Somewhere high in some mountains near you lives the Oracle…
“Okay laddie. Where’d you want to start?”
“At the beginning.”
The grimy old woman’s eyes rolled back in her head and she spoke in the singsong tones of the prophetess.
“Beginning is a construct of a corrupt society…”
She opened her eyes and laughed sarcastically, before winking at the pale young man who was being paid to put her wisdom on a pay-per-view channel.
“Specifics,” She snapped.
He mumbled
“How’d I get to be the resident Oracle?”
He nodded
“Okay. I was about two steps ahead of the bailiffs when I saw a card in a phone box.”
He mumbled again.
“What do you mean, what’s a phone box? It’s where you used to have to go to make a call before mobiles.”
He opened his mouth to ask more, but hushed abruptly when the Oracle threw a handful of dirt in his face.
“As I was sayin’, I saw a card in a phone box. It said: Need to escape? Temporary vacancy for person who has no objection to looking unsavoury. Board and lodging, plus all the weed you can smoke. Needless to say I about snapped their hands off.”
She noticed the appalled expression on his face and laughed long and heartily.
“What was you expecting? A call from on high? The pull of the earth? A need to be prophetic?”
He nodded, aware of his own gullibility and also deeply aware that he was going to have to drastically reword the Oracle’s memories if he wanted to eat this month.
The old woman looked into his face and nodded just once.
“You need this job, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Okay then. I get that. You pretty up what I tell you and I promise not to rock the boat.”
He grabbed that straw and with a ray of hope for the future he wrote movingly about how the mountain oracle was called to the high holy places.
When she read the first instalment of ‘her’ life story she laughed so hard she could barely breathe and her amanuensis worried that his meal ticket was about to shuffle off this mortal coil…
The Oracle foresees she will return next week…
Working Title Blogspot 