The following is an excerpt from Real Toads, Imagined Garden by Frank Dax, runner-up in the 2022 Reflex Press Novella Award.
Pre-Amble
Meet me at stairbottom in cherried dawn and I’ll walk you through a city and its seasons. Come, we’ll stroll dirt lanes and gilt boulevards along unburied pasts and up-budding futures. Yes, we’ll drift and wander among the cliffs and canyons formed by high-rise buildings, those Pueblo dwellings of modern living. We’ll greet bees and boulders in valleys of white clouds and red oaks and by cool streams let our thoughts to Tang poets turn. Come, and we’ll peer into gardens, unpack peaches on trains and divine dreams through doorways of warmly lit homes. Come, come. We’ll gather chestnuts in gorges, examine mossflowers on mountains, seek plum trees in pine forests and sit like herons on river rocks used by generations of washerwomen. Hurry now and from splendour to squalor we’ll adopt a love for all things – for bricks, weeds and clay pots, handbags on hooks, crickets in corners and snow on rooftops. We’ll glorify gutter glass, bond with alley cats and beneath upturned stones find secret beauty. Come, comrade, whoever you are. Grab your moth-eaten fleece, your shawl, your dhoti, your cloak or hakui. Lace up your boots, pocket your fife, and carve out a staff of hazel’s finest. Come now, be quick, and slowly we’ll see the cinema of light that ends in white stars on fields of black night.
Balneology (II)
Shall we cleanse our bodies in the public bath? Follow me this way, around the corner and up the stairs of the local ‘Turtle Tub’ establishment. Pay the small sum and leave your shoes at the sill. Inside, relax. Let your eyes rest on teak walls and ceiling pine. Move about the large warm changing room. Observe the long-incumbent barber, the demure caretaker, the pecan carpeting and orange, well-laundered towels. Observe the poses of male bodies and the movements of male bodies. Undress and ingress through the glass door and we’ll give ourselves over to water and vapour, the operative elements hereafter.
Now sit back in the central tub. Lose yourself in the decorative tiles above the water fonts depicting Arcadian pastures in cerulean blue. We’re in the steamy belly of the city, or one of its purifying lymph nodes. Don’t mind the looks and exchanges of glances, rather meet the men who gather. Steely self-control and distrust have no place here. Notice the child who comes in with his father – he’ll disarm us all with a wave and a smile. Bear in mind, the father has long fantasised bringing his son here. It’s inherited this desire, born of deep-seated memories: his father before him brought him to the bathhouse, and his father before him brought him.
Notice, I say then, that human sentiment is fluid and fills the room. A whale-ship solidarity prevails – a feeling of fraternity, of convivial masculinity, of nuanced attractions and wholesome curiosity. Like in a barracks or sportsmen’s locker room there’s a coming together of stripped identities – a doffing of armour that leaves each male vulnerable yet each substantial.
And such beauty! Such dignity! Here a professorial fellow, entering bespectacled. There a dutiful teen, his hand on his granddad’s waist as they cross the wet floor. And look here – an epicene youth, still unconscious of his power. And there – the marmoreal body of a Dionysius reclining!
Now then, come. Let us sit before the mirror and have a shave and a scrub. But first let me tell you, my friend, this might be the pinnacle of the whole bathing ritual. Seated and staring at our own image we may find that space shrinks in on us, life shrinks in on us. In this moist, feebly-lit room, our womb, we could be anywhere and nowhere. We become entities whose minds can migrate around the world, across the galaxy, taking stock of ourselves as time stands still. Are you beginning to feel it – this seeing yourself from a higher vantage? Your temporality apparent? Your mortality apparent? Your life’s choices clearly steering you to where you are today? And, those choices ultimately being the right choices because you can only be where you are today? Myself, I see myself as a passing spirit. But I also see myself as an everlasting spirit that sees itself passing. Would you agree? Is your physical self in dialectic with your metaphysical self? Do you feel the meeting between your corporeal and numinous natures? If so, if you’re feeling what I’m feeling, you may have the urge to get down on your knees in gratitude. I know I do. Or you’ll want to stand and stretch through the ceiling. Which I’ve done. Both are permissible, both understandable, for those able to bear the weight of these insights, and not quake and head for the door.
From Real Toads, Imagined Garden by Frank Dax (£11.99).
