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The Whisperbreath hung on the air, counting her oceans and the navies of truth, lies and rumours that sailed upon them.
She waited.
Where two or more are gathered together, there shall be my harbour and my company.
She spotted a bench, like a lioness spots a zebra, and began to concentrate like instant coffee getting ready for water. A person was moving towards the bench and had a feast to tell and a hunger to feed.
The person was a small man, middle-aged, receding hair, with no clue to the scene in which he was about to play a part. He took his place like a pawn on a chess board, not knowing when the game would start. Not knowing when the crucial move would come and the opposing king fall into check.
No-one was abroad that morning. The sun beat down palely on the man’s unprotected head as it had nothing better to do. The sun was not particularly interested in the man’s head and wished it had more serious tanning to do elsewhere. But it hadn’t, so it stuck to the man’s head, turning the taught skin faintly red like a photocopy of jam.
The Whisperbreath waited. She hovered like an empty apartment awaiting new tenants or a kettle starting to boil. The man fidgeted and looked at his watch as though he had suddenly realised that he ought to have an appointment but didn’t. The Whisperbreath knew that he did have an appointment, it was just that the balding middle-aged man did not know, because The Whisperbreath never told anyone of her appointments. The sun shuffled its hands into the pockets of a cloud and wished it had something better to do.
There, further along the sidewalk, The Whisperbreath saw what she knew she would see eventually – more people. More people moving towards the bench and getting in line to perform in the scene that The Whisperbreath wanted and the sun slid from behind a cloud like a tramp moving from behind a trash can to see what happened next.
The more people were two more. A young woman bright with a floral dress and a floral personality, slender and spring-heeled in the morning of life. The other woman was older and in late-summer colours, gathering her leaves for autumn. She was listening half-attentively to the younger woman with her springiness of speech with little to offer in return and wondering whether the sun was going to stay out or hide away with errands further abroad. It seemed like the sun might stay and watch for a while in case anything happened.
The two women reached the bench that had become the temporary home of the middle-aged man and realised that they recognised him, and greeted him. He, too, greeted them in return as if it had been a long time since they had all seen each other, though it was not clear whether this was the case or not. I mean, it is easier to meet total strangers on a bench in the sunshine than to run into some you know but have not seen since you were a different age and hue.
The older woman started to engage the man in some kind of conversation or chat, or it may have been just politeness or courtesy to keep saying something if they had not seen each other for a change in their ages. Certainly the sun couldn’t tell and was considering once again moving to more fertile fields with crops to raise. The younger woman wanted to speak but she kept finding herself treading on the paving stones of the conversation between the other two and missing the cracks. The Whisperbreath waited and looked on. This showed promise like a glow in the fuse of a firework.
At last the younger woman, who was seated closer to the man than the older woman, said, "Of course, you know what I heard."
Of course the man did not know what the younger woman had heard, otherwise there would have been no point in the younger woman saying that he had. He replied, "No – what have you heard?"
The younger woman leaned towards the man and away from the older woman, and whispered.
"What was that?" said the older woman. "What did you say?"
"I said," the younger woman began, and uttered something that was different from what she had whispered to the thin-haired man, who could feel his hair grow thicker as his importance in the conversation grew thicker, and The Whisperbreath grew also.
"Oh," said the older woman, unimpressed by not being whispered to. "That is very interesting," she lied. She wanted to have something she could whisper about in confidence to someone else, not something that was broadcast all over the city like the sunshine and the cloud. It didn’t matter. She would tell her version to someone else in a whisper later on.
The Whisperbreath settled down beside her and followed her the rest of the day like an obedient pet until she found someone else she could tell her private version of the truth to. The Whisperbreath also followed the middle-aged man with his crop of newly-grown hair until he could whisper his version of events that he had got from the younger woman, suitably embellished by its fermentation in his imagination. In fact, so potent was this brewing of The Whisperbreath’s heady sugar that, by nightfall, as the sun took its final look at the city and gave up on it for the day, there was a bar-full of rumour waiting to be uncorked.
As the sun had set, it missed the party that the rest of the people of the city threw that night, all dancing and chatting and getting giddy on The Whisperbreath’s liquor.
Tomorrow would be another day.
THE END.
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