurries, feel more immediate than that daily sensation of light secured by virtue of death’s avoidance. A frightful horn, causing a fright over and above what the nerve can handle, or so the whimper would attest, slithers up and intoxicates the driver, momentarily, then dissipates from the white of knuckles turning rosy again. “Watch out for them,” his trainer says, in his own right disregarding such sluggish advice. A driver in conditions extreme as these has to question why he wished for such a role in society in the first place. Deriving no insight from the world at large, a vision of his manifesto in the flicker of a candle, both of these atop his desk in the attic room, warms him as it hovers. Those pages, each wrought with the utmost care in ink, where the thoughts and elegant phrases of his idols are rejuvenated, ensure him, or all but do, of his place among the revolution’s luminaries. As their company overwhelms him and the melody of many voices united in glorious refrain compound the significance of his written pages, a car pierces paraffin apparition, its horn’s sound blaring, before actions taken at both wheels avoid catastrophe. The side mirror flickers with the sight of headlights twice before no signal of the ethereal spinning can be gleamed through the drift. He looks over, wipes a tear from his teary eyes, and sees his trainer twist further into his coat and against the window, sleepily.
Contrary to any disgust, or concern over professional neglect, the driver appreciates this apparent show of confidence in a fellow member of the proletariat. A driver this desperate, but also pursuing a purpose, cannot rest, not when the revolution hangs in the balance, nor when the paycheck is needed. A wariness gives way to resentment of the plow, of the obstructed way that lies ahead, and the fact that the smell of fuel lingers where gratitude does not pierce. However nearly he caused a catastrophic wreck, the catastrophe of capitalist society pales it exceedingly.
