Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Still Life
Page 74
The guards responded.
They erected ritual barricades made of antique pews and unread catechisms.
They deployed the Choir of Tactical Vagueness, whose harmonies disrupted Aurelius's calculations.
They released the Peacocks of Jurisdictional Pride, whose plumage shimmered with provincial authority.
Yet Aurelius persisted.
He began inscribing his findings on scrolls made of recycled sermon pamphlets, leaving them tucked into hedges and under gargoyles. Pilgrims and tourists began to gather, drawn by the spectacle of a man attempting to audit the ineffable.
One child asked him, "What are you measuring?"
Aurelius paused, slid a bead, and whispered;, "The distance between belief and bureaucracy."
Eventually, the Council of Ritual Boundaries issued a decree. Aurelius could remain, but only as a Witness of the Unquantified. His abacus was to be sealed in a reliquary and displayed in the castle's museum of failed metrics.