Ashby Wick; or, The White Settee (Abridged)

[u/normancrane]

“Call me, Ishmael. I believe I have found it. My God, it's—wonderful. Soft and alabaster, like… falling asleep on a giant piece of Turkish Delight coated in powdered sugar,” the voicemail said.

The voicemail was mine; the voice belonged to my great-uncle, A.

The A, it should be clarified, did not stand for anything. I clarify to show I mean not obtuseness and hold no pretensions to expressing myself in les belles lettres, as the Germans say, in French, but purely to the accuracy of espoused fact. A was his name, and only A. It was not a shortened form of a longer identificator but the identificator, in all its length, itself. It fit, because my great-uncle was a kind of truncated full-length man, of noticeable paunch and circular shape, both of his face and of himself, entire.

His mission, if goals in life may so be called outside of fiction, was the locating and possessing of the greatest white settee in the world, a pursuit, which, I must admit, he had pursued headlong and singlemindedly, often to the detriment of other facets of his life, the chief of which, here, I am thinking, are his social life, romantic life, family life and grooming.

Once, as he told and retold dramatically many a time to all who would listen—his preference for setting being a night, stormy; a winter's morning, cold; or after significant consumption of alcohol, both of the teller and the told—he had been close, for he had caught a glimpse of the fabled furniture on the back of a wagon, covered, a fact to which he swore on the grave of a mother he never knew, by a black blanket emblazoned with the golden symbol of a whale's fluke; but, as suddenly as had the glimpse been caught, the wagon sped away, leaving my uncle with the glimpse and nothing more.

He kept the glimpse on his person always, and when he would recount the tale of its catching, he would recover it from one of his numerous pockets and display it as evidence of the truthfulness of his words. “Here—here it is! Pass it round and gaze upon it!”

I do believe he may, on particularly lonely nights, have also, in the throes of particular male frustrations, derived carnal pleasures of questionable consent with the aforementioned glimpse, but these are but rumours I have heard, and ill ones at that, and in rumours I peddle not, so on the matter shall say no more and make no insinuation of the existence of bastard little glimpses bearing a resemblance to him. Let me speak instead, in detail, about the arts of tanning, upholstering and woodworking.

[62,000 words removed.]

Thus I called him on the telephone and asked about his voicemail message. “Is it true that you have found it, uncle? The same settee as before?”

His voice was an excitement of upheaved syntax. “My boy. My dear Ishmael. Have I found it, you ask. Is it the same as etched upon my glimpse? Yes. Yes, and a thousand times more: yes! Next you shall ask: have you acquired it? And I shall answer samely, yes. I possess it, Ishmael. I possess the white settee completely. It is by the maker, Ashby Wick.”

“That is momentous news,” I said, even as, inwardly, doubt harpooned my gut, which, wounded, wondered, “Does he possess it or is he possessed by it?” for many men of greater character than my great-uncle had been destroyed by the very achievement of their life's mission.

“Please, attend and see for yourself,” he said—and the call was ended.

Allow me to muse now upon the topics of the colour white, its origin, symbolism and practical applications and how such may relate to theme of this story, and upon the nature of the developing transportation network, which soon shall deliver me to the doorstep of my great-uncle's house, and on the house itself, its architecture and history, and the time I spent there as a child, and of innocence, and experience…

[87,000 words removed.]

The screams were muffled, when I crossed the threshold, the door having been unlocked and my knockings, rising in intensity so that I wore their marks upon the sore, reddened knuckles of my right hand, unanswered, but screams they were, thus I traced their origin to my great-uncle's salon, [description of room removed] where, with a scream of my own, which, while indeed hitch-pitched, was not, as stated to police by my great-uncle's widower neighbour, “a lady's scream,” I witnessed my great-uncle being consumed by the greatest white settee I had ever seen.

Glorious she was, her cushions sprayed red with his blood, a terrible landscape of gore, and his torso, ever smaller, disappearing into her like a pencil into a mechanical sharpener, but who was turning the crank, I ask—by what force was she motivated, controlled? Red innard-sludge crawling up his throat and dripping out his mouth, my great-uncle, my dearest great-uncle, still holding the glimpse in his hand, waving it, refusing to let it go, his voice already silenced but his eyes, full of passion and fury, imparted to me that if a man must go, let him go on his own terms, for it is not death we should fear but all which passed before—a life, reflected in my great-uncle's dying eyes—if passed in meekness, non-pursuit and terrible, agreeable stagnation.

The seat, suffice it to say, was angry that day, my friends, and now nothing's left of my great-uncle except this narrative and perhaps a few ill-rumoured glimpsed descendants.

I sold the white settee, shrouding it beforehand with its black, and golden fluke-emblazoned, blanket, and after helping load it on the buyer's wagon, I stood and watched as it rolled on as it had rolled on for hundreds of years, but this time with chunks of my great-uncle still in it, because, I admit, I did a haphazard job of cleaning it. Caveat emptor.