[b]Intermission:[/b]

[i]It was a crisp morning and the sky had been painted a rare shade of cardinal pink. A choir of yellow songbirds appeared, glided into a Japanese garden, and sang notes and melodies which made the ears of the world waggle with joy. Stoic statues lowered their heads in thought; rows of blessed bonsai tree bowed before a broken and weathered image of the Buddha; stocky monkeys in triads armed with sticks; some gnarly, some bent, some broken, but sticks; ran across a badly-made bridge of bamboo, which crackled hellishly when ran on. And when the monkeys knew that the bamboo crackled hellishly when ran on, they made it crackle like hell and laughed at the pointless vanity of their actions, then went rambling on, hitting sticks in hand.

Below the bamboo bridge a lonely female carp swam in absolute darkness inside her stagnant stream, performing a series of increasingly lonely cycles, and within her lonely black nirvana a perfect conch shell sat glittering in the riverbed, illuminated solely by a fateful patch of sunlight... that was a mystery in itself, yet waiting to be solved.

Out of the water and back on land, purring moggies delighted in lengthy catnaps; usually in, on or under the hallowed arches of depreciated shrines. A woman’s evening lantern, unlit for a decade, hung tattered and forgotten beside the back door of the garden’s esteemed estate. And the estate towered over all, though would one day crumble to dust during the passage of time....
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