Free Indigo by Clemens J. Setz

feeling of being the only one they could do it to. Because his I-space, his zone, his region went through those lunar phases in late puberty, waxing and waning, then even vanishing completely. What vileness.
    And today, on this late summer day in 2021, after he had put away his freshly painted monkey portrait, he was very grateful to Cordula that it hadn’t been a bad attack this time. She was sleeping. She was breathing normally. She was well adjusted.

[RED-CHECKERED FOLDER]
    THE HALDRESS OF BONNDORF
    I N THE YEAR 1811 there lived in the city of Bonndorf, in the Danube District, a haldress named Beglau. She took great joy in her baby, to whom she had given birth a few weeks earlier. But then came the comet, which in autumn visited the sky over the earth and of which the kind reader has elsewhere heard.
    During a midday meal at the Wounded Landlord Inn, the Family Friend was told that after the appearance of the comet in the vicinity of the moon a change had occurred with the haldress in Bonndorf. While the comet, like a holy evening prayer or like a priest when he roams the church and sprinkles the holy water, like a noble good friend of the earth who has a great longing for her, like a mischievously winking eye in the night firmament, remained there, people at times felt as if it wanted to say: I was once an earth too, like you, full of snowstorms and thunderclouds, full of hospitals and Rumfordian soup kitchens and churchyards. But my Judgment Day is over and has transfigured me into heavenly clarity, and I would like to come down to you, but I do not dare, because of the oath I have sworn, lest I become impure again from the blood of your battlefields. It had not said this, but it seemed so, for the closer it came, the more beautifully and brightly, joyfully and fondly it shone, and when it receded after a certain period of time measured in accordance with celestial principles, it became pale and gloomy, as if it were itself grieving deeply. The haldress Beglau in Bonndorf must have looked up at it often when she crossed the wellbridge in the evening on her way home, where her baby waited for her. The baby was still quite small, a little lump of living tissue in a cradle next to the stove. The more she stayed outside in the comet nights, as her occupation required, the odder the broad fluttering belt of the Milky Way and the other cosmic curio sets of the stargazers appeared to her. Like jugs and pots in a cupboard, those things up there seemed to her disorderly, and she had all sorts of fantasies, so that she soon acquired a rather strange reputation in the area. Meanwhile, she began to fear her own baby. The people of Bonndorf heard about that too, and they sent the doctor to her, who examined her. Unable to find any causal change in her vessels, he took a look at the baby in the cradle. He was a fine boy, wrapped in clean white linen. And as the doctor now looked at the child, he was beset by a terrible headache, followed by pains in his body and a malaise of the soul more intense than anything he had experienced since his boyhood on a strict and bleak abbey estate. The haldress, meanwhile, complained of exactly the same ailments, and together they only barely made it out to the well and leaned there against its stone. Having recovered his breath, the doctor realized that his usual strength had returned.

    The baby was subsequently named the Comet Child and grew up among caring nuns in a separate area.
    Remember: It is fortunate that in certain cases we do not first send for the priest but instead for the doctor. Thus was the city of Bonndorf saved in the year of the comet 1811 from an arrival of the devil incarnate.
    ( FROM : Johann Peter Hebel, The Calendar Stories: Complete Tales from the Rhineland Family Friend , p. 334-335)

5. In the Zone: Part 1
    B Y C LEMENS J. S ETZ *
    Pension Tachler in Gillingen
    Gillingen is a typical southern Styrian small town in the middle of hilly wine country and with a