Stream System by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pink Lining

The image that caused me to begin writing this story is an image of a single cloud in a sky filled with heaps or layers of clouds. The single cloud and all the other clouds in the sky are coloured grey, but the single cloud is surrounded by an aureole or nimbus of pink. All the clouds are being driven by wind across the sky, but the single cloud with the aureole or nimbus of pink is moving less swiftly than the other clouds. If the clouds were a group of children being driven past me, then the cloud surrounded by the pinkness would be the one child who is reluctant to be hurried past me: the one child looking back over her shoulder towards me and wanting to tell me something.

All the clouds mentioned in the previous paragraph are details in a picture on the obverse of a card of about the size of the palm of the hand of the man who is holding the card in his hand and looking at the heaps or layers of clouds in the picture that contains the image that caused me to begin writing this story. The card is one of a collection of similar cards that the man keeps in an envelope in a hanging file in a filing cabinet. When the man was a boy he called these cards and other similar cards holy cards, but for as long as the cards have been kept in the man’s filing cabinet, they have been kept in one of many files labelled Memorabilia.

Every card in the collection mentioned in the previous paragraph has on its obverse a picture of Jesus or of his mother or of a male or a female saint and beneath the picture the text of a short prayer of the sort that the man called as a boy a pious ejaculation. During the years while the man has kept his cards in the file labelled Memorabilia, he has sometimes amused some of his friends by telling them that he was encouraged as a boy by his favourite aunt to ejaculate frequently and piously. The man has always been pleased to amuse some of his friends in this way, but he knows that his friends are amused only because they are somewhat ignorant of the meanings of English words and because they are wholly ignorant of the meanings of words in the Latin language.

Below each of the texts mentioned in the previous paragraph is a statement of the number of days of indulgence that each pious ejaculation earns for the person who utters it. The man who owns the cards has never tried to explain to any of his friends that he not only ejaculated frequently and piously as a boy but that each of his ejaculations earned him an average of three hundred days’ measure of the spiritual commodity known as indulgence. The man has never tried to explain this to his friends because he doubts

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