Toodle pip, my tedious arachnids! Last time, we left you in a parlous state after a severe thrashing with a branch of blackthorn. You were weakened and on the horns of a dilemma after coming to a stunning revelation about your obsession with the powers of darkness. You were faced with a threefold choice. Go back to Hell and marry the devil! Stay in the forest and thrash yourself again! Return to Oslo for a cappuccino and a herring pizza while you think things over!
Myself, I would prefer a decent thrashing over the devil or a herring pizza any day but there's no accounting for taste. The only sure way to know which path you will choose is to consult the vile and bitter prognostications for the current month. This I believe to be malodorous May, due to the presence of five knots in my handkerchief. As it's already begun and I'm late with the forecast, I will recount what should have been the future as the past. I find the two confusing anyway, as a rule. It's not as easy to discern the difference between them as one might think. Vamping Venus disported herself in addlepate Aries. This may indicate that if you did have herring pizza, you had it with extra chili, cooked by an exotic menial female, wearing red.
But what's this? Why it's the ghastly cavorting of jolly Jupiter in your sign, in hideous congress with the great Sol Invicti. And, what's worse, both make improper suggestions to cranky Chiron and grim Saturn. You look at the branch of blackthorn in your hand. Its very fibres seem to tremble while the leaves glow with an outré yet mystic sheen.
Mischievous Mercury clatters into cloddish Taurus and the branch now seems to live and speak with you. Egad! Gadzooks! Eek! And other such quaint expressions to indicate surprise and alarm. What's happening to you? Are you losing your mind? Was the herring on the pizza older than herring should be? Or are you having a spiritual experience?
As the Heavens splash and slosh under the influence of a grand trine in water signs (how aqueous), you feel tides of emotion run through your bloody and aching body. A Full Moon blazes in your odious sign and two things happen, both of which inspire a kind of horror that would send normal folk running to the tranquilizer cabinet. The branch of blackthorn transmogrifies to a being of the opposite sex! Quelle horreur! Though it must be said that the being is of a fetching beauty. The other thing that occurs is that you fall in love with this being instanter! Quelle horreur a second time!
At first you stand transfixed. Then, as marauding Mars parts the weakening thighs of narcotic Neptune, you fall to your knees, declare undying love and beg for sex. Your blackthorn beauty asks, in a voice that sends shivers down your spine, if you're prepared to put down roots to share this love.
You take this to be largely figurative and arboreal. After all, what does one say to a bush? Thus, desperate for a dose of the prickly branch, you agree without reservation. And that's where the trouble starts. By my sainted aunt, it does! The leafy object of your affections (snigger) swears undying fealty as dark Pluto lays bare his private parts for the foul attentions of the great Sol Invicti and mischievous Mercury. Then, the busy messenger and the vain and selfish Sun god roll drunkenly into supple yet perverted Gemini, heading towards an odious New Moon in the two-faced sign.
Shriek and double shriek, tiny addlepates! Something begins to happen in your body. You feel a delicious tingling in your extremities. The sky rolls away as the earth opens beneath you, seeming set to swallow you whole. Your body roils with a strange, orgasmic delight yet not a finger (or any other thing) has been laid upon you. By all that's dark and unholy, what is happening? You look down, though the effort costs you dear as your limbs are strangely stiffened! Egad! Your toes have burst from your shoes! They've taken on a fibrous, woody character, not dissimilar to the roots of a tree!
Great gods alive and dead, say not so! Aargh! But it is! You swore to the blackthorn that you'd put down roots for love and now you're turning into a tree, or more properly a bush, as that's the blackthorn's nature. The air about you is resonant with dark and dangerous questions. As a bush, will your bark be worse than your bite? Will this transformation open a new branch for you in business? Will you still be able to make a trunk call in an emergency?
With these and, indeed, many other questions, we will leaf you until next time. Kindly log on then and get an update. For the nonce, ave atque vale, my odious arachnids!
| |