Victoria Williams: 0057

This is not the beginning of a limerick: I once knew a man named Horace. Seriously, I did. His charms were similar to those of a milkmaid’s, by which I mean there was something fleeting and saintly about him which you couldn’t quite put your finger on. And also they depended significantly on whether you liked what you were looking at. He was that kind of guy. He was terribly jumpy too – sometimes literally, hurling himself about like a dying fish. You didn’t really feel safe from any angle, since he could go from one spot to another defying all the natural laws of gravity and physics.

The last time I saw him before he disappeared he was playing cards, and the night he disappeared he was playing cards too. (I’ve still got his deck as a matter of fact). He fled the room – I wasn’t there, but for some inscrutable reason I’m pretty certain he’d have been screaming as he did it. What happened next we can’t be sure – if there’s one thing Horace has taught us, it’s that anything is possible.

Eyewitnesses report seeing him take a running jump into an open sewer, becoming half man, half sea-goat in mid-air – maybe disappearing into the shadows below, or maybe quietly exploding like fireworks and dispersing into the sky. Now condemned to circle subterranea for evermore, or perhaps enshrined in the constellation of Capricorn. It’s possible that neither theory is any less correct than the other, although I have my favourite. There is still, after all, a sea-goat in the sky, perhaps Horace having taken the place of the old one, but there is altogether too much joyful singing coming from the sewers for one to ignore.